A Second Death

by Graham Brack

  Slonský could only hear one side of the discussion but it was very clear to him that Peiperová was getting the pointy end of the stick from her boss. She assured him that she would be back in no time at all and then noticed Slonský pointing to her phone and making a beckoning gesture.

  ‘Captain Slonský would like a word with you, sir,’ she stammered.

  ‘Slonský! I might have known he would be involved…’

  ‘Slonský speaking, sir. This is entirely my fault. Unfortunately we’ve had an unsatisfactory trip. The office at Ústí sent the file we wanted to Prague rather than keeping it here for us. It took us some time to wrap things up.’

  ‘Like all yesterday and half of today?’

  ‘No, sir, we were interviewing witnesses as agreed. It was just this morning that we could have done with the file. Officer Peiperová offered to catch the train back while I stayed here but I thought that it was unnecessary expenditure given that you had a meeting.’

  If Slonský’s former boss Lukas had heard him claim to be exercising economy he would probably have had a stroke, thought Peiperová, but she sensibly kept her mouth shut, whilst wishing she had not had her mouth full of cinnamon bun when she had answered Urban in the first place.

  Urban seemed to have calmed down a little.

  ‘You’re on your way back now?’

  ‘More than halfway, sir.’

  ‘Good. Ask Peiperová where I can find the job applications for the interview panel this afternoon.’

  Slonský posed the question and was delighted to return the phone to Peiperová so she could direct her boss to the second shelf of the letter trays on the corner of her desk and promise to be in place first thing the following morning.

  ‘Lucky I was here to vouch for you,’ said Slonský. ‘He didn’t sound too happy that you were out for so long.’

  Peiperová bit her tongue. Anything she might have said could only make things worse. After a few minutes she felt bold enough to raise a point with Slonský.

  ‘Sir, should you have told the Director an untruth?’

  ‘I didn’t. Show me one thing I said that wasn’t true.’

  ‘You gave the impression that we didn’t know that the file was on its way to Prague.’

  ‘No, Peiperová, I said it was. I drew no conclusions from that. I just recited some facts. If people want to incorrectly link them together that’s their problem. There’s a lesson there, my girl. Honesty is the best policy.’

  The wicket gate opened briefly and an untidy figure stepped through, emerging to stand for a few moments blinking in the autumn sun. Wearing a suit that now seemed a little too large, with an open-necked white shirt and a navy raincoat flapping in the wind, he froze as Navrátil climbed out of the car and walked towards him displaying his badge.

  ‘Mr Kobr?’

  The middle-aged man nodded. His hair needed a cut. In fact, it needed completely restyling, because the comb-over was stretching credibility nowadays beginning, as it did, just above his left ear.

  ‘I’m Navrátil. Would you like a lift somewhere?’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘You have a choice about the lift. The conversation isn’t quite so optional.’

  Kobr followed to the car and eased himself into the passenger seat.

  ‘Have you had lunch?’

  Kobr nodded again.

  ‘Coffee, then?’

  ‘I haven’t got much cash.’

  ‘That’s okay. I’m paying.’ Navrátil pulled into the traffic. ‘I’ve been asked to have an unofficial word with you. You realise, I’m sure, that your every move will be watched to see if you try to pick up the missing money?’

  ‘They can watch as much as they like,’ spat Kobr. ‘There is no missing money. I never had it.’

  ‘So you said at your trial.’

  ‘It’s true. I admit that I agreed to accept a bribe, but once they had that on tape they didn’t actually need to pay it to get me to do what they wanted, so they didn’t.’

  Navrátil, unlike his former boss Klinger, believed him. Why would a criminal gang pay money to a police officer if they already had a hold over him?

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Navrátil, ‘you’ve served your time and there’s no more to be said if there isn’t any proceeds of crime.’

  Kobr was wringing his hands in his lap.

  ‘The payroll thing — that money went at the time. But the bribe never existed. They offered it, but they never paid it. Would I be going to live in a hostel if I had half a million crowns somewhere?’

  Navrátil weighed this carefully for a few seconds.

  ‘Come on,’ he said at length, ‘let’s get you a coffee.’

  Slonský and Peiperová entered the police building together, but while she turned into what Slonský liked to call “the posh corridor” he paused at the desk to chew the fat with Sergeant Mucha.

  ‘I have something for you,’ said Mucha.

  ‘Is it riches beyond my wildest dreams? A winning lottery ticket?’

  ‘No, it’s an old file from Ústí.’

  ‘Ah, that. Have you opened it?’

  ‘It’s addressed to you,’ protested Mucha.

  ‘So it is. Have you opened it?’

  ‘Naturally I flipped through it to see whether it was what it purported to be.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s a slipshod piece of work.’

  ‘Now if Klinger said that I’d assume he’d noticed that the margins weren’t the same on all the pages, but I’m guessing that’s not what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You might want to look at page five, the list of witnesses interviewed.’

  Slonský laid the folder on the counter top and quickly found the page in question. Running his fingers down the list he could see what Mucha meant.

  ‘There’s no continuation on page six?’

  ‘That’s the lot.’

  ‘Imbeciles.’

  ‘If it’s so easy for me to spot, why didn’t Ústí notice it at the time?’

  ‘Who knows? Either you’re unusually brilliant or the investigating officer in Ústí was astonishingly dim.’

  ‘It’ll be that, then,’ murmured Mucha.

  ‘That’s where the smart money is,’ agreed Slonský.

  ‘I feel sorry for him,’ said Navrátil told Slonský when they had both returned to the office.

  ‘He’s a criminal,’ observed Slonský. ‘A disgrace to the police force.’

  ‘Yes,’ agree Navrátil, ‘but on a human level I still feel sorry for him.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, why?’

  ‘He’s got no job, no money, no reputation, nowhere to live and his wife divorced him.’

  ‘That’s all true of me, too. Except the job. And my wife hasn’t actually formally divorced me.’

  ‘He’s lost it all and got nothing to show for it.’

  ‘Permit me to observe that this is the result of bad choices he made. This is not bad luck, Navrátil. I’d have thought that as a believer you would have understood that bad things happen to you if you’re naughty.’

  ‘I know, but it’s disproportionate. And he has served his time. He’s paid his penalty but it’s as if we’re punishing him some more for the same thing.’

  Slonský smiled. ‘You poor young thing. If you’d been around when I started you’d have seen all this and more. Back in the day if someone got sentenced for something his family and friends fell over themselves to have nothing more to do with him. They’d often bring in extra evidence even after he’d been convicted.

  ‘I can remember a factory manager out near Letňany who was caught dipping his fingers in the till. He got eight years, if I remember correctly, and within a month his wife had filed for divorce, his children had changed their names and two of his workmates organised a petition saying they’d always had suspicions about him and the sentence was too light. Imagine what sort of welcome he got when they let him out. Nobody would admit to having ever m
et him.’

  Navrátil was unmoved. ‘Kobr served his sentence. That pays for his crime. Anything extra is just spite.’

  Slonský was often intransigent, occasionally downright stubborn, but even he was impressed by Navrátil’s dogged refusal to accept things that offended against his sense of ethics.

  ‘You really mean that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m not defending what he did, but once he’s out, he should get a fair crack of the whip.’

  Slonský dropped his pencil on the desktop. ‘You realise you’re making me question everything I’ve believed in for the last forty years?’

  ‘I don’t think I am. I think you think that too.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Because you can’t abide injustice, and this is unjust. Once you realise that, you’ll agree with me.’

  The arrival of Peiperová terminated their discussion.

  ‘Am I interrupting something?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Slonský. ‘However, you’ve arrived just in time to examine this file which our colleagues in Ústí — and I use the word colleagues in its loosest and most temporary sense — have forwarded to us. We can either read it here, and die of thirst and hunger, or we can go to a bar, but we’d have to keep our voices down because this is confidential. Or, at a pinch, we could go to the canteen for a coffee, safe in the knowledge that everyone who might overhear us is a police officer.’

  ‘So were the people you’ve been abusing under your breath for the last hour,’ Navrátil pointed out.

  ‘Good point. A quick conference here, then, followed by our decamping to a nearby hostelry for a little something to fortify us for the journey home.’ Slonský opened the folder and turned it so that his juniors could read it. ‘Cuddle up, then, and feast your eyes. Page one — mainly drivel. Tells us nothing we don’t know.’

  He waited for them to finish reading, then turned the page.

  ‘Page two. Background drivel. Family tree for the child, map of the town, that sort of thing.’

  They scanned it quickly and nodded to show that they had reached the end.

  ‘Page three. Forensic drivel. Not much to say because they didn’t call the experts fast enough.’

  The page was mainly blank, so it did not take long for Navrátil and Peiperová to take in its contents.

  ‘Page four. List of all the external reports requested that appear as appendices. Social worker report on parents, psychiatric reports on parents — they were, apparently, depressed, but who wouldn’t be? — requests to other police forces for details of similar cases.’

  Slonský pushed his chair back and had a good stretch.

  ‘Page five. The good stuff. List of people interviewed for the enquiry, with job title and address. What do you notice?’

  Navrátil and Peiperová read the list intently but offered no suggestion.

  ‘Oh, you disappoint me!’ said Slonský. ‘Let’s step through it slowly and we’ll see if that makes a difference. It’s a bit unfair to ask you, Navrátil, because you haven’t visited the site, so Peiperová can take the lead. So, how was it done? How was a young child snatched in broad daylight with the minimum of fuss?’

  ‘If it was February it wouldn’t be broad daylight,’ objected Navrátil.

  ‘Sunset was at 16:58, so objection overruled, but a nice try. It was gloomy because there was snow in the air, I’ll grant you that.’

  ‘The mother must have been distracted, sir,’ suggested Peiperová.

  ‘Didn’t the investigating officers think the father took her?’ asked Navrátil.

  ‘Whoa! I can only deal with one incorrect wild hypothesis at a time,’ Slonský told them. ‘If the father took her, where did he keep her for seven years? Or even for seven hours, because the police took the home apart that night?’

  ‘They’re divorced,’ Peiperová noted, ‘so perhaps this was his way of getting custody and the mother knew nothing. But it would explain why the child didn’t cry out.’

  ‘Again, where did he keep her given that he was contacted at work, and a little girl in an auto repair workshop would be noticed? There’s no dispute that when they finally rang him he was at work three kilometres away.’

  ‘But if they were so slow,’ Peiperová doggedly persisted, ‘he’d have time to snatch the child and then go back to work before they called.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Slonský, ‘but he can’t have known that Ústí would be so damn inefficient. They might have called within minutes. Or Mrs Dlasková might have found a public phone and called. Besides which, it’s bad for our image if we build a case based upon the guaranteed ineptitude of the police, however accurate that might be.’

  Navrátil rested his head on his hands and concentrated on the floor, a pose he found conducive to serious thinking. After a few moments a light dawned.

  ‘The only piece of solid evidence we’ve got is the coat,’ he said, ‘so whatever the explanation is it must start with that.’

  ‘Aha! We’re getting somewhere. We’ve got her white coat. What would happen to her if she went outside without a coat on?’

  ‘She’d freeze,’ said Peiperová.

  ‘In time. But I bet she’d complain. She’d ask for her coat. People would notice a child leaving with no coat on. Therefore I postulate that she had a coat, in which event…’

  ‘The kidnapper brought one,’ Navrátil concluded.

  ‘Indeed they did. And it was different to the other. With a coat on, and the hood up you wouldn’t see much of any particular child. So Mrs Dlasková possibly did see Viktorie leave, but she wouldn’t recognise her because she was wearing a different coat. If we’re right and the child left via the back fence that just strengthens the case because she would be facing away from her mother.’

  ‘Why didn’t the investigating officers work this out, sir?’ Peiperová posed.

  ‘Because they didn’t have the benefit of my brains,’ said Slonský, ‘and they don’t appear to have had any others of their own to call on. But hold hard, that’s only half the story. Who did it?’

  ‘You know that?’ Navrátil enquired.

  ‘I don’t have a name yet,’ said Slonský, ‘but I should have in a day or so.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Peiperová asked.

  ‘Katja gave us the clue, lass. Now look again at that list and tell me who we’re looking for.’

  ‘It all looks in order, sir. Everyone on the list was interviewed and accounted for. They either had an alibi or they were in sight, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they were, young lady. Which means it isn’t anyone on this list. But what about people who aren’t on this list?’

  ‘It’s got the other parents and the kindergarten staff. I can’t think of anyone else, sir.’

  Slonský sighed. If two intelligent young people like this couldn’t see it maybe he had been too hard on the numbskulls at Ústí.

  ‘Where did we interview Katja?’

  ‘At her house, sir.’

  ‘Why was she at home?’

  ‘Because it was her day off.’

  ‘Because…’

  ‘She only works part-time.’

  ‘So who was there in her place?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know…’

  ‘They didn’t interview all the staff!’ blurted out Navrátil.

  ‘Of course!’ Peiperová agreed. ‘They only interviewed the ones who were at work. But Viktorie would have known anyone who was off duty that day and might well have gone with them without complaint.’

  ‘Finally!’ said Slonský. ‘Come on — I’ve earned that drink.’

  An hour or so later, it appeared that Slonský believed that he had earned several drinks, as a result of which he had gone to adjust his personal fluid balance. This gave Navrátil the opportunity to unburden himself of a task he had been putting off.

  ‘Mother thinks it would be good for the two of you to spend some time together. She wants me to invite you for the weekend.’
r />   ‘That’s kind of her,’ Peiperová replied.

  ‘No, it isn’t. It’s like being brought in for questioning.’

  ‘Are you worried she’ll tell me all your little secrets?’

  ‘Not at all. I don’t have any. I just don’t want her judging you.’

  ‘If she’s going to judge me she’ll do it anyway, before or after the wedding. Better get it over and done with. Anyway, I want her approval. And it’s not like we haven’t met. We had a meal together last Christmas, remember?’

  ‘A couple of hours in around eighteen months?’

  ‘Is it worth reminding you that we might have known each other better if you had told her that I existed?’

  This touched a raw nerve. When Navrátil first met Peiperová she was still a uniformed officer in Kladno and he had told his mother he was going to Kladno to spend a Saturday with a new friend, carefully avoiding any specification of the friend’s gender. When he had started going out with her he had said nothing to his mother and when, much to his surprise, he had impulsively proposed and been accepted he decided it was time to tell his mother he was “seeing someone”. Only now she would see the engagement ring and he would be on the end of her tongue for keeping it from her.

  ‘Do you want me to take the ring off?’ Peiperová asked.

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Respond to thoughts I haven’t voiced.’

  ‘I can read you like a book.’

  ‘Well, no, certainly not. I’m not going to conceal our engagement from my mother.’

  ‘You have so far.’

  ‘I haven’t concealed it,’ Navrátil protested. ‘I just haven’t mentioned it yet.’

  ‘Well, she’s your mother,’ said Peiperová. ‘It’s not for me to advise on how to handle her. But imagine the shock when she sees the ring.’