Death On Duty

by Graham Brack

  DEATH ON DUTY

  Josef Slonský

  Book Three

  Graham Brack

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  ALSO BY GRAHAM BRACK

  Chapter 1

  It was as close as Lieutenant Josef Slonský had ever come to an ecstatic religious experience. He had to admit that in the six months since Officer Kristýna Peiperová had arrived to join his team, there had been a number of changes. For example, she had instituted the Grand Night Out, when they all went out together once a month to enjoy ballroom dancing, bowling or skating. Slonský did not especially enjoy any of these, but he approved heartily of the principle, even though it meant spending the evening with a bunch of teetotallers, which in Slonský’s definition meant anyone who drank less than two litres of beer in a day.

  Another change had been the marking of people’s name days or birthdays. For a long time nobody knew when Slonský’s birthday was, and he was still unsure how they had found out. Of course, Officer Jan Navrátil now had the telephone number of Slonský’s ex-wife — or, more accurately, the wife who would be an ex-wife but for a small clerical error when she failed to sign and return the paperwork — so that was a possibility. And Peiperová had a gift of winkling information out of people without giving the impression that it was anything other than idle chatter. Either way, it had been wonderful enough when they had given him a ticket to the All-Moravia Artisan Sausage-Making Championship, but when he was co-opted as a substitute judge after one was taken ill, he was as close to heaven as he ever expected to get.

  He had found a nice little inn with the intention of making a weekend of it and after a simple lunch of beer and hunter’s stew with dumplings, he was busily contemplating entry number twenty-five, for which he scored a seven, being concerned that the skin was insufficiently extruded and therefore played too great a role in the overall chewing process. The meat content was good, though, and he would have given high marks for the seasoning. Moreover, unlike entry number eight, there was no foreign matter in it. Slonský had been shocked to discover that anyone would sink low enough to bind their sausage together with egg, which in his view made it a type of omelette. His indignation was fanned by the discovery that the other judges felt the same way, and he was fairly sure that the retired butcher who was chairing the panel would have hanged the man on his own meat hook, but they had tempered justice with mercy on the grounds that the evildoer was half-Hungarian and therefore could not be expected to know better.

  Entry twenty-seven was chunky, a good colour, but perhaps a little heavy on the garlic. Slonský felt he had to deduct a point or two for the failure to let the flavour of the meat flow through, and was just marking his card when it occurred to him that he had not seen number twenty-six.

  He sought out the nearest judge to compare notes. He, too, had not sampled number twenty-six, nor had any of the other judges, although the sausage-maker in question had registered on arrival earlier that day. The organisers were perplexed, because they knew that Mr Mazura was a keen competitor and highly fancied by the sausage-making cognoscenti to come away with a prize. He had been seen as the tables were being set up, but his post was now unmanned and his ingredients were hopelessly overcooked.

  A search was instituted in case he had been taken ill somewhere, and after about a quarter of an hour a series of loud cries announced that the quest had been successful. Mr Mazura was found gagged and tied to a post in a barn on the outskirts of the village, a placard round his neck proclaiming that he had been seized by a party of militant vegetarians for crimes against the animal kingdom. There was uproar, and a number of persons worthy of investigation were denounced to the local policeman, who appealed to Slonský for help in detecting the perpetrators.

  Slonský had been hoping to have a weekend free from consideration of crime, when a second series of cries proved how cunning the whole thing had been and how unlikely it was that his ambition would be fulfilled.

  ‘The trophies!’ yelled the chief judge breathlessly. ‘They’ve all gone!’

  Mr Mazura was shaken by his experience, but answered the question Slonský put to him, after which the detective showed no interest in him, but went off to make a couple of phone calls.

  Mazura had managed to see that the van he was bundled into was small and red with a registration number ending in -56. Slonský rang police headquarters in Prague and asked for a search for such a vehicle, starting from the assumption that a local gang was most likely to be the culprits. Within a few minutes a police patrol reported seeing such a van on the road towards Vsetín.

  ‘I hope he can keep them in sight until a car gets there,’ Slonský said.

  The local police officer smirked. ‘The way Marek rides that bike, there’s no car on earth could get away from him,’ he said.

  Traffic control rang back with a couple of names and addresses.

  ‘Any chance of a lift to Vsetín?’ Slonský asked. ‘It seems there’s a van fitting that description registered to a young man there.’

  The occupants of the van had tried hard to lose Marek, but to no avail, and when they pulled up in Vsetín he was right behind them. They fled the scene, allowing Marek to confirm that the load area was filled with cups and shields. He shut the door and sat by the van to wait. Around twenty minutes later Slonský and Officer Limberský arrived.

  Slonský introduced himself to Marek and showed him the address he had written down. ‘Know where this is?’

  Marek pointed through the trees to a couple of white buildings. ‘It’s one of those,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Slonský. ‘Let’s go for a little walk.’

  Marek rapped on the door. After a few moments it was opened by a young man who yawned and stretched as if he had just woken up.

  ‘Pavel Baránek?’ asked Slonský.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Lieutenant Slonský, criminal department, Prague, and Officer Marek.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m Baránek.’

  ‘Where’s your van?’

  ‘Isn’t it outside? Oh, my God, it’s been stolen!’

  ‘Just as well we’re here, then. I’ll be happy to look into it for you. Mind if we come inside?’

  ‘Well...’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Slonský as he pushed past. ‘In bed, were you?’

  ‘No, asleep in the chair.’

  ‘All afternoon?’

  ‘I must have been.’

  Slonský nodded. ‘That figures. You’re asleep over there, so you don’t hear your van starting up outside.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Baránek.

  Slonský walked over and felt the seat cushion. ‘Are you a reptile, sir?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Reptiles are cold-blooded. They take in heat from their surroundings. That would explain why this seat you’ve been in all afternoon is stone cold. By the way, one of our colleagues is getting your van fingerprinted.’

  Baránek did not flinch. ‘Of course it’ll have my fingerprints on it. It’s my van. And I bet the thieves wore gloves.’

  ‘Thieves, sir? So you know it was more than one?’

  ‘Just guessing.’

  ‘Good guess, then. Perhaps you’d like to tell me who the other two were. After all, there’ll be prints all over the metal trophies, won’t there? At least one of you wasn’t we
aring gloves.’

  Baránek flopped in a chair, crestfallen and defeated. He offered a couple of names.

  ‘Abduction, theft, driving without due care and attention, and coming between me and the sausage experience of a lifetime. I should think that might well earn you around two and a half life sentences. Officer Marek will book you now, then we’ll haul you off to clink and I’ll return to the contest. The length of your sentence may well depend on how many sausages I’ve missed.’

  Slonský need not have worried. When he arrived with the trophies, he was the hero of the hour and was feted in the village that evening. He finally crawled into bed around 2 a.m. with his wallet unopened all night, his stomach filled with sausages of all conceivable kinds, and the makings of the mother of all hangovers.

  Chapter 2

  Sunday was a painful day. Slonský was reduced to drinking water until he found some Polish beer which, he thought, was pretty much the same thing and should rehydrate him adequately. He spent the morning writing his report on the previous day’s events, then took a walk before lunch to work up an appetite. A rather slower walk after lunch filled in the time until his train to Prague departed in the late afternoon.

  Peiperová and Navrátil were both disgustingly bright and cheerful on Monday morning. In any other young couple, Slonský would have suspected that this was a prolonged bout of post-coital merriment, but it was clear that Navrátil had views on that kind of thing. Whether Peiperová shared them was a matter of debate, but Slonský was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt on that matter — or indeed any other.

  Slonský recounted the events of his trip, playing down the detection element but majoring on the defects in parts of the artisan sausage industry, particularly of the semi-Hungarian variety, while making it plain that this had been a thoughtful and acceptable present that he would be happy to receive again. He asked politely about their weekend, and Peiperová recounted tennis matches, walks, dinner in a riverside restaurant and a considerable amount of laundry. Navrátil was quick to point out that he attended to his own laundry, and that after church he had engaged in vigorous shoe-polishing. Slonský glanced downwards, and observed that Navrátil’s shoes were highly buffed. This was not a description that anyone would have applied to his own, which had quickly acquired a matt finish and were scuffed in a number of places.

  ‘What would you like us to do today, sir?’ asked Peiperová.

  ‘I think a division of labour is called for,’ Slonský opined. ‘One of you can fetch coffee, while the other can help me with my groundbreaking report into the criminal activities of expatriate Bosnians in Prague.’

  ‘Are there any criminal Bosnians in Prague?’ asked Navrátil.

  Slonský adopted his most pitying tone. ‘We won’t know until I’ve written my report, will we? So far as I can make out, this has arisen because the police there have lost track of a bunch of desperados and are hoping that if they ask enough people someone will tell them where they’ve gone. I haven’t seen any sign of them in Prague but in an hour or so we’ll venture into these mean streets to find one of our informers who’ll tell us what he knows.’

  ‘Why not go now, sir?’

  ‘Because, Navrátil, he’ll still be in his pit. We won’t see him much this side of lunchtime, especially in November when there are fewer tourists to rip off. So we have time for a leisurely coffee and then we’ll wander down to the corner by Kafka’s birthplace and keep our eyes peeled for Václav the Storyteller.’

  ‘He sounds like a character from a fairy tale.’

  ‘Obviously it isn’t his real name, Navrátil. We have to observe confidentiality when it comes to informers. The key thing is that Václav is a nosey so-and-so who seems to know what is going on.’

  ‘Why don’t we use him more often then, sir?’

  ‘Think about it, lad. If he tells us too much, everyone will know he’s the squealer. Even meeting us is taking a chance for him, so there’s a certain etiquette to be observed. Try hard not to look like a policeman. Make it as short as possible, and when he decides it’s over, we let him go and head in the opposite direction, even if he goes the way we were going to go. Now, we need a newspaper and then we’re ready.’

  ‘A newspaper, sir?’

  ‘Yes, one of those things they print every morning with news in it. We tuck a small monetary token of appreciation between the front page and page three, fold the paper and negligently leave it on the table in front of us. If we leave first, he picks up the abandoned paper. If he legs it, he takes the paper with him.’

  ‘But how do we know how much his information is worth?’

  ‘We don’t, so we keep tight hold of the paper until we’ve ascertained that. If it’s really juicy we may have to leave a note on the table, but that’s risky if anyone is watching.’

  ‘How will we find him, sir?’

  ‘If he’s around, he’ll find us. Believe me, once he sees me standing by Kafka’s birthplace with a folded newspaper in my hand he’ll make himself known.’

  Peiperová looked less than happy. ‘Do I take it this means I’m fetching the coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah, I have an alternative task for you,’ said Slonský.

  ‘Yes, sir — which is?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when you get back with the coffee.’

  Peiperová set off on her quest. As soon as the door closed behind her Slonský whispered urgently to Navrátil, ‘Quick, lad! Think of something she can do, or our lives are going to be hell for a day or two.’

  Peiperová had been taken aback. No sooner had she placed a coffee in front of each of her colleagues than Slonský had lent forward as if about to impart a great secret.

  ‘I don’t think we take Christmas seriously enough here,’ he said.

  ‘No, sir?’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s been bugging me for a while and I’ve come to the conclusion that no-one else in this department is going to do anything about it, so we’d better take the bull by the horns and organise Christmas ourselves. Oh, I suppose Mucha will put a few streamers up downstairs and there might be a small tree, but I’m more concerned about the social aspects.’

  ‘Social aspects, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Peiperová. Are you going to repeat the last couple of words of everything I say? Navrátil does that, and it’s one of his most irritating habits.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘You usually tell me it makes me sound stupid,’ Navrátil interjected helpfully.

  ‘Yes, but Peiperová is bright enough to realise for herself that it makes her sound stupid, Navrátil. She doesn’t need me to tell her. Now, where was I?’

  ‘Social aspects, sir. I’m not quite clear what social aspects are, sir.’

  Slonský looked aghast. ‘Navrátil, explain to Peiperová about social aspects.’

  ‘I’m not entirely clear...’

  ‘Just tell her what we were talking about while she was fetching coffee, lad.’

  ‘Oh! I asked what we were doing about the staff Christmas party.’

  ‘And I said...?’

  ‘You said we don’t have a staff Christmas party but you’ve always thought we should and maybe Peiperová and I could introduce some Christmas spirit into the miserable bunch of killjoys that inhabit these offices.’

  ‘Exactly! Social aspects. I’m sure Captain Lukas will agree.’

  Slonský had not asked Captain Lukas, because the idea had only just come to him, and was banking on the probability that Lukas would not want to dampen the enthusiasm of two young officers, and the fact that it was only six weeks until Christmas which would not allow Lukas to conduct his usual degree of in-depth dithering.

  ‘I’m not sure we’ll get any money from the department, but perhaps a nice lunch together, or an hour of cocktails? I leave it in your hands to organise. But there isn’t a lot of time, so while Navrátil and I do this tedious interview with the informer, why don’t you pass a couple of hours scouting out the possibilities in the restaurants
and pubs nearby?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I do it in my own time, sir?’ asked Peiperová.

  Slonský had not anticipated that objection. He knew of very few police officers who offered to do anything in their own time. Lieutenant Dvorník had once offered to question a suspect when everyone else had gone home, but somehow he did not think it was quite the same thing.

  ‘The main organisation, perhaps, but these places will be busy when you finish at the end of the day. No, much better to visit them in a quiet time.’

  ‘Very good, sir. And it’s all right for me to do this without Navrátil, although he is organising it with me?’

  ‘Certainly. If it’s left to Navrátil we’ll probably wind up in some lap-dancing club.’

  Navrátil spluttered a protest.

  ‘Joke, lad, joke.’

  Slonský and Navrátil sauntered across Old Town Square and paused for a few moments in the corner nearest to Kafka’s house before continuing their walk in the general direction of the old Jewish quarter along Maiselova. There was a café on the left hand side that seemed quite empty, into which Slonský turned. They took their seats against the wall, and Slonský ordered three coffees.

  ‘Three?’ asked the waitress.

  ‘Yes, three,’ said Slonský. ‘Our friend will join us in a minute.’

  As the coffee arrived a man in several layers of ragged clothing pushed open the door and took the seat opposite Slonský.

  ‘Something to keep the cold out?’ asked the detective.

  ‘Civil of you. Wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Navrátil, you’ll have gathered this is the man we’ve come to meet. I told you he’d see us.’

  ‘But you must have seen him too, sir, or you wouldn’t have ordered three coffees.’

  ‘I did. But I knew where to look, didn’t I, Václav?’

  ‘A warm doorway is a blessing in this weather. What do you want to know?’

  ‘We’re looking for Bosnians.’

  ‘You’ll have no trouble finding them. But I guess you’re after some particular Bosnians.’