Secrets of the Dead

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ESCAPING WORK ON a Friday afternoon was still a luxury Abby hadn’t got used to.

For ten years, work had been long days in the dark places of the Earth, listening to shattered people relive brutality on an unimaginable scale. Then evenings at a laptop in rooms converted from shipping containers, freezing or baking with the seasons, wringing all the blood and tears out of the stories until they became dry pieces of paper that would make presentable evidence for the International Court in The Hague. She never escaped. She’d lost count of the nightmares, the times she’d found herself kneeling over the chemical toilet deep in the night, desperate to purge the things she’d seen. Among the casualties over the years had been several promising relationships, a marriage, and finally her ability to care. But always, next morning, straight back to work.

Now all that was history. She’d transferred to the EU mission in Kosovo – EULEX – teaching the Kosovars how to be model European citizens. There had been war crimes in Kosovo, true, but they were someone else’s problem. She worked with the civil courts, trying to unwind the tangled questions of who owned what after the war. The Lost Property Office, Michael called it. She didn’t mind being teased. She could sleep at night.

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