The Stolen Girls (Detective Lottie Parker #2)
Patricia Gibney
For Aidan
A true soldier, a peacekeeper
My husband, my friend
Rest in peace
Prologue
Kosovo, 1999
The boy liked the peacefulness of the creek, midway between his home and his grandmother’s. Despite the roar of water flowing down the mountainside, it was quiet today. No gunfire or shelling. He looked around as he dipped the bucket into the spring water, making sure he was alone. He thought he heard a car in the distance and glanced behind him. Dust was rising from the twisting road. Someone was coming. He hauled up the bucket, spilling the water. The screech of brakes and the sound of loud voices propelled him to run.
As he neared home, he dropped the bucket and fell to the ground, lying flat on his belly, gravel tearing into his bare skin. He had left his shirt hanging on a rusty nail sticking out of a concrete block back where he was working with Papa. They’d been trying to mend the shell damage on his grandmother’s house. The boy knew it was futile, but Papa insisted. At thirteen, he knew better than to argue. Anyway, he had been happy to spend a day with Papa, away from his chattering mother and sister.
On elbows and knees he crawled over the dusty roadway into the long scrub grass at the edge. Only a few yards from his house, but it might as well have been a mile.
He listened. Heard laughter, followed by screams. Mama? Rhea? No! He pleaded with the sun in the cloudless sky. Its only answer was a burning heat on his skin.
More rough laughter. Soldiers?
He inched forward. Men were shouting. What could he do? Was Papa too far away to help? Did he have his gun with him?
The boy crept on. At the fence, he parted the long brown grass and leaned in between two posts.
A green jeep with a red cross on an open door. Four men. Soldier’s uniforms. Guns slung idly across their backs. Trousers around ankles. Bare buttocks in the air, humping. He knew what they were doing. They’d raped his friend’s sister who lived at the foot of the mountain. And then they’d killed her.
Fighting back his useless tears, he watched. Mama and Rhea were screaming. The two soldiers got up, straightened their clothes as the other two took their places. More laughter.
Clamping his teeth onto his fist, he choked down sobs. Shep, his collie dog, barked loudly, circling the soldiers hysterically. The boy froze, then jumped, cracking his front tooth against bone, as a gunshot echoed up against the mountain and back down again. He let out an involuntary cry. Birds shot up from the sparse trees, merged as one, then flew in all directions. Shep lay unmoving in the yard beneath the makeshift swing, a tyre Papa had put up on a branch when they were little children. They were still children, but they didn’t play on the swing any more. Not since the war.
An argument broke out among the soldiers. The boy tried to understand what they were saying but couldn’t avert his eyes from the naked, dust-covered figures, still alive, their screams now muted whimpers. Where was Papa?
He stared, feeling hypnotised, as the men pulled on surgical gloves. The tallest one extracted a long steel blade from an old-fashioned scabbard attached to his hip. Then another one did the same. The boy was frozen with terror. Watching transfixed, he saw the soldier crouch behind his mama and drag her up against his chest. The other man grabbed eleven-year-old Rhea. Blood streamed down her legs and he quelled an urge to find clothing to hide her nakedness. Weeping silent tears, he felt powerless and useless.
One man raised his knife. It glinted in the sun before he drew it downwards, slitting Rhea from her throat to her belly. The other man did the same to Mama. The bodies convulsed. Blood gushed and spurted into the faces of the abusers. Gloved hands thrust into the cavities and tore out organs, blood dripping along their arms. The other two soldiers rushed forward with steel cases. The bodies dropped to the ground.
Wide-eyed with horror, the boy watched the soldiers quickly place the organs of his precious mama and sister into the cases, laughing as they snapped them shut. One took a marker from his pocket and casually wrote on the side of the container and another turned and kicked out at Rhea. Her body shuddered. He looked directly over towards the boy’s hiding place.
Holding his breath, eyes locked on the soldier, the boy felt no terror now. He was prepared to die and half stood up, but the man was moving back to his comrades. They packed the cases into the jeep, jumped in and with a cloud of stones and dust rising skywards, drove back down the mountain road.
He didn’t know how long he stayed there before a hand clamped down on his shoulder and pulled him into an embrace. He looked into a pair of heartbroken eyes. He hadn’t heard the frantic running or the frenzied shouting. The vision of the disembowelled bodies of Mama and Rhea had imprinted themselves as a photograph in his mind. And he knew it would never fade.
Papa dragged him towards the bodies. The boy stared into his mother’s eyes. Pleading in death. Papa took out his pistol, turned his wife’s face into the hot clay and shot her in the back of the head. Her body flexed. Stilled.
Papa cried, big, silent tears, as he crawled over to Rhea. He shot her too. The boy knew she was already dead. There was no need for the bullet. He tried to shout at Papa but his voice was lost in the midst of the turmoil.
‘I had to do it!’ Papa cried. ‘To save their souls.’ He pulled the two bodies, and then Shep, into the house. With determination in his steps he hurriedly emptied a jerry can of petrol inside the door and threw in a lighted torch of dry reeds. Picking up his gun, he raised it towards the boy.
No words of fear, no movement. Yet. The boy was immobile until he saw Papa’s work-stained finger tremble on the trigger. Instinct caused him to run.
Papa cried out, ‘Save yourself. Run, boy. Don’t stop running.’
Looking over his shoulder as he went, he saw Papa turn the gun to his own wrinkled forehead and pull the trigger before falling back into the flames. They ignited in a whoosh of crinkling, falling timber.
The boy watched from the fence as the life he had known burned as bright as the sun in the sky. No help came. The war had caused everyone to fend for themselves and he supposed those living in the other houses along the road were hiding, terrified, awaiting their own fate. He couldn’t blame them. There was nothing they could do here anyway.
After some time the sun dipped low and night stars twinkled like nothing was wrong. Without even a shirt on his back he began the long, lonely trek down the mountain.
He did not know where he was going.
He had nowhere to go.