[Josef Slonský Investigations 06] - Laid in Earth

by Graham Brack

  LAID IN EARTH

  Josef Slonský Investigations

  Book Six

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  ALSO BY GRAHAM BRACK

  Chapter 1

  Hanuš Himl loaded his barrow once more and laboriously reversed it out of the greenhouse before turning it around so he could get back to the flower bed on which he was currently working.

  Hanuš loved his job, and he particularly enjoyed it when spring came around and he could be creative, though he would not have used the word. The budget that he was given to manage the gardens he tended was hopelessly insufficient, but one of the wonderful things about plants was that you could take cuttings and hence keep up a supply even without money, so Hanuš had been busy dividing, cutting, rooting and generally mollycoddling his babies all through the winter and now he was ready to start introducing them to the outside world.

  The first thing he had to do was to break up the top layers of soil just in case there was still ice underneath, so last week he had taken a fork to the flower beds. It did not take long if you knew what you were doing and worked steadily, which was just as well, because Hanuš had a lot of gardens to look after and not much in the way of help.

  Hanuš was an orderly man, and systematically loaded his barrow in the order that the plants would have to come off: those in the centre of the beds first, then working outwards to the margins. It was his habit to place the trays on the earth for a while before planting so that the plants could get used to their new surroundings. After all, he would say, we don’t just take children to a new school and throw them in through the door. We give them some time to get used to a place and make some new friends.

  On this particular morning, he had planned to plant five beds that ran down the southern edge of the site in a horseshoe shape. Each barrow would carry about half a bedful of plants, so he made a number of trips to lay out the first couple.

  It was then that he noticed something odd about the third bed. He knew these places intimately. He had handled the soil for years. And though he could not immediately tell you what was wrong, it took him no time at all to decide that there was something strange here.

  He did what he had always done at times of perplexity. He upturned a bucket and sat on it while he thought. In the old days he would have had a smoke, but he had cut that out once he realised that it was affecting his whistling, so he sat and whistled a tune or two while he looked at the flower bed and tried to decide what to do next.

  Having given it due consideration, he settled on the best course of action. He would finish beds one and two, then he would tackle five and four, and he would leave number three until tomorrow. In the meantime he would go to a bar to see if that big fellow was there, the one who was something to do with the police. Josef Slonský.

  He had shared quite a few happy hours with Slonský, sipping beer and talking about the old days, not that either of them was starry-eyed about the past. The policeman worried that if young people weren’t reminded of what the past had really been like, the many little inconveniences and injustices that filled your days, they might head back that way again. Things like the “voluntary” extra hours you put in on holidays, or the nepotism that saw people promoted far beyond their merits, or simply the lies.

  It was the bare-faced lying that had niggled Hanuš. The news reports that had described bumper crops when anyone with eyes could see they were not doing well; the stories they had been fed of food riots in London and New York that turned out to be baffling news to tourists from those places; Hanuš particularly remembered how the head of the Australian Communist Party had been feted by the press, which was a bit of a shock to visiting Australians who didn’t even know Australia had a Communist Party, and were pretty definite that it was not on the point of taking power, whatever Rudé Právo claimed on its front page.

  Hanuš slapped his knee as if to seal the decision, inverted his bucket once more, and got on with his day. That man Slonský was the answer. He would know what to do for the best.

  Hanuš pushed open the door and looked inside the pub, taking a few moments to accommodate his eyes to the gloom. For a moment he thought he was out of luck, then he spotted the familiar bulky figure in the tatty overcoat standing at the far end of the bar, a large glass of beer in his hand and a plate of beer cheese in front of him.

  It was not the sort of place where there was sport blaring out of television screens. Neither Slonský nor Hanuš would have frequented it if it had been, though they might watch pictures if the sound was turned down. They were content to talk to people who talked to them, and they each knew enough people by sight not to have to pass an evening in silence.

  Hanuš slalomed his way through the customers until he was able to slide into a space on Slonský’s right side. They greeted each other and Hanuš ordered a beer. It wasn’t until he had taken a long pull at his drink, sighed deeply and expressed satisfaction that he felt the conversation could start.

  ‘That first mouthful is worth waiting for,’ he said.

  ‘The best,’ agreed Slonský. ‘It never wears off.’

  ‘Could I ask you a question? Professionally, that is.’

  ‘Of course. But I don’t know what your profession is.’

  ‘I’m a gardener,’ said Hanuš.

  ‘I guessed that,’ answered Slonský. ‘The muddy knees and the earthy smell give it away a bit.’

  ‘It’s a garden-related question.’

  ‘Not something I know a lot about, but try me.’

  Hanuš took another long slurp. ‘I look after the gardens for some municipal buildings, and I was working in one today.’

  ‘Would I know it?’

  ‘It’s owned by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. Something to do with teacher training, I think. But to people of our age it was more familiar as the Red House.’

  Slonský’s ears twitched. If you had been an adult in Prague before communism collapsed you would have heard of the Red House. It had been built in the late nineteenth century as the Prague home of some baron or other with more money than taste. Its great attraction was the high walls and large gardens that meant you could shut the world out. After the First World War it had been some sort of sanatorium for a while, and then it had been sequestered for use as a government guest house once the communists came to power.

  The guest houses were the regime’s answer to hotels for people they required to come to Prague from the provinces. This arrangement had the twin advantages that it left the relatively small number of serviceable hotels free for foreigners with hard currency, and it meant the regime always knew what their country cousins were saying about them because every room was bugged. This was much more convenient than having to install microphones at short notice.

  The Red House was a slightly unusual guest house because nobody ever wanted to book in there. It was described as a guest house, looked like a guest house, and bore signage declaring it to be a guest house. More realistically, it was an interrogation centre for the StB, the state’s security force.

 
Most Praguers knew that if you went to Pankrác, that was prison. Bad things might happen to you there, but the Red House existed for the purpose of having bad things happen to people.

  When the communist regime broke down there had been calls for the demolition of the Red House as a way of burying the evil memories associated with it. Instead, the new government had decided to devote it to the more cheerful use of training primary school teachers. The inside had been tidied up, the more obvious apparatus of torture had been removed (though you can’t remove a stairwell down which victims had been dropped on the end of an elastic rope, never quite knowing if the rope was designed to stop their fall before they reached the floor or not) and with a lick of paint and some brightly coloured vinyl flowers attached to the walls, it had become repurposed to its new use.

  ‘I remember the Red House,’ said Slonský. ‘Never been inside, I’m pleased to say, but I know what it was.’

  ‘Grim place,’ agreed Hanuš, ‘but lovely gardens, even if I say so myself. Good soil, you see. It makes all the difference.’

  ‘I’m assuming you’re not going to ask me about fertiliser.’

  ‘No, it’s more something that I’ve seen that puzzles me, and I don’t know whether to report it. And, if I do, who I need to report it to.’

  Hanuš finished his drink, signalled for another and asked Slonský if he wanted one by the silent method of pointing into the glass and raising an eyebrow. Slonský drained the glass in mute acceptance.

  ‘Do you believe the dead come back?’ Hanuš asked.

  To his credit, Slonský took the question seriously. ‘I’ve never known it. Back in the day a few villains with a noose round their necks used to threaten to come back, but none of them ever did to my knowledge. Why, have you seen someone dead?’

  ‘No, not as such. But I need to let you in on a secret. So far as I can make out, the folks who ran the Red House tried not to kill people there. They would interrogate them, then pass them on to other places for punishment. But I suppose once in a while someone couldn’t take the treatment. My predecessor said he sometimes turned up odd bones in the garden at the back. Well, there’s a certain flower bed on the south side that I dug over a couple of days ago.’ He took a reflective mouthful from his glass and paused to compose the next part of his story. ‘You have to be quite sure the ground has thawed deep down before you plant, and it’s my habit to fork a bit of manure in as well. Just to give the plants a bit of a start. Anyway, I don’t work on Sundays, you know, it’s not right. Sunday is a family day. So when I went back this morning, something caught my eye and I can’t explain it. The middle bed was higher than the others.’

  ‘Are you fussy about that sort of thing?’ said Slonský, fairly sure that he knew what the answer was going to be.

  ‘A garden that’s not balanced isn’t right,’ Hanuš answered. ‘You’d see that the soil in that bed was out of line with the others.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Slonský. ‘You would.’

  ‘I’d always know,’ said Hanuš. ‘It would offend my sense of order. I’m sure I didn’t leave it like that.’ He leaned closer to lower his voice. ‘And there’s another thing. The soil’s all wrong.’

  Slonský’s glass hovered halfway to his mouth. ‘How do you mean, wrong?’

  ‘It’s the wrong way up. I dig down so far and turn it over and bring the lower stuff to the top. But on this bed it’s been turned again, so some of the earth that was originally on the top is now back on the top.’

  ‘You’re personally acquainted with each piece of soil, are you?’

  Hanuš tutted. ‘Any gardener would know. It’s been dug over again.’

  ‘So, if I’m safe in assuming there aren’t any gangs of secret gardeners sneaking around on the weekend digging over other people’s gardens without a by your leave, it’s your idea that somebody has been hiding something there.’

  ‘Well, if they didn’t bring extra soil, they’ve put something in the flower bed that has pushed the soil up a few centimetres. Mind, this is a relatively new bed. We only created it last year because it looked unbalanced coming up the west drive with plenty of flowers to your left and none to your right.’

  Slonský pondered for a few moments, sank the rest of his beer and ordered two more. ‘Tell you what — why don’t I come over to the Red House tomorrow morning and see for myself? And we might do a bit of digging.’

  Hanuš smiled. He knew he could rely on this fellow.

  Chapter 2

  Slonský stepped off the bus and strolled through the gates into the garden.

  ‘Beautiful morning,’ said Hanuš.

  ‘Beautiful?’ Slonský replied. ‘When I get back to the city centre, I’m going to have a look under St Wenceslas’ horse to see if anything’s dropped off in this cold.’

  ‘It’s fresh, I’ll grant you,’ Hanuš answered, ‘but it’s dry. This way.’

  He led Slonský up the drive to the point in front of the main door where the path forked north and south. The building was an odd one. Originally aligned east-west, the addition of a wing and the decision to close the main west door and use doors in the north and south sides to enter the respective corridors gave it a straggly look.

  Slonský had heard of the ways it had facilitated secrecy in the past. Respectable guests had been taken to the north door, whereas involuntary visitors were pushed in through the south door. The room in the very south-east corner was particularly remembered by those involuntary guests, because it was only a metre square and had a door with a big rubber seal. At the flick of a switch, it could be filled with the contents of the bath and toilets above, and if that proved to be too shallow the cold tap above could be left running until the occupant remembered the answer to the question he had just been asked.

  As they crossed the lawn, Slonský found himself staring at the building and reflecting that there must be many buildings around with a tale to tell every bit as horrible as the Red House’s.

  ‘There you are,’ said Hanuš, pointing to the three flower beds in a row.

  There was no doubt about it, the middle one of the three had a higher hump than the others, and assuming that they started level — and why would they not? — the obvious conclusion was that there was something under the soil that had not been there when Hanuš dug it over.

  Slonský took his coat and jacket off and laid them on the lawn. ‘Got a spare shovel?’ he asked.

  The first thing Hanuš observed was that the bed had been dug down deeper than he had gone. It was not a matter of something being placed in the bed as he had left it, because the dislodged earth went down more than two spades’ depths. Something told Slonský they needed to work more slowly once this became clear, for fear that they might disturb some valuable evidence. He suggested to Hanuš that they should dig at the ends and then rake the loose soil to the edges for lifting out, thus avoiding digging downwards at the centre. It was not very long before the wisdom of this approach was demonstrated.

  Hanuš felt something under his spade and was careful not to put any weight on it. Casting the tool to one side, he knelt down and clawed the soil away with his hands, and in no time at all they could see what had pushed the soil up.

  ‘I think we’d better stop there and send for Dr Novák,’ Slonský announced. ‘He’ll go ape if we interfere with his crime scene.’

  ‘Well?’ said Slonský.

  ‘It’s a woman,’ said Dr Novák.

  ‘I guessed that,’ Slonský replied. ‘The bright red nail polish put me onto it.’

  ‘See? You’re not a detective for nothing.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘She stopped breathing.’

  ‘And why might that have happened, do you think?’

  ‘Probably has something to do with that red line round her throat, but you tell me. I’m just the pathologist.’

  ‘Strangled or garrotted?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Don’t know for sure
yet, but probably strangled.’

  ‘Has she been interfered with?’ Slonský asked.

  ‘No. No sign of sexual activity as such.’

  ‘What do you mean, “as such”?’

  ‘I mean there’s no sign of anything being inserted anywhere, but maybe she was hoping, because that’s pretty flimsy underwear to be walking around in. She’s dressed for a date, I’d say. She had been wearing quite a smart suit. Probably cream when she put it on, though lying in soil hasn’t helped its appearance.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Forties, maybe fifty. Not in the first flush of youth, shall we say, but nicely kept.’

  ‘Wedding ring?’

  ‘No. Nor any sign of one having been removed.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘Shoes and handbag are missing.’

  ‘How did she get here?’

  ‘I doubt she walked, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  Slonský winced. He had been trying to think how you would get a body over that wall which must be about one and a half metres tall, if not more. ‘No sign of a car on the path or lawn, so she wasn’t driven to her grave,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ agreed Novák. ‘But there are plenty of wheelbarrows around the grounds.’

  ‘Time of death?’

  ‘Just after she stopped breathing. Honestly, Slonský, I’ll tell you as soon as I can but it’s not straightforward. There’s a complication.’

  ‘What sort of complication?’

  ‘I think she’s been in a freezer.’

  Slonský removed his hat and gave his head a good scratch before deciding it was too cold not to have a hat on and hastily replacing it. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because it’s true. I’ll know better when I’ve looked at some tissue samples, but there’s still some ice in the folds of her clothes. Needless to say, that’s going to make it difficult to pinpoint the time of death.’

  ‘If Hanuš is right and the body was buried over the weekend, it’s been here less than forty-eight hours.’