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The red VW swerved back to its original lane. Inside the car four young men in black-leather jackets were laughing and nodding in time to whatever was playing on the car's stereo. Solomon slowed the Nissan to give them plenty of room. Driving on Bosnian roads was dangerous at the best of times: it was as if surviving the war had given the locals a sense of invulnerability. If the Serbs couldn't kill them with tanks, mortars and sniper fire, then nothing as banal as a road-traffic accident would.
    “I'm just saying, there must have been a reason.”
    “She's originally from Bosnia, from a small village not far from Mostar. She married an Albanian and moved to Kosovo to be with his family. He died, but she stayed in Kosovo to raise her kids. In 'ninety-four her relatives in Bosnia were pretty much wiped out by the Serbs. There were a couple of teenagers who needed looking after, so she went back. Her kids had grown up by then and I think she just wanted to get back to her roots. I think the fact that they risked losing their land had something to do with it.”
    “She's going to be distraught when she finds out what's happened,” said Kimete.
    “Did she report them missing?”
    Solomon wound down his window a fraction to let in some fresh air. On his left were austere tower blocks, many still bearing the scars of shrapnel hits, the hillside to his right dotted with brown houses that had new orange-tiled roofs. Virtually all the houses on the hillsides around the city had been devastated by the fighting, and after the war builders had made fortunes repairing the damage.
    “No, it was a neighbour. Back then there was no procedure for contacting relatives, and because the bodies weren't found they weren't included in our database. The police didn't take a statement from her and certainly no blood sample they didn't do that back then.”
    They drove past factories empty since the war and out of the city. They curved round to the south-east and followed the Neretva river to the town of Jablanica, then along the twisting road through heavily wooded hills and rocky gorges.
    It started to rain so Solomon flicked on the windscreen wipers and his side-lights. When they were ninety kilometres outside Sarajevo, Solomon passed a map to Kimete and tapped on the road they were looking for.
    They turned off the main road and headed up a hill, then Kimete told Solomon to turn again and he urged the four-wheel-drive down a narrow, rutted track. They rumbled over an ancient stone bridge speckled with bullet strikes, then went through a small village with cobbled roads. More than half of the houses were roofless and every building had been pockmarked by shrapnel. They passed an orchard of fruit trees, the trunks painted white with quicklime to keep insects away, and Kimete pointed to a single-storey stone cottage.
    “There it is,” she said. It was a long, low building with a pitched orange-tiled roof and a small chimney at one end. The walls had been painted white, probably with the same lime that had been used to protect the trees. Set into the wall by the door was an alcove filled with neatly chopped firewood. A lonely cow was tethered to a tree-stump, cropping a clump of tired grass. Solomon pulled up the collar of his sheepskin jacket and jogged along a rough gravel path to the front door, Kimete following close behind. There was a big brass knocker in the shape of a coil of rope and he banged it against the door. The blows echoed dully around the cottage. Solomon stood with his back pressed up against the door, trying to shelter from the rain. After a couple of minutes he knocked again, harder this time. There was still no reply. He shivered as cold water trickled down the back of his neck.
    He walked along the side of the house, squelching through mud. He came to a window and peered inside. An old woman was sitting in a wooden rocking-chair, huddled over a small black stove. Solomon rapped on the window. The old woman didn't react.