They will never find the body of nine-year-old Mandahie Mucoli, whose remains are probably too twisted and burned to be distinguished from the 23 other Kosovar children who died with her.
But her ring survives. Cleaned up, it sits, looking tiny in the palm of her cousin, 27-year-old Qamil Mucoli.
Mandahie and the other children, together with mothers, aunts, and grandparents, 52 people in all, were herded into one room of a farmhouse in the tiny village of Poklek by Serbian police on one fine spring day on April 18th. Then, through an open window, someone threw a grenade.
The explosion's force can still be seen in the scarred walls and ceiling. Just to make sure, the police emptied several magazines of Kalashnikov ammunition into the room. Even so, six survived.
Elheme Mucoli is one of them. She doesn't like to talk about it. She doesn't cry. In fact, when you ask her about her experience she looks awkward and shy. The 14-year-old somehow survived the carnage, and with five others slipped out of the room, jumping out of a back window. "I went from the window but I hurt my leg. I just ran away as fast as I could," she said.
Qamil watched from a nearby wood, along with his unit of KLA guerrillas. "There was nothing we could do, they had much heavier guns than we did," he says.
Two hours later the police were back. This time they brought an orange plastic can of petrol and a tyre. They went into the house and put the tyre on the floor of the room full of the bodies, then covered it in petrol and set it alight. Qamil came back the next day to bury them.
In the room, studded with bullet holes, its ceiling blackened, he has laid out the surviving jewellery. A gold pendant with Islamic writing, some necklaces, a group of rings, and two watches, black, the faces gone, the metal fused. "This is the watch of my brother's wife," he says matter of factly, staring with blue eyes. "And this is my mother's watch. I know that this is the watch of my brother's wife because my brother fixed it. Look."
Sure enough, the metal strap has been fixed with a different bit of metal.
The floor of the room has long since been swept of human remains. But something remains in the dark basement beneath. The blood from those pulped bodies dripped through the floor, and for those willing to brave the smell, you can see it now, the long stains passing down the brickwork, the black thick mess lying in the centre of the floor, from where it has dripped through a crack in the basement ceiling.
Qamil waited until the Serbs had gone, then moved the roasted bodies to a patch of earth around the back of the house.
British soldiers came yesterday morning and told him to keep the graves off limits to journalists until the war crimes investigators arrive, though what they will be able to find from it all is unclear.
He had another shock in store that weekend. His father was also missing, but he was not among the charred corpses of his mother, his wife, his two children, his four sisters, his brother's wife, and her four children. His father's body was down the well.
When the police first came to the house on Saturday afternoon, they had taken his father and a friend who was staying there out into the garden, and behind some trees had shot them dead. Then, say the survivors of the subsequent carnage, the Serbs had tried and failed to burn the bodies. So instead, they stuffed them down the farm well.
"Ten days later we pulled my father out of the well," he said. "I got my father's leg and half the body of his friend, but we couldn't get out any more." Eight members of his family survive out of 60. He said he does not know if they will stay in the farm. At the moment they do not live there - the water in the well cannot be drunk.
"There's no kind of human being that can do something like that," he says, his handsome bearded face expressionless. "What can you think about them? Is there anybody who would not feel sorry about doing this?"
Apparently there is. Poklek's slaughter of the children is an extreme example of mass slaying in Kosovo, but it is one of many.
On the way out, we pass a Belgian news team who want to take us to find another mass grave - this one, they say, has bones sticking out of the earth. We decline, and our colleagues who return later do so in shock. An Albanian farmer had his legs blown off 300 metres from their jeep, even as British soldiers were putting up mine warnings.
Instead, we headed north, intending to visit Mitrovica, to check on news that a flying column of French troops had occupied this last major town in Kosovo. We stopped half way, at Srbica.
Srbica, deep in the Drenica valley of rolling hills and woods, was of course safe, the Serbs were due to have pulled out that very morning. So there was no problem, we thought, in driving in through these still shattered streets to find the old Serbian special forces base.
Here was where some of the most sinister of the paramilitaries operated, and, seeing a few Albanians walking in the town, we went up the hill to the base. Where two Serb police suddenly emerged and shouted at us. We ran for the car, thanking fate that for once my battered car started first time, and scooted down the road backwards. Turning, we drove fast across town - what is left of it: Srbica has been pummelled for more than a year by a string of battles.
Then, at the other end of town, the brakes went on once more - another Serb jeep. Back again, we drove fast past the police base, and realised the mistake. Srbica is still under Serb control.
We had not noticed the house that is their headquarters, nor the light blue armoured car parked in the garden in front of it. They watched us pass, shaking their hands - but not their guns.
Up the road, half way between Serb and guerrilla lines, we got a puncture. A mortar bumped in the distance, and the jack broke. Another car arrived, with Dutch journalists. They provided a jack, and we provided some good advice about turning around.
Mortar fire continued in the surrounding hills as we drove away, through a blasted, devastated landscape that is full of little chambers of horrors.
But fate was kind. It provided some humour. Near Pristina, the Serbs had erected a dummy bridge near the real one made of plywood and black canvas. NATO didn't bomb it. So someone built a polythene tank - with see-through plastic sheeting stretched over a wood frame, tank-sized, with a long drainpipe gun pointing at the sky. Still it didn't fool the pilots. There is no crater anywhere near it.
Only, presumably in the all-Serb village nearby, a very frustrated carpenter.