by Graham Brack
‘I hope that works. I’d hate to lose her.’
‘You won’t. If she shows signs of leaving I’ll just call her a quitter. She’ll stay to prove me wrong.’
Slonský allowed himself a thin smile. Jerneková and tact were strangers to each other. ‘How about Krob?’
‘Not so good, I’m afraid. They’ve had to repair several badly torn muscles. The nerves were damaged but they think they’ll repair in time. For now they’ve had to immobilise his shoulder until everything knits, then he’ll need a lot of physiotherapy. It’s going to be a long haul for him. But he’ll get there. He’s very patient, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, he is,’ agreed Slonský.
‘And Hauzer will go home today too, sir. Bit of a sore head and he needed a few stitches, but he’ll be all right.’
Slonský thanked her for the update and decided he needed some thinking time, not to mention some cogitation lubricant, so he grabbed his hat and coat and went off in search of a consoling glass.
The next few days were very strange. Slonský had been in places where a colleague had been killed and he knew the blanket of gloom that descends and quietens the office, the things that people think and do not want to voice aloud, the glances at the empty chair; now he pushed open the door of the men’s office and looked at the two unoccupied desks and it seemed natural to sigh. He walked to the women’s office and saw another empty desk because he had given Peiperová some compassionate leave.
Jerneková looked up from her notepad where she was drafting her report on the discovery of Tomáš Kašpar’s bones in a left luggage locker. Though she was perfectly competent on a computer she liked to marshal her thoughts on paper first.
‘It’s just thee and me now, Jerneková,’ Slonský said.
‘The criminals of Prague should be quaking, sir,’ she said. ‘We can cope. But I’m on my period so I’m less tolerant than usual.’
Ten out of ten for openness, thought Slonský, and a big fat zero for self-awareness.
He returned to his own desk and reflected that for nearly all his life he had been very happy working alone, then Lukas had given him an ultimatum; if you don’t want to be retired, take on a trainee. And Navrátil appeared.
He was a breath of fresh air. Suddenly there was someone who hung on Slonský’s every word, including his worst jokes and his most self-aggrandizing accounts of past glories. To his surprise he found there were other scrupulously honest cops out there, and some of them were ferociously bright. Navrátil learned quickly, and their relationship was changing. Now Navrátil gave as well as received. If he thought Slonský was wrong, he wasn’t afraid to say so.
And in another challenge to Slonský’s previous thinking, he had found a woman who enhanced the team. Peiperová had a gift for organisation. He had lost count of the number of times she had reminded him of tasks he had forgotten, birthdays he needed to remember, little things in witness statements that needed to be followed up. On top of that, there seemed to be no office gadget she could not work better than he could. She photocopied the right side of a piece of paper, managed to listen to answerphone messages without wiping them first, and regularly showed him things his mobile phone could do that he had never suspected. Admittedly his first attempt to fly solo had misfired a little; when he tried to order a pizza delivery, he accidentally typed 11 instead of 1 and made himself very popular with the night shift by sharing them around, but he would never have tried that had it not been for her.
Then there was Krob, who was Slonský’s exact opposite. Patient, gentle, methodical, all the things that Slonský was not. Another thoroughly decent young man whose future may just have been made much more difficult by a disabling injury. It had never crossed Slonský’s mind that Rezek might be so full of bile and hate that he would jump off a ledge handcuffed to an officer. It made him all the more determined to see Rezek behind bars for the rest of his life.
And what about Jerneková? Mucha, who knew him better than Slonský was prepared to admit, had been heard to describe Lucie as Slonský with a bust. He hoped that wasn’t true, because even he had more social skills than she had. Hadn’t he?
He was shaken out of his daydream by the telephone ringing. It was the Prosecutor’s Office. Slonský listened in increasing disbelief as the Assistant Deputy Under-Prosecutor or some such nonentity explained that they did not propose to charge Rezek with the 1970 killings, nor with any harm caused to Krob, but were going to concentrate on the killing of František Kašpar and the wounding of Navrátil, though even this had been downgraded to the lowest category. Slonský listened without comment, checked the name of the caller, and then stormed along the corridor to see Rajka.
Rajka was equally indignant though unsurprised. ‘I sometimes think Hitler could have got away with a suspended sentence from our prosecutors. It’s a nonsense, but our choice is simple. We settle for a quiet life and accept it, or we go and argue our case.’
‘I agree,’ said Slonský. ‘Are you going to drive?’
‘The problem is,’ said Prosecutor Janák, ‘that we have insufficient evidence to charge him with the three murders in 1970.’
‘Except a confession,’ said Slonský. ‘That seems pretty substantial to me.’
‘He’ll probably repudiate that in court,’ Janák replied.
‘Well, of course he’ll repudiate it,’ Slonský told him. ‘Every criminal always does. But the court usually says that’s tough and stands by the original.’
Janák sighed. ‘The other problem is that we’re worried about his argument that his actions were legal at the time.’
‘Surely that’s for a court to decide?’ said Rajka.
‘Goodness, no!’ Janák replied. ‘That’s the last thing we want. So long as a court hasn’t taken a view on it, we’re all right, but if they accept his submission everyone will be sheltering behind it.’
‘Here’s a thought,’ Slonský said. ‘Suppose we put it to the court and they come down on our side. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?’
‘But they might not,’ Janák pointed out.
‘And if you never put the question to them there’s no point in prosecuting anyone for crimes under the old regime,’ Slonský argued. ‘They can always say it was authorised then, even if it’s not true, because I have no idea how we would disprove it.’
‘Look,’ said Janák with a faint yet condescending smile, ‘why are you so worried? The killing of František Kašpar alone is going to put him behind bars for the rest of his life.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past your lot to cock that up too and get it ruled a suicide,’ Slonský replied with feeling.
Rajka intervened. ‘It also does not reflect the deliberate wounding of two of my detectives, in one of whom we can make a very strong case for a charge of attempted murder.’
Janák checked his folder. ‘Ah yes — Lieutenant Navrátil, wasn’t it? But the difficulty there is that his injuries turned out to be relatively trivial. Rezek couldn’t have foreseen that Navrátil would fall over and knock himself out.’
‘Couldn’t he?’ said Slonský. ‘Was Rezek entitled to assume that someone he shot would remain standing, then? Or perhaps we have to conduct a health and safety assessment on the way down to the ground so we don’t hurt ourselves?’
‘Your line of argument,’ Rajka added, ‘suggests that we should tell officers to leave off their bulletproof vests because that will determine the charges their assailants face.’
‘As for poor Krob,’ Slonský raged, ‘are we to tell him his serious injury was just an accident?’
‘From the statements it appears that Rezek was trying to commit suicide,’ Janák remarked. ‘He did not necessarily intend any harm to Krob.’
‘He knew he was handcuffed to the poor lad,’ said Slonský. ‘Even you must admit that it’s foreseeable that if you jump off a cliff handcuffed to some other poor bastard it’s not going to end well for them.’
‘His lawyer will argue that the balance of his mind was d
isturbed and therefore he wasn’t responsible for his actions,’ Janák replied.
‘In that event, neither am I,’ said Slonský, who stood up, walked round the desk and yanked Janák out of his seat, frogmarching him to the door and through the swing doors to the landing, where he proceeded to lift him bodily and push his upper half over the handrail at the top of the stairs. ‘Look down,’ he ordered.
‘It’s five floors!’ yelped Janák.
‘There’s nobody down there. If I throw you off and you land on someone and kill them, is that my fault?’ Slonský asked.
‘Of course. It would be murder.’
‘Right, foreseeable damage to another; that’s my argument about Krob,’ Slonský told him. ‘If I hold you over the stairwell and your jacket rips and you fall to your death, is that my fault?’
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘But if you had different equipment you’d suffer different injuries. That’s my argument about Navrátil. If I had thrown you over last week instead of today, would it have been less blameworthy?’
‘No!’
‘So an offence is the same whenever it was committed, which is my argument about the three killings in 1970.’ Slonský pulled Janák to his feet. ‘I’m glad we agree,’ said Slonský. ‘No doubt you’ll revise your decisions.’
Janák straightened his suit and glared at Rajka. ‘Have you no control over your officers?’
‘I agree with him,’ said Rajka. ‘It seemed to me that Captain Slonský made his arguments clearly and cogently.’
‘He could have dropped me,’ whined Janák.
‘I could,’ conceded Slonský. ‘But I didn’t intend to, and according to you that makes all the difference.’
Janák made a formal complaint about Slonský’s conduct to the Director of Police, Colonel Urban, who responded that the police service stood squarely behind Slonský. Janák then made a complaint to the Office of Internal Control, the OVK, which was the new name for the department that Rajka used to run. Major Lukas waited a week and then replied that after a full investigation they had been unable to find any matter worthy of reproach. Coincidentally, Valentin’s newspaper ran an exposé into the workings of the Prosecutor’s office in which it alleged that Klement Rezek, recently jailed for forty-two years for four murders and two attempted murders, was originally going to be charged with only one and questioned whether the department was fit for purpose. It also noted that one of the Prosecutor’s staff had made “hysterical and unsubstantiated allegations” against a senior policeman to deflect attention from the department’s shortcomings.
‘That’s good stuff,’ said Slonský, lobbing the newspaper onto the table in front of them.
‘I thought so,’ agreed Valentin. ‘So did my editor. Thanks for the exclusive.’
‘One for the road?’
‘Why not? You can add a plum brandy if you like.’
Epilogue
On Saturday, 21st June 2008, on a sunny afternoon in Kladno, Kristýna Peiperová, lieutenant in the Czech police service, married Lieutenant Jan Navrátil. As they left the church colleagues formed a guard of honour, the places nearest the church being taken by Officers Krob and Jerneková.
Krob had left off his sling for the occasion. Although his recently unused arm was weak, he had sensation in it and was able to use it to raise his glass in repeated toasts. Jerneková had agreed to take Slonský’s phone calls during the ceremony and wedding breakfast in case he was needed, and ensured that he was not by turning it off as soon as she was given it. Captain Josef Slonský gave a brief but elegant speech in which he wished the young couple well and took credit for the way they had developed over the last couple of years. As he ended he said he wanted to be serious for a moment and express publicly the belief that the Czech public could be confident that in the two officers beside him the police service would be in good hands.
‘I hope you have a wonderful honeymoon,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be back at work at 7 a.m. on that Monday morning or I’ll want to know why.’
As he sat down Peiperová leaned towards him. ‘I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,’ she said.
***
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A NOTE TO THE READER
Dear Reader,
For those who like to know these things, this plot was actually the first of the series to be developed, but I put it aside to write Lying and Dying and only came back to it when I had completed A Second Death.
The starting point was the feeling that it would be difficult for the police to find a motive for a killing if the reason for committing it was not anything that the victim had done other than being connected with someone else.
I am gratified that readers take such an interest in my detectives, especially their lives outside work. Including some back story for some and a few day-to-day events for others helps to lighten the darkness that would otherwise be unavoidable due to the unpleasantness of the crimes I write about. It seems to me that a detective novel that concentrated entirely on some of these would be too depressing to enjoy. I took the risk of widening the cast a little, which seemed a natural progression; few of us work with the same individuals for many years without one or two changes.
Slonský is not yet ready to retire. I think if I tried to stop he would write the stories himself. So long as there is an appetite for reading about his activities I hope to keep going!
There are two potential cliff-hangers here I ought to sort out. On Saturday, 21st June 2008, on a sunny afternoon in Kladno, Kristýna Peiperová, lieutenant in the Czech police service, married Lieutenant Jan Navrátil. As she left for her honeymoon she promised Slonský she would be back at her desk in a fortnight. Behind her Slonský could see Lucie Jerneková mouthing “Told you so”.
If you have enjoyed this novel I’d be really grateful if you would leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. I love to hear from readers, so please keep in touch through Facebook or Twitter, or leave a message on my website.
Všechno nejlepší!
Graham Brack
ALSO BY GRAHAM BRACK
Josef Slonský Investigations
LYING & DYING
SLAUGHTER AND FORGETTING
DEATH ON DUTY
FIELD OF DEATH
A SECOND DEATH
Published by Sapere Books.
11 Bank Chambers, Hornsey, London, N8 7NN,
United Kingdom
saperebooks.com
Copyright © Graham Brack, 2019
Graham Brack has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are purely coincidental.
eBook ISBN: 9781913335861