by Graham Brack
‘Not at all,’ said Rajka. ‘We are reopening an old case on a confidential basis and need to review the evidence relating to a robbery you had here eight years ago. Were you here then?’
‘No, not at all!’ the relieved manager replied. ‘That would be my predecessor.’
‘Do you have an address for him?’
‘Not really. He’s dead.’
‘So are there any staff here now, or with whom we could make contact, who may be able to answer our questions?’ Rajka asked, slowing his speech to ensure that he made himself very clear.
‘Ah, yes. Our chief teller, Mrs Klimentová, was here then. I’ve heard her talking about it. Should I fetch her?’
‘That would be helpful,’ Rajka agreed. ‘And perhaps there is a spare room we could use?’
‘Certainly. If there isn’t you can use mine.’
‘We’ll try to avoid that,’ said Rajka, ‘to reduce the inconvenience to you.’
‘Most thoughtful,’ the manager said before rushing off to find Mrs Klimentová.
The chief teller proved to be a woman of around fifty with hair that Slonský for one found intriguing. First, it appeared to have been made from tightly coiled steel wire that had then been lacquered into a style that could outlast eternity. You could have thrown an owl at it and watched it bounce off. It also had a dashing blue streak. With the exception of an occasion in the sixties when the young Slonský had asked his barber for a Tony Curtis cut (and received the usual short back and sides) it had not crossed his mind that hairstyles could depart from nature so radically. Nowadays when his barber asked what he wanted, Slonský usually answered “a discount”.
They were offered an interview room adjoining the manager’s office, and settled themselves with the two policemen on the window side and Mrs Klimentová opposite them.
‘I am Major Rajka and this is Captain Slonský,’ Rajka began. ‘I understand you were here on the day that the bank was robbed eight years ago. Is that correct?’
‘Yes. It was a ghastly day. I shall never forget it,’ Mrs Klimentová responded.
‘That should make you a good witness, then,’ Rajka smiled. ‘Perhaps you could tell us, in your own words, where you were and what you saw.’
‘I wasn’t on the counter at that time, but in the back reconciling the cash from the morning shift. There was a large desk immediately behind the counter that we used for the purpose because it had privacy screens at one end that stopped the coins rolling off. So I was standing there counting the cash received and ensuring it was correctly bagged.
‘That was when Julia asked me if I could help her. She was carrying a bundle of printouts from the fax machine. At that time if you wanted to get out of the back into the bank lobby you had to go through a door at the end of the counter. It had two locks and you had to turn the knobs simultaneously to open it. We have an electronic system now. Anyway, Julia couldn’t carry her printout and open both locks, so I went to open the door for her. No sooner had we pulled the door back than a man ran in and pushed Julia over.’
‘I hope she wasn’t hurt,’ Rajka commented.
‘Shocked more than hurt, I think. There was a lot of shouting as two accomplices in front of the counter produced guns and demanded that we fill their holdalls. I couldn’t see any way of preventing them robbing us but I was determined that they were going to get as little as possible, so I started filling the holdall with coin bags and blank paying-in slips, but the one in the back, who must have been their leader, shouted that they only wanted banknotes, ideally in large denominations.’
‘Did he have a gun?’ Rajka asked casually.
‘I didn’t see one. He was using both hands to fill the bags so if he had one he wasn’t holding it. Anyway, if I couldn’t hamper him as I had planned the next option was to slow him down, because I knew that Matĕj on the counter would have pressed the silent alarm. It wasn’t very well designed, because the bank was worried that we’d knock it accidentally, so it was under a small cover. You had to flip it up with your hand and hit it with the other one. The other problem was that it was very obvious what you were doing. Fortunately Matĕj was quite a big lad and while he stood with his hands up one of the girls slipped behind him to trigger the alarm.’
‘And how quickly did the police come?’
‘Very quickly. One of the armed men opened the door slightly and shouted that someone wasn’t there. That seemed to panic them, and the leader told him to shut the door and barricade it, because a couple of City Police had turned up outside. I don’t know exactly when the assault team arrived.’
‘Is there a back door they could have used?’
‘There is, but it wouldn’t help them a lot. For safety reasons you can open it from the inside by pressing on a bar and a button simultaneously, so if there’s a fire we can escape, but only into a back courtyard. We then have to wait for someone to unlock the outer gate. The leader grabbed one of the girls and made her lead him to the door but he soon returned and said there was no way out in that direction.’
‘So what did he do then?’
‘He told each of the robbers to grab someone. He grabbed Julia and the robbers each seized a customer. By this time someone outside had telephoned the bank and they were beginning negotiations. The robbers asked for a car and safe passage out of the country. I don’t think they had any idea where they could go but that’s what they asked for.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘The robbers started arguing about where they could go where the police couldn’t extradite them. One of them suggested Ukraine, and another thought Moldova might work.’
‘I doubt they knew where either of those was,’ interrupted Slonský.
Rajka arched an eyebrow but decided not to pursue that discussion.
‘And then?’ he asked.
‘We could hear people in boots running around upstairs. I don’t know how long they’d been there. The leader looked out of a window and saw a fireman’s ladder being used to lift armed police in at one of the upper levels. Because this is an old building there are restrictions on alterations we can make, you see. The upper floors can’t be secured, so we have a cage separating the lower two floors from the upper ones. People may get into the building, but they still have to get into the caged area.’
‘And how did the police do that?’
‘It was during working hours, so one of the two doors was open. I think the police just blew the other one off its hinges somehow.’
That’s exactly what Dostál would do, thought Slonský, but he said nothing.
‘Then they came running down the stairs. The leader told the other two to shoot, but they clearly didn’t want to. They held their guns to their hostage’s heads but an open lobby area and police spreading into a wide semi-circle meant that sooner or later they’d be shot. There was a stand-off for a moment, then they pushed the hostages away and dropped their guns, but it was too late. The police had fired at the same time.’
‘This is very important. Are you sure that the police fired at the same time as the men dropped their guns?’
‘It was all so fast. It’s really difficult to decide.’
‘Put it another way,’ said Slonský. ‘When they pushed the hostages away, was there any reason for the police to think that they, or anyone in the room, was under direct threat from their guns?’
‘I don’t think so. Their arms weren’t raised to a firing stance.’
‘And the leader?’ asked Rajka.
‘He tried to mingle with the staff at the back with a view to slipping out. He edged round to the staircase they’d come in at and was just making for the stairs when they shot him.’
‘But you don’t think he had a gun?’
‘I never saw one, and he wasn’t holding one when he fell to the floor.’
Something had occurred to Slonský. ‘Just a minute. You said he was shot at the foot of the staircase. That’s to the back left of the room, if I remember correctly?’
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‘That’s right.’
‘Yet I have a photograph here that shows his body lying behind the large table you talked about.’ He riffled through the folder to find it. He had not planned to show it to Mrs Klimentová but she held out her hand for it.
‘No, that’s not right at all. He died by the stairs. And he didn’t have that gun.’
Rajka sat back quite satisfied. ‘I don’t want to hold you up now. We’ll need a proper statement but I can construct a draft and come back tomorrow. You can amend it in any way you think fit, so please don’t let me put words in your mouth.’
Mrs Klimentová indicated that she understood by nodding gently.
‘Now,’ Rajka asked, ‘are there any colleagues here who were working then?’
Navrátil had a definite gift for extracting information from large datasets. He was never happier than when he was surrounded by sheets of paper and trying to meld them together into some sort of coherent whole.
At that particular moment he was browsing through a selection of train timetables when a frighteningly cheerful Slonský walked in and threw his hat in the general direction of the hook behind the door.
‘I’ve had a good day, lad. How has yours been?’
‘Disappointing, sir. None of the ticket clerks on duty that Sunday recall serving a woman with dark glasses and a bruised face, but they admitted that they don’t always scrutinise the customer’s face. And, of course, she may have bought her ticket on the train from the conductor.’
‘No credit card slip?’
‘For a single journey nearly everyone uses cash. So my next thought was — where could she go? She’d just missed a train to Most and there wasn’t another one for over two hours, so if she has someone there to go to, she’d have to hang around the station.’
‘That sounds unlikely. If you’re running away you want to get out of the area. You can always triangulate to your original destination later.’
‘That’s what I thought, sir. So, assuming it takes her about five minutes after she parks the car to get into the station, choose her train and get to it, there’s a train to Pardubice at two minutes to three, and a train to Brno at 14:50 too. She’d probably just miss the train to Plzeň.’
‘Either of those might do.’
‘Unfortunately the Brno train then goes to Vienna. But the Pardubice one left from platform 3 and the Brno train from platform 6, which is that much further away. I’m not sure she could have got to the train before it left.’
‘It would be tight, even allowing for the fact that a Czech train doesn’t always leave on time.’
‘There’s another reason for thinking she may have taken the Pardubice train. She withdrew some money from an ATM on Saturday but there’s not much in that account. A ticket to Vienna would have eaten into it and she needs to have something left to live on. Even so, she has to find someone who will let her live with them cheaply.’
‘And the likeliest place will be friends or family. If we’re right and she originates from somewhere near the kindergarten, then that’s the place she’s likely to go, but it’s also where her partner will go looking for her.’
‘Try this then, sir. She goes to a third place. Let’s say it’s Pardubice for the moment. Her partner isn’t likely to be able to follow that trail. From there she phones someone in Most explaining her problem and checking whether Nágl has shown up there yet. If he has, she stays put. If he hasn’t, she completes her journey. Even if he went there on the Sunday, he can’t stay indefinitely. Sooner or later the coast will be clear.’
‘That’s probably our best guess for the moment. Has he used his credit cards or bank account?’
‘I’m still waiting for that information, sir.’
‘There are just too many variables to try tracking her. I doubt she’d go south because then she’d have to come back through Prague. But until she shows up somewhere there’s not much we can do. Any mobile phone information?’
‘She has one but it’s been switched off since she caught the train. I’m also keeping a lookout for Nágl’s but no sign of that either since that weekend.’
‘If they were fleeing together that would make sense, but why would he switch his phone off while he’s chasing her? It’s not as if she can track him.’
‘Maybe he’s more worried about us, sir. By the same token, why has she turned hers off when he can’t track her? And the safest place for her to be is in one of our cells.’
‘You haven’t tasted the lunches we give prisoners, Navrátil. On top of that, she’s probably a bit wary of us too given that if our suppositions are right she’s looking at a lengthy jail sentence for abducting Viktorie in the first place.’
‘So what do we do now, sir?’
Slonský flopped in his chair and folded his arms slowly.
‘Navrátil, my long experience of police work has taught me that there are occasions when the most important thing to do is nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing. Rien du tout. Nada.’
‘Isn’t that a dereliction of our duty, sir?’
‘It would be if we had something useful to do. But there is no merit in mindless activity, lad. It just wastes valuable energy. Let’s go and think this through over a coffee and a pastry or two. Good work, by the way.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘No, I mean it. You know, when I first saw you, I thought I’d been saddled with a complete deadweight. I am happy to admit that I was wrong.’
Navrátil smiled.
‘Or, at least,’ added Slonský, ‘not entirely right.’
Chapter 11
Major Rajka rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
‘The big problem here,’ he said, ‘is that however good Mrs Klimentová’s statement is, it’s just her word against Dostál’s.’
‘Her colleagues support her,’ Slonský pointed out.
‘No, they don’t contradict her, which is not quite the same thing. Too many of them didn’t see enough to be useful.’
‘We don’t need to prove it. We just need enough to get an enquiry rolling, then Dr Pilik won’t dare appoint him.’
‘You don’t need to prove it for your purposes, but as Head of OII I need to know there’s a good chance we’ll prove our case. I have my department’s reputation to consider.’
To Slonský’s way of thinking the reputation of OII was streets ahead of most other police departments, at least with him. Unlike, say, Organised Crime, some of whose members had been found to be doing the organising of quite a bit of crime, or the Fraud Squad, who had that unfortunate incident with Kobr on their record. And as for Vice, a more shady bunch of rampant trouser-droppers had yet to cross his path.
It was not a great concern to him if the enquiry petered out in December, so long as it lasted long enough to ruin Dostál’s chance of getting the post Urban wanted, thus making Urban happy and, by extension, Urban’s PA, Peiperová. However, he could see that if the investigation came to nothing and Dostál had been denied the top job as a result of some character assassination Rajka’s position vis-à-vis his new boss could be difficult. And he could be fairly certain that Dostál’s second action upon taking over would be to send a retirement letter to one Slonský, J.
‘So how do we beef up the evidence?’
Rajka pressed his temples with his fingers as if it might help to stimulate thought.
‘We need some corroborating evidence. It’s a shame that videotape went missing.’
‘It didn’t go missing. It was removed.’
‘Yes, I know, but we can’t prove that.’
‘What about the woman who wrote to the newspaper?’
‘Obviously we have to visit her. Have we got an address?’
Slonský patted his pockets. ‘Yes,’ he announced firmly. ‘Somewhere.’
After a bit more rummaging he unfolded a grubby piece of paper. It proved to be a receipt for two sandwiches and a half-litre of beer. Even deeper in his pocket than that he found th
e address he wanted and handed it over.
Rajka bounded from his chair.
‘Off we go, then. Shall I drive?’
But he had left the room before Slonský could answer.
Not all of Prague is picture postcard beautiful, and the area where Božena Moserová lived was fairly decayed. Chunks of render were missing from the walls of some of the buildings and too many of the shops had steel shutters for Slonský’s liking. Rajka had to concentrate on the road so Slonský was left to look for the apartment block unaided.
‘Ninety-eight, ninety-two, next block, I think.’
He was just about to announce that they had arrived when he was thrown forward in his seat by Rajka’s enthusiastic use of the brake.
‘An empty legal parking space. You don’t see those too often,’ Rajka remarked.
As they climbed out of the car a boy of about eleven eyed them suspiciously as he juggled his football.
Rajka beckoned him towards them.
‘We’re going in there. We’ll be on the third floor. If you make sure nobody touches this car I’ll give you ten crowns when we come back.’
‘Twenty,’ said the boy.
Rajka opened his jacket to show his badge. This move ensured that the boy also got a glimpse of his shoulder holster.
‘No, ten’ll do,’ the boy corrected himself.
They began to climb the stairs. While Rajka skipped upwards with the grace and ease of a chamois Slonský looked more like an arthritic bear, but in time they were both on the landing outside Mrs Moserová’s apartment.
Mrs Moserová was in much better condition than her apartment block, but then she seemed to have had much more remedial work done over the years. Her nails were beautifully tended and she wore a cameo brooch on her white blouse. She invited the officers in and offered them coffee, which Slonský accepted. Rajka asked for a glass of water.
‘Must be money in the family,’ whispered Slonský as he pointed at the tasteful objets d’art that fringed the sitting room.