CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Pit
Peace had come to Bosnia with the Dayton Agreement of November 1995, but over five years later, the scars of war were not even disguised, let alone healed.
It had never been a rich province. No Dalmatian coast to attract the tourists; no mineral reserves; just low-tech agriculture in the farmlands between the mountains and the forests.
The economic damage would take years more to recover from, but the social damage was far worse. Few could imagine that in less than a generation or two Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslim would accept living side by side with each other again, or even a few miles apart, save in armed watchful compounds.
The international bodies spouted the usual blather about reunification and restoring mutual trust, thus justifying the doomed attempts to put Humpty Dumpty back together again rather than facing the necessity of partition.
The task of governing the shattered entity went to the United Nations High Representative, a sort of pro-consul with near-absolute powers, backed by the soldiers of UNPROFOR. Of all the unglamorous tasks that fell to the people who had no time for posturing on the political stage but who actually made things happen, the least charming went to the ICMP – the International Commission on Missing Persons.
This was run with impressive and quiet efficiency by Gordon Bacon, a former British policeman. To the ICMP fell the task of listening to the tens of thousands of relatives of the ‘disappeared ones’ and taking their statements on the one hand, and tracing and exhuming the hundreds of mini-massacres that had taken place since 1992. The third job was to try to match statements with relics and restore the skull and bundle of bones to the right relatives, for final burial according to the religious creed or none.
The matching process would have been completely impossible without DNA, but the new technology meant that a swab of blood from the relative and a sliver of bone from the cadaver could provide proof of identity beyond doubt. By 2000 the fastest and most efficient DNA laboratory in Europe was not in some wealthy western capital but in Sarajevo, set up and run on tiny funds by Gordon Bacon. It was to see him that the Tracker drove into the Bosnian city two days after Milan Rajak had signed his name.
He did not need to bring the Serb with him. Rajak had revealed that before he died, the Bosnian aid worker Fadil Sulejman had told his murderers that the farm had once been his family home. Gordon Bacon read the Rajak statement with interest but no sense of novelty.
He had read hundreds before, but always from the few survivors, never from one of the perpetrators, and never involving an American. He realized the mystery of what he knew as the Colenso file might be solved at last. He contacted the ICMP commissioner for the Travnik zone and asked for the fullest cooperation with Mr Gracey when he arrived. The Tracker spent the night in his fellow countryman’s spare bedroom and drove north again in the morning.
It is a mite over two hours into Travnik and he was there by midday. He had talked with Stephen Edmond, and a swab of the grandfather’s blood was on its way from Ontario.
On 11 April the exhumation team left Travnik for the hills, aided by a local guide. Questions at the mosque had quickly discovered two men who had known Fadil Sulejman, and one of them said he knew the farm in the upland valley. He was in the leading off-road.
The digger team brought with them protective clothing, breathing aids, shovels, soft brushes, sieves and evidence bags, all the needs of their grisly trade.
The farm was much as it must have been six years earlier, but a bit more overgrown. No one had come to reclaim it; the Sulejman family appeared to have ceased to exist.
They found the sewage pit without difficulty. The spring rains had been less than in 1995 and the contents of the pit had hardened to malodorous clay. The diggers pulled on garments like a fly fisherman’s waders, and over-jackets, but seemed immune to the smell.
Rajak had testified that on the day of the murder, the pit was full to the brim, but if Ricky Colenso’s feet had touched bottom, it must be about six feet deep. Without rain, the surface had receded two feet downwards.
After three feet of slime had been shovelled out, the ICMP commissioner ordered his men to throw out their shovels and resume with hand trowels. An hour later the first bones were visible and in a further hour of work with scraper and camel-hair brush, the massacre site was exposed.
No air had penetrated to the bottom of the pit, so there had been no maggots at work, since they depend on air. The decomposition was uniquely due to enzymes and bacilli.
Every fragment of soft tissue was gone, and when wiped with a damp cloth, the first skull to emerge gleamed clean and white. There were fragments of leather, from the boots and belts of the two men; an ornate belt buckle, surely American, plus metal studs from jeans and buttons from a denim jacket.
One of the men on his knees down below called out and passed up a watch. Seventy months had not affected the inscription on the back: ‘Ricky, from Mom. Graduation. 1994’.
The children had all been thrown in dead and they had sunk on top of, or close to, each other. Time and decomposition had made a jumble of the bones of the six corpses, but the size of the skeletons proved who they had been.
Sulejman had also gone in dead; his skeleton lay on its back, spread-eagled, the way the body had sunk. His friend stood and looked down into the pit and prayed to Allah. He confirmed his former classmate had been around five feet eight inches tall.
The eighth body was the big one, over six feet. It was to one side, as if the dying boy had tried to crawl through the blackness to the side wall. The bones lay on their side, hunched in the foetal position. The watch came from that pile, and the belt buckle. When the skull was passed up, the front teeth were smashed, as Rajak had testified.
It was sundown when the last tiny bone was retrieved and bagged. The two grown men were in separate bags, the children shared their own; the reassembly of six small skeletons could be done in the mortuary down in the town.
The Tracker drove to Vitez for the night. The British army was long gone but he took a billet in a guest house he knew from before. In the morning he returned to the ICMP office in Travnik.
From Sarajevo, Gordon Bacon authorized the local commissioner to release the remains of Ricky Colenso to Major Gracey for transportation to the capital.
The swab from Ontario had arrived. In a remarkably fast two days the DNA tests were complete. The head of the ICMP in Sarajevo attested that the skeleton was indeed that of Richard ‘Ricky’ Colenso of Georgetown, USA. He needed formal authority from the next of kin to release the remains into the care of Philip Gracey of Andover, Hampshire, UK. That took two days to arrive.
In the interval, on instructions from Ontario, the Tracker bought a casket from Sarajevo’s premier funeral parlour. The mortician arranged the skeleton with other materials to give heft and balance to the casket as if it contained a real cadaver. Then it was sealed for ever.
It was on 15 April that the Canadian magnate’s Grumman IV arrived with a letter of authority to take over. The Tracker consigned the casket and the fat file