Field of Death

by Graham Brack

  ‘Of course. And it would be stupid for me to take it over on my first day when I’ll have plenty of other things to learn. But I’ll have to attend meetings with the Chief of Police at which he is bound to ask how it’s going. Unless, of course, you’d rather attend those yourself?’

  Doležal may be many things, thought Slonský, but he is not a fool.

  ‘Of course,’ said Slonský. ‘Let’s get comfortable. Navrátil, why don’t you fetch us some coffees?’

  ‘Decaffeinated for me,’ declared Doležal. ‘With low-fat milk.’

  Slonský winced.

  Some time later it crossed Slonský’s mind that Peiperová was very late coming in to work.

  ‘She’s in Holice, sir,’ explained Navrátil.

  ‘What’s she doing there?’

  ‘You sent her, sir.’

  ‘I sent her yesterday, Navrátil. It was a brief trip, not an extended holiday.’

  ‘I don’t think you’d go to Holice for a holiday, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps not. Anyway, how come you know more about what she’s doing than I do?’

  ‘She rang last night to say she hadn’t finished interviewing people so she was going to stay there and finish off today before she came back.’

  ‘And she didn’t think to clear her expenses with me first?’

  ‘There aren’t any, sir. One of the policewomen there said she could stay with her for the night. Said she’d be glad of the company.’

  Slonský scratched his head. He could never imagine inviting anyone, even a policeman, into his home, and anyone who said they would like some company would be the very first person who should be avoided like the plague, he thought.

  Peiperová was beginning to feel the same way. She had gratefully accepted the invitation from Officer Roubalová rather than drive back and forth to Prague, and after a quick trip to a small store to buy necessary toiletries, the two of them had headed for Roubalová’s flat for a girls’ night in, equipped with pasta, wine and chocolates.

  Roubalová was a Sergeant who specialised in child and family matters, which was a slightly eccentric job choice for someone who was divorced and childless. To some extent those two things had gone together, because her brief marriage had led her to form some unshakeable views on love, families and men.

  ‘Bastards,’ she proclaimed, ‘the whole lot of them. It’s biological. They can’t help it. They just have to spread their seed in as many places as possible.’

  ‘Jan is very old-fashioned,’ Peiperová explained. ‘He’s saving himself until we’re married.’

  ‘Good luck with that. Once he’s found out about it you’ll have to spike his coffee with bromide. Bastards.’

  It was no better when Roubalová enquired if Peiperová hoped to have children.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

  ‘Little bastards. Swearing, underage drinking, breaking windows, they’re all at it.’

  ‘Surely not all of them?’

  ‘All the ones I meet,’ answered Roubalová, causing Peiperová to reflect that this was probably true. Whoever thought that all women had natural maternal gifts and that they would be a comfort to distressed women and children had failed to reckon with Roubalová, whose complete lack of sympathy for her fellow human beings briefly led Peiperová to regard Slonský as a beacon of empathetic feeling before she shook herself out of it.

  They parted in the morning when a young male officer came to collect Roubalová so they could go across town to sort out a domestic dispute, at which the fresh-faced policeman would find himself comforting the crying woman while Roubalová jabbed her forefinger into the husband’s diaphragm in the kitchen and threated to emasculate him with an ice-cream scoop she had spotted.

  Jiří Jeníček was straightening one of the fence posts around his garden that had developed a slight lean when Peiperová drove up and greeted him.

  ‘This must be about the explosion,’ he said. ‘There was a hell of a bang.’

  ‘Did you go up to see what it was?’

  ‘Not immediately. I had to check Lenka was all right first and I didn’t know exactly where she was. In the end I found her in the bedroom. She had hidden beside the bed in case the Russians had come back.’

  ‘The Russians?’

  ‘You’re too young to remember. They came through here in sixty-eight. And the old folks in the village remembered what they did in forty-five. No woman was safe. Every girl around here knows what to do if the Russians come. You grab the biggest knife you can find in the kitchen and hide somewhere in the house.’

  ‘Why would she think the Russians were coming?’

  ‘Well, who else would be setting off bombs here?’

  Peiperová decided she had taken that line of questioning as far as it could go.

  ‘So once you had found your wife…?’

  ‘I walked up towards the field. I could see Captain Forman was by the gate. Of course, I didn’t know that was where the noise had come from but I knew the general direction, so I headed off that way. I’m not as nimble as I used to be so it took me about five minutes, I suppose. But before I got there I could see there was something amiss, because the field gate was swinging open and it had been closed earlier.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘If it’s left open I get complaints from motorists. It’s a big gate and it swings into the road so they have to swerve round it. I was going to shut it, but before I got there I was stopped by Captain Forman.’

  ‘Did he say who called him?’

  ‘No, just that he’d heard the noise and decided he ought to see what was going on.’

  ‘And Captain Forman was at the gate?’

  ‘Yes, he’d parked in the middle of the road outside my house and took out his gun. I could see it in his hand. He went into the field a few steps then came back to tell me I shouldn’t go in there because it was so awful.’

  ‘Did he say what had happened?’

  ‘He said the metal detectors must have detonated a buried shell. But I can’t understand that, because that field has been ploughed a few times to my knowledge and surely anything big enough to kill people would have been found before now?’

  ‘Did you know the metal detectors were going to be checking out the field?’

  ‘No, they didn’t ask me. So far as I know they didn’t ask Irina either.’

  ‘Miss Valachová confirms that she didn’t know.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. Mind, I’m surprised at Sedlák. He was usually very fussy about rights of way and getting permission.’

  Peiperová paused to reflect. ‘Do you know where the metal detectors had been exploring before this week?’

  Jeníček removed his cap to scratch his head, as if this might somehow aid his memory. ‘They were in the wood at the end of the lane the other week.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  Jeníček walked her to the gate. ‘If you go down past Irina’s field and bear round to the left there’s a footpath into the woods. The highway is quite recent but for centuries there was a path that we used to get to the high road to Pardubice. Procházka had an idea that there might be stuff worth finding along that path because it been used for so long.’

  ‘That’s about a hundred and fifty metres further away than the field?’ Peiperová estimated.

  ‘About that. That’s where they’ve been working. I don’t know that they’d found anything there.’

  ‘But if they’ve been doing it for a while they must have thought it was worth the effort.’

  ‘Ah, you don’t know these types! They’re fanatics in their own way. They think nothing of spending a weekend dismantling a manure heap if they think there might be something underneath it. And there usually isn’t, but it doesn’t put them off trying again next weekend.’

  Peiperová thanked him and returned to the car. There were questions she would like to ask Captain Forman, but she thought that perhaps they ought to come from Slonský rather than her.


  Slonský was very willing to use the technical services that police scientists could provide. It was his private opinion that many of the technicians were very lucky that they had found gainful employment given their multiple and flagrant personality issues, but he never doubted their technical skills or their usefulness to him.

  It was the scientists elsewhere that he found difficult. Experts of every kind perplexed him because he had never had the kind of enquiring mind that wants to know everything about a subject. Slonský was capable of understanding a great many things, but as soon as he had used the information, he forgot it. There was no point in cluttering up your memory with stuff you were never going to need again. At a pinch he could probably remember the years when Slavia had won the Czech hockey championship, and he had a pretty sound grasp of brewing practices good and bad, but otherwise he liked to keep the mental decks clear.

  As an example of how this accumulation of knowledge could all go horribly wrong, he needed to look no further than one of the boys he had known at school, who had gone on to earn a Ph.D. in medieval history and knew everything there was to know about plagues and pestilences except, of course, how to treat them or anything else that Slonský would have considered useful knowledge. Still, it was good to know that if he ever caught the Black Death he knew someone who could tell him ten or twelve cures that definitely would not work.

  Kohoutek, on the other hand, seemed relatively normal, or as near to it as anyone to whom Valentin had ever introduced him. His enjoyment of a beer or two elevated him in Slonský’s estimation, to the point where Slonský had taken his telephone number in case something else turned up where his expertise might be helpful. And now an idea was beginning to form in his head for which Kohoutek might come in handy — but first he needed to pay someone a visit. And he needed to go on his own, so he had to find something else for Navrátil and Peiperová to do while he did it.

  The Security Information Service of the Czech Republic was widely viewed by serving police officers as about as useful as a chocolate coffee pot. BIS, to give it its Czech acronym, had no police powers and therefore could not arrest anybody, so if they wanted someone detained they had to ask the police to do it, but often they would not tell you why. Of course, before the Wall came down, arresting somebody and refusing to tell them what they were being charged with was normal practice, but now it was generally frowned upon, and most police officers felt uncomfortable with telling someone that they were being arrested but they did not know what it was all about.

  BIS occupied an eight-storey office block in Stodůlky, so there must have been plenty of them in there, but trying to get an appointment was still a challenge. Slonský suspected that they might have been working on the puffer fish principle, making themselves look big so others would not give them a hard time. If so, it wasn’t working — or at least it was not going to work this afternoon.

  He had deputed Peiperová to trawl such army records as she could find to see if they could work out who, if anyone, might have been the men detached into the Ghost Battery. He was fairly sure that it would be fruitless because those who selected them would have been in a position to conceal their existence by losing any relevant papers, but it had to be done for form’s sake, and it would keep her out of the way while he was asking a few questions on an unofficial basis. Navrátil, meanwhile, was engaged in a similar search of police records for anyone who had been shopped to the police as a potentially subversive or treasonous entity in the Pardubice region. Navrátil had already discovered that the locals there must have been of a deeply suspicious nature, since they had complained about a Jehovah’s Witness, two people who were “cycling suspiciously” and the organisers of a triathlon in the last six months alone.

  Contacts between the police and BIS were strictly regulated to ensure that the two of them did not collaborate to stage a coup. Slonský felt this was unnecessary since, if he had wanted to stage a coup with any prospect of success, the last people he would have involved were BIS. But he might have made an exception for Milan Poznar.

  Poznar had worked with Slonský once before on a case involving a man who was smuggling industrial secrets out of an engineering company. This would not normally have attracted the attention of BIS, except that the company held a contract for armament development, and there was some concern that those secrets might be at risk too. Poznar had been sceptical that anyone had been attempting to steal those secrets, and Slonský had proved him right when it turned out that the thief had actually wanted the laptop, not the information carelessly left on it, though not before some overzealous BIS officers had attempted to persuade him to confess with the help of a flight of stairs and a lump of wood. Over a beer afterwards, which stretched into several beers, a sausage or two and a very uncomfortable night on Poznar’s couch, the two had bemoaned the difficulty of getting their organisations to work together in any rational way and had cooked up a more informal method of contact.

  Slonský knew that all phone calls to Stodůlky were recorded and that officers were not supposed to receive work calls on their mobile phones, but he also knew that they turned them to silent rather than switching them off. Thus, he left a voicemail on Poznar’s cellphone inviting him to a sausage at a nearby café at 14:00.

  Precisely at the appointed hour the café door opened and Poznar walked in, carefully scanning the room for anyone he knew. Slonský was sitting behind a pillar on the right hand side.

  ‘Good choice,’ Poznar muttered. ‘Don’t want to be seen from the street.’

  ‘You work with some very suspicious people,’ Slonský remarked. ‘There’s not a lot of trust within our security services.’

  ‘Nor in our police. You could have asked me to come to your office.’

  ‘I’m a natural plotter. I don’t see why I should tell anyone anything they don’t need to know. Coffee or something stronger?’

  They ordered their drinks. Despite Slonský’s exhortations Poznar declined any food, citing the need to keep in shape.

  ‘I need to keep in shape too,’ said Slonský. ‘It’s just a different shape.’

  ‘I heard a rumour you were trying to lose twenty kilos,’ Poznar replied.

  ‘Who told you that?’ a shocked Slonský gasped.

  ‘We’re the security service. It’s our job to know everything. In this case, it’s the talk of the police gym.’

  ‘Ah. I’ve been shopped by Čada.’

  ‘Not that I know of. It was more the result of the bitter disappointment felt by some who had lost heavily on the sweepstake about whether you would pass your captain’s medical.’

  ‘People bet on that?’ Slonský asked.

  ‘You know our colleagues. They’ll bet on anything. I’m told you could get three to one against your passing.’

  ‘Passing the medical or passing away?’

  ‘Passing the medical. Actual death was pretty long odds. Twenty to one at the very least.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring.’

  ‘There weren’t many takers.’

  ‘Many? There shouldn’t have been any!’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. They didn’t want it to happen. They just thought that if they pocketed a small fortune at least some good would have come of your passing.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Your desk sergeant did all right.’

  ‘Mucha?’

  ‘Took quite a plunge on your passing the medical and cleaned up, I hear. Though he had inside information from that woman of yours.’

  ‘My wife?’

  ‘No, the young officer. She was convinced you would do it.’

  Slonský filed the information away with a view to getting at least ten per cent off Mucha when he next saw him. ‘To business. I need to know something but I have a little information to offer.’

  ‘I’m intrigued,’ Poznar replied. ‘People giving us information before we’ve threatened violence is a fairly unusual experience for me.’

  ‘It’s about t
he explosion at Holice.’

  ‘The shell from World War II? Well, obviously that’s bunkum. So what have you discovered?’ Poznar asked.

  ‘It looks as if the four men were tied up, placed in a circle and then someone threw a grenade into the middle of them.’

  ‘Ouch. Doesn’t sound like an accident, does it?’

  ‘It sounds like somebody with a big secret to keep to me,’ Slonský suggested.

  ‘I can see why you might think that. But there’s obviously a security angle which isn’t clear to me yet.’

  ‘Hold your horses. I’m coming to that. I’ve spoken to a fellow called Kohoutek. Works for a think tank.’

  ‘I know him.’

  ‘He told me the story of the Ghost Battery.’

  ‘That old chestnut.’

  ‘Yes, and he didn’t believe it either, until now.’ Slonský fished in his pocket for the photograph of the tracks in the field which he handed over without a word.

  Poznar inspected it and let loose a low whistle. ‘This is the field where the killings took place?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘And presumably forensics are telling you that whatever made these tracks was in the field when the murders took place?’

  ‘Yes, they are. So my first thought was to ask you whether you know of any organisation that could hide a gun for forty years and what they’re keeping hold of it for.’

  Poznar passed the photograph back. ‘I’d better not keep that or I’ll have to log it and you’ll have us all over your back. We’ll have to see it at some time but I’m sure you can arrange not to know about the gun for a few days.’

  ‘I’m an expert at not knowing stuff. I can avoid knowing things for months on end in the right circumstances.’

  Poznar pinched his nose as he thought. ‘There’s a group called New Bohemia. Right wing, get rid of immigrants, usher in a new age of aggressive national assertiveness. But I doubt they would be involved in this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re a gang of nutters. They’re much more interested in pamphlets and speeches than direct action. They were also only formed about eight years ago, so how would they get a gun from 1968?’