by Graham Brack
‘What can I do for you, Mr Holoubek?’
‘Call me Edvard. I saw you mentioned a lot in the papers recently over that German chap who topped himself.’
‘Dr Sammler.’
‘That’s the one. You did a good job running him down, I thought. Obviously took the easy way out rather than go to court and prison. Can’t have been a simple case for you.’
‘It wasn’t,’ agreed Slonský, glancing at Navrátil as he answered. His assistant appeared to be fascinated by an imaginary mark on his desk top.
‘And I thought “Slonský: I remember a likely lad called Slonský from my time on the force. There can’t be many of that name. I’ve never met another one.”’
‘My dad had it, but I agree it’s uncommon. And I was on the force in your day.’
‘So I thought to myself, that’s the sort of man who can help me with my problem. Someone who remembers those days but wasn’t high enough up to have been involved in it all.’
‘Involved in what?’
Holoubek ignored the question as he expounded his thoughts. It was unclear whether he was deaf, single-minded or just plain rude.
‘I saw young Tripka downstairs. What does he do now?’
‘Colonel Tripka is in the National Anti-Drug Centre.’
‘Young Tripka?’ Navrátil blurted out.
‘His father was a policeman before him. For a while they were both on the force at the same time, hence Old Tripka and Young Tripka,’ explained Slonský.
‘Old Tripka was an StB liaison officer,’ Holoubek added.
‘Responsible for keeping us out of the way when the Secret Police were running something. In which capacity,’ Slonský added, ‘I’m glad to say he was completely useless.’
‘Total waste of space,’ Holoubek agreed. ‘Of course, they didn’t trust him, so they didn’t share their plans with him, so it was hardly his fault. Still, good to know his boy hasn’t followed in his footsteps.’
‘We don’t have a secret police any more,’ Slonský pointed out.
‘Not that we admit to,’ Holoubek said, ‘but you and I know that can’t be true, don’t we? Where would our security be without a secret police, eh?’
Slonský saw no point in trying to answer a man who so clearly had a closed mind about the StB. Slonský’s own recollection was that the secret police were a pretty ineffectual bunch much of the time, and that many of the “plots” they claimed to have foiled were actually little projects of their own that had gone off at half-cock. There was, to name just one, an entertaining confusion when an StB agent had borrowed some army explosives to equip a dissident cell to blow up a railway line on the outskirts of Prague, only to be arrested himself by the “dissidents” who turned out to be StB agents to a man. However, Slonský held the view that the Czech Republic was better off without these clowns, and he did not think Holoubek was likely to agree with him.
‘You mentioned a problem,’ said Slonský. ‘What kind of problem?’
Holoubek paused and wiped his lips with a grubby handkerchief.
‘I’ve got something on my conscience,’ he began.
‘Haven’t we all?’ agreed Slonský. ‘You couldn’t be a policeman then without your conscience having a rough ride now and again.’
‘I know,’ said Holoubek. ‘But even so…’
‘Why don’t you just tell me the facts? I’m not going to judge you.’
Holoubek remained silent for a few seconds, made as if to speak, and stopped. After a moment or two, he seemed to have satisfied himself that he knew how to tell the story, and he began again.
‘Cast your mind back to 1976.’
‘I’ll do that. Navrátil, don’t even attempt it.’
‘I’ll tell you the story as I knew it. That doesn’t mean that it’s right, just that it’s what I heard or saw. I was working the night shift when we got a call to a house in Ruzyně. That was when the airport wasn’t so big. There were some nice villas out that way, and it turned out to be one of those we were called to. When we got there we found a young girl in a blood bath. She’d been stabbed multiple times and was lying in the bathroom where it looked as if someone had tried to make a tourniquet out of a towel to staunch the flow from an artery in her forearm. We couldn’t get much information because there was no-one else there. The door was wide open, the lights were blazing, and there was evidence that at least three people had been drinking and eating, but no sign of them.’
‘Did a male or female ring it in?’
‘A male. Didn’t give a name. Didn’t sound drunk or stoned, though one of the other officers reckoned he could smell something in the room when he first arrived that might have been cannabis. But remember that this was 1976. We had no DNA testing then, and drugs weren’t easily come by in Prague, so he may have been mistaken.’
Holoubek took a sip of coffee, though it must have been cold by now.
‘We didn’t know whose villa it was, but after a bit of hunting around we found some papers. It turned out to belong to a man called Válek, who was director of a factory making kitchen goods — you know, toasters, grills, that sort of thing. Válek was out at a function with his wife and the dead girl was his daughter Jana. He came home around two in the morning before we’d managed to trace him. Bloody mess. The idiots who were supposed to be guarding the front door let him wander in on the grounds that it was his house, so I soon had them shipped off to some God-forsaken hole in Slovakia where their lack of brains wouldn’t be noticed.’
‘Whose case was it?’ asked Slonský.
‘Well, mine at first, but it turned out that Válek had connections — his wife was sister to someone in high places — and after a day and a half I had Vaněček put in charge over me.’
‘I didn’t know him,’ Slonský said.
‘Not many more brains that those numbskulls I sent to Slovakia, but a few notches up the ladder. Knew which backsides to kiss. It didn’t hurt that his brother was a film director who could get you tickets for things.’
‘You’re spared that now, Navrátil,’ Slonský interrupted. ‘The people who could lay their hands on things used to get on in life, whatever their talent or lack of it.’
‘Vaněček looked good on May Day. He had a chest full of medals and nobody was very clear how he’d got them until we discovered that he sat on one of the committees that decided who got them. Vain man. Had a desk the size of Austria and nothing useful ever came off it,’ Holoubek continued.
‘What rank?’
‘I’m not sure now. A long way above me, that’s for sure. But he’d never been a policeman. He’d been in the army and transferred across via the People’s Militia. He had no idea how to run an investigation. To his credit, he knew that. He took me aside on the first morning and told me that although he was nominally in charge, he was going to let me get on with it. I had to brief him twice a day so he could report up the line. It sounds like good delegation but actually it was work avoidance.’
Holoubek paused for a moment. He looked confused.
‘Is there a toilet somewhere near? It’s that damn coffee.’
‘Navrátil, would you show Mr Holoubek to the toilet and escort him back?’
While they were gone, Slonský found a few biscuits in his desk to keep his brain energy stores fuelled. He had intended to share them, but they took too long to come back and missed out.
‘Where was I?’
‘You were telling us that you were left in charge when Vaněček took over.’
‘For a while. But it wasn’t an easy inquiry. We found the man who had called us. He lived a few doors away and had seen a car driving away at speed from the villa with its lights off. He insisted he had given his name to the officer who took the call, but it had not been recorded. Anyway, he had gone down to the house to complain about the noise and found the door open. He discovered the body and used the villa’s telephone to call the police.’
‘Did he have an alibi?’
‘His wife said he had
been muttering about the noise from around nine o’clock, so finally she had told him to either go and sort it out or stop moaning about it. Off he trotted down the road, and you know the rest. We couldn’t find out who was there with her. None of her friends could give us a name for either of the lads we knew must have been there. She allegedly didn’t have a boyfriend.’
‘Any scientific evidence?’
‘I’m just coming to that. Let me keep my thoughts in order. The pathologist told us we’d read it all wrongly. His view was that she hadn’t been killed in a frenzied attack. She had been stabbed a lot of times, as if the murderer was trying to see how many different places he could stab her before she died. It was a bit like that game when you have to pull out sticks and see who makes the marble drop.’
‘Two killers, then, competing?’
‘It looked that way. The arm wound had been the one that killed her. It severed her artery. But the pathologist said she had been conscious throughout and the loud music was probably to drown out her screams. That, and a gag that had been in her mouth and split the junction of her lips on each side.’
‘Had she been interfered with?’
‘She certainly had. But the pathologist thought that only one boy had raped her. I didn’t really understand the test but he reckoned there was only one lot of semen there.’
Holoubek began to look weary, and Slonský hoped that he would stay awake long enough to finish his story, or at least not lose his thread and start asking where he had got to.
‘After a week or so Vaněček assigned me to another case for a few days, so I lost touch with what was happening, though colleagues told me the investigation was fairly aimless. You’ll have had some of those, no doubt, when nothing seems to lead to anything worthwhile and you just find yourself doing something just so nobody can say you’re doing nothing.’
‘One or two,’ Slonský agreed. ‘Or a few hundred.’
‘Well, you can imagine how surprised I was when I heard that Vaněček had made an arrest and that someone had been charged with the rape and murder. Things can happen quickly, as you know, but there hadn’t been a sniff of the lead at the start of that week and I couldn’t find anyone working on the case who knew where Vaněček had found the evidence. The man he had charged was called Ľubomir Bartoš. He was a Slovak, around thirty years old, with a list of convictions for cat burglary. First jailed when he was about seventeen. Now, I didn’t know Bartoš from Adam, but the whole thing struck me as strange.’
‘Earn your crust, then, Navrátil,’ Slonský interrupted. ‘Why would it strike Mr Holoubek as unusual?’
‘Cat burglars aren’t usually violent,’ Navrátil suggested. ‘They travel light, so they wouldn’t carry a weapon.’
Holoubek nodded approvingly.
‘Not bad, son. I checked the records for Bartoš’s previous arrests. Not once had he been found with a weapon on him. Of course, you can do someone some damage with a jemmy or a screwdriver, but that’s different to packing a weapon that could do the sort of injury done to that poor young girl.’
Navrátil was feeling a little smug, but that was soon put right by Slonský’s next comment.
‘Of course, you missed the key point, which is that cat burglars, by the very nature of their calling, are usually wiry little blokes because big men aren’t that agile. And pinning down a woman who isn’t drugged to rape her is easier for a big man than a skinny gymnast. How big was Bartoš, Edvard?’
‘Around one metre sixty-five, perhaps sixty kilos. Not much bigger than the girl herself.’
‘But he had an accomplice, didn’t he?’ Navrátil interjected. ‘You told us there had been three people there.’
‘Sharp lad, this one,’ Holoubek told Slonský approvingly. ‘Now there’s another odd thing, because the scene of crime report that I saw now only mentioned one visitor. Vaněček didn’t seem to be interested in finding the other man. He’d got one, and he constructed a series of events that only required one. According to this, the girl fainted from blood loss, then Bartoš raped her.’
‘Couldn’t it have been that way?’ asked Navrátil.
‘Now there you go again, lad,’ Slonský growled. ‘One thing right, then one thing wrong. You heard there were three there. But in any event I’ll bet the pathologist knew she struggled during the rape.’
‘Extensive bruising that wouldn’t have been so marked if she hadn’t been able to fight,’ agreed Holoubek.
‘So what did young Bartoš have to say about it all?’
‘It’s hard to say. At first, nothing. But he was hauled into court surprisingly quickly. I didn’t know it was scheduled and I wasn’t there, but one of his guards said he kicked up a hell of a racket when he discovered what he was charged with, and in the end the judges had him taken back to his cell and tried him in his absence. Tried in his absence and convicted in his absence.’
‘But unfortunately not hanged in his absence.’
‘No. But you’re leaping ahead a bit. Between the trial and the execution I had a call from the remand prison in Olomouc. That’s around two hundred and eighty kilometres from Prague, you know.’
‘Yes, I know. Did you know that, Navrátil?’
‘I do now.’
Holoubek leaned forward as if about to impart a great secret.
‘The director wanted to know whether Bartoš was coming back. I said he wasn’t, but asked why he was asking me. He said “Of course I’m asking you. You signed the transfer request.” Of course I hadn’t, so I asked if I could have a copy. He mumbled about the fact that he’d sent someone to be hanged on what turned out to be a forgery, and in those days you knew that the kind of people who could organise that would be the ones you didn’t want to mess with, so he told me it wouldn’t be “convenient” to make a copy, and his photocopier was broken, he claimed. But before he rang off I got one thing out of him. I don’t remember the exact dates, but one thing was crystal clear. Bartoš couldn’t have done it, because when the crime was committed he was already sitting in jail in Olomouc.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I tackled Vaněček about it, but he just waved me off. Said the prison director was an idiot and had got the dates wrong. When I tried to ring the prison, the director had been reassigned and nobody was quite sure where he had gone. So I took a chance and went down to Pankrác Prison to talk to Bartoš. Unsurprisingly he wasn’t keen to talk to me, because he thought I’d stitched him up. He said this fellow Holoubek had visited him in Olomouc and got him to sign something about a break-in in Prague. Bartoš couldn’t actually read and write, but he didn’t like to admit it. He was told if he admitted to this one he could forget the other eight cases, so as he saw it he’d get a lighter sentence for one than he would for eight. I asked him who this other Holoubek was, but I didn’t recognise the description and he couldn’t tell me anything useful that would help me pin it down.’
‘Could it have been Vaněček?’
‘No, for two reasons. One, he was too bone idle to do that and two, he hadn’t the brains to come up with it. I knew Vaněček hadn’t left Prague. He might have known who went though, but I never got the chance to ask him. He wouldn’t talk to me about it and then he was retired about three years later when he screwed up a case. Dead within nine months in a gardening accident. They reckon he had a heart attack and fell on a fence post. Stupid way an idiot like that would die.’
‘So, if not Vaněček…?’
‘Good question. I’ve often thought about it, and I don’t know. But I’ve got one more clue. Bartoš was a Catholic and he asked for a priest before his execution. You didn’t always get one, but he did, and the priest told me that as he was being dragged from his cell Bartoš shouted “Tell Holoubek he knows Mandy.”’
‘Mean anything to you?’
‘No, not a thing. From the context it must have been either the murderer or the policeman who came to get him, and since I had no reason to think Bartoš knew the murderer, it must have been th
e policeman.’
‘So we’ve got a miscarriage of justice and an unsolved murder. But they’re nearly thirty years old.’
‘I haven’t finished,’ Holoubek snapped. ‘I got hold of Bartoš’s things and drove to Slovakia to give them to his family. His mother wouldn’t talk to me at first — she thought I’d been the one who’d stitched up her son — but I told her what I knew and said I’d try to clear her son’s name. After a while I reached a dead end and I stopped, and there it stays to this day. But I’m not getting any younger, and it’s weighing on my mind.’ He fished in his pocket for the folder of papers. ‘I’ve kept a few documents all these years. Some tell you what I’ve said, and some are copies of the original papers. Not many, but it’s all I could get then. I don’t know if the files are still around but if they are, you’re the kind of man who could get them. Will you do this for me, Slonský? Will you help an old colleague’s conscience?’
Slonský held his hand out for the folder.
‘Out of respect for you, I’ll read these. I’m not promising that we’ll get anywhere. You’ve done this job, Edvard. You know what the chances are of picking up an inquiry successfully after thirty years.’
Holoubek nodded. ‘Yes, it’s a long shot. But at least I can say I’ve tried. And since it won’t be long now before I’m going to meet up with Bartoš again, it would be good to be able to tell him I didn’t forget him.’ The old man picked up his coat and shook Slonský’s hand. ‘I’m grateful that you’re even trying. Please keep me informed. I don’t have a phone. Somehow when you’ve bugged dozens you don’t want one yourself.’
‘I’ll get Navrátil to drop you off.’
‘No point. I get free tram rides. We can’t go wasting police fuel, can we?’
The faintest of smiles ran across his face fleetingly, then Holoubek turned away and tottered off along the corridor.
‘Well, Navrátil, what do you think?’
‘That’s incredible. We hanged a man for a crime when we knew he couldn’t have done it. Where was his lawyer when this was going on?’
‘The chances are he got a court-appointed lawyer, who was probably told he’d confessed and who wouldn’t want to oppose the State prosecutor anyway. The thought of pleading not guilty wouldn’t occur to him. He’d see his job as finding some mitigating factors to reduce the sentence. Back then you didn’t get too many people walking free once they were charged. It made the state look bad, you see. Can’t have that.’