by Graham Brack
Slonský put an arm round the man’s shoulder. ‘Think what demolishing that wall did for the world,’ he said. ‘Democracy flourished, more or less, the dead hand of Communism was lifted, a new era of liberty was ushered in. You could do that here.’
‘That’s a weight-bearing wall,’ said the superintendent. ‘If I knock it down you’ll have Major Klinger and the fraud squad in your office.’
Slonský flinched a little. ‘Yes, well, we don’t want that, do we? Just go away and think of a solution, okay?’
Navrátil returned from the archives with a suspiciously thin folder.
‘All the young girls who have gone missing this year so far, aged between eight and thirteen. The snag is that none of them look like our girl.’
Slonský accepted the proffered folder unenthusiastically. ‘No matches at all?’
‘Our victim has long blonde hair. None of these do. There is a blonde girl, but she has short curly hair.’
Slonský found the relevant sheet. ‘Went missing in April. How quickly does hair grow?’
‘Not four centimetres a month, that’s for sure.’
Slonský grunted an acknowledgement of the truth of the proposition, then lobbed the folder into his in-tray. ‘What news did Peiperová have today?’
‘How did you know I’d been meeting…?’
‘Because it’s between Monday and Friday. And Colonel Urban is at a meeting which, I have learned by skilful interrogation of one of the drivers, is at the Ministry of the Interior and is being attended by a significant amount of top brass.’
‘Do we know what they’re discussing?’
‘Well, it won’t be about Bohemians’ chances of winning the football league this year.’
‘Do you have any idea why the Major General delayed his retirement, sir?’
‘No. And, unusually, Sergeant Mucha doesn’t know either. I don’t know what we do next when even Mucha doesn’t know something. I don’t think it’s happened before.’
‘What about Major Rajka?’
Slonský leaped from his chair with an athleticism that Navrátil had never suspected was concealed within him.
‘Brilliant! Rajka is just the sort of person who would know.’
Major Rajka led the Office of Internal Inspection, a sort of police for the police. A former Olympic wrestler who kept himself in trim by tearing telephone directories in half and crushing drinks cans in the crook of his elbow, Rajka had once worked for Lukas who had given him unofficial time off to enable him to win his place for the Olympics. As a result, Rajka would do anything he could for Lukas, and now that Lukas had retired Slonský hoped that this goodwill had been transferred to the new incumbent, namely himself.
Slonský found Rajka’s number in Lukas’ address book and gave it a call. After an exchange of pleasantries Slonský got to the point.
‘There is a body of opinion which holds that if anyone knows why the Director of Police hasn’t retired yet, it will be you.’
‘That’s very flattering,’ replied Rajka, ‘and highly inaccurate.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I don’t know, but I can guess. And, by the way, I think they call it President of the Police Presidium now.’
‘I bow to your superior knowledge. So, spill the beans.’
‘Between us?’ Rajka confirmed.
‘Shall we say not for general circulation? And definitely unattributable.’
‘Good enough for me. Do you remember Colonel Dostál?’
‘Dostál? The one who ran the SWAT teams?’
‘That’s him. Have you wondered where he has been for the past three years?’
‘I can honestly say it has never crossed my mind,’ said Slonský, ‘but no doubt you’re going to tell me.’
‘He’s been attached to Interpol managing their Incident Response Teams. But his tour of duty is up in October and he’ll be back here looking for a job.’
Slonský’s heart sank. Dostál had some depressingly weird ideas about doing things by the book, by which he meant a book that he got to write and revise at will. He was also very much a “hands-on manager” as he kept telling people. Slonský’s life under Dostál could be much more difficult, particularly because Urban would have a chip on his shoulder for years to come.
‘And the Minister is behind this?’ Slonský asked.
‘Dr Pilik thinks Dostál is just what the police service needs to shake them up.’
‘We’re a law enforcement agency, not a cocktail.’
‘I agree. Dostál would depress morale and cramp the senior managers’ style.’
‘You mean your style.’
‘No, way above me. I am but a humble major. It’s colonels and upwards that don’t like this idea.’
‘Can it be stopped?’
‘Two options, I suppose. Urban has a big success, or Pilik is removed from the Ministry. Come to think of it, you have form when it comes to removing Ministers of the Interior, don’t you?’
This was a reference to Pilik’s predecessor, Dr Banda, whose career had taken a bit of a jolt when he was arrested by Slonský and charged, quite wrongly, with murder. In the event, Banda had done quite well out of it, because he had been compensated with a job in Brussels that he really wanted and which came with a salary that Ministers of the Interior could only dream about. Nevertheless, Slonský and Banda did not exchange Christmas cards.
‘A misunderstanding, that’s all,’ Slonský answered.
‘Isn’t there anything you can pin on Pilik?’ Rajka asked.
‘He was a pretty lousy defence lawyer in a case thirty years ago,’ Slonský said, ‘but I can’t bang him up for that or the cells would be full of lawyers. We’d have no room for criminals.’
‘Well, there’s your problem. If I can do anything to help, remember that I draw the line at anything illegal. After all, I’m supposed to be safeguarding police ethics.’
Slonský dropped the receiver and collected his coat.
‘I’ll explain all that on the way, lad,’ he said to Navrátil.
‘The way, sir? To where?’
‘To a place where my brain can be lubricated and tuned to perfection.’
‘Oh — we’re going to a bar.’
‘Correct. I need to do some of my best thinking. Probably about two litres’ worth, I’d say.’
To nobody’s surprise, Valentin was already in the bar when they arrived. Navrátil occasionally wondered when and where Valentin ever wrote anything for the newspaper since he seemed to spend most of his time in the bar and rarely had a notepad with him.
‘Getting rid of a Minister of the Interior?’ Valentin mused. ‘That’s a new one. They don’t usually hang around long enough to get people plotting against them.’
‘This one has been around nineteen months,’ said Slonský. ‘He’s probably done any good he’s going to do.’
‘He came when you arrested that other one, didn’t he?’ said Valentin.
‘No need to drag that up. It was a perfectly reasonable response to the evidence available at the time.’
‘But he was innocent,’ teased Valentin.
‘No, he was guilty,’ Slonský protested. ‘He just didn’t do what we charged him with. But he did loads of other stuff, which is why he didn’t sue us when he got out. He didn’t want to face charges of obstructing a police enquiry given that he supposed to be in charge of us.’
‘I suppose you can see his point of view.’
‘Look, I bought you a drink in the hope that you would lend your brain to the common cause and all you can do is drag up ancient history.’
‘From last year.’
‘Nitpicker.’
‘So what do you want from me?’ Valentin asked.
‘Anything that might persuade the Prime Minister that Pilik needs a change of scene. He doesn’t have secret mistresses or any disgusting habits he wouldn’t want to see plastered all over the gutter press?’
‘I don’t think so. He’s depressingly d
ull. He wants to lower income taxes for the wealth creators, which is shorthand for “his mates”, I think.’
‘And how does he think the country is going to afford that?’
‘He’s in favour of increasing the duty on beer.’
There was a shocked silence.
‘Isn’t that treason or something?’ asked Slonský.
Chapter 3
The image of the murdered girl stared up at Slonský from his desk. There were two versions; one was a photograph of the girl’s face which had been doctored to give the impression of continued animation, and the other was an artist’s interpretation which seemed to Slonský to offer a better glimpse of what she had been like in life. The artist had given her a smile and a faint rosiness to the cheeks. Her hair was brushed and had a central parting and her dry clothes exhibited more vibrant colours.
‘Pretty little thing,’ Slonský commented.
‘Maybe that’s why she’s dead now,’ Navrátil replied.
‘We’d better get it in the papers. I hate doing it because I don’t think any parent should learn that their child is dead by seeing her picture on the front page, but if she hasn’t been reported missing I don’t know how else we can find out who she is.’
‘I’ll take it to the press office, sir.’
‘Thanks. Any other ideas we can follow up?’ Slonský asked.
‘She looks well kept. She’s not a street child.’
‘Too blonde to be a Roma girl. Not that I’m stereotyping,’ Slonský added quickly.
‘Could she be a foreigner?’
‘Her top is Czech. I doubt you can buy it abroad. But it might explain why we haven’t heard anything. Ask for the photo to be shared with the Slovak and Austrian police just in case and get them to check their missing children’s lists.’
‘Could she be on a school trip?’
‘She’d have been missed, surely! What kind of school doesn’t notice a child has gone missing? Anyway, whoever she is and however she got here, there’s a pattern of long term abuse in Novák’s report that we have to look into. I’m going to go down to the river and talk to a couple of the cruise boat captains.’
‘What shall I do, sir?’
‘Use your initiative. You’re not a new trainee any more. You should be coming up with ideas of your own. Which is another way of saying I haven’t got a clue. Just keep busy, lad, and something may turn up.’
Slonský sat on the wall and listened as the two river boat captains debated what might have happened.
‘The thing is, you really have three rivers in one here,’ one of them explained.
‘Is this going to turn religious on me?’ Slonský asked.
‘No, it’s simpler than the Holy Trinity,’ replied the older man. ‘The central part of the river flows fast. To each side there’s a zone that moves slower. As a result, anything that joins from the side is likely to be kept near the bank, at least until it reaches a bend where it might get swept towards the centre. So if your girl was found where you’ve marked it on the map, I’d say she went in not too far away. Perhaps a couple of kilometres, but if it was much further she’d have been seen from the riverside villages, especially wearing a red top.’
His colleague was quick to agree. ‘There’s less boat traffic here than further along the river, but it’s hard to imagine nobody saw her for a couple of days. She was probably put in the river at night by someone who didn’t know the water and thought she’d be well clear by morning.’
‘And it would have to be from the right bank?’ asked Slonský.
‘Couldn’t have been the other because she’d have had to cross that faster current in the centre that would push her forward.’
Slonský thanked them and walked away deep in thought. While he lacked the social skills that many others prized he had never had any difficulty in persuading ordinary Czechs to speak to him. Of course, the fact that he encountered many of them in bars and cafés may have helped.
Slonský was Prague born and bred. It was his city. Aside from a few months during his national service in the army, he had never lived anywhere else, nor could he imagine doing so. It was overlaid with memories for him, many of which would have been utterly unknown to any of the umbrella-wielding tour guides who made the Old Town Square such a misery these days.
He gazed from the tram window and reflected that they were only two blocks from the flat where a jealous music teacher murdered one of his best pupils, having castrated him first in the hope of ruining that beautiful baritone voice. They turned the corner and Slonský could see the ornate building that had once housed a bank, the one that the idiot Klimek had tried to rob all those years ago when the police payroll was being collected. If it had been after 1989 he would probably have served a few years before being released into the community to fend, albeit unsuccessfully, for himself, but in 1975 that sort of thing got you put up against a wall while a gang of recruits attempted to shoot you with a rifle from ten metres. Slonský could remember such an execution where the officer had been compelled to administer the coup de grâce with his pistol to a startled prisoner still trying to come to terms with the fact that the entire firing squad had missed him. That may have been deliberate, of course; nobody likes shooting a man in cold blood, and they tell themselves that no-one will ever know they deliberately fired a little to one side, which is fine so long as they don’t all think that way.
Slonský believed that he understood Praguers. If pressed, he would admit that Czechs from elsewhere were harder to read, and as for Slovaks, well, they were just different. But the inhabitants of Prague thought like he thought, he believed.
There was a balance within each of them between a fervent desire that nobody should poke their nose into their business and their clear right to investigate everyone else’s. Couple this with an innate sense of justice that would, on occasion, cause them to embellish evidence to ensure that the right person was convicted, regardless of the facts of the case, and you ought to have had a policeman’s nightmare; but Slonský could gently tease them round to giving him the facts without the extras, and was very tolerant of attempts at perjury so long as they were not too blatant.
It was this sympathetic sense that Slonský had detected in Krob. Faced with an indignant crowd who had been present at a hit and run that had killed a retired policeman, Krob and Slonský had been offered detailed eye-witness accounts by people who, by their own evidence, could not possibly have seen what they claimed unless they had x-ray vision that could penetrate the tram from which the policeman had alighted. But whereas many policemen would have recited portions of the law code to explain why passers-by should tell the truth, Krob had simply kept them there for expert questioning by Slonský and Peiperová, meeting their grumbling with good humour, free coffee, and pleas to “help me out here, mate.”
The faces turned towards him alerted Slonský to the ringing of his mobile phone. He did not recognise the number but answered it anyway.
‘Velner. I work in Human Resources.’
‘Good for you. I’m glad somebody does,’ Slonský replied.
‘I’ve read the folders that you dropped in to us. I just need to check the equality and diversity aspects.’
‘What, exactly, are “equality and diversity” aspects?’ asked Slonský, easing his collar away from his jugular vein to allow the blood to escape from his head.
‘You know — race, gender, background, disabilities. So far as I can see, all your department are white, male and Czech.’
‘We have a female — whom I was personally responsible for appointing — but she has been snaffled on secondment by the top brass.’
‘I see. You don’t think the post should go to another female?’
‘I think the post should go to the best person for the job, male, female or somewhere in-between,’ Slonský asserted.
‘A female would give you more balance.’
‘This is a police department, not a damn trapeze act.’ Slonský could feel the h
eadache starting again. Novák had warned him about his blood pressure before. He was about to add a few well-chosen phrases of street Czech when an idea came to him. ‘However,’ he smoothly added, ‘there is more than one vacancy. In fact, there are three, and if you were to approve Krob and let me fill the others I would be very happy to give due consideration to any woman officer you might suggest. Send me a Vietnamese lesbian if it helps with your quotas; just give me Krob to be going on with.’
‘We couldn’t possibly propose an officer for a post,’ protested Velner. ‘That would be most irregular.’
‘Then I will find one. Or even two, if they’re good. Just approve the filling of the vacancies so I can get on with it.’
‘We would be very happy to search our records to find officers who fitted your requirements, of course,’ Velner added.
‘That would be welcome,’ Slonský agreed, inwardly vowing to disregard anyone put forward by such a route.
‘I don’t know if I can get approval for both posts,’ Velner retorted, ‘due to the current budgetary pressures.’
‘That’s because you don’t let criminal gangs sponsor police officers any more. The days when drug dealers could slip a million or two to high ranking officers to ensure that complete idiots were appointed to posts have gone now.’
‘That would be completely improper!’ Velner spluttered.
‘One new post?’ Slonský pressed in his sweetest tones.
‘For now. I’ll confirm with a memo this afternoon.’
‘And I can appoint Krob?’
‘Of course. He’s clearly the best man for the job.’
‘I think you mean “best person”.’
‘Yes, person. It was just a figure of speech.’
The tram pulled up and decanted Slonský whose sixth sense had detected a bar round the first corner on the left. It was some time since he had been there, but after speaking to Human Resources he felt in need of a little something. Once refreshed, he stepped outside to discover that it had gone dark in the interim, so he decided to head home.
He mounted the stairs to his flat and was surprised to find his front door was not locked and the lights were on — or, at least, those of the lights that possessed working bulbs. There was an unusual smell emanating from the kitchen.
