In the picturesque Slovenian seaside resort of Koper, on the Adriatic shore, a body is found in a lonely, rocky spot on a coastal path. When it is identified as that of a police inspector, Ivan Furlan, his brother is arrested without further investigation since it is well known in the town that the siblings had fallen out over inherited property.
Then a whistle-blower sends an anonymous message to headquarters in the capital, Ljubljana, asking for urgent assistance to prevent a miscarriage of justice, and Petra Vidmar, the youngest serving female police inspector in the Slovenian police, is despatched to sort things out. She may be a high flyer destined for an exciting future working for Interpol, but she has to solve this last domestic murder before she heads to new destinations...
Release date:
March 6, 2025
Publisher:
Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages:
93000
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At this time of year it was not rare to find scores of dead jellyfish littered along the rocky beach that stretched from Koper to Izola, and today was no different. Their plump, translucent bodies quickly turned pink and slack on the pebbles, sitting in haphazard piles wherever the slight tide had pushed them. In the shallows where the waves broke across the shore yet more of them were tossed around, thrown up before crashing back into the water, soon to join those already beached. As Andrej walked along the concrete coastal path just a couple of feet above the jellyfish graveyard, he shuddered to remember the summer when his brother had found a particularly large specimen stranded in a tiny tidal pool and triumphantly launched it at him. When it had collided with Andrej’s face he could have sworn he felt it wriggling, although his grandmother had told him that they were barely alive to start with, let alone after Matej had had his grubby hands all over it. Even at six years old Andrej had concluded that the swarms of jellyfish were best avoided, alive or dead, although this had put a significant dampener on his adolescent socialising. It turned out that most people weren’t interested in hanging out with the boy who refused to go swimming after school as soon as it was warm enough, just because he wasn’t keen on the meduze. The ones they got on the Slovene coast didn’t even sting.
The arrival of the jellyfish was, he mused, an indication that spring truly had its foot in the door, edging out the admittedly mild winter of the northern Adriatic coast. Soon Andrej could enjoy the blissful but desperately short period in which he didn’t have to spend half his income on heating or air conditioning his small apartment. He would be able actually to enjoy his dizzying proximity to the sea, and justify the small fortune he spent on the privilege. No matter the weather, Andrej made a point of marching from Koper to Izola and back again every morning, following in the footsteps of his grandfather who had made the same trip every morning from when he could walk until the day he died, or so he claimed. From November to February these trips were made hastily, so as to avoid the freezing winds sweeping in off the water. From May until mid-September they were even swifter in an attempt to reduce distressing sightings of naked tourists attempting to make themselves even redder than they had managed last summer. Not that Andrej disliked the tourists, of course. A not insignificant portion of the town relied on them, at least partially, for their incomes, but that didn’t mean that he had to enjoy zigzagging through their beach towels and plastic buckets every day for months on end; especially when those were the months he’d have most liked to be down by the water himself. Crucially, the jellyfish didn’t tend to make an appearance in summer.
Andrej had almost reached Izola now, the skinny church spire rising up strikingly against the hills behind. Around it sat the lower, redder roofs of the hotels and cafés in Veliki Trg, the main square, their colourful façades and wooden shutters visible even from this distance. He stopped for a minute to take in the scene, admiring the way the water glittered and danced with the morning light. On the steep bank that rose up on the other side of the coastal path he could hear birds chirping merrily in the trees, accompanied by the rustling of leaves and the occasional disturbance as a lizard made a mad dash into the undergrowth when it saw him approaching. It was a fine Sunday, the air a little warmer than it had been up until now, and he started to deliberate over whether he should treat himself to a drink and a rest at one of the little bars that lined the shorefront in Izola. He had just decided on his order, a white coffee with a cottage cheese zavitek, and started to resume his walk when he noticed something else lying below him among the rocks a little way ahead. From where he was standing, it looked like someone had left their jumper and jeans on the beach, the legs of the trousers half-submerged by the sea. He continued to peer down from his slight vantage point as he walked along the path, assuming it was simply a bundle of clothes abandoned by a tourist or a drunken local, although it seemed a little seasonally premature for either to be this far along the coastal path and happy to be unclothed. As he got closer to the pile, Andrej started moving faster. What had previously been obscured by rocks and jellyfish was now starting to look more like a hand sticking haphazardly out of the sleeve, the skin pallid. When he was a few metres away, Andrej scrambled down off the path and onto the slick rocks, praying as he went that he was wrong and that the clothes were unoccupied, and that this could all be an amusing story he would tell his grandmother next time he visited her in the nursing home. When the neckline of the jumper was fully and undeniably in view, Andrej stopped. He pulled his phone from the pocket of his coat, and quickly dialled the police.
He was aware that he gabbled when the call handler picked up, but he hoped he’d still got the salient points across: dead man on the beach, coastal path about fifteen minutes’ walk from the outskirts of Izola, hurry. After all, while it was common to find jellyfish corpses along this stretch of shoreline, the same could not be said of human ones.
As Inšpektorica Petra Vidmar sat in what must have been the third traffic jam of her journey so far, she found herself re-evaluating her childhood jealousy of friends who were taken to the coast every summer. As soon as temperatures had reached twenty degrees there had been a great rush on a Saturday from Ljubljana down to the sea, everyone throwing themselves into their cars and joining the legions of foreign-plated campervans and saloons already choking the ring road around the capital. Their desperate goal, her friends had informed her, had been to make it onto the Koper-bound A1 in time for a late-morning malica, the habitual mid-morning snack, on the beach. How a slice of bread topped with pršut, Slovenia’s answer to prosciutto, was any better by the coast than in the city, Petra had never quite understood. Asking, however, admitted ignorance that, as a teenager, she’d been unwilling to demonstrate. As soon as they had drained their cappuccinos, the more adventurous apparently then piled back into their cars, continuing along the winding road to the Croatian border before sitting grumpily in a gridlocked queue at the checkpoint, bemoaning the mere existence of everyone else doing exactly the same thing and rudely delaying their first sip of rakija in Umag. Come Sunday, they would make the return journey, probably crammed at the border crossing next to the same people who had impeded their outbound trip. Petra had heard this story dozens of times from various friends over the years, always told with a strange mixture of loathing and desperation to do the same thing again next weekend. Since she had never done it, she had always been jealous that she didn’t get to join in the swapping of stories about grumpy Croatian border guards poking through beach bags to check for unspecified contraband or share recommendations for the best fried calamari to grab from a roadside gostilna before continuing onwards. Her own family had been stoically capital city folk, and any vacation time had been saved for a trip to her mother’s family in Prekmurje, the region as far from the Adriatic as it is possible to get and still be in Slovenia. She had had more than one row with her parents about how it would be nice to make just one weekend trip to the seaside, if only to see what all the fuss was about.
Now, sitting in a conga line of oversized family SUVs and caravans that stretched as far as the eye could see, she made a mental note to compliment her father on his foresight and good sense next time she visited. Quite how this many of her fellow Ljubljanans had decided that a Thursday morning in mid-April was the perfect time to explore the wonders of Istria was unfathomable to Petra, let alone why countless Germans and Austrians saw fit to join in. Surely there were nicer beaches nearer them? She’d seen enough sponsored adverts online about holidays on the Baltic coast that she’d vaguely considered it herself. Even if they had to come south, weren’t Trieste, Venice and the Italian Adriatic just as accessible, and boasted fewer Communist-era concrete hotels clustered on the coastline; eerie in their sameness? Did they really enjoy the wonders of formerly Yugoslavian road networks to the extent that they wouldn’t rather fly? With Croatia set to join the Schengen area soon, she supposed the era of sweaty border queues would soon come to an end.
As the traffic crawled imperceptibly forward, she reflected on her mental list of people to blame for putting her in this situation. Campervan owners of Teutonic origin, certainly. Inšpektor Jakob Mlakar, for insisting that the impending birth of his second child should prevent him from being sent on an assignment away from the capital, despite him being the one who had worked in Koper as a young officer. And then, of course, the police officers of Koper themselves, whose apparent incompetence and insistence that they could handle everything internally, without an interloper from the big city, meant that Petra’s presence hadn’t been requested until late on a Wednesday evening, condemning her to the Thursday morning migration of the long weekenders. Even then it had been anonymous. Could they really not have put their pride aside and accepted that they needed help earlier, or never asked at all?
Petra pulled her phone down from where it had been cradled in its holder to act as a GPS, angrily stabbing at the screen to close her map app. It wasn’t as though she needed help with directions, the A1 by this point was simply the road to the coast, and she and the majority of her fellow travellers would be on it until it petered out at Koper. Swiping through her emails, she read the bullet-pointed list that her commanding officer had sent her once it was established that Mlakar was going to be appeased, despite Petra’s pleas and seniority.
The case was, Petra had to admit, more exciting than most that came up in Slovenia. On Sunday morning, a young man walking along the coastal path from Koper to nearby Izola had discovered a corpse. Despite being found at the water’s edge, the body had not apparently spent any time at sea. The cause of death had been a gunshot, with the head bearing a significant wound that Petra would have appreciated not seeing a photo of while she was trying to eat her canteen breakfast that morning, already disgruntled at the impending journey and workload. All of this made the case one of the more tantalising to have crossed the desks of any police station in the country in recent memory, and if it had been six months earlier and in Ljubljana, then Petra would have relished the chance to add it to her career highlights. However, it was happening now, when, with luck, she no longer needed to plump up her CV, and was over an hour away from her home even without the tourists. It was also sure to be far more aggravation than it was worth due to the identity of the victim.
The walker who had found the body hadn’t recognised it, which was perhaps unsurprising. Andrej Kos was an elementary school teacher whose main hobbies included birdwatching and playing the accordion for events at his grandmother’s retirement home, thus he had predictably never experienced any run-ins with the law. When the emergency services had arrived, however, they had recognised the deceased immediately. It would have been hard not to, considering it was one of their own. Inšpektor Ivan Furlan was coastal born and bred, and had served his entire career in Koper. By all reports he was well-liked, a family man, but always willing to work an extra hour in the evening to help junior officers learn and gain experience. His commanding officer had described him as uninterested in promotion, just in keeping the city safe, which might have explained how he was the same rank as Petra despite being old enough to be her father. It also raised Petra’s eyebrows a little. The police were known to be laughably underpaid, and it could be a thankless career even if it was much safer than police work was in most countries. Everyone Petra had ever met in the force had been focused on promotion, simply because going up a rank was the difference between being able to buy your mother a nice birthday present versus spending your entire salary on rent and food. Petra chose to put aside her initial incredulity and assume that the rather saccharine sentiment was simply the result of a commanding officer who had no experience in eulogising his colleagues, especially not to other police officers.
Watching a small and particularly ancient Yugo triumphantly zoom off at the motorway exit she was about to inch past, she wondered how Svetnik Golob, her own superintendent, might memorialise Petra herself. Hard-working, she hoped, perhaps even relentless. Definitely considerate, ideally kind. She’d have to be, considering how often she had been nominated to do the bad news door-knock when a body was fished out of the Ljubljanica river, or there was a fatal car crash after a particularly heavy St Martin’s Day celebration. She could have throttled whoever had suggested that kind of interaction was best handled by a woman, particularly as women of any seniority were rare beasts in a male-dominated force. Observing her reflection in the rear-view mirror, she hoped that her decision not to wear her uniform for this first meeting with the superintendent in Koper had been the correct one. In the mirror her face seemed thin and pale, dominated by her large sunglasses. The ponytail she had carefully styled in the harsh lighting of Ljubljana station’s bathroom now looked a little scruffy, her brown wavy hair fighting against the slim, black hair tie. She felt again the familiar stab of imposter syndrome, and prayed that she was up to the task ahead. She gave the hair tie she always kept around her wrist a sharp twang, the shock momentarily clearing her head, and returned her attention to the stationary traffic ahead of her.
There was no reference in the email to the exact circumstances that saw Petra on her way to Koper, although that was not entirely unexpected. It was shaming enough for the superintendent that a whistle-blower had written to the capital accusing their colleagues of mismanagement of the case at best, and deliberate covering-up of a murder of one of their own at worst. Petra supposed there wasn’t much the superintendent could say, all things considered. He could hardly demand that he’d rather the capital keep their nose out, not when Ljubljana had decided it was worth looking into and had told the Koper directorate that they would be sending someone to answer the informant’s call. Even if there was no corruption or incompetence to answer for, resistance would make the superintendent look either petulant, or complicit. It was probably better for everyone’s pride and working relationships that no one engaged with the original circumstances of Petra’s involvement, although she doubted that the men on the ground in Koper would share the same belief. It was not going to be a pleasant case.
Furlan had left behind a wife and two adult sons, both of whom now lived in Ljubljana, and after immediate visits to their widowed mother, were back there again. Although Petra had attempted to use this fact as a way to delay her drive, the traitorous Mlakar had quickly offered to do any necessary interviews with the sons. He had phrased it in a way that suggested he honestly thought he was doing Petra a favour, which had rankled, but then so had his suggestion that it might be nice to have a quick coastal assignment and get a bit of a tan before she headed off to ‘bigger and better things’ in Lyon. Never one to tempt fate, Petra had simply asked him to pass on her best wishes to Gospa Mlakar on the upcoming birth and beaten a hasty retreat out to the Skoda, which had now been her prison for almost two hours. The traffic surged forward a few metres before grinding to a halt again, but Petra was now wise to the juddering pattern of the coastal rush and didn’t bother to pull forward. Instead, she looked out of the window and gazed longingly at the empty carriageway going in the opposite direction. It couldn’t be too long before she was cruising back to her apartment in Ljubljana, surely. She would count the days.
By the time she reached her guesthouse it had taken her nearly twice the time she had initially anticipated, and she was ready to murder either Mlakar or a large cappuccino. Deciding that the second was both easier to carry out and less damaging to her career, she eased herself out of the car and stretched dramatically in the late morning sun drenching the car park. She was already woefully overdue for her original arrival time at the station in Koper, so she decided that she could afford to be a few minutes later if it meant she could gather her thoughts. The budget for her lodgings had been small, and with the tourist season apparently already beginning to warm up, the poor soul who had been in charge of making her booking had found only slim pickings. Indeed, although she’d been assured that she’d be staying somewhere close to the police station, she had long since passed every exit signposted ‘Koper/Capodistria’, the Italian name for the town, and had climbed a not insignificant way up the next hill by the time she eventually pulled into the dusty car park.
The guesthouse was a medium-sized, concrete affair, which seemed to have been haphazardly extended and refurbished over the years to create a building that had as many doors and corners as it did windows. The original structure might have been the ground-floor restaurant with rooms above, but there were now terraces and glass-roofed extensions from various eras sprawling out in all directions. From the car park and the largest of its extensions, the guesthouse boasted a view straight over the straggling two-lane road, offering excellent observational opportunities for anyone interested in the variety expressed in European numberplates. As Petra pulled her shoulder-bag out from the passenger seat and started to make her way around the back of the building, she was surprised to be met with a gorgeous view of a vineyard running down the hill, green leaves glistening in the sunshine. Halfway down the field she could see an old man and a young boy walking through the neat rows of vines, the boy skipping ahead as the man stopped to peer at the occasional plant. Near where Petra was standing, and in perfect view of the next roundabout along the road, someone had erected a homemade sign that read in clear, black capital letters ‘vino in olivno olje’, wine and olive oil, followed by a large green euro symbol. An enterprising individual had then translated the same sales pitch into German, Italian and English on an A-board, which was propped up next to it. Petra smiled at the signs and stood for a minute longer taking in her surroundings before heading through what appeared to be the main door of the establishment.
After checking in with what she assumed was the owner’s unenthusiastic teenaged son, Petra wasted no time in setting herself up in the restaurant, bedroom unseen and duffle bag of clothes still sitting in the Skoda. She whipped her laptop out of its neoprene sleeve and opened up the email explaining the case once more, sipping gratefully at the coffee that had been procured for her. This time, as she read through, she started to jot down notes on one of the thick reporters’ notebooks she’d snaffled from the stationery cupboard back in Ljubljana. She hated walking in anywhere without a plan of attack, let alone into a police station where she knew most of them didn’t want her, and which would require her commandeering a case that must have been incredibly personal to them. After a moment’s hesitation she opened another email sent by Svetnik Golob, which contained the text of the whistle-blower’s cry for help.
To whom it may concern,
I write regarding the death of Inšpektor Ivan Furlan of Koper Police. The man we have arrested is not guilty, and there is little evidence to suggest his involvement. It would be a gross miscarriage of justice to allow him to pay the price of someone else’s crime. Requests to Svetnik Horvat that he bring in another police directorate for an impartial view have been ignored, so I have had to resort to this.
Reading through it, she was reminded why she had been sent to the coast and felt momentarily guilty about her reluctance to answer the author’s call. The note was brief and had been sent from an email address apparently created specifically for the purpose, although the author had made no attempt to hide that they were evidently an officer of the Koper Police themselves. Petra knew that the Powers-That-Be in Ljubljana had seriously considered ignoring it but had decided it couldn’t hurt to send someone down to poke around, even if only to ensure that both the investigation and the national police grievance procedures were above reproach. She snapped her laptop decisively shut and stood up from the table, heading back out to the car park as she stabbed at her phone for directions to the police station. It was time to get started.
Finding the police station was not as easy as Petra had originally assumed. She had been warned before she left Ljubljana that Koper was a warren of increasingly difficult to predict roundabouts, and discovered as soon as she pulled back off the A1 that this was not an overstatement. Vague assertions from Google about which lane might be most appropriate had also proved unhelpful. She crawled along in the right lane as much as possible, peering hopefully through the windscreen for a signpost indicating Policija, switching lanes as soon as she caught sight of the familiar pictogram of a behatted figure wearing a sash. It was one of her favourite things about Slovenian towns, the sort of thing that you didn’t appreciate until you’d found yourself lost in one too many foreign holiday destinations: they were always well-equipped with large white signs clearly showing the way to the nearest public services. As a teen she and some friends had occasionally prowled down Dunajska Cesta, one of the main streets through Ljubljana, furtively scribbling moustaches on the police pictogram and arrows on the bullseye used to signify the town centre. Shockingly, this hobby had never made it on to her CV. She smiled at the bilingualism of the signs here, with the Italian translation written out under the Slovene no matter how closely related the words were. Spotting that Policija/Polizia required a left at the next roundabout she quickly shifted across, glad of the lighter traffic now she wasn’t fighting her way through the holidaymakers.
Petra had been to Koper once before that she remembered, for an ill-fated New Year’s Eve party when she was a teenager. A friend’s family had acquired a holiday apartment following the death of an elderly relative, and her memories of the town were a mixture of grappa-induced haze and the oppressive atmosphere created by years of excessive usage of vanilla-scented talcum powder. The flat had been in one of the large concrete blocks built in the 1960s that appeared in crops of three or four in the area just outside of Koper old town. She remembered from school geography lessons that Koper had once been an island, and that the buildings on the belt of land reclaimed to join it to the mainland dated from centuries after the medieval centre. Naively, she had assumed that Koper Police would occupy one of the stunning sixteenth-century buildings hailing from when the town had been a jewel of the Venetian Republic. As a teenager, she and some friends had once spent New Year’s Day stumbling around the winding streets of central Koper, following a tourist guide who led them from various palazzos to historic churches to memorials, all hidden in the rabbit-warren of medieval streets. Instead, and perhaps a little disappointingly, it seemed that the police had been relegated to a Yugoslavian-era industrial park, several roundabouts away from anything that could be even vaguely described as Venetian. The signage led her to a squat, grey building bordered by a large car park on one side and a post office on the other. Most of the parking spaces were empty, save for a few police cars in the slots directly in front of the building. Manoeuvring the Skoda into the shadiest slot remaining, she sat for a second watching as two uniformed officers juggling greasy white takeaway bags and disposable coffee cups jostled up the three shallow stairs leading into the station, guffawing with laughter as they threw open the glass front doors. Petra took a deep breath as she grabbed her bag, slid her sunglasses off her face and got out of the car.
The plastic frame of the main door was warm to the touch as Petra opened it, reminding her of quite how much later in the day it was than she’d initially planned. Although it had been bitter when she’d woken up in Ljubljana this morning, it would seem that proximity to the Adriatic and a few hours of the sun shining had created a pleasant spring day in Koper. Petra immediately realised the downsides of the climate, however, as the door swung closed behind her, leaving her in a sparsely-furnished, square entrance hall that was already starting to get overly warm and stuffy. She could smell kebab meat and fresh coffee, and quickly noticed that one of the paper bags carried in by the officers earlier was now sitting next to the desk sergeant’s computer, cheap white napkins balled up and strewn around her keyboard. Petra smiled at the female officer as she approached the desk, and was met with a grin in return.
‘Dober dan, Inšpektorica Vidmar! I am so glad you made it here safely.’
Petra blinked in confusion, stopping slightly short of the desk. Was this town so small that she was so obviously a stranger? Did they have so few visitors that the only woman who walked in who wasn’t immediately recognisable had to be the inspector from the capital?
‘Dober dan, Policistka. . .’ Petra paused to take in the name badge pinned to her front, desperate to return the woman’s personalised friendliness, ‘Medved. I am sorry if you have been waiting for me. I know I am running late . . .
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