by Graham Brack
Slonský remained resolutely unexcited.
‘It’s true that I’ve had two envelopes. Didn’t I mention that?’
‘No, you did not.’
‘Then I’ll tell you the whole story. Navrátil, stop hanging around in the corridor and get yourself back in here. The coffee can wait.’
It was Klinger’s turn to be surprised. For Slonský to defer refreshment of any kind was a rare occurrence.
Slonský produced a large folder and offered it to Klinger.
‘You know that we are investigating the death of one Irina Gruberová, who was the mistress of Dr Albert Banda, of whom you may have heard.’
‘And whose bank account details I furnished for you, at your request.’
‘Yes, thank you. Or are you expecting hidden microphones to capture the fact that it wasn’t your initiative?’
Klinger flapped his hand impatiently.
‘The involvement of Dr Banda came to our notice because someone sent us a photograph of him having dinner with the victim on the evening of her death. That photograph came in an envelope that we passed to Technician First Class Spehar for examination.’
‘Did the examination provide any useful information?’
‘It was posted in the Ninth district, probably at a post office, and was addressed using a laser printer. Some time later, I received an identical envelope, this time containing a photograph of another prominent politician, Daniel Soucha.’
‘Soucha! I know him.’
‘Then you may not want to see the photograph. But it’s in evidence envelope B2 if you do.’
Klinger riffled through the stack before him, extracted the envelope and examined the contents.
‘I’m surprised. Financial circles gossip like any other, but I’d never heard any suggestion that Soucha went in for that kind of thing.’
‘That seems to be the general reaction. Soucha was a bit surprised himself.’
‘You showed him the photograph?’
‘It seemed more tactful than putting it on the internet and inviting him to download it. The interesting thing about this photo is where it was taken.’
‘The country house of Theodor Sammler.’
‘You know it?’
‘No, but I recall you asked me about it, and now I know why. And Sammler, as we know, knows Banda.’
‘He’s his bank manager, if that’s the right word for someone who sits on the top floor making millions.’
Klinger drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk as he thought.
‘There have been rumours for some time that Banda was under financial pressure. He was a very wealthy man before he joined the government, but his investments have not done well lately. With a reduced salary, and no change to his outgoings, it wouldn’t surprise me if he had needed the help of someone like Sammler.’
‘Yes, we know all that,’ Slonský confirmed, causing Klinger to raise an eyebrow.
‘You knew all this and you didn’t tell me?’
‘I thought someone with contacts like yours was sure to know it already.’
‘Flattery will not divert my wrath, Slonský. I expressly asked young Navrátil to share anything relevant to my department.’
‘Which he would have done, had we found any evidence of naughtiness. But being skint is not a crime yet, thank God. And of course poverty is relative. The Banda children are not exactly going round with their backsides hanging out of their trousers.’
‘No,’ conceded Klinger, ‘but the holiday in the Mediterranean will probably have to be scaled down, which will hurt him just as much.’
‘It will have to be scaled down,’ agreed Slonský, ‘because he’s in cell five downstairs and we don’t normally let remand prisoners hop off to the Med for a bit of R&R.’
Klinger indicated agreement with a sharp nod of his head.
‘Do you think Banda killed her?’
‘We haven’t got a better candidate yet.’
‘He doesn’t strike me as the murdering kind.’
‘Neither did Kvapil, who ran amok in the Roma camp a couple of years ago. One of the nicest chaps you could hope to meet, if you didn’t have any gipsy blood in you. Which he, of course, corrected by letting it all drain out of you through your neck.’
‘Kvapil and Banda are very different animals. Banda is a more cerebral type.’
‘If you’re going to follow the Lukas line that it’s unthinkable that he is a murderer because he has a university doctorate, I beg to differ, and be warned that I’m prepared to use reasonable force to defend my position.’
Klinger held his hands up in a gesture of surrender.
‘It’s your case; not my business. My interest is in the little bundle I’ve had through the post.’
‘Say more, gentle sage.’
‘The envelope contains a set of documents showing large transfers of currency to a bank account in Liechtenstein. Ordinarily I would have no access to the details of that account, but our informant has helpfully provided a certificate of ownership.’
Slonský whistled.
‘How did he get that?’
‘I have no idea. Liechtenstein banking security is legendary. Only the bank where it’s held would have that information and they wouldn’t release it short of an Interpol warrant. Even then, they’d argue first.’
‘And who is the lucky account holder?’
‘One Leoš Holec.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘You haven’t. I have. Holec is a senior adviser to the Finance Ministry and the National Bank.’
‘Does that mean that sneaking large sums of money out of the country is okay?’
‘It means it definitely is not okay, especially if they’re sums of money far in excess of anything that has been declared to the tax authorities. Holec has been banking more money in Liechtenstein than he has been earning in this country, yet he appears not to have any other income. Conclusion?’
‘Some kind person has been sending him the occasional postal order.’
‘For several million crowns at a time. And presumably Holec has been doing something to earn this largesse. And we further presume that whatever he has been doing, he won’t want us to look into it. But we will.’
Navrátil interrupted to ask the obvious question. ‘Could Sammler have known about these payments?’
‘They weren’t made by his bank — at least, not by the Czech part of it. And I can’t imagine that bankers talk about this kind of arrangement openly. But if anyone could know, Sammler is the kind of person who might.’
Slonský rolled his pencil back and forth across his desk, an action that he expected would irritate Klinger intensely.
‘Do you have to do that?’
‘Sorry. It helps me think. So you’ll call in Holec and try to find out who arranged this, but if it wasn’t Sammler then tying Sammler to it is likely to be very difficult. We’d have to show that he definitely knew about it. It’s the same problem we face with Soucha and Banda. Sammler doesn’t seem to have known that Soucha was gay, and Banda says he showed no interest in his private affairs and therefore probably didn’t know about Gruberová.’
‘But if Sammler is the only link between them, he has to be involved,’ offered Navrátil.
‘Obvious, but false logic,’ Klinger replied. ‘He may be the only link we know about, but as soon as the defence find one other that’s our case in ruins. And the connections between Sammler and any one of them are tenuous.’
‘I hate to say it,’ said Slonský, ‘but Klinger is right. We’d never get a conviction based on our guess that Sammler knows three important people. And even if Sammler has this information, it only has value if he keeps it to himself. How can he profit by it getting out? If he knows about Gruberová or Mario —’
‘Mario?’ asked Klinger.
‘The other man in the photo. To repeat, if he knows about Gruberová or Mario he has a hold over Banda and Soucha, but only so long as nobody else knows. Once the cat is out of t
he bag, his grip is broken, so he is the last person to want to let it out. There has to be someone else that we don’t know about.’
‘Agreed,’ said Klinger. ‘But who?’
‘Difficult to say,’ Slonský pronounced, ‘since we don’t know about them. But let’s think about a strategy to plug some of the gaps in our knowledge. How quickly can you pull in Holec?’
‘Given the sums involved, it could be sometime today.’
‘Then you’ll be able to ask him how these transfers were arranged. There can only be a small number of people who would know about this set-up. Then we take your list and cross-check it against Soucha and Banda to look for the links.’
‘And if there are none?’
‘Then Banda goes down for a very long time because there’s probably enough to implicate him. Besides, I don’t like the little greaseball.’
‘Hardly adequate reason for imprisoning him, Slonský,’ Klinger said.
‘I don’t know; it’s pretty convincing from where I’m sitting.’
Navrátil felt moved to interject.
‘But sir, if we’ve agreed he’s being framed, and we put him away, doesn’t that mean the real criminal has got away with it?’
‘Don’t be a nit-picker, Navrátil. We want a criminal, and we’ll have found a criminal. There may not be a perfect match between what he has done and what he goes down for, but that’s a small administrative detail. However, I take the point that in an ideal world we should only jail men for their own crimes and not other people’s, so I promise I’ll really try to find someone else.’
When Klinger had gone, Slonský decided that he had better brief Lukas on the latest developments. Navrátil was despatched to the canteen with instructions to wait ten minutes before he bought the coffee so it would still be hot when Slonský returned.
‘I’m perturbed,’ Lukas declared. ‘This murder is becoming a complicated web of crime.’
‘Exactly, sir.’
‘It takes a lot to get Klinger to come down to this floor. He keeps muttering about dirty doorknobs.’
‘I believe it’s a recognised medical condition, sir.’
‘Having dirty doorknobs?’
‘No, being worried about them. But there’s no doubt that Technician Spehar has done us a great service. If he hadn’t been alert we might never have put these envelopes together.’
Lukas sucked the leg of his spectacles pensively.
‘It’s leaving things a bit to chance, don’t you think?’
‘Sir?’
‘Well, I mean, if one chap is sending all these envelopes, and he wants us to realise that this is all part of one big plan, sending them to two policemen who might never speak to each other is a fairly inefficient way of getting that across.’
Slonský jerked upright in his chair.
‘I didn’t think of it as one plan, sir. I thought it was just information that came to hand being sent to whomever was best placed to pick it up and deal with it.’
‘So murder stuff would come to you, and fraud stuff to Klinger, just because that’s the natural way of things?’
‘Yes. No point sending fraud papers to me — I don’t know the first thing about financial crime, except that they keep putting the price of German beer up.’
‘Hardly criminal, Slonský.’
‘Matter of opinion, sir.’
‘But — to return to my point — why send the picture of Soucha to you? If it’s criminal, it should go to the vice squad.’
‘I thought we agreed it wasn’t criminal, sir.’
‘Then why send it to us at all? If he wants a fuss, he should send it to the gutter press. He can’t know that we’re going to take a blind bit of notice of it.’
Slonský stood and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. He thought better when he walked, so he started pacing the length of Lukas’ rug, back and forth, all the while thinking hard.
‘So you’re arguing that the key to this is the photo of Soucha, because it has no value on its own. Sent to us, we would ignore it. If it went anywhere else, it would provoke a reaction, but not the reaction the sender wants. The sender sent it to us because he wanted us to act upon it, but because it wasn’t criminal there must be another reason why he thought we might follow it up. There’s some link in his mind that we haven’t worked out yet.’
‘That’s about the sum of it,’ said Lukas, who was actually quite uncertain that Slonský’s summary represented his own thoughts at all.
‘Is he telling us Soucha killed Irina?’
‘That’s a bit far-fetched, Slonský. Why would Soucha do that?’
‘But the sender forwarded both pictures to me. He sees a connection where I don’t. Soucha and Banda have something in common.’
Lukas’ eyes opened wide as a thought flitted through his head.
‘Could it be that he has murdered Mario? Both men’s lovers have been killed.’
‘But then he would have sent the picture after one crime but probably before the other. We know he didn’t send the first picture until Irina’s discovery was in the newspapers, but there haven’t been any gay Austrians killed in Prague for a while.’
‘Get onto the report system, Slonský. See if there are any murder victims anywhere in the Czech Republic who could possibly be Mario. It’s a slim chance, but it’s all we have at the moment.’
‘Get onto the report system, Navrátil. See if there are any murder victims anywhere in the Czech Republic who could possibly be Mario. It’s a slim chance, but it’s all we have at the moment.’
Navrátil scribbled a note to himself.
‘Do you really think that’s the link, sir?’
‘I don’t know, Navrátil. But neither do you, and we won’t until you do the search, so shift yourself. I’ll be down in the cells when you finish.’
Slonský flicked the door open with his foot and entered with a cheery ‘Room service!’
‘Very droll,’ said Banda. ‘Have you come to threaten me in some new way?’
‘No,’ said Slonský. ‘I come bearing gifts.’
He handed Banda a 25cl bottle of red wine and a plastic beaker.
‘I can’t give you glass, I’m afraid, in case you smash it and slice your jugular with the shards.’
‘I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction,’ Banda replied. ‘But I should thank you for this small token.’
‘Not at all. It’s all part of our new justice system. Since the new Interior Minister arrived there have been some changes.’
‘Don’t rub it in. And, as one who knows the new minister personally, enjoy the honeymoon. It won’t last.’
‘Got any dirt on him we could save for a rainy day?’
Banda considered.
‘It would be disloyal to share discreditable information about a coalition colleague. But if you have an idle moment you might want to consider how his son got a scholarship to a large American university.’
Slonský smiled broadly.
‘I can see this heralds a whole new era of co-operation between the accused and forces of law and order. Mind if I sit?’
‘It’s your house. I’m a guest here.’
Slonský perched himself on the end of the bed. It was a tricky operation, since the cot was rather lower than Slonský had expected.
‘I’d like to talk about your relationship with Daniel Soucha.’
‘I don’t have a relationship with Daniel Soucha.’
‘I mean a professional relationship.’
‘I don’t have a professional relationship with him.’
‘What’s he like?’
Banda sipped his wine, not without an involuntary grimace.
‘A populist of the worst kind. His grasp of economics is feeble, his approach to law and order is slack and his ethics are questionable.’
‘In the interests of balance,’ Slonský enquired, ‘what are his bad points?’
‘He is the darling of the chattering classes. Looks good on television. But there’s no
substance to him.’
‘What could he have against you?’
Banda’s beaker paused abruptly in its upward course.
‘Against me? Why would he have anything against me?’
‘You’re a political rival.’
‘Of course. I thought you were hinting at something personal.’
‘I might have been.’
Banda sit in silence for a few moments, thinking deeply.
‘You’re suggesting that he might be behind the framing of me?’
‘It doesn’t sound likely, unless he then decided to do the same to himself in a sudden fit of even-handedness. But evidence has come to hand that suggests that there is a link between you. I can’t begin to imagine what that could be, but the obvious answer was to ask you.’
‘I wish I could help, but I can’t think of any possible link between me and that serpent.’
‘Apart from the fact that you’re both in the manure in a big way.’
‘If you say so. But I’m getting quite a lot of writing done here. If I could have some new curtains, perhaps a room with a view…’
‘I’ll have a word with the hotel manager.’
‘That neanderthal on the front desk?’
‘Sergeant Mucha? He’s good at what he does. I’ve known him for years. Just remember that there are nasty people out there gunning for you, but so long as Mucha is between you and the outside world, you’re safe in here.’
‘Forgive me if I refuse to be comforted by that thought.’
‘Do me a favour. Keep thinking about my question. The bottom line is that you don’t get out until we bring someone else in.’ Slonský rose from the bed. ‘I have to take the bottle, I’m afraid. It’s glass. Just promise me you won’t do anything silly with the beaker and you can keep the wine.’
Banda raised his right hand.
‘I do so swear.’
‘Thank you. Now I must go and visit my other guests. We must do this again sometime.’
Holec looked unwell. He was perspiring, his colour was poor and his hands trembled as he mopped his brow with a large white handkerchief.
‘I’m waiting, Mr Holec,’ Klinger intoned, evenly but with a hint of menace.
