The Murdered Molls (Josef Slonský Investigations Book 7) by Graham Brack

Author:Graham Brack [Brack, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2023-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

In his teenage years Krob had been quite a formidable chess player. Not brilliant, perhaps, but very dogged, and known for his imperturbability. The problem was that his team-mates could never tell from his facial expression whether he thought things were going well or badly; he sat patiently looking at the board with an entirely neutral expression before finally making a move.

He no longer played regularly, but he had carried this impassivity into other walks of life, and was now sitting on a log ostensibly watching Marek play but actually turning over the question of Chigulin’s disappearance in his brain, working out all the possible moves.

He was distracted momentarily by Marek’s inability to apply the basic laws of physics to a see-saw, and rose to push down on the other end and lift his son gently from the ground. Taken by surprise, Marek tumbled backwards, and required some comforting before suggesting that ice cream might make the bump go away.

‘There is no bump,’ he assured his son.

‘Not yet,’ Marek agreed, ‘but I bumped it so there will be a bump some time. Unless I have ice cream.’

Krob laughed and put his son down to walk with him to the little local supermarket. The traffic was not racing past as usual, and it took Krob only a moment to realise why. About eighty metres up the road a dark blue BMW was blocked in by a police car and the unhappy occupant was giving his details to the officers.

An idea sparked in Krob’s head, so a few minutes later father and son were sitting on the log again, the latter holding a large ice cream and the former with his mobile phone jammed to his ear.

He was in luck. Berger was on duty. The two of them had worked together for a while when Krob was still with the City police. After a few pleasantries, Krob got to the point. ‘I’m working on a case and a witness has disappeared. But he said he drove to the site of the crime, so he has a car, and I wondered if you’d ever picked him up.’

‘I’ll look him up. Name?’

‘Chigulin, Yurii.’

‘Stand by.’

The police computer did its thing laboriously. Some time ago the National Director of Police had commissioned a report on how the system could be modernised which had concluded that the architecture of the files was so weird that there was no easy way to transfer them to a new system. One of Technician First Class Spehar’s team could have put them right on that, because he had worked out a way to download all the files and convert them to a standard format, but then he was not hoping to be awarded a lucrative contract for doing so.

Eventually the system disgorged its conclusion. ‘Yes, we booked him for running a red signal about eight months ago.’

‘Have you got the registration of his car?’

‘Sure. Got a pen?’

Berger duly recited the registration mark.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any way you could ask units to keep an eye out for it.

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