[Josef Slonský Investigations 06] - Laid in Earth

by Graham Brack

  ‘Then your best guess at time of death is going to be based on when she was last seen alive, rather than anything I can tell you.’

  ‘Why would you put a body in the freezer and then bury it?’ Slonský asked.

  ‘That’s a question for a psychiatrist rather than a poor run of the mill pathologist.’

  ‘I wouldn’t describe you as run of the mill.’

  ‘No?’ said Novák hopefully.

  ‘No. I’m far too polite.’

  Novák smiled. Despite himself, he enjoyed his verbal sparring with Slonský, who was one of the few officers who ever said thank you and who completely trusted the professionalism of his work. Slonský just wouldn’t admit it, that’s all. Novák stood up and arched his back to allow himself to stand up straight after having been hunched over for a while. ‘We’ll take her back to the mortuary and I’ll get to work. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ Slonský began. ‘I realise you’re probab— what is it?’

  Novák had obviously seen something in the makeshift grave that puzzled, intrigued or concerned him and was walking slowly round the grave to see it from various angles. ‘Slonský,’ he said, ‘would you do me a big favour?’

  ‘Anything I can.’

  ‘Good. Push off and annoy someone else for half an hour. If I’m right, I may have something very interesting for you, but I need to think long and hard first.’

  ‘Your wish is my command. Half an hour?’

  ‘Thereabouts.’

  Slonský spotted Hanuš in the background and walked over to ask the key question of the morning. ‘Anywhere nearby that does a good coffee?’

  Slonský was leaning against the gatepost when Novák found him.

  ‘Nice to see some people have time for coffee,’ the pathologist remarked.

  ‘I’d have brought you one, but it looked like you were busy.’

  ‘I was, and so will you be in a minute. Come and see what I’ve found.’

  Slonský’s curiosity was piqued but it would not do to show it, so he affected an air of nonchalance as he strolled behind Novák.

  ‘It would be a good idea if you resisted any temptation to jump into the grave and stamp all over the evidence in your size forty-fours,’ Novák said.

  ‘How do you know I take a size forty-four shoe?’

  ‘I’ve told you before, I’m a world authority on footprints.’

  ‘So you have. But I thought you were kidding.’

  Novák scowled, as would any man who had just been asked to contribute a chapter on footprints to an international forensic encyclopaedia. ‘You’ll recall,’ he said, ‘that Hanuš told us he dug down a certain distance to turn over the top layer of soil.’

  ‘Yes, my memory isn’t that bad. It’s only been an hour or so.’

  ‘Then he noticed that someone had dug deeper,’ Novák continued. ‘Averaged out, they’ve gone down about sixty centimetres or so.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Then we hit compacted soil that hasn’t been disturbed.’

  ‘Except for a body being laid on it, yes.’

  ‘Now, Slonský, here’s the bit you’ll find interesting.’

  ‘I doubt that very much, but pray continue.’

  Novák took his glasses off and polished them vigorously before continuing. Two of them could play that game of being extremely irritating, and he was not about to be bettered by Slonský. ‘We’ve taken the body out and laid it beside the grave for easy comparison. Now, what do you notice?’

  Slonský stepped back to get a better view, then squatted on his haunches. ‘Is this a trick question?’

  ‘Of course not. I don’t do that.’

  ‘The dent is too big,’ decided Slonský.

  ‘Correct. So what do we conclude?’

  ‘She has shrunk since she’s been dead?’

  Novák sighed deeply. ‘Not by six and a half centimetres. Not to mention having dropped around twenty kilos in weight.’

  Slonský decided to start by eliminating the least likely answer. ‘Dehydration?’ he suggested.

  ‘Dehydration? She’s dead, man! Dead people don’t drink.’

  ‘That’s a good reason for not being dead, then,’ Slonský replied. ‘I could do with a beer myself.’

  ‘The impression in the earth was made by a different body,’ Novák told him, speaking slowly as if addressing the dimmest student he had ever had.

  ‘A different body? Well, where’s it gone, then?’

  ‘That’s your job. My job is to tell you there was one, and your job is to find it. It’s called demarcation.’

  ‘It’s called bloody weird, that’s what it is. So someone else was buried here, then someone came along with a body, dug a hole, thought “Goodness me, this grave is already occupied but I’m not digging another damn hole, so I’ll yank that one out and plant my one”, and carted the first body off somewhere else.’

  ‘That sounds a remarkably improbable reconstruction of the facts, Slonský, even by your standards.’

  ‘To be honest, I can’t think of any reconstruction of the facts that would be any more plausible.’

  ‘Let me give you another clue. I’ve taken soil samples which I’ll have to analyse, but my first impression is that the original body had been here quite some time.’

  ‘How can you say that when it isn’t here?’

  ‘Because it’s stained the soil in a characteristic way. Bones aren’t forever, Slonský. They can deteriorate during life, but they can carry on doing so after you’re dead. That’s especially true if people are laid in shallow graves that are alternately wet and dry. I’m going to guess that this whole area was watered by the gardeners from time to time. Each time the soil gets wet, water seeps into the bones and washes minerals out. Those minerals dribble into the soil. If it goes on long enough you can be left with just a soil silhouette, a shape in the earth where the skeleton was. I don’t think that one went this far, but it suffered some deterioration.’

  ‘How long was it here?’

  ‘It’s very hard to say, but it’s going to be years.’

  Slonský decided that he needed a good scratch of the back of his thigh in order to process this information. ‘So you’re saying we’ve probably got two murders, one of which involves a body we haven’t got who was killed a long time ago?’

  ‘That’s about the sum of it. Should be easy meat for a man of your ability, Slonský.’

  ‘Don’t mock me or there’ll be a third corpse in this grave.’

  ‘There’s one piece of good news.’

  ‘Is there? What is it?’

  ‘It’s almost impossible for an amateur working quickly to retrieve a whole body. While you’re having lunch, we’ll still be here going through that spoil heap looking for any tiny fragments of bone. I’ll be surprised if we don’t find any of the original occupant. And if we do, we’ll be able to do some tests that, with any luck, will tell you the sex of the corpse and maybe even its age. But don’t hold me to that.’

  ‘There’s no point. You’d just deny you ever said it was possible.’

  Chapter 3

  Slonský returned to his office and surveyed his empire from the rarefied heights of his new office chair. He had detected a crack in the frame of his old one, undoubtedly the result of inferior workmanship and nothing to do with the kilos he had put back on since becoming a captain, and had asked about a new chair, being both surprised and delighted to discover that as a captain he qualified for a chair with five castors and a little lever on the side that moved him up or down.

  Having had it for a few days, during which he had twice involuntarily launched himself into the filing cabinet with sudden movements, he gave it to his assistant, Lieutenant Kristýna Peiperová, and switched back to an old-style chair, which had in turn come apart at a joint. The supplies people then came up with a magnificent high-backed chair like the throne of the potentate of a small country. It was not new, admittedly, but it had stood the test o
f time, and with a cushion at the back it was very comfortable.

  Having cautioned Peiperová that the chair had a mind of its own and to exercise due care in its use, Slonský was surprised to discover that she sustained no injuries from it, but appeared to be able to control it perfectly well. If she wanted to turn, it turned; if she chose to roll to one side, she rolled just far enough. He attributed this to the lower centre of gravity of women which meant that they were very stable around the hips.

  The new lieutenant, Peiperová, was doing well. Returned from an unhappy period as Personal Assistant to Colonel Urban, then the Director of Criminal Police and now Great Lord Bigwig of Czech Policing overall, she had soon fitted right back in and was showing how right Slonský had been when he had pushed for her promotion.

  The desk at the back of the room was newly occupied by Lucie Jerneková. She was still in uniform, having just completed six months’ basic training after Slonský recruited her, having been impressed by her aggression, her observational powers and her unwillingness to take a backward step whatever life threw at her. He had cut a deal with Colonel Urban under which all Lucie’s rotations after her first six months would be performed in his team, following which she would be appointed a trainee detective. For now she was just Officer Jerneková, trying to curb her tongue and grateful that she had a barracks to live in and some money in her purse. She was a little older than Peiperová but did not resent having been assigned to work under her, largely because she was completely indifferent to ranks. Although Czechs are generally quite informal people, she was the only person who routinely referred to all her colleagues, except Captain Slonský, by their first names.

  The only colleague who found difficulty in reciprocating was Lieutenant Jan Navrátil, who was meticulous about the use of titles. During working hours, he even referred to his fiancée as Lieutenant Peiperová. Given that context, he could hardly refer to Officer Jerneková as Lucie.

  Navrátil was a law graduate who had been fast-tracked at the Police Academy and then sent for detective training under the then Lieutenant Slonský. Slonský much preferred working on his own and would have refused had it not been that Captain Lukas had a nuclear option that he was prepared to deploy if necessary. At the time Slonský was coming up to retirement age; officers can only continue beyond that age with the agreement of their superiors, and Lukas let it be known that his agreement might be contingent on Slonský’s willingness to take on a trainee. Since Slonský dreaded retirement, he had gritted his teeth and agreed.

  And in the event he had enjoyed it. Navrátil was young, idealistic, intelligent and hard-working. Slonský could only legitimately claim to score one out of four on that list. Even his idealism was tempered with some cynicism, though he retained hope that once his generation was out of the way people like Navrátil and Peiperová would make the police service what it was meant to be. He genuinely believed that Navrátil could one day be the Director of Police — if Peiperová didn’t beat him to it.

  Then there was the other recent arrival, Officer Ivo Krob. Krob had spent some years as a policeman in the Municipal Police in Prague. As a result, he was very pleased to have a job that was not usually conducted outdoors, though Slonský had noticed that it didn’t worry Krob if they had to knock on doors in sub-zero temperatures or driving rain.

  The chief characteristics of Krob were his relentless cheerfulness and his absolute faith in his boss. At first Slonský was very touched as Krob reassured victims of crime that Captain Slonský would sort things out for them, that Captain Slonský would soon be on top of their case, and that Captain Slonský had a knowledge of the city’s criminals second to none; then it dawned on him that this one-man publicity machine was putting pressure on him to achieve superhuman results, so he had to ask Krob to remember this was a team effort and that it was the team that would succeed. Or not.

  Krob was also very relaxed. Navrátil could become frustrated, and an explosion was never far away when Jerneková was having a bad day, but Krob just shrugged and got a coffee, then started again. He had a winning way with people, which was what had first brought him to Slonský’s attention, and his other defining feature was his averageness. Krob was so average that Slonský had joked that it wouldn’t surprise him to find that Krob had exactly 1.5 children. When he discovered that Krob actually had one child with another on the way, he trumpeted the fact that he was right, provided it was a ten-month pregnancy, since Mrs Krobová was five months gone at that point.

  Slonský had resisted the reallocation of space that saw him separated from Navrátil and Peiperová and installed in Lukas’ old office, but had come to realise that since their old room could not accommodate five, he would have had to choose to sit with either Navrátil and Krob, or Peiperová and Jerneková, and whichever choice he made might upset someone. Instead, he left his office door open and wandered back and forth as he saw fit; or, more often, bellowed for someone to come to him. Navrátil usually responded with alacrity, whereas Peiperová was more likely to call him on the internal phone to see what he wanted. Someday he must learn how to do that, he thought, but not today.

  Slonský called the four of them into his office and filled them in on Novák’s findings.

  ‘Someone has taken the other body away?’ repeated Navrátil.

  ‘So I said,’ Slonský replied.

  ‘Why?’ Navrátil asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe you get cash back on bodies at the funeral home.’

  ‘Did they know it was there, sir?’ asked Peiperová.

  ‘Ah, as usual you ask the key question, young lady. If they didn’t, it must have come as a heck of a surprise.’

  ‘But how would they know if the gardener didn’t?’ Peiperová persisted. ‘Hasn’t he dug it all over before?’

  ‘No, lass, not all of it. That part of the garden was lawn until a year or so ago.’

  ‘Presumably it wasn’t lawn when the body was buried though,’ Krob suggested, ‘so if we could find when there was last a flower bed there, we might know when the person was killed.’

  ‘Not quite so simple, unfortunately, though it’s worth a try. The building was previously known as the Red House.’

  ‘What’s the Red House?’ they chorused.

  ‘That’s the problem of employing you young people,’ Slonský replied. ‘You don’t know so much. The Red House was an interrogation centre for the security services under Communism. People were taken there to be questioned, then either sent to court, given summary punishment or — rarely — sent home.’

  ‘So this is one of those they executed?’ Navrátil asked.

  ‘I doubt it, if only because they usually executed them elsewhere, then they’d cremate the bodies and use the ashes to melt snow. We wouldn’t have a body for most of those they executed. My guess is that this was someone who died during questioning, which doesn’t mean that what happened there wasn’t criminal, of course, just that they may not have deliberately killed him or her.’

  ‘So this is pre-1989,’ Krob continued.

  ‘Certainly, unless the current security forces aren’t telling us something. That’s why you may not find any photographs in the archives. The StB weren’t too keen for people to walk around the gardens of their places snapping the flowers. For that matter, you’d have to pay a photographer quite a bit extra before one would be prepared to try.’

  ‘Will the files list the people who were arrested by the StB, sir?’ Navrátil asked.

  ‘Strangely, they might. Not as openly as we do it now, but there’ll be daybooks and arrest records if they weren’t hurriedly destroyed when the old regime fell. It’s worth asking Mucha though. If a file exists, he’s the person most likely to sniff it out.’

  ‘Why are we more interested in the first one than the woman who has just been killed?’ Jerneková demanded.

  ‘We’re not. We just don’t yet have all the information that would help us to find out who she is. Once we get Novák’s report we can try comparing her w
ith any women reported missing, but in the meantime you can get a list of women between, say, thirty and sixty so it’s ready as soon as we need it.’ Slonský stood up and looked around the table. ‘Does everyone know what they’re doing?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Navrátil.

  ‘Good. We’re probably the only team in the police force that can say that. Let’s keep it that way.’

  Slonský’s own contribution was to decamp to a nearby bar where he expected to find his friend Valentin, a celebrated journalist whose scoops were nearly all provided by Slonský in exchange for the possibility of planting stories in the press that suited Slonský’s immediate needs. A number of senior officers had found their inadequacies and errors paraded before the public in the pages of Valentin’s paper over the years.

  ‘You’re early,’ Valentin remarked.

  ‘So are you,’ Slonský countered.

  ‘No, I usually get here about now. The bar isn’t too busy in the afternoon, so it’s a good place to write my stories. I can’t cope with all the noise in the newspaper office.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose all that activity must be very off-putting.’

  ‘You don’t seem your usual bouncy self, Josef.’

  ‘I’m not. The weirdest thing has happened. We’ve found a body.’

  ‘I could be wrong, but I think that’s happened before,’ Valentin remarked.

  ‘This one is different. This one is in a makeshift grave that was previously occupied by another murder victim. And the first victim has been removed.’

  ‘Isn’t stealing a corpse illegal or something?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think that’s going to worry the guy too much when we charge him with murdering a woman.’

  ‘Which woman?’ Valentin asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Slonský replied. ‘Unidentified at present.’

  ‘And who was the first victim?’

  ‘Weren’t you listening? He’s not there, so we don’t know.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you went to dig up the first one and found the second one.’

  ‘No, neither was properly buried.’