[Josef Slonský Investigations 06] - Laid in Earth

by Graham Brack

  Slonský and Valentin introduced themselves and asked if they might join him.

  ‘Ah, company! How delightful,’ Vlk replied. ‘Please do. It’s always pleasant to make new friends.’ He raised his glass in salute, drained it, and looked around as if bewildered to find it empty. He lifted a thumb in the direction of the barman. ‘How may I help you?’ Vlk asked.

  ‘I’m afraid we have some rather sad news for you,’ Slonský replied. ‘I have to tell you that your sister Adalheid has been killed.’

  Vlk blinked as if having some difficulty processing this information. ‘Killed? Adalheid?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Poor girl,’ said Vlk. He attempted a brave smile. ‘I was rather hoping you were going to tell me the old man had keeled over.’

  ‘I understand you and your father don’t see eye to eye,’ Slonský said.

  ‘No, that’s a fair summary. In fact, it’s a bit of an understatement. I can’t remember the last time we exchanged a civil word.’

  ‘You and Adalheid had different mothers, I believe?’

  ‘Yes. My father divorced my mother shortly after I was born. She wasn’t the right sort of wife for a rising StB officer, you see. Too independent and insufficiently docile. Adalheid’s mother was a genuine proletarian, grateful for anything she got. I don’t have anything against her — from what I could tell she was a nice woman and devoted to Adalheid — but I could cheerfully see Daddy rot in Hell. The divorce was a calculated business transaction, you see? Where is that fellow with the drinks?’

  Valentin went over to the bar where the barman explained that he thought the gentleman might have had enough. On the assurance that Slonský was a police officer who had just brought Vlk news of a death in the family, the barman gave way and a tray of drinks soon arrived, along with Vlk’s bill, the traditional Czech way of telling a drinker he was not going to get any more.

  ‘How much?’ Vlk exploded. ‘For three little Scotches?’

  ‘It says here you’ve had five,’ Slonský explained. ‘And they were large ones.’

  ‘They may be large in this bar,’ Vlk grumbled, ‘but they barely dampened the sides of the glass. You’re a police officer. Check his measures, why don’t you?’

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Slonský suddenly enquired.

  ‘Eaten? I don’t think so. No, of course not. It’s early yet.’

  ‘Why don’t we drink these and go and have an informal bite somewhere, perhaps with something to wash it down?’ Slonský gave Vlk his most appealing look, to which Vlk responded with a charming smile.

  ‘How very civil! That’s the spirit. And I can tell you a bit more about how much of a bastard my father is.’

  ‘That’s what I was hoping,’ said Slonský.

  Navrátil and Peiperová were strolling back to the barracks where Peiperová lived, having been to the movies to see a film of her choosing. Navrátil’s taste ran more to the kind of film that had witty dialogue, and he was very willing to sample any movie made in black and white on the assumption that it must be either old or artistic, whereas Peiperová, for all her practical and modern approach to life, was a devotee of the chick flick.

  Along the road in front of them there was a white van which was being loaded by two men with the contents of an apartment. For a moment, Navrátil thought that maybe he should check that they were authorised to do so, just in case he was an unwitting observer of a burglary, but a quick conversation between a woman in the upper window and one of the men put his mind at rest. They closed the back doors of the van, returned to the flat and reappeared a few minutes later with a rolled-up rug which was too long to go inside and had to be secured to the roof. Navrátil suggested to Peiperová that they should cross the road to avoid becoming caught up in the removal process, and they resumed their conversation on the other side.

  ‘He was quite attractive,’ Peiperová suggested.

  ‘Good-looking or not, he was unattractive. Neanderthals always are.’

  ‘He just needed taking in hand. If it had worked out, she would have tamed him.’

  ‘Now that’s the big difference between the sexes,’ Navrátil remarked. ‘Women hope the men they marry will change, and men marry women hoping they won’t.’

  ‘We’re both in for disappointment then,’ Peiperová laughed. ‘Will you still love me when I’m old and wrinkled?’

  Navrátil sensed a trap.

  ‘I love my mother, and she’s old and wrinkled,’ he answered.

  Peiperová laughed, shook her head, and walked on, giving her fiancé a squeeze round his middle and failing to notice the backward glance he gave the van as an idea came to him.

  Vlk was relaxed and communicative, a fact probably not wholly unconnected with the empty bottle in the wine cooler. Slonský had carefully sidestepped any questions about Vlk’s television work, but Valentin had agreed that it was of the highest order, considering the constraints that Vlk had to work under. Valentin had no idea what these might have been, but he knew that every television presenter in current affairs believes that they are being held back by petty restrictions and needs little encouragement to share them at length, which Vlk duly did, leading Slonský to feel that whereas he had previously believed that the Czech police had cornered the market in incompetent management, there was actually some in the broadcasting world too, suggesting that the seam of incompetence that could be mined was much larger than he had thought.

  He allowed Vlk to rant right through the main course and coffee — nobody wanted a dessert — before asking him the pertinent questions that were the purpose of the outing.

  ‘Do you know exactly what your father did in the StB?’

  ‘He was a political officer here in Prague,’ Vlk replied. ‘It was his job to clamp down on dissidents.’

  ‘When did he retire?’

  ‘He would argue that he never got the chance, because he was one of the officers kicked out in 1990 when the StB was dissolved. He was prepared to sign the pledge of allegiance to the new regime, unlike some of his colleagues, but they didn’t offer him any alternative job. Damn good thing too. He should have been one of those who were prosecuted.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know anything particular, just his general attitude to people who were arguing for reform. I’m going to sound like an awful hypocrite, because I can’t deny that my father’s influence must have opened some doors for me. I didn’t ask for that, but people chose to be co-operative rather than get on the wrong side of an StB general.’

  ‘I wonder why?’ Slonský mused, earning a smirk from Vlk.

  ‘He could be incredibly vindictive. Of course, that’s what made him good at his job, though it didn’t do much for his parenting skills.’

  ‘I understand the two of you fell out in a big way,’ Valentin continued.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. Around 1992, my employers produced a series of documentaries about the work of the StB under Communism. Dad was mauled in one of them, and he thought I should have tipped him off and had them suppressed. He was a dinosaur and didn’t seem to understand that the days when you could ring a producer and just order him to burn a film had long gone. After all, if Dad couldn’t do it, why should he think I could?’

  ‘And you fell out over that?’ Slonský persisted, with just a hint of “I wasn’t born yesterday” in his tone.

  ‘Things got a bit heated and I said that if that was what he’d done then the public ought to hear about it and he ought to be in jail. I’d rather draw a veil over the rest of that particular conversation, if you don’t mind, except to say that it ended with us in complete agreement. Each of us thought the other ought to be ashamed of himself.’

  ‘What did your sister think?’ Slonský asked.

  ‘Adalheid was always a daddy’s girl when she was growing up, but it wasn’t actually about his power or status with her, just a daddy-daughter thing like plenty of other families. Like a mediaeval king with a princess to marry off, Dad
was on the lookout for a suitable catch for her. It wouldn’t work with me, because any woman was bound to have less influence than a man, but if he could marry her to the son of someone important in the Party it would give his career a boost.’

  ‘Did you ever marry?’ Slonský continued.

  Vlk looked at them sadly. ‘No, I chose not to play that game.’

  ‘What game is that?’

  ‘The sad old queen marrying a bit of fluff to cover up his interest in young men game. I wasn’t made for married life. That was another thing Dad held against me. He reckoned I’d been spoiled by my mother — who was pretty much a saint, by the way, struggling to bring me up with the occasional handout from him. He had visitation rights as part of the divorce settlement but hardly ever exercised them. I might see him a dozen times a year, I suppose.’

  ‘But he helped you with your career?’

  ‘Yes, he put in a few calls to get me a start. He said it would reflect badly on the family — by which he meant himself — if I loafed around doing nothing. But he made plain that all I was getting was a foot in the door. Anything beyond that I’d have to earn for myself. And I did.’

  Since it all came tumbling down when your father was sacked, that’s a matter for debate, thought Slonský, but he decided not to antagonise Vlk. ‘Adalheid married quite young, I think,’ he said.

  ‘The son of a Deputy Minister of the Interior. Absolute sponge. My God, people say I drink, but at least I stay upright and I take a taxi home. He didn’t, hence his sticky end. He got tanked up and drove his BMW into the supporting column of a bridge at around ninety kilometres an hour. Since it was a built-up area it was damn lucky he did, or he’d have killed some other poor soul. But she’d given up on him before that. His family claimed he turned to drink after she rejected him, so it was all her fault, but that nicely overlooks the fact that he was so hammered on his wedding day that he thought he’d married one of the bridesmaids and tried to get her to go upstairs with him before spending the night sleeping on the landing. She divorced him.’

  ‘With your father’s blessing?’ Slonský asked.

  ‘He saw it as inevitable by then. He’d sent her back a couple of times when she’d turned up at home with a shiner after her husband hit her, but when she said she’d rather kill herself than live with him, Dad gave way. She paid for it, though. Until the Wall came down her father-in-law saw to it that she didn’t get a decent job.’ Vlk looked longingly at the empty wine bottle, causing Slonský to suggest a small schnapps for the road. ‘What a splendid fellow you are,’ opined Vlk, ‘looking after a chap after such a sad event. Here’s to Adalheid!’

  He raised his glass, to which Slonský and Valentin responded by repeating the toast.

  ‘If only we could all get along like we are tonight,’ Vlk murmured.

  Slonský could see that Vlk was beginning to slip off the Peak of Volubility and was heading for either the Trough of Insensibility or the Weepy Place of Sentimentality, so he pressed for a few more snippets of information.

  ‘Had you seen Adalheid recently?’

  ‘She came round for my birthday in January, bless her. She brought me a very acceptable bottle of rioja and a sweater. She was a good sort, you know. After Mother died she was the only one of them who bothered with me. Dad didn’t even come to the funeral, but she did. Who could have wanted to harm such an angel?’ His eyes glazed and he sniffled loudly. ‘Whoever he is, he’s a bastard,’ he declared.

  Chapter 7

  Navrátil arrived for work at ten to seven the following morning, but even with such an early arrival he could only take third place in the office race, because Krob and Slonský were already at their desks. A few minutes later Jerneková appeared for the morning briefing which, for largely historic reasons, always took place in the men’s office, followed by Peiperová, who had correctly anticipated a general desire for coffee and was carrying a tray. In her days as an ordinary officer, Peiperová had resented repeatedly being sent to fetch coffee, but now that she had been promoted to Lieutenant and did not need to do it, she was very happy to volunteer.

  As a Captain, Slonský could have asked the canteen staff to deliver coffee to his office but as he told Dumpy Anna, such an abuse of his rank would be unforgivable and would deprive him of the pleasure of seeing her happy smiling face every day. ‘Get away with you!’ she had replied, before slipping him the last of the roast pork in a roll. The two of them enjoyed a prolonged friendship that was entirely confined to working hours. Dumpy Anna liked a man who enjoyed her food, and Slonský, who believed that the canteen was the beating heart of an efficient police force (because who can detect on an empty stomach?) regarded her as the heart’s pacemaker without which nothing would happen.

  ‘Did you have a successful evening, sir?’ Navrátil enquired.

  ‘That depends on whether Colonel Rajka approves my expenses, lad. Vlk has expensive tastes. But I think we did. Jerneková, Adalheid was once married. Find out what you can about her husband. He died in a car crash around 1986. See if we’ve got any information about it on file.’

  ‘You think there’s something suspicious about it, sir?’ Jerneková asked.

  ‘No, but we’d look a bit stupid if there was and we hadn’t even asked the question, wouldn’t we? It’s just that the StB were really good at rigging bogus car crashes. They didn’t always remember to remove the handcuffs securing the deceased to the steering wheel, but that’s a small detail.’

  Jerneková scribbled a note in her pad.

  ‘Sir,’ Navrátil said, ‘I’ve got an idea and I wanted to see if you thought it was sensible.’

  ‘Yours usually are, Navrátil.’

  ‘It’s just that when Lieutenant Peiperová and I were walking back from the cinema last night, we saw a family moving house and it spurred a line of thought about how the murderer got the body over the wall.’

  ‘Why — did they have a trampoline?’

  ‘No, sir, they had an oversized rug.’

  ‘I’m listening, lad,’ Slonský announced, managing to convey that he was sceptical about the value of the notion Navrátil was about to expound.

  ‘The rug wouldn’t fit in the van, sir.’

  ‘Big rug, small van, I assume.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then they needed a bigger van. Well, that’s that conundrum solved.’

  ‘That’s not the point I wanted to make, sir.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. They transported the rug by attaching it to the roof. Now, we know Adalheid Rezeková was wrapped in a carpet or rug at some point. Suppose the killer wrapped her in a rug and put her on the roof of a vehicle. Then, when he gets to the Red House he drives up the side lane, parks as close to the wall as he can, and swings the carpet round so one end is on top of the wall. Then all he has to do is push and she’ll drop over the other side.’

  Slonský had a good scratch of his ear while he pictured the scene in his head. ‘Not a bad idea, Navrátil. But there’s one difficulty. You’ve accounted for how he could get a body off a vehicle, but how would he get it on top of the vehicle in the first place? It’s as difficult to lift it onto a van as it is to put it on the wall.’

  ‘Not if he lives in an upstairs flat,’ Peiperová chipped in.

  ‘Right,’ Slonský said, ‘Navrátil and Krob, I want you to get yourself down to the Red House and look out for any video cameras that might have caught an image of someone driving around with a carpet on their roof at night. Spread out over a wide area, at least up to the nearest major road junction in each direction. Secure the videos for the nights of that weekend if you can. Then when you get back, you can enjoy watching them all till you prove Navrátil right.’

  ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ Peiperová enquired.

  ‘I want you to talk to anyone you can find who knew Adalheid. See if anyone knows if she was seeing someone, but first I think you need to turn her flat over. There may be some clues there. Jerneková, when you’ve fi
nished your first job, give your boss a hand. All clear?’

  Everyone assented.

  ‘Meanwhile, I’m going to see how an ex-offender is getting settled back into the world.’

  Slonský completely understood the suspicion with which he was regarded by Jiří Holub when the latter finally opened the door and discovered the identity of his visitor.

  ‘What do you want?’ Holub snapped.

  ‘A nice quiet chat,’ Slonský replied, ‘here or at a café of your choosing. I want to pick your brains.’

  ‘A public place would be good, in case you turn nasty.’

  ‘Being in a public place won’t stop me turning nasty, but take my word for it I won’t.’

  Holub considered for a moment, then lifted his jacket off a hook and closed the door behind him. ‘There’s a place down the street where we can talk.’

  ‘Lead on, then.’

  Holub showed no curiosity in the purpose of Slonský’s visit until they were both sitting with a coffee and a ham roll. Even then, Slonský saw no reason to put off a ham roll to give an explanation, so it was not until both rolls had vanished that he opened up about his interest.

  ‘This is not about anything you may or may not have done,’ he began. ‘I’m interested, as one old-timer to another, about how the StB worked back in those days. I can’t tell you exactly why just yet, but it’s to do with a present-day case.’

  Holub nodded. ‘The judge said I should have disobeyed my orders. Well, he can say that sitting on a bench a decade later. You and I know what happened to officers who didn’t obey orders. They finished up checking passports or guarding a work camp — and that’s if they were lucky. I had a wife and two kids to look after.’ He took a noisy slurp of coffee. ‘The boys don’t speak to me now. My wife waited, but I can’t get a job to keep her properly either. I’ve paid for my loyalty to the StB.’