It was a musty, dimly lit room. Nothing like what she remembered from detective stories — not even the old communist ones. And yet it was supposed to be an interrogation room. She had been sitting in the chair for hours. Her backside ached and her eyes burned from all the crying. This was bad. Very bad. And why? Because her brother had done something stupid, and now they wanted the truth.
They. Two men. One was a thin man in his fifties with graying hair and a prominent bald spot on the crown of his head. His worn shirt smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. He sat directly across from her behind a battered table, chewing steadily. The other, much younger, leaned against the door — the only way out of the room. He wore a tight T-shirt that showed off his biceps but also his beer belly. He kept flashing that odd smile and looking her over.
“So, have you come to your senses, little girl?” asked the older man, who had introduced himself as Captain Mašek.
She looked at him pleadingly — it was the same question he had been asking her for the past hour.
“I told you it wasn’t like that,” she said quietly, and started sobbing again.
She had never imagined she would experience something like this at twenty-one. Arrested and charged alongside her brother. The idiot. How she hated him. Then again, when she thought about why she was really here, she had herself to blame as well. But they wouldn’t understand. Could she even tell them the truth? It seemed unbelievable to her too.
“Let’s run through it for you then,” the younger man began, turning his smile up a notch. She watched him and could see he was taking a strange pleasure in this. The whole thing might even have been exciting to him.
“You have one last chance. Just put it all on your brother. You won’t have to deal with any of the consequences — well, except for that one thing,” the older one tried. As though he were meant to be the good cop and the younger one the bad cop.
“Come on, you’ve still got your whole life ahead of you. You don’t want a criminal record. Something like that follows you for a very long time,” he continued, trying to use her emotions to get her to confirm what they had already decided was the truth. But she couldn’t. She knew it was a lie, and she couldn’t lie.
“So your brother…”
Her brother. A twenty-two-year-old idiot who never stopped showing off, convinced he was God’s gift. Girls came and went faster than he changed his socks. He’d never done well at school, so he’d taken up an apprenticeship and trained as a locksmith. His free time went to the gym, pubs, and clubs. And he still lived with their parents. The Hotel Mama suited him perfectly, though their parents would have preferred him to find his own place. Their father had even considered charging him rent, but eventually thought better of it — he didn’t want the aggravation. She understood him. Her brother was simply an idiot.
“Two years ago he made his decision and acted on it,” the older officer said, pulling her out of her thoughts and looking at her pointedly.
“You just have to nod. There’s no need to be embarrassed,” he said, steering her toward the answer he wanted.
“No, it really wasn’t like that. He’s not like that. He’s an idiot, yes — but he really wouldn’t do this,” she sobbed again.
“The way I see it,” the younger officer began, “you were both in this together. You made the decision too, and you went along with it. Which makes things even worse for you, sweetheart.”
She stared at him in horror and shook her head.
“No, no — it really wasn’t like that,” she repeated, crying and burying her face in her hands.
The two officers exchanged a glance.
“We don’t have all day, so let’s go over the facts we have,” the older one sighed, opening the file on the table in front of him and scanning it.
“Approximately two years ago, you and your brother decided to begin an intimate relationship. We don’t know exactly how it started. Your brother was single at the time — witnesses confirm this — and according to them, that was unusual, since he typically managed to have up to three girlfriends at once. You were also single at the time and had turned down everyone, which suggests he turned his attention to you.”
The younger officer was grinning outright, eyeing her with undisguised interest. It was plain to see exactly where his imagination had gone — her and her brother together, the sounds she must have made, the way their bodies must have moved.
He had a good physique, after all. Athletic. And she was far from plain — quite the opposite. Tall, slender, with long blonde hair. Small but firm, full breasts. It was obvious he must have been drawn to her. That much was clear from the way the officer himself was looking at her now. And she, too, would have had to admit that her brother was not without his appeal.
“We know you argued frequently. You could be heard from across the street. He probably wanted more than just a casual arrangement. And you wanted to put a stop to it. We understand that.”
“You enjoyed it though, didn’t you?” the younger officer said.
“What do you take me for? I have never been with my brother—” she began defiantly, then caught herself, realizing that finishing the sentence would mean telling them what had actually happened.
“Hmm. Then I’d love to know how your one-year-old son can be your brother’s child — as confirmed by a DNA test.”
And there it was. That was what everything revolved around. The test had been ordered. Someone had reported them — someone who found it strange that she, whom no one had ever seen with a man, had suddenly turned up pregnant. Someone who had then seen her son and noticed how much he looked like her brother.
Unfortunately, the DNA results could only confirm what she had known from the very beginning of her pregnancy.
“He just couldn’t help himself, could he? A body like yours,” the younger officer muttered when she didn’t respond.
Her brother had never liked condoms — everyone knew that about him. He never used them with any of his girls, and some of them had ended up having abortions because of it. He hadn’t cared. When he was with someone, he gave it everything. And at the end — he was not a man who held back.
“I’m so stupid,” she cried, burying her face in her hands again.
The younger officer smiled — a triumphant, now we’ve got you smile. He knew they had won.
“Why would you be stupid?” the older officer asked.
He wanted her to confirm it. To say out loud that she had slept with her brother, that they hadn’t used protection, and that she’d gotten pregnant as a result.
“It’s the remote,” she said instead — and confused them completely.
They looked at each other, then back at her.
“What?” they both asked at once, staring open-mouthed.
“The remote. The TV remote. I’m so stupid… but it’s not my brother’s fault. He really didn’t — I’m not with him — but the remote,” she rambled incoherently, crying all the while.
The officers were completely lost.
“What the hell does the remote control have to do with anything?” the younger one snapped, stepping up to the table and slapping his hand down on it. “Stop wasting our time. What are you talking about?”
“He really did just stop having a girlfriend all of a sudden. He just sat at home watching porn,” she blurted out.
“I’d sometimes walk in on him. Sometimes he’d call out my name while he was doing it. And it… it got to me — the way he’d be going at it, watching that porn, with my name coming out of his mouth,” she continued.
Suddenly the floodgates opened and she had to tell the truth.
“One night I came home from a party. My parents were asleep and my brother was at it again — calling my name again — and just as I walked in, he finished. He panicked and bolted to his room, yelling that I was a complete idiot.”
The officers watched her open-mouthed, sensing that what came next would be unlike anything they had heard before.
“I went over to the sofa to turn off the porn and I noticed that on the remote…” she started crying again.
The older officer was beginning to put it together.
“What about the remote?” the younger one asked.
“It was covered in his… and I picked it up, and—” she dissolved into tears again.
“And what?” the older officer prompted after a moment. She looked up at him.
“I put it inside myself and used it. Is that what you wanted to hear? I got myself off with the remote control that had my brother’s cum on it!”
She screamed and collapsed forward onto the table.
The officers needed a moment to recover. Then they switched off the recording, picked up the file, and walked out of the room.
