by Graham Brack
Peiperová gulped her coffee. ‘And miss out on the one chance in my life to wear the big white dress? No, thank you.’
‘You could always have the police insignia sewn on its shoulders,’ Slonský proposed, ‘if you want to find a middle way.’
‘A traditional white wedding, that’s what we said, isn’t it, Jan?’
Navrátil nodded emphatically. ‘That’s right. We want a wedding just like other Czech brides and grooms have.’
‘You mean with the bride three months gone?’ Slonský asked.
Peiperová was about to snap at him until she realised that he was smirking.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t resist. I’m sure it’ll be lovely. I’ll make sure you get the whole day off.’ He finished off his pastry, emptied his cup and pushed them away. ‘I guess we ought to talk shop at some point. How have you got on?’
Peiperová was first to speak. ‘I’ve got a list of places from social services. I had no idea there were so many. I’ve rung about eight but it’ll take me all day, I think.’
‘Not quite so difficult up north,’ Navrátil added. ‘Social services didn’t have much of a list. I rang the local priest to ask where he would send anyone who asked him for help. He was understandably reluctant to give me addresses because I suppose he couldn’t be sure I wasn’t a husband chasing after a runaway wife, but he gave me phone numbers. Between us Krob and I have rung all those without finding anything out. We’ve got a couple of hostels we’ve got to ring back once they’ve spoken to whoever was on duty at the relevant time in case they turned her away.’
‘Do they often turn women away?’ asked Slonský.
‘Only when they’re full. They give them introductions to another place but some don’t ever present themselves there, it seems.’
‘Okay. Keep pegging away at it. Has Krob got his new badge?’
‘They wouldn’t give it to me until Monday, but it’s all ready. And I’ve been measured for my uniform and they tell me that will be waiting for me on Monday too,’ Krob replied.
‘Excellent. By long-established tradition the newest member of the team gets to organise the staff Christmas party, just so you know.’
‘That’s a long-established tradition that dates back to last year,’ Peiperová helpfully added.
Slonský was deep in thought.
‘Something puzzling you, sir?’ asked Peiperová.
‘It’s the timing of the whole thing. Let’s walk through it. Maybe you folks can spot something I’ve missed. Broukalová goes to school on Friday 14th September to tell them she and Viktorie are moving away and not to expect her on Monday. In fact, for whatever reason she doesn’t actually go until Sunday 16th, and Viktorie doesn’t go with her, so let’s assume Viktorie has been killed on Friday or Saturday. So why, having decided to leave, does Broukalová not immediately go? If she’d left that afternoon she’d have been away before Nágl came home. She’d be safe and Viktorie would still be alive. So what kept her?’
‘Presumably she had to wait for something,’ Navrátil suggested.
‘Pay day,’ Krob interjected.
Slonský’s eyes lit up. ‘Money would make sense. She doesn’t have the money to get away.’
‘We’re all paid direct into our banks once a month but she’s probably paid weekly because if I understand correctly she worked in a local shop. And if it closes on Sunday then Saturday would be the last working day and therefore pay day.’
‘Good thinking, Krob. When we’re done here see if you can find out where she worked and when she was last paid.’
‘When she enrolled Viktorie at the school she showed them a death certificate that allegedly belonged to the father,’ Peiperová pointed out.
‘Since we know she was using the name Broukalová I expect she used her father’s. It would have the right name and enough women marry men a generation older for it not to be a complete surprise. She may even have altered the date of birth,’ Slonský responded.
‘And he’d died the year before Viktorie was taken,’ Navrátil added. ‘That bit fits.’
‘Right, so we may be able to explain why she doesn’t leave on the Friday. But where was she on the Saturday night? You see, we know of a number of events, but we can’t assign them to a sequence. There are four that we have to get into order. Viktorie is killed, Magdalena is beaten up, Viktorie’s body is disposed of and Magdalena runs away. The last one has to be Nágl chasing after her, and since I can’t imagine that he broke off the chase to go back and put Viktorie in the river, and since we know Magdalena left on Sunday afternoon and he followed, it seems that Viktorie’s body must have been put in the river before then.’
‘Would he risk it in daylight, sir?’ Navrátil wanted to know.
‘It’s much more likely he’d go when it was dark. That leaves us Friday or Saturday night for the disposal of the body. So Nágl would get in from work at six or seven on Friday, somehow discover they were planning to leave, there’s an argument, Magdalena gets hurt…’
Krob interrupted. ‘If she did, wouldn’t they notice at work when she went to collect her pay?’
‘Good point. Check that. We should have done it before, but I’m afraid I let the Dostál thing distract me. Mucha here can show you how to get employment records, so unless she was paid illegally cash in hand we should be able to find out where she worked.’
‘Isn’t it more likely that Magdalena would try to make Friday night entirely normal,’ said Navrátil, ‘if she knew that she couldn’t leave till Saturday? Then she collects her pay, and if she didn’t take Viktorie with her when she did so — and we can check that — she’d have left her alone with Nágl. And she must have known that was a risk because she knew Nágl had molested the child before.’
‘She doesn’t have a good option though, does she?’ Slonský argued. ‘If she’s going to keep things as normal as possible she can’t take Viktorie if she wouldn’t normally take her. She can’t pack her bags without giving the game away. She’s obviously hoping that Nágl will go out over the weekend and she and Viktorie can get away. If all else fails they can go on Monday morning when he has gone to work. But until then, it has to be normal. Except that somehow he seems to have worked out what was happening.’
There was a short silence while they processed the information they had just shared.
‘Viktorie told him,’ said Peiperová.
‘What? Why?’ asked Navrátil.
‘Not deliberately, of course. But she let it slip somehow. Perhaps she said she wasn’t going to school on Monday. Maybe he asked her if she was good at keeping secrets and she told him one she was keeping. Or it could be that she thought he was coming too. They’re a family in her eyes, so they would go together. All she’d need to do is ask where they’re going and he’d tease the rest out of her.’
It seemed plausible.
‘So when Magdalena comes back he lays into her. Viktorie starts to scream, he pushes her face into the pillow to keep her quiet…’ Slonský continued the sequence. ‘Then after dark he goes to dispose of the body, Magdalena hurriedly packs and gets out of the house. But where can she go? Why does she wait until Sunday to leave town?’
‘Maybe the beating is so severe she can’t go any earlier,’ Peiperová suggested.
‘Or perhaps he takes her with him while he disposes of Viktorie’s body to make sure she doesn’t leave,’ added Navrátil. ‘Then he thinks she’s too badly hurt to travel on Sunday, relaxes his guard and she steals the car and drives off, leaving him to trail behind.’
‘He used his bank card on the Monday in Kolín,’ Peiperová read from her notebook, ‘then he uses it again in Most on Monday 24th.’
‘And our best guess at present is that Magdalena is surviving thanks to the charity of Petra Novotná. We need to find an address for her,’ said Slonský.
‘I’ll see what I can find,’ Mucha replied.
Slonský looked at his watch. ‘Let’s meet up again in two hours for lunch and see
what we’ve got.’ He looked up at the menu board on the wall. ‘On second thoughts, let’s meet somewhere else for lunch.’
A murder enquiry can be a frustrating thing. Some days the police work ferociously hard tracking every possible piece of evidence, and at the end of it all the investigation seems to have gone backwards. On other occasions they find that witnesses introduce other witnesses, facts fall nicely into place and — if they’re really lucky — someone confesses and saves them a lot of trouble.
Over the next two hours the team felt that they were really making some headway. Mucha found the name of Magdalena’s employer. Navrátil was doubtful that they would be able to make contact since it was St Wenceslas’ Day and therefore a public holiday (albeit that the non-believers referred to it as Czech Statehood Day) but when they telephoned the number they had the owner of the small local shop picked up.
Krob explained the reason for their call and the owner agreed that Magdalena Broukalová had worked there. She only worked from nine o’clock to two o’clock four days a week but she was a hard worker and flexible about her schedule. The owner had been disappointed when Magdalena had said that she would have to leave and explained that her relationship had broken down; so much so that the owner had suggested that she could keep her job if she could find somewhere else to live in Prague. However, Magdalena said she couldn’t settle knowing that she might bump into her ex-partner.
‘I don’t like to gossip,’ said the store owner, ‘but I think she was hinting that she feared violence.’
‘Did you ever see her bruised or harmed in any way?’
‘No, never,’ said the owner. ‘That’s one reason why I was surprised at her hint.’
‘Not even on the last day? We gather she worked on Friday and came in on Saturday to collect her wages.’
‘No, she seemed fit and well. She could have had the wages on Friday but she said she had better follow the usual routine so her partner would not become suspicious. I could quite understand that. She also had to pick up her work papers, of course, with her employment record so that she could get another job elsewhere. I gathered those together into a folder for her but she took them out and folded them so that they would fit in her bag.’
‘Was her daughter with her?’
‘No, she never brought her daughter to work. Occasionally in the summer holidays she would leave her with one of the other workers and they would meet here to hand their children over, because on her days off she would look after someone else’s child in return, but otherwise we never saw her.’
‘And just to confirm she hasn’t been in touch since she left?’
‘No, not at all. May I ask what this is about?’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that her daughter died an unexpected death a few days later and Ms Broukalová hasn’t been seen since. We’d like to confirm her safety if we can.’
When Krob put the phone down Navrátil complimented him on the call.
‘That was a nice construction. “An unexpected death” sounds much better than “murdered by her stepfather”.’
‘We’re assuming it was her stepfather,’ said Krob. ‘Do we know that?’
Navrátil was stopped in his tracks. They had built such a compelling picture of the events of that weekend that they had not stopped to consider an alternative. Could Magdalena have suffocated Viktorie? Was that why Nágl had beaten her?
Slonský listened to Navrátil’s questions with increasing unease.
‘Those things are possible, but there are two ways to conduct an investigation. You can either keep all the possibilities running at the same time, in which event you risk ending up with chaos, or you pick the likeliest one or two and go with them until they’re disproved, when you have to retrace your steps and think again. Why would Magdalena suffocate Viktorie?’
‘So she could start a new life, I suppose.’
‘And why would she do it when she had already risked so much to snatch her in the first place?’
‘Well, she could hardly return her to her mother, sir.’
‘And I could understand that Nágl might have thumped her if he caught her red-handed, but after the event why chase her across the Czech Republic when he could just call us and get us to do it for him? He’s given up his job and he’s using his savings trying to find her. Why would he do that if she’s the guilty one? It makes no sense to me.’
Mucha had found an address for Petra Novotná but he had not been able to trace a telephone number. It was a cause of continuing disappointment to Czech officials that some people seemed to be able to live their lives without possessing a telephone or even a computer. Novotná was described as self-employed, so he assumed that she used a business phone registered in a business name. It ought not to be difficult to find — after all, self-employed people want others to be able to find them — but it was going to take him a little while longer.
Peiperová was still ploughing through the list of refuges and hostels in Prague. Slonský had no idea that there were so many. He had sorted out enough cases of domestic violence over the years to be under no illusions about their frequency, but as a man who would never think of hitting a woman and would have been deeply ashamed of himself if he had he could not understand why so many men demeaned themselves in this way. In the interests of balance Peiperová had felt obliged to note that violence in relationships did not always flow in the same direction, but agreed that it was a considerable task and expressed her thanks to Krob for helping her work through the list after his phone call to the shop owner.
Navrátil had completed his ring-round, but without finding anyone who would admit to having received a woman of about fifty with a bruised face last Sunday or Monday.
‘If she isn’t staying with Novotná I don’t know where she is,’ said Slonský. ‘It’s hard to imagine that she has the money for a hotel or guest house.’
‘She might for a few days, but she’d quickly run out,’ said Peiperová. ‘I’m better paid than she was and I doubt I could stay in one for more than a fortnight, and then only if I bought food and prepared it myself somehow.’
Slonský drained his glass. ‘I have to go to see Colonel Urban now. Keep up the good work and give one another a hand. We’ll get to the bottom of this somehow.’
I just can’t see how unless we strike very lucky, he thought to himself.
Chapter 16
Colonel Urban was in a very good mood. He remained in a very good mood even when he saw what Slonský was expecting him to sign off.
‘You might like to know,’ he began, ‘that Dr Pilik has today written to Interpol terminating Colonel Dostál’s secondment and requiring his return to Prague to face serious criminal charges. I haven’t seen the letter, of course, but that’s what the Minister’s office has told me.’
‘I’ve had some experience of the Minister, sir. Dr Pilik is very good at sticking the knife in once he’s been shown where he has gone wrong.’
‘As you climb the greasy pole, Slonský, you come to realise that he’s not alone amongst politicians when it comes to that.’
‘I imagine not, sir.’
Urban read the first couple of documents and signed them without any fuss. The third one produced a deep furrowing of his brow.
‘This Jerneková woman — why do you want her?’
‘I could go through the normal processes, sir, and spend weeks reading applications and interviewing only to be saddled with somebody unsuitable. I just took the view that if I went out and found the right person it would save a lot of time that I could devote to doing my actual job of fighting crime.’
‘And you think she can do it?’
‘She’s a bit rough and ready but she’s streetwise, she observes well and she’s honest. She’s also a woman, which is seemingly the most important characteristic of all in the eyes of the Human Resources department, since they made that the top requirement on their list.’
‘She’ll still have to do her basic training.’
/> ‘I know, sir. She doesn’t qualify for the Police Academy, not having completed higher schooling, so she’d have to go to a Police School, but after six months she can apply for a placement with my team, which we will of course grant. She’d be a uniformed officer in the crime department for another year, then she can apply for detective training, which we would again grant. So eighteen months from now I’ll have the officer I want, and that’s worth waiting for. But it needs your signature to say that she’ll be given a placement with us. And if you have any pull to get her into the police school that would be good too.’
‘Getting her into the school won’t be too hard, Slonský. We’re not meeting the target for recruits as it is. It’s just a little irregular to recruit someone by promising that they’ll get postings and promotions before they start.’
‘I’m just being innovative, sir. The current Director of Police always says that’s what he wants us to be.’
‘I don’t think he had that sort of innovative in mind, Slonský.’
Urban read it through one more time and signed it.
‘There! If it all goes belly up, on your head be it.’
‘I’m entirely confident, sir.’
‘Now, this building quote. Why do you need a wall knocked down?’
‘Because my old office and my new office have a wall between them. I can’t see my staff to supervise them. It would foster team spirit to be together. Besides, Krob would find it much more convenient because as things stand the old office will hold three and a half and the new one could hold one and a half, and he’s the unlucky beggar who won’t have a proper desk in either.’
‘But you also have an office that used to house Dvorník, Hauzer, Doležal and Rada, and now that the latter pair have been posted to Pardubice two people are occupying a room designed for four. You could simply swap them over.’
‘Ah, but with all due respect, sir, Lieutenant Dvorník doesn’t need the level of personal supervision that the younger officers need, and if I swapped them over I’d be even further from Navrátil and Peiperová than I am now. And the derogation that allows them to work together despite their relationship was based upon the supposition that I would be physically close enough to intervene if they showed signs of unprofessional canoodling.’