by Graham Brack
‘She’s young. She’ll learn.’
‘Times may be changing though. Have you noticed that people are getting promotions based on merit these days?’
‘No, who?’
‘Well, me for a start. Twenty-something years as a lieutenant, and suddenly I’m a captain.’
‘Yes, but you never applied.’
‘I know, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. And then look at Colonel Urban getting the Director of Police post.’
‘I didn’t think that had anything to do with merit. I thought you put a word in for him.’
‘You overstate my influence,’ said Slonský. ‘Slightly.’
Navrátil had the look of a man who had spent a very uncomfortable night on an elderly sofa; or, more precisely, dividing his time between the elderly sofa and a rather older floor, onto which he had fallen at least twice. Peiperová had slept quite well once she had stopped trying to deduce anything about her boyfriend from the appurtenances of his bedroom. There was only one photograph of him in there, taken when he was about fourteen and showing him in some sort of uniform with a startlingly white shirt and shorts with creases that could have cut cheese. She moved it to the bedside table and gazed at it until she fell asleep.
In a startling development unanticipated by Slonský Peiperová had not tied her hair in its customary ponytail, but was sporting a red and blue headscarf within which her blonde hair had been bundled apparently carelessly, though the artifice in this was demonstrated to Navrátil by the knowledge that it had taken her fifteen minutes to get it as she wanted it. It was as if she wished it to be clear that Saturday was meant to be a day off.
As they drove into Komořany Slonský turned to speak to Broukalová.
‘Our purpose in coming here is so that you can show us where Viktorie was put into the water. Navrátil will drive wherever you direct him, and we’ll search the area for any additional clues. I need to make plain to you that you can expect a substantial prison sentence for the abduction of Viktorie. Your guilty plea, and the degree of co-operation you give us today, may go towards reducing your sentence. And while the difference between, say, fifteen years and twelve years may not seem much, try thinking how you’ll feel about it eleven and a half years from now.’
Broukalová appeared unmoved, but turned to look out of the side window.
‘Head right towards the train station, then once you’ve crossed the railway line turn next left,’ she said in a low, flat voice.
Navrátil did as directed. The road became narrower and eventually it was not possible to drive any further.
‘Ignore the “cars prohibited” sign, Navrátil. I bet they did,’ said Slonský.
Navrátil drove a little further until the path became too narrow.
‘We parked here on the right,’ said Broukalová.
‘Then we’ll do the same,’ said Slonský. ‘We can walk the rest of the way with you.’
‘It’s not far,’ Broukalová whispered.
As they climbed out of the car she indicated a gap in the bushes.
‘There’s a path parallel to this one that runs along the riverside. We carried Viktorie through here. Daniel couldn’t get the car any closer to the water and doing it this way we could hide out of sight if anyone was taking a late night walk along the river.’
‘How were you carrying her?’ Slonský demanded.
‘She wasn’t heavy. Daniel could have carried her by himself but he wanted me to help so I’d have to share the guilt. And to stop me running off, I suppose. He carried her under the arms and I had hold of her ankles. I couldn’t really use my right arm after he’d hurt it, so I made a loop out of my left arm and carried her ankles on my hip with my arm holding them against my body.’
‘So you were in front?’
‘Yes. Daniel barked at me to look up and down the river path before we stepped out. There was nobody there, so we ran across and put her on the ground behind that clump of greenery.’
‘Navrátil, call the technicians to search there. We won’t go any further than the gravel area until they’re done.’
Broukalová moved closer to Peiperová so that the people using the path could not see the handcuffs that linked them. Peiperová took a step further away to re-establish the space between them.
‘So you’ve got Viktorie on the ground. Then what?’ demanded Slonský.
‘Daniel said that we had to put her into the water face down because when people drown they finish up face down, so he wanted me to climb down into the water. I wouldn’t do it because I thought he’d push me under once we’d put Viktorie in, so he crouched down and rolled her into the water himself.’
Slonský nodded as if this confirmed what he had already pictured in his head.
Broukalová began to cry softly. Peiperová resolutely refused to put a comforting arm around her.
‘I see,’ said Slonský quietly. ‘And this is where you killed Daniel, isn’t it?’
Broukalova’s eyes opened wide, but no wider than those of Navrátil and Peiperová.
‘No!’ Broukalová protested. ‘He took me home and I ran away the next day. He’s been chasing me. He wants to kill me.’
‘He’s going to find that difficult,’ observed Slonský, ‘given that he’s been lying at the bottom of the river here for a couple of weeks. Have it your way, if you want. You can protest your innocence, but when I call the divers in and they dredge him up you’re going to need a really good story to explain how he drove you home after you battered his head in.’
The sobbing began. Peiperová seemed unsurprised that Broukalová might have killed her partner as if nothing that the woman could do would astonish her. Navrátil knew that his best course of action was to listen and learn, and to make the occasional note that might be needed later.
Slonský remained impassive. He just wanted the truth, and Broukalová could provide that.
‘It was the forensic report on the car that made me realise what might have happened. You see, Daniel loved his car. Maybe he even loved it more than he loved you. He certainly spent a lot of time on it, polishing it, cleaning the inside, making the glass sparkle. So it seemed a little odd to me when the technicians remarked that it was missing its wheelbrace and jack. How could that happen?
‘Then an idea came to me. When you lifted the body of Viktorie out of the boot you could have picked up the wheelbrace and hidden it somewhere, probably under your jacket. When Daniel bent down to push her into the water, you struck him over the head with it, and you kept doing it until you were sure he couldn’t fight back. There’s probably some blood spatter in those plants. If so, we’ll find it.
‘Then you’d need to get rid of his body, and lo and behold you had a thumping great river in front of you. He’d probably more or less fallen in as it was, but if he floated along beside Viktorie it would provoke questions and was bound to lead back to you. Much better if he went into the river and never came back up, so you looked for something heavy to weight him down, and there was the jack. It’s a couple of kilos of metal, not perfect but a good start. Put some stones in his pockets and shove the jack down his pants and kick him off the bank, and you’ve done all you can. At any rate, it was enough to stop him bobbing straight back up. He’s probably slowly moved along with the current but the divers will find him. Now, I’ll ask you again, are you going to co-operate by telling us the truth?’
All eyes turned to Broukalová. She gazed helplessly from one to the other until finally she dipped her head and agreed to give a confession.
Three hours later Slonský was in his accustomed seat, Navrátil was putting the finishing touches to the documentation for the prosecutors’ office and Peiperová was returning with a tray of coffee and pastries from the canteen. In the interests of gender equality she had been offered the option of writing out the statements but had allowed Navrátil to take the lead on that.
‘There’s something I don’t understand, sir,’ Navrátil began.
‘There
’s a lot of things you don’t understand, lad, and a lot of things I don’t understand about you, but don’t let it upset you.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us we were on the wrong track?’
‘Because you might not have been, and then I’d have looked a real turnip if I’d told you you were wrong and I was right, wouldn’t I? Better to hold my peace until I had a bit more information.’ Slonský took an expansive bite of pastry. ‘Strangely enough, it was you who convinced me, Navrátil.’
‘Me, sir?’
‘Yes, with your spirited defence of Kobr. You see, we’d all got a story in our heads that fitted the facts. Everyone was inclined to believe that he had a stash of cash somewhere waiting for him. We created a story, and then we saw the facts in the light of our story, so of course they all fitted.
‘Then you came along with an ugly little fact that didn’t really fit, but couldn’t easily be shaken. Why would the villains actually pay a bribe when they’d got him on tape agreeing to take a bribe? Common sense said he’d never had his hands on the money.
‘When you’d gone home I thought about what you’d said and realised where we’d gone wrong. Now — and I say this from the point of view of encouraging self-improvement and not to gloat over you cocking this up — it then seemed to me that we were doing the same in the case of Magdalena Broukalová. When you were questioning her you were asking questions designed to confirm the narrative we’d all cooked up, so of course she went along with it because it didn’t incorporate any extra wickedness on her part. She gave you the answers you were expecting, and you accepted them because it proved your story right. Well, our story. I mustn’t attribute it to you personally.’
‘But I can only ask questions based upon what we know, sir.’
‘Maybe, but you mustn’t close off other options. In Kobr’s case, you pointed to a fact we hadn’t considered, and yet with Broukalová we all accepted something as fact that was purely speculative and was actually at odds with common sense.’ Slonský clammed up and returned to his coffee and pastry as if he needed to explain no more.
‘So what was it, sir?’ asked Peiperová.
‘The use of Nágl’s credit card. We’d formed a picture of a man chasing a partner he’d abused. It fitted that story to assume that he’d used his card. But when you think about it, why would he use a credit card to draw out cash? It’s an expensive thing to do. Surely most of us would just buy what we needed with our card? So why did he draw cash?
‘And then it dawned on me. He didn’t. Someone else did, and the obvious person was Broukalová. If she’d used his card for purchases the shopkeeper would have looked at the card and realised she couldn’t be Daniel Nágl. But if she knows that magic number you have to type in, she can get money from his account at any teller machine.
‘She drove his car to the railway station and left it there, but when you look at that video footage she isn’t running to the train. She needs to get out of Prague but she hasn’t yet worked out where she ought to go. So she goes to Kolín and sleeps there, thinking through her options.
‘Next day she draws out some money and heads to her old home. Maybe she used the card in a ticket machine and that gave her the idea that she could draw money out of his account. But if he isn’t chasing her, when all logic says he should be, the obvious explanation is that he can’t chase her. And the top reason for that would be if he was dead too.’
‘And the car report persuaded you that was what had happened, sir?’ asked Navrátil.
‘Not exactly. It was the improbability of what we were proposing. It worked for us because we have the resources of the state behind us. We can make a good fist of tracking someone down when they run off, so we were disposed to believe Nágl could find Broukalová. But when you think about it, finding a woman who could be anywhere in the country is a tall order. He can’t just walk around until he spots her. Heavens, we couldn’t find him for a fortnight so why should we think he could find her?
‘Once she’d boarded a train she was as good as safe. She might not have believed that, but it was the case. He’d have given up on Sunday afternoon and been back at work on Monday, no doubt concocting some story about Magdalena and Viktorie having run away so that if the girl was found the finger would point at his partner, not at him. And she would have set herself up for that by telling the school that that was exactly what she and Viktorie were going to do.’
Navrátil scratched his head in perplexity.
‘Careful, lad, you’ll get splinters.’
‘It’s beyond me,’ Navrátil argued. ‘If it’s obvious, it must be wrong because it’s too simplistic. And yet it has to be where we start our enquiries. How do we ever solve crimes?’
‘That’s been puzzling me for some time,’ Slonský conceded. ‘I put it down to clean living, and enormous slices of luck. Plus a bit of hard work and keeping our brains in top notch working order.’ He reached into his inside pocket and extracted two cream envelopes. ‘I’ve been meaning to give you these for some time. I wanted to be sure you’d get them simultaneously, so this seems as good a time as any.’
He handed one to each of them.
Peiperová must have read from the bottom upwards, because she reacted first, gasping with delight and surprise.
‘You’ve been promoted to lieutenant!’ she cried.
‘So have you!’ came the reply.
‘Why did you give us the letter addressed to the other one?’ Peiperová asked.
‘Because this way each of you got to celebrate the other’s success instead of just your own. Congratulations to the pair of you. And now you understand why you won’t be working together in the future. We don’t usually have two lieutenants in a team. Dvorník will be senior lieutenant, and you’ll each have a helper. You’ll have to wait a bit for yours, Peiperová, so in the meantime you can give me a hand.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ they chorused.
‘Don’t thank me, thank Colonel Urban. He’s the one who has the power to promote you. And he made it one of his last acts as Director of the Criminal Police to bump the pair of you up the ladder before he becomes Director of Police and is far too grand to speak to the likes of us.’
‘Do we know who’s replacing him here, sir?’ Navrátil asked.
‘No idea,’ said Slonský. ‘Probably someone we’ve never heard of and we’ll have to break him in. Who knows what rubbish we’ll be fobbed off with?’
Since Slonský was taking his wife Věra out for the evening they agreed to celebrate their promotions after the weekend, and rushed back to Navrátil’s mother’s house, pausing only for a twenty-five minute phone call in which Peiperová conveyed the glad news to her mother and father at home in Kladno. Her parents declared themselves delighted but unsurprised, because they always knew she would be a success in Prague, thus neatly drawing a veil over their previously expressed views when she was kidnapped by a criminal and held in a warehouse. Peiperová was made to promise that she would come home as soon as she could wearing her augmented uniform, in which she could be paraded around the town to draw the admiration of all her mother’s friends.
Navrátil’s mother was a martyr to arthritis and therefore sat to peel potatoes, holding one bowl on her lap and dropping the peeled ones into another at her feet. Peiperová offered to take over the duty while Navrátil told his mother something important. Having conveyed the information Navrátil flinched as he was attacked by seventy kilograms of newly-mobile old lady intent on a hug. He went out for a run while Peiperová and Mrs Navrátilová busied themselves in the kitchen. This went very well indeed, so much so that Mrs Navrátilová shared her secret method of making her much-acclaimed cheese straws, and when Navrátil returned his mother brought him a glass of water, seizing the opportunity to grasp him by the arm and whisper her verdict to him.
‘This one’s a keeper,’ she said, nodding towards the kitchen where Peiperová was making a blueberry sauce. ‘If you muck this up you’ll have me to deal with.’
Chapter 19
Slonský had very fixed ideas when it came to soap.
He had grown up with one type of soap in the house. It was a big square-sided brick, usually green but occasionally pink, and it was used to wash anything that needed washing. His mother would rub it along shirt collars and then transfer it to the back of Slonský’s neck. To his way of thinking, soap should smell of cleanliness and disinfection rather than of the flower garden. Accordingly, he continued to buy these blocks whose phenolic smell lingered for some time and convinced anyone within around ten metres that he had just come out of the shower. He even used it to wash what remained of his hair.
That Saturday evening Slonský was taking his estranged wife Věra out to celebrate her impending birthday — if only he could be sure when exactly that was — and he therefore went to town in the shower. He sang Lady Karneval as he scrubbed away. If Mucha’s desk colleague Sergeant Vyhnal had been there he would have been able to tell Slonský it had been a big hit in 1968 and therefore was probably part of the soundtrack of Slonský’s romancing of Věra. Slonský had forgotten that, just as he had forgotten some of the lyrics, though the bigger surprise to him was how hard he found it to hit the top notes these days.
Unlike many of his compatriots Slonský hated going out unshaven, and since it was around ten hours since his last shave he repeated the exercise using the same large bar of soap to provide the lather. Slonský had seen advertisements for new-fangled razors with three or four blades, but since he did not hold with so-called safety razors he stuck to the cut-throat version his father had given him in 1962. Suitably buffed up, he eschewed deodorant or body spray in favour of a liberal dousing in talc and turned his attention to a precise parting of his hair.
Věra had also made an effort. She was wearing a long-sleeved dress in blue. Since Peiperová was wont to ask what his wife had been wearing, Slonský decided he ought to define the shade of blue more closely, and came up with the description “a bit darker than Czech flag blue”. He also observed that you could see through the sleeves.