The Skinner's Revenge

By Chris Karsten

Nerve-tingling suspense – I couldn’t put it down – Michele Magwood

The second book in the Abel trilogy:
Ella Neser is on compulsory sick leave after her close encounter with Abel Lotz’s scalpel. Between therapy sessions and harp lessons, she ponders over the photographs of Abel’s four victims, dead set on catching him before he kills again. When a burglary results in the death of one of the victims, Ella returns to duty to catch the culprits. But she isn’t the only one on their trail. Has Abel Lotz returned, or is there a new killer in Dorado Park?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Human & Rousseau
• Release date: Dec 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780798162821

Chris Karsten

Karsten is ’n bekroonde skrywer en voormalige joernalis. Sy romans is al vyf maal bekroon met die ATKV-prys vir spanningslektuur, en vier maal met die die ATKV-prosaprys. Vir ​Op pad na Moormansgat​ ontvang hy ook die kykNET-Rapport Herman Binge-filmprys.

Book preview

The Skinner’s Revenge

Chris Karsten

Human & Rousseau

For Mentz and Hanlie

The direction, though not the nature, of his destiny was clear before him, and there was no need to trace the devious path by which he had come. The ancient mechanisms of the Star Gate had served him well, but he would not need them again.

– Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

PART I

Murder for gain, people can understand that. Or murder in war, something depersonalised, they even invest that with a kind of heroism. You die for your country, you kill for your country. That’s very acceptable indeed, you get medals for it and handclapping and cheers.

– Tom Parker, Life after Life

1. Present: Johannesburg, South Africa

Four municipal workers leant on their pickaxes and shovels beside a pile of clay soil. PARKS & RECREATION stencilled on their yellow plastic raincoats, hoods over heads as they took their smoke break, rubber boots caked with red mud, hands cupping damp cigarettes. Wet and bedraggled. But curious.

Two pickaxe wielders had started the digging. Despite the rain, the earth had been dense and firmly compacted, having lain undisturbed for years. The other two workers had then shovelled the loose earth out of the hole with easy, practised swings, before clambering out and making way once again for their colleagues with the pickaxes. Deeper and deeper they had dug the hole, the pile of muddy soil on the edge growing higher and higher.

With the first drops from the leaden sky, the digging had ground to a halt, and a canvas awning supported by aluminium posts had been summoned and erected over the hole. The four men had resumed taking turns inside the hole, thankful for the shelter.

The caretaker slurped his coffee, huddling in the crowded space under the canvas, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He’d had to jostle for space with the two beefy police officers and the two tall, reedy funeral directors, all of them silently observing the excavation. The girl, he noticed, had decided to capitulate, standing out in the rain as wet as a rat, head bowed and absorbed in thought.

At the stipulated depth of two metres, the group under the awning heard a shovel strike something hard. The caretaker lowered the plastic cup of the Thermos flask he was drinking from, leaned forward to peer down the hole and issued a brusque warning to the two diggers.

Careful now.

And then the grave was open, the coffin exposed.

Around the graves in this old part of the cemetery, the police had marked out a large square with plastic tape, with the warning: NO ENTRY – CRIME SCENE. A bit over the top, in the caretaker’s humble opinion. This was his cemetery, and in his sacred domain no crime had been committed. Late on this dismal afternoon, this was merely a sensitive, perhaps even poignant, operation to retrieve an old coffin – without the presence of a single loved one.

His gaze travelled over the graves to the fence around the cemetery. The colonel had been adamant: no one was to be allowed inside while the digging was in progress. On the far side of the wire fence and cypress trees a small crowd of inquisitive bystanders had gathered, pointing, wondering what was going on, speaking in furtive whispers because the exhumation of a body demanded respect.

By now the rain had abated and under the awning the next step was being discussed, also in muted tones. The caretaker shot the dregs in his coffee mug sideways onto the ground and ran a thumb over the stubble on his chin. He stood to one side, pushed against one of the corner posts, not part of the conversation. His job was digging holes and filling them up again…well, supervising the workers who did the actual work. His job description did not require of him to do manual labour, nor to shave every morning – except maybe on Mondays, and again on Fridays, in readiness for the weekend. He seldom received visitors in the Wendy house that served as his office under the cypresses at the cemetery’s entrance, and he never mingled with the mourners who came to pay their respects or lay loved ones to rest.

He screwed the plastic cup back onto the Thermos and glanced furtively at the slight figure of the drenched young woman beyond the canvas canopy, who was hugging herself against the chill. Her short hair was wet, shiny raindrops trickling down her cheeks, nose, throat and neck.

He’d been surprised, a few months ago, by the arrival at his office of this young detective of the city’s Murder and Robbery squad. A woman, no less, and during his lunch hour, without a prior appointment, tersely commandeering the grave register, and his chair. While she was searching for names and grave numbers in the files, he’d had no option but to stand while he ate his Marmite sandwiches, washing them down with coffee. At half past four, when he’d packed up to leave, she was still wandering amongst the graves, camera and notebook in hand.

And here she was again, not so cheeky today, taking no part in the conversation under the awning. Her fingers fidgeted at her stomach while she peered distractedly into the open grave, as if she was trying to fathom the contents of the cheap wooden coffin, all muddy and rotting.

His gaze shifted to the big cop with the gravelly voice. He had the stature, the voice and the moustache, the caretaker reckoned, of a man who did not put up with shit from anyone. And was clearly in charge of these unusual proceedings.

The caretaker listened with divided attention to the predicament the cops and the undertakers were discussing. He took his cellphone from his pocket, and stole a sly glance at the screen. The phone very seldom rang, but the alarm was a handy reminder of lunch hour and quitting time. The damp air was settling in his joints, aggravating the gout in his big toe.

The older of the two undertakers leaned slightly forward to survey the grave with his pale, watery eyes. Uh-huh, pine, unvarnished. The coffin is in bad shape. Damp and borer beetle…the wood is in an advanced state of decay.

The caretaker was familiar with Mr Poppe Senior, with his long, thin neck. A good forty years in the undertaking business, almost as long as he himself had been a caretaker. He knew the bony man at Mr Poppe’s side as well: his son, Mr Poppe Junior. The Junior was deceptive. Difficult to guess, but Junior could be in his early sixties, and a bit of a windbag, the caretaker thought. An embalming specialist, so he’d heard. Junior had studied in Mississippi at the State Institute for Embalmers and Morticians, Mr Poppe Senior liked to boast when he came to inspect a grave before an interment. Check the specifications were up to code. Fussy old fart. The caretaker didn’t know where Mississippi was, and didn’t give a shit.

We can’t stand here arguing all bloody afternoon, said the moustached police officer, who was addressed as Colonel Sauls. What do you suggest? You’re the experts!

The Messrs Poppe Senior and Junior put their thin heads together in a hushed but animated discourse. The caretaker took another peek at the time on his phone. Next to the muddy pile of red earth, the pickaxe wielders were grinding out their cigarette butts, the diggers shifting their weight as they leant on their shovels. Everyone was getting restless, the caretaker thought.

At which point Mr Poppe Senior turned back and announced triumphantly: We have a plan!

The female detective had moved to where the headstone had been removed and solemnly laid down before the first pickaxe strike. She, too, was looking expectantly at the undertakers with the plan. Both dressed in black suits and white shirts, their grey ties fastidiously knotted around their wrinkly necks, each with an open umbrella in his hand.

Yes? the colonel snapped.

’Er…am I still needed here? asked the caretaker.

The colonel gave him an irritated look. No. We’ll let you know when your men can fill in the grave. Perhaps in a week or so.

With a nod of the head, the caretaker motioned to the four gravediggers. As they were leaving, he heard the deep voice ask: So, how do you plan to get the coffin out?

* * *

Warrant Officer Ella Neser watched the caretaker walk away with his team. He had a slight limp, as if his shoe was pinching his toes, the flask in his hand thumping against his leg, his neckless head pulled into the collar of his raincoat. With the back of her hand she wiped her wet forehead, felt her blouse cling coldly to her skin. She remembered the afternoon she had walked into the Wendy house: the pounding of her heart, her finger trembling as it paused under a particular entry in the grave register.

It had also been late afternoon, like now, when at last she’d discovered the final resting place of the mother of the serial killer she’d been hunting. But of course on that hot, dry and windy day she couldn’t have foreseen the fatal outcome of her visit to this particular grave.

Her hand slid down her wet blouse. Over the past few months she had acquired a habit. When in thought, her finger would absent-mindedly move to the right side of her waist, across the lower part of her stomach, finding the dim, pale scar where her appendix had been removed when she was twelve. It had never bothered her before, but recently her stomach had acquired fresh scars, not yet faded. It was not tenderness or itchiness that caused her fingers to fondle the injured skin. It was whenever she thought of him, of Abel Lotz, that her fingers instinctively searched out the scar. Like now.

The discovery of his mother’s grave had led to that fateful encounter in his kitchen. The events were fixed in her mind. She’d looked up, and their eyes had met, and in that moment something had passed between them like an electric current, a mutual recognition. An awareness that hunter and hunted had found each other.

She’d been paralysed, like a mouse mesmerised by the eyes of a snake.

She remembered his hand, as it had shot out to crack her skull against the old ceramic washbasin. Later, of course, she hadn’t seen or felt the blade of his scalpel on her stomach, had only known its result when she’d regained consciousness. The new scar was a deep purple welt, the tissue still in the process of healing. Sometimes it itched, but not as badly as it used to.

Ella recognised the impatience in Silas Sauls’s voice.

Mr Poppe Senior wheezed. "We’ll erect our new pulley system over the grave. As we do for an interment. Not to lower a casket in this case, but to hoist it up. Space technology was employed in the development of the pulley, made of titanium, especially imported from Mississippi…"

Do it! ordered Col. Sauls.

We’ll support the floor of the coffin to prevent her from falling out. We don’t want to leave her behind in the grave, do we, Colonel?

What are you waiting for?

Another wheezy coughing fit. With a large white handkerchief Mr Poppe Senior wiped the phlegm from his thin lips, his eyes on the departing gravediggers.

Who’s going to help?

Someone will have to get inside the grave. Mr Poppe Junior stooped to wipe the mud spatters from his black shoes and polish the patent leather with his white handkerchief. Someone has to place the props and straps and support under the coffin.

Fred, Col. Sauls barked, turning to a detective who had moved slightly apart and was lighting a cigarette.

Lieutenant Fred Lange stuck his thumb and forefinger into his mouth and whistled shrilly. The caretaker and his team stopped, turned around.

Not finished! Fred shouted. Something else to do.

From the hearse parked in a driveway between the graves, the Poppe father-and-son team produced a pulley system with wide straps, which they carefully erected over the grave.

Ella looked down at the gravestone, raindrops like quicksilver on the polished granite.

Dorcas Johanna Lotz (née Linde), 11.12.1930 – †11.08.2005. I am pure, without transgression; I am innocent and there is no guilt in me. – Job 33:9.

Without transgression? Ella thought. She’d given birth to Abel, a child whose spirit she’d kneaded and moulded like clay. She’d created a fucking monster. And that was no exaggeration. Ella knew from personal experience, and the evidence etched into her skin.

She was only dimly aware of the bustle inside the grave, of Mr Poppe’s orders to the two diggers. The undertakers had not been given a reason for digging up Dorcas Lotz’s coffin. Ella supposed they would like to know, but they didn’t ask. Having carefully inspected the warrant for the exhumation, Mr Poppe Senior had nodded and filed the document. It was only fitting that their undertaking business should do the exhumation, seeing that they had laid the deceased to rest. They would know best how to handle the coffin and its contents.

There was no need for the Messrs Poppe to know that it had taken almost two months for the warrant application to be approved and signed by the chief magistrate himself. Even with valid reasons and strong motivation, the magistrate had wanted to be sure that the police had indeed not been able to trace any of the deceased’s relatives. Even Interpol had been involved in trying to find the only known next of kin – Dorcas’s son, Abel. And not only to obtain his permission for his mother’s grave to be exhumed: he was also wanted on allegations of serial murder. Only when all these measures had proved unsuccessful had the magistrate finally put his ornate signature to the warrant.

Now, with great effort, the coffin was being raised from the grave.

It’s heavy, said Mr Poppe Senior, bent over the pulley.

She was a big woman, if memory serves, said Mr Poppe Junior.

Ella looked at the grave to the left of Dorcas’s. The inscription on that undisturbed headstone read:

Johanna (Hannie) Maria Linde (née Yssel), 24.05.1893 – †16.03.1981. And behold, a pale horse, and he who sat on it, his name was Death. Hades followed with him. – Revelations 6:8.

Mother and daughter, Ella now knew. The mystery had been solved. Abel’s mother and grandmother, who had transferred their delusions to the receptive mind of the boy and grimly reinforced them.

How many years has it been? grunted Mr Poppe Senior. How can she still be so heavy? Only the skull and bones should remain, and what could they possibly weigh, a bundle of bones?

I had to embalm her, remember? said Mr Poppe Junior, embalming expert of Poppe & Son Undertakers & Embalmers of Fordsburg, Johannesburg.

Oh, yes, it’s what her son wanted. His mother had to be embalmed so that she could be preserved forever.

She’s coming up, warned Mr Poppe Junior.

Ella turned towards the grave. The coffin appeared, supported by the strong straps of the hoisting apparatus, all glistening stainless steel with purple velvet ruffles draped around the sides.

Take it to the forensic path lab, said Col. Sauls.

But we can open it up at our place! Mr Poppe Junior sounded perplexed and Ella realised that he’d give his left pinkie to investigate his handiwork and study the long-term results of his embalming techniques.

Dr Koster is waiting, said Col. Sauls.

What will Dr Koster do with the body? asked Mr Poppe Junior.

Compile a forensic report; that’s what forensic pathologists do. Thanks for your help.

Mr Poppe Senior cleared his throat and shook his head. Still so heavy. She should have been much lighter, dried out, just skin and bone.

We’ll send the account, said Junior.

Let us know when we must reinter her, said Senior. It’s a sin for a body to be disturbed like this.

I am pure, without transgression. The words were etched into Ella’s mind.

I want a guard here, Fred, said Silas. All night. No curious onlookers or reporters between the graves. The dead must be respected. It’s a cemetery, not a damn circus. And a crime scene, so keep them away. Come, let’s go, Warrant Officer Neser.

It’s not actually a crime scene, said Fred Lange.

Next to her, Silas stopped, turned to Fred.

Oh hell, thought Ella. Here it comes! Fred and his big mouth.

Do you want to split hairs, Lieutenant?

Just saying, Colonel…Technically, no crime’s been committed here.

When you’re in a hole, Fred, don’t dig, thought Ella, with a spiteful twinge of delight – you didn’t act the wise guy with a tetchy Silas Sauls.

Are you saying this is not a crime scene? That it’s just a scene that might be linked to a crime? Is that what you’re trying to say? Are you a bloody smart arse, Fred?

No, Colonel.

No, what?

I’ll summon two constables from Dorado Park, Colonel.

Right.

How long will it take, Colonel, their guard duty? What can I tell them?

How long? It’ll take as long as it takes. Until it’s over. Tell them that.

Walking behind him, Ella ducked under the police tape and headed for the Wendy house. The caretaker, Thermos tucked under his arm, empty Tupperware in his hand, was limping towards his car, which was parked under a cypress.

No one goes near those graves, Silas ordered the caretaker. Not even next of kin, understand? You stop every visitor, with or without a bunch of flowers. Then you phone us. Or ask the guys on guard duty to phone us.

The caretaker frowned. I can’t stop mourners from visiting graves.

Here we go again, Ella thought.

So you’re planning to fuck up a police investigation?

What? No, but…

That’s what you’re saying. You’re saying you’re not going to obey my orders. That’s what you just said.

That’s not –

"Not? Now you’re calling me a liar? What are you saying?"

Uh…. no one will be allowed near those graves, Colonel.

Good. If anyone wants to go there, you phone me. Or Detective Neser. This is Detective Neser here, right next to me. You’ve got our numbers and you’ve got a cellphone. You phone immediately, pronto, especially if a man arrives with flowers for Mrs Lotz’s grave.

In the car Ella said, You don’t think he’s back, do you, Colonel? That he’d have the audacity to come and see what’s happening?

I expect anything from Abel Lotz. He’s not rational. Remember to get that video the police photographer took of the onlookers at the cemetery fence.

I’m on sick leave, Colonel.

Watch the video. Look at every face, see if you recognise Abel Lotz, or anyone resembling him.

Was he deaf or merely ignoring her? she wondered. I’m on sick leave, Colonel. Not allowed to work. Regulation.

And see that you do it tonight.

He’s left the country. Crossed the border into Mozambique at Komatipoort. He’s somewhere in Africa.

For almost two months? He’s not the type.

No, Ella knew, Abel wasn’t logical, not the type to stay away. He would visit his mother, even if it was only her grave. Without her, he was lost.

They drove through the deserted rural streets of Dorado Park, took the on-ramp to the R82 and headed north towards Johannesburg. Fifteen kilometres further, they passed Poppe & Son’s hearse, cruising at a dignified speed, the mossy old coffin visible behind the large glass windows. Junior was behind the wheel. Both father and son sat bolt upright, sparse hair plastered to their scalps. Undoubtedly engaged in deep discussion, Ella thought, about the marvel of Mr Poppe Junior’s embalming techniques. And the benefit of long-term embalming, bearing in mind that not a whiff had been discernible from poor Dorcas Lotz’s exhumed coffin. Perhaps they were even speculating an embalming patent based on the Dorcas Lotz case – if only they’d been granted the opportunity to open the casket and study her remains up close, touch her withered skin, probe and prick her petrified flesh, incise her mummified tissue…Where can Abel be hiding? Silas wondered aloud.

It was a rhetorical question and she knew he wasn’t expecting an answer. The same question was in the minds of all who’d witnessed Abel’s handiwork in the old house in Dorado Park.

It also haunted her.

He can’t run forever, she said.

Silas’s only response a grunt.

Ella was well aware that the serial killer dubbed the Nightstalker was not responsible for the largest number of serial killings in the criminal history of the country. Not by a long chalk. There’d been only four victims. And he wasn’t the most sadistic either. No limbs or sexual organs had been harvested for muti, the victims had not been tortured to express anger and frustration, none of the perverse sexual acts that typified such killings. Strange rituals there might have been, yes. But Abel Lotz’s tortured soul remained a mystery.

I’ll find him, said Ella, wherever he is.

It had been her first case as investigating officer. Initially there’d been a single murder, and Col. Sauls, branch commander at Murder and Robbery, had thought the time was right for her to lead an investigation – take on her first case and solve it. No one could have foreseen that Ella herself would become a victim of the serial killer, almost a statistic.

You’re obsessed. An obsession can consume you, observed Silas. Let’s sort out the coffin thing first. Let’s take it step by step, think every step through and discuss it logically. Let the head rule, not the heart.

He spared my life. Why? It would have been easy, quick…

Are you discussing these questions with your trauma counsellor, Ella?

When they were alone, she was Ella, not Warrant Officer. She liked it when he called her Ella in private, like a father talking to a daughter. She snuggled into the seat, her clothes still damp, and turned towards him so she could study his profile. In the dim evening light, shadows lay in the furrows and contours of his cheeks, chin and neck.

Killing isn’t what drives him, Colonel. For him, killing is a by-product. His primary motive is the skin…he is only interested in harvesting skin.

And when he couldn’t get yours, he had no reason to take your life. Is that what you’re saying?

He wouldn’t have accomplished anything by killing me. He wanted a piece of skin from my stomach. Why? What’s the meaning of the skin?

It wasn’t as if he spared your life because he was overcome by sudden affection. He didn’t pity you. He was interrupted. If he hadn’t been interrupted…

She knew what he wanted to say, and why he’d stopped mid-sentence, the words dangling in the air. She knew only too well the fate of Abel’s fourth victim, the one who’d come to rescue her from that house, the one who had interrupted the Nightstalker while he was harvesting the skin from her stomach…Zack’s death wasn’t a by-product, Zack was the recipient of Abel’s terrible fury.

Silas drove through the gates of the provincial hospital and round the back to the forensic path lab, which was set slightly apart. Dr Koster’s domain.

I want to see her, said Ella as they got out. She’s a part of Abel. They’re inseparable, Abel and his mother. She’s the one who led me to him.

From her grave.

She can help me again.

Only once your sick leave is over, when the trauma counsellor has signed you off.

An unmistakable smell hung in the long, silent corridor leading to Dr Koster’s office. Not the usual antiseptic odour of hospital corridors, but a whiff of decay, and of strong deodorant sprays and cleaning agents, with undertones of chlorine, formaldehyde and death.

It was not exactly an uplifting professional environment, but this was where Ella had become acquainted with Abel’s first two victims. Naked and defenceless on the stainless-steel autopsy table, here the bodies had talked to Dr Koster, told him what had happened to them, helped him fill in the details of their violent passing.

Ella had come here to look at Mia Vermooten, the ambitious high-flyer who had been the Nightstalker’s first victim. And his second victim: pretty, frisky Emma Adams.

Where’s the coffin? asked Dr Koster.

There were brownish smears and stains on his overcoat – dried blood, or coffee, Ella guessed. Harder to tell his age. The grey stubble on his wrinkled face and the brown pigmentation on his forehead and the back of his hands put him on the wrong side of sixty, perhaps even seventy, she speculated.

I’d love some tea, said Silas, while we’re waiting for the Messrs Poppe.

Dr Koster switched on the kettle. Ella watched as he scooped coffee into a mug. He’d remembered, she thought with some satisfaction, that she didn’t drink tea.

She’d come to Dr Koster’s domain to see the third victim as well: the reporter. She’d found it much harder to look at him, at someone she’d known as a living, breathing, laughing human being. She knew it was him, lying there on the autopsy table without a face, the skin completely stripped from his skull.

What are you going to do with the old lady? asked Dr Koster. When we’re through with the coffin?

Silas shrugged. Put her back in her grave. What else?

She’ll need a new coffin. You can’t put her back in an old, rotten coffin.

I’ll put in a requisition for a new coffin. Pine, with rope handles. Poppe & Son can rebury her.

Ella had not seen the Nightstalker’s fourth victim on Dr Koster’s table. She’d known him even better than she’d known the reporter. Much better. Intimately, in fact. She’d still been in ICU when Dr Koster had completed his autopsy report on Zack. Her condition had been critical. The doctors had feared the onset of sepsis where Abel had cut into her stomach with an unsterilised blade. She’d attended Zack’s funeral in West Park in a wheelchair, pumped full of antibiotics and strong pain medication. Afterwards, she’d been taken straight back to her hospital bed.

There was a sound at the service entrance and Dr Koster looked up. They’re here.

Poppe & Son’s coffin trolley came rolling up the slight incline. Under their grisly load, rubber wheels crunched over the clean tiled floor, the swing doors of the autopsy room were pushed open and then silently closed again, aided by hydraulic springs.

Thank you – you can leave the coffin on the trolley, said Dr Koster. I’ll call you when I’m finished with her.

How long will it take? asked Mr Poppe Senior.

Not long.

We’re busy. We have a funeral tomorrow.

She’s not going anywhere. The day after tomorrow, the next day…

After the Messrs Poppe had left, Dr Koster’s assistant appeared with a claw-hammer and a large screwdriver.

The screws were rusted, but as the wood was rotten, damp and covered with red mud, the coffin wasn’t going to be reused. It took the assistant only a few minutes to dislodge the lid and lift it away.

2. 1991-1993: Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Mountains, forests, rivers. Rolling verdant hills dotted with villages. Cottages built of stone, corrugated iron and wood huddled around places of worship. Bells pealing in church towers, muezzins calling from minarets. Riverbanks with trees and fruit-laden orchards, juicy red pomegranates, vegetable patches, fields of oats and wheat, grassy pastures covered with white and yellow daffodils. A landscape unchanged for centuries, inhabited by simple people going on their unhurried way. Not always at peace, for these parts have had their fair share of bloodshed and suffering. The Balkan killing fields: the scene of invasion and massacre by the Barbarians and Vandals in the Dark Ages, by the medieval Ottomans, by the power-crazy Austro-Hungarians, by adversaries in two World Wars.

Now there was a new invasion: brutes operating in the name of reprisal are advocating bloodshed, even calling it necessary. It can be traced all the way back to the Great Schism in the eleventh century. So old is the suppression and annihilation of the Serbs.

The new horde came from Serbia, wreaked havoc in Croatia, then crossed the border to Bosnia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina nothing that stood in their way was sacred. Prijedor, Sanski Most, the Sana valley, further along to the west and south and east to Banja Luka, Srebrenica, Mostar and Sarajevo. They convinced one another that the problem was an ethnic one, always had been. They had long memories, and they never forgot old injuries, which they were now intent on redressing. Ruthlessly they advanced, with their tattoos and guns and cannons, and nothing would ever be the same again.

When the sun rose over the hills during this blood-drenched time, the early morning light bathed the pastoral landscape in a fresh rosy glow, calling to mind the blood of the men, women and children that had been spilled there.

* * *

In the mountains around Sarajevo, eight battalions of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps were strangling the life out of the city and its residents with snipers’ bullets and shells. Buildings, many of them historic, had been reduced to rubble: Ottoman structures from the fourteenth century, Austro-Hungarian façades more than two centuries old.

Very few areas in the city were left unscathed, and when the shelling abated, dark, sooty clouds hung over the bomb craters and rubble. The air was filled with the acrid smell of gunpowder, fire and charred remains, and echoed with the cries of the wounded and maimed. In the streets and on the pavements the dead were left lying, because only the foolhardy, or those with a death wish, would brave the bullets to try and reclaim their loved ones’ bodies.

At a military base in the hills around Glasinačko Polje, Vlatko Galić and Zoran Dragnić had been trained as snipers. Then Vlatko, with his Zastava M76, and Zoran, with his AK47, were unleashed to do what they did best: sow terror and spill the blood of unarmed men, women and children in the city of Sarajevo. They squatted in a deserted building in the Serbian neighbourhood of Kovăcići, south of the great Miljacka River, which slices through the length of Sarajevo like a knife. The seventy-fourth snipers’ nest in the beleaguered city.

In an empty apartment on the seventh floor, Vlatko had taken a hammer and chisel on the day of their arrival and knocked a vertical hole in the outside wall of the living room: not big, a slit just large enough to accommodate the barrel and scope of his rifle. The Zastava M76 was a Yugoslavian sniper rifle, a replica of the Russian Dragunov, but using more effective 7.92 x 57mm Mauser bullets. Like the Dragunov, it had a flash suppressor at the end of the barrel to conceal the ignition of gas when a shot was fired, thus concealing the location of the shooter. The M76 fired its bullets at a muzzle velocity of seven hundred and thirty metres per second. Normally, the effective striking distance of a man-sized target is eight hundred metres; in other words, it took a mere second for the bullet to find its mark.

He lay on his stomach on the floor, the barrel pushed through the slit in the wall. Through the scope he had a bird’s eye view of the city centre. The Marijin Dvor building, the National Museum, the Houses of Parliament and parts of Tito Street were visible between the rooftops. If he swung the barrel to the right, he could see the Skenderija Centre, home to a youth club and cultural centre, a shopping mall, restaurants and the courts of the KK Bosna basketball club. He could also see the razor wire surrounding the large complex of UNPROFOR’s French contingents. When he lowered the barrel, he had the Vrbanja bridge over the Miljacka in his sights – so close, it seemed he could touch it if only his hand could fit through the narrow slit as well.

Vlatko raised the barrel and trained his sights on a scrambling pedestrian who was trying to cross Tito Street to reach the Holiday Inn on the opposite side. In Sarajevo, no one crossed a street slowly. If you wanted to survive, you scrambled like a rat from one doorway to the next. Vlatko’s finger lay on the trigger, the muscles of his forearms tense.

Bang!

The word burst softly from his lips. He grinned as he relaxed his finger and lowered the stock from his shoulder to the floor. I am God, he thought. I decide who lives and who dies. Today I grant that woman her life.

With his trigger finger he rubbed his neck where a bead of sweat had rolled out of his dirty bleached hair. The drop hovered over the open jaws of a wolf, the tattoo by no means delicate. The tattoo artist in Vukovar had used blunt needles and botched the job. The shading was rough, with little definition. Vlatko had actually wanted the head of a tiger.

En route to the new killing fields south of the Croatian border, he’d acquired another tattoo: the soft flesh on the inside of his left arm flaunted the words ARKANOVI TIGROVI. And so, wearing his warrior tattoos like insignia, Vlatko had crossed the Una River to Bosnia with Zoran Dragnić and the troops of Arkan’s Tigers.

Vlatko liked the phrase ethnic cleansing: they were doing their best to clean up wherever they went. First Croatia, now Bosnia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, they were told, their prey was not only the treacherous Croats, but also the Bosniaks.

Vlatko did not care about fine political nuance. Politics as an excuse to kill was fine by him. He didn’t care who formulated the excuses, who gave the orders. The fun was in their exploits, in hunting down the Croats and Bosniaks. In spilling their tainted blood.

He withdrew the barrel from the slit and collected the cartridges. He sat down at the table and began to clean his weapon with an oily rag. His shift was over.

Neither of them yet thirty, Vlatko and Zoran’s actions had always been motivated by violence. Since childhood. It was in their blood. They’d learned as children to assert and defend themselves in summary and violent manners; the meek and humble didn’t survive the mean backstreets of Belgrade. Later, as members of soccer gangs, spilling their opponents’ drunken blood with fists, rocks, knives and chains had become as much a sport as the matches of their beloved Red Star Belgrade FC. As soccer hooligans they were scorned. But their abusers were silenced when they became the chosen ones, when they were recruited for Arkan’s Tigers and donned the uniform of the Srpska Dobrovoljačka Garda, the Serb Volunteer Guard.

Arkan was the embodiment of an untainted Serbian bloodline. He was their hero.

To others he was still just