Chapter Forty

Three days later, Diane Fry received a letter in the morning mail at West Street. It carried a Bulgarian stamp depicting a yellow-winged butterfly, and the address on the envelope was written in tiny, precise black letters, with her name, rank and every word spelled out perfectly.

Inside the envelope, she found a postcard and a colour photograph. Was that all? It seemed very disappointing. Holding the postcard carefully by the edges, she looked at the front. The picture was a detail from the Pleven Panorama, depicting some epic battle that had liberated Bulgaria from five hundred years of Turkish rule.

But something about the picture unsettled her. Abandoned cannon and a landscape littered with bodies? It wasn’t her idea of a tourist attraction, but perhaps it was considered art.

Then she flipped the card over and read the message. From the moment she’d seen the stamp, she had no doubt who it was from.

Honoured Sergeant Fry, It was my privilege to work with you in this recent investigation. I will remember it always, because it will be my last. My chief has been pleased to accept my resignation from the service.

As you read this communication, I will no longer be in Bulgaria. So where will I go now? That is uncertain. Perhaps I will move to your Derbyshire? As I told you, your beautiful hills resemble those around my home in Miziya. I hope you know you are very lucky!

Please give my regards to your colleagues. And my apologies to your Constable Cooper. Tell him, sometimes a man can see too much.

Ah, but you asked me a question once. You asked me would a father really go so far to get his child back? Would he go to any lengths necessary? I did not answer you then. This was because I knew what should be done, but I felt certain you would say I was wrong. You are a good professional. You have my admiration.

So now I will tell you the answer. Would a father go to any lengths necessary to get his child back? The answer is ‘yes’. The answer is that I already did. May forgiveness be with God.

Dovijdane,

Georgi Kotsev

Afraid to start figuring out what the message meant, Fry turned over the postcard again. This time she realized what she’d found disconcerting about the picture. The lower half of it was real, a photograph of an actual battlefield. Brown mud, abandoned weapons, a makeshift trench with a dropped water bottle, an empty ammunition box. But beyond the foreground, the scene was false. Those exhausted soldiers she could see weren’t walking through a real landscape, but an imaginary one. The dead bodies were painted in, the drifting smoke was the product of an artist’s brush. Reality and illusion had been cleverly merged, and the line where they joined was almost imperceptible.