Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

“WHO ARE THEY?”

“We don’t know, boss,” said Jakub. “Cleaner found them four hours ago. We’d have got the shout, but what with the…”

“We’ve been busy.” Petr sighed. “Yes.”

They were standing in a smartly-appointed apartment in Pankrác, not far from the prison. The apartment was in one of the two new blocks which the city had grudgingly, after many many years’ discussion about their impact on the skyline, finally given permission for. They had filled up with young professionals – graphic designers, IT entrepreneurs, media people. Several soap opera actors lived in this block, Petr knew.

Neither of the people lying side by side in the apartment’s living room was a soap opera actor. At least, he didn’t recall seeing them on television. A man and a woman, they were in their middle thirties, their clothes nondescript but a little old-fashioned. Both had had their throats cut. The floor and the furniture and the walls were awash with blood.

“There hasn’t been a full search yet, but so far, no ID,” Jakub said. “None of the neighbours knows who they were – although one of them thinks they might have been English.”

Petr groaned inwardly at the thought of having to deal with the English Embassy. “Go on.”

“Well, the really interesting stuff’s in here,” Jakub said, leading the way to a small bedroom off a hallway at the rear of the apartment. “Uniformed officer who responded to the call made sure life was extinct and then went to secure the apartment, but he says he thought he heard someone moving around in here. Turns out he was imagining things – you know how jumpy you can get at a scene like this – but he took a look, and, well…”

The bedroom had been converted into a small workroom by dismantling the bed and stacking the frame and mattress against one wall. In the middle of the floor stood a couple of small trestle tables, and on the tables were boxes and tools and rolls of wire. Without touching it, Petr looked into one of the boxes. “Are these detonators?” he said.

“Yes, boss. And those bigger boxes, that’s C4.”

Petr straightened up and looked around the room. “A lot of these C4 boxes appear to be empty.”

“Yes, boss.”

They returned to the main room and stood looking at the bodies. “Oh, there was one last thing,” said Jakub. He held up a little plastic evidence bag containing a cheap cigarette lighter. Printed on the side of the lighter were the words ‘TikTok.’

“That’s just too easy,” Petr said.

“Yes, boss.”

“That sort of thing only ever happens in films.”

“I know, boss.”

Petr sighed. “All right. When scenes-of-crime have finished and the bodies have been taken away, search this place properly for ID and anything else that looks interesting. Then, and only then, notify ATG.”

Jakub sucked his teeth. “They won’t like that.”

“They can sue me.”

“They probably will,” Jakub noted.

PRAGUE HAD, IN general, an enviably low crime rate. Pickpocketing had been a cottage industry for decades and there were always muggings and other forms of low-level trouble in and around Sherwood, the park around the railway station, but mostly the old city had escaped the wave of crime which had engulfed other European capitals.

Following the TikTok bombing, however, a wave of murders swept the city. Organised crime figures were assassinated in their cars and in their homes. Several drug pushers were found crucified against trees in Sherwood. The Government began to take notice, which was never a good sign in Petr’s world.

Two Scotland Yard detectives flew in to look at the bodies from Pankrác, failed to identify them, consented to being treated to a slap-up meal at a restaurant in the Old Town for their trouble, and flew out again without once mentioning why the job could not have been done just as easily by someone from the Embassy security staff. Petr drove them to the airport himself, watched them go through the security checks, waved bye-bye, and thought about that.

A Colonel from the Gangs Taskforce met with the heads of all of Prague’s organised crime groups – this entirely off the record and as far as possible from the Press and some of the less-understanding members of Parliament – and reported back that they were as in the dark as anyone else. They all blamed each other for the killings, but when pressed could not give a single good reason why they should have taken place.

“I told them to stop, and they just shrugged their shoulders,” the Colonel told Petr over a drink. “This is a territorial thing, plain and simple. You mark my words. They just won’t admit it.”

Except for those two bodies with their throats cut. That whole business had disappeared into the pockets of an angry Major Vĕtrovec, but in Petr’s mind’s eye they stood out from all the other killings. Somehow those two murders, that room full of plastic explosive, made sense of everything else. Except they didn’t.

The Press took up the story of the gang war, questions were asked in Parliament, and one day Petr found himself sitting in the Minister’s office, feeling small and overdressed in his one good suit. The Minister, a florid woman who favoured grey trouser suits and red shirts, kept him waiting while she read through something on her desktop.

“Your officers call you ‘Major Zeman,’” she said without looking at him.

Petr sighed. Major Zeman had been the lead character of an infamous long-running Communist-era television series, a propaganda exercise more than anything else.

“A joke, Minister,” he explained. “The star and I share a surname.”

The Minister looked at him.

“Squadroom humour,” he added.

The Minister said, “This is no laughing matter, Major.”

“No, Minister,” he agreed. “It is not.”

She consulted her desktop again. “Thirty-seven fatalities. Not including the TikTok bombing. Not a laughing matter at all.”

“Has someone complained that we were treating it as such?” he asked.

Another level stare. The Minister said, “The Press seems to think that the Prague police force is incompetent. Those criticisms tend to arrive on my desk, Major, not yours, and the President and Prime Minister expect me to answer to them.”

“Yes, Minister.”

“The Gangs Taskforce appear to believe this will burn itself out eventually.”

“Do they?”

“They have something they call…” she checked her desktop once again “… dynamic modelling . Are you familiar with it?”

Petr shook his head.

“Computer software,” she said. “From the United States. It constructs a model of the relationships between groups. Any kind of group. Model train enthusiasts, football supporters, the fans of the latest teen pop singer, criminal gangs. It’s supposed to predict the dynamics between those groups, locate periods of stability and chaos. What do you think of that?”

“I think it would probably have been more cost-effective to examine the entrails of a chicken, Minister.”

A smile quirked her lips. “Dynamic modelling says that these killings will run their course and stability will return.”

“Eventually we’ll run out of criminals,” Petr said. “Then stability will certainly return.”

The Minister sighed. “Meanwhile, the latest round of budget cuts mean savings will have to be made across the board.” She left unsaid the obvious, that departments which showed results would need to make the fewest savings. She took a single photo printout from a folder on her desk and showed it to him. “Do you recognise this man?”

The picture was a blurred blow-up, the face of a youngish man in half-profile. He had an ordinary-looking face, shortish brownish hair. An ish sort of a man, completely unremarkable. Petr shook his head.