The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid Page A

do what we’ve been doing in Prague. It’s not the only place where people are denied the freedom to talk and think. This is too important to walk away from, Maggie. These people need us.’
It wasn’t long before Melissa found a solution that went some way towards satisfying her desire to spread the word of the new discipline that was being carved from the marriage of feminism, philosophy and geopolitics. The answer lay in Dubrovnik. Although it was part of the wider Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia had more freedom to connect with the West. And at the Inter-University Centre there, it was possible for academics from both sides of the ideological divide to meet. Those oppressed and constrained by the regimes they lived under could hide their dissident tendencies and disguise the nature of the encounters that made their time at the IUC so fruitful. They could engage in seminars and discussions of the latest theories, then take those subversive ideas back to their own campuses and spread them via the handfuls of students they could trust. Melissa was in her element, enthusiasm and intelligence transmitting themselves to everyone she encountered.
Just as she did in Oxford, Melissa made learning fun. Seminars segued seamlessly into social occasions, late-night drinking sessions filled with discussion and disputation. She started a journal for dissident feminist philosophers and geographers, persuading a small German academic publishing house to fund the anonymous contributions. I remember sitting up into the night typing the handwritten articles, trying to make sense of the sometimes fractured English. But I was happy to be part of the adventure. Everybody loved Melissa; everybody wanted more of her.
Unfortunately for Melissa, the fellows of Schollies were among that number. Instead of being proud of what she was achieving in the wider world, most of the governing body suffered from the tunnel vision that outsiders suspect all academics of. They were more interested in their own convenience than in the human rights of a bunch of wannabe philosophers they’d never heard of. Melissa was being paid by Schollies to teach and to shoulder her share of administrative duties. In her absence during the summer term of 1991, when it looked as if Croatia would be engulfed in civil war any day, the college Governing Body had appointed her Dean and were insisting she honour her teaching commitments.
Melissa was livid. Although from my present perspective as a senior member of college I can see that the Governing Body had a difficult balancing act to fulfil, at the time, I was wholeheartedly in Melissa’s corner. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the role of Western academics was even more crucial for the future, she argued. Much more crucial than teaching undergraduates whose education had been infinitely more privileged. In my eyes, she had sole occupancy of the moral high ground. But in spite of her impassioned arguments to anyone who would listen, the college remained impassive. Come the autumn term, Melissa’s wings would be clipped. She wouldn’t be running seminars for dissidents in Dubrovnik. She’d be teaching Malthus and the history of population development in first-year tutorials.
And that’s how I ended up in Dubrovnik on 1 October 1991, when the bombs started falling that cut off the water and the electricity to the city.

7
     
    A lan Macanespie scratched his belly through the gap in his shirt buttons and slurped milky coffee from a cardboard carton. Theo Proctor’s lip curled in disgust as his colleague belched sour breath across the table. ‘You are disgusting, you know that?’ The Welshman waved a hand in front of his face and reached for his bottle of mineral water.
    ‘Just because you’ve no idea what a Saturday night’s for doesn’t mean the rest of us have to behave like we’re a bunch of choirboys.’ Macanespie shifted in his chair, his stomach following his