Read The Skeleton Road for Free Online

with words like “rough justice” – they’ve got to be history.’
    ‘I take your point,’ Macanespie said. ‘But why is that our problem? We didn’t do the killing or commission it. Not even behind our hands.’
    ‘Because what they all have in common is that every one of those assassinations was a case where we had a key front-line involvement. We, us, this office. We’re the common denominator. Either somebody on our team thinks they’re channelling Charles Bronson or there’s a mole leaking the product of our investigations to a third party who’s got his own programme of Balkan cleansing going on.’
    Proctor was visibly shaken and Macanespie suspected he was too. He’d never put it together quite like that. They exchanged another look, this time aghast. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Macanespie hissed under his breath.
    ‘Like he said. We’re not killers,’ Proctor said, indignant.
    Cagney allowed a smile to twitch one corner of his mouth. ‘Now that I’ve met you, I’d have to agree. But somebody is. And I’m making it your job to find who.’ He pushed back from the table and stood up.
    ‘We’re lawyers, not detectives,’ Macanespie said.
    ‘You might have been lawyers once. But these past few years, you’ve been hunting dogs, triangulating the whereabouts of a bunch of butchers. This is your last assignment. Find the avenger. You can make a start first thing tomorrow.’
    ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday,’ Macanespie protested.
    ‘You sound like a shopkeeper.’ Cagney’s contempt was obvious. ‘The sooner you get started, the sooner you can deliver. Then maybe you’ll have a career to come home to.’

5
     
    M aggie Blake went to pull the heavy drapes across the window of her sitting room. Catching sight of the full moon, she paused, looking out over the silvered rooftops towards the dreaming spires of central Oxford. St Scholastica’s College was far enough out to feel a little aloof from the hurly-burly of the tourist-trap heart of the city, but from her suite of rooms on the third floor of Magnusson Hall she looked over gleaming slates punctuated by chimney pots, across the blank space of the University Parks towards Keble, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and beyond that, slivers of the crenellations, towers and stone facades of a variety of college and university buildings. She was one of the few remaining fellows of the college who lived within its walls and she was grateful for the privilege. It freed up more of her income to travel for pleasure, not purely at the dictates of her research grants. And she loved the view from this room, where she read and wrote and met the handful of postgraduate students she supervised.
    Because this had been a day shot through with memories, she recalled the first time she had brought Mitja to her rooms. They’d both been war-weary, sleep-deprived and aching from two days in the back of a truck that had dropped them off on the Banbury Road in the small hours. The college had been still, only a couple of lights burning in student rooms. The bathetic quacking of a mallard duck had disturbed the peace as Maggie had fumbled her key into the front-door lock of Magnusson Hall, and Mitja had chuckled. ‘Dinner,’ he said softly.
    They’d climbed the stairs slowly. Maggie remembered the straps of her rucksack biting into the tender places on her shoulders and the tremble in her quads as she’d headed up the final flight.
    And then they were in her sitting room, and the moonlight bathed the panoramic skyline. Mitja dropped his bag like a sack of stones and made for the windows as if drawn by a tractor beam. He leaned his forehead against the glass and groaned. ‘Do you remember when Dubrovnik was as beautiful as this?’
    She wriggled out of her rucksack straps and crossed the room, wrapping her arms around him, leaning round his shoulder to see a little of the view she’d missed. ‘I remember. The first time I saw the city at night, I thought it was like something from a