Ad akta

An insurance assessor, Hubert Matlač, is a short, ugly, elderly man. He finds photographs of an attractive young woman in a file documenting the tragic death of Ondřej Burda and his little daughter in a car accident near Dubrovnik. During the investigation, the local police used Burda’s camera, which remained undamaged by chance, to take shots of the crashed car and the site of the accident. The developed film also revealed photographs of a happy family enjoying their holiday by the sea. Matlač is utterly unofficially fascinated by the young Mrs Burdová and invites her over to his office. The widow is a good-looking and pragmatic woman, and she is apparently not too shaken by the tragedy. The girl who died with her father was his daughter from his first marriage. Matlač keeps inviting the woman over and again. He even looks up a luxurious villa which she inherited in the upscale Prague neighbourhood of Barrandov, and also discovers the woman’s lover, Daneš – Burda’s former colleague. Matlač’s wife is an unsightly ageing woman, and Matlač thus suggests to Burdová that he would prompt the insurance disbursement in exchange for a bit of her kindness. Burdová is outraged and refuses. Soon after, Matlač finds out that she married Daneš. He puts two and two together and hurls an accusation at her, claiming that she married Burda for acquisitive reasons and intentionally taught the little girl to cover people’s eyes with her hands, which she also did to her father as he was driving in Croatia. Although Burdová’s guilt cannot be proved, her bad conscience probably makes her intentionally crash her car and she herself dies during the accident.