Entanglement (6 page)

 

Hanna Kwiatkowska signed each page and handed the transcript to Szacki. Kuzniecow had mentioned that she was quite badly shaken, but apart from that, rather a good-looking girl. It was true. Hanna Kwiatkowska had a pretty, intelligent face and her slightly hooked nose gave her a surly appeal and a certain aristocratic charm. In twenty years she’d look like a pre-war countess. Her smooth, mousy hair came down to her shoulders, and its ends curled outwards. And although no fashion house would have offered her a job advertising underwear on the catwalk, plenty of men would have been happy to take a good look at her well-proportioned, attractive body. It was quite another matter how many of them would be scared off by the restless look in her eyes. Szacki for sure.

“Well, is that all?” she asked. “We talked for such a long time.”

“I’m a prosecutor, not a writer,” said Szacki. “I can’t convey all the nuances of the conversation in the transcript, and besides, it’s not necessary. Impressions and nuances only matter to me if they allow me to establish new facts.”

“It’s a bit like with my pupils at school. It’s not the impression they make that counts, but the knowledge they demonstrate.”

“Always?”

“I try my best,” she replied. She smiled, but she was so tense the smile changed into a scowl.

Szacki looked at her and wondered if she was capable of killing someone. If she was, then maybe she’d do it in exactly that way - grab a skewer, lash out and accidentally hit the spot. Lots of hysteria, lots of panic, lots of pure accident. He could see the woman was trying to keep her chin up, but it felt as if her jittery nerves were making the air in the room quiver.

“You must be having a tough time at school right now,” he said as an opener, so he’d be able to watch her a while longer during a neutral conversation.

“Well, yes, you know what it’s like, the end of the school year. They all come along, wanting to improve their marks, change a C plus into a B minus, complete an overdue test, and suddenly all their essays turn up. There’s really no question of teaching any classes. We’ve got until next Friday to give all the marks, so we’ve still got two more weeks of this madness.”

“I live quite near the school where you work.”

“Oh, really? Where’s that?”

“On Burdziński Street.”

“Oh yes, that’s only two blocks away. Do you like it there?”

“Not particularly.”

She leaned towards him, as if wanting to betray a shameful secret and said: “Neither do I. And those children, Jesus Christ, sometimes it’s like being in a reformatory or a madhouse. My nerves are in tatters. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good kids, but why do they have to throw bangers in the corridors? I just don’t get it. And all those jokes about penises - they’re over twelve years old! Sometimes I’m so embarrassed. You won’t believe me, but I’ve just had a text message from one of my pupils saying that she’s fallen in love with a priest and might do something to herself. I’ll show you - maybe it’s a matter for the prosecutor?”

She started searching for her phone in her handbag, and
Szacki began to regret having set her off on a neutral topic. Was that how a murderess behaved? Wouldn’t she be eager to get out of there as soon as possible, rather than showing him text messages? Was it really possible to act quite so well?

She handed him the phone: “IMustTellSomeoneILoveFather MarekICan’tBearToLiveHelp”.

“There’s no signature,” he noted.

Plainly becoming increasingly relaxed, she brushed that aside, saying: “Well, yes, but I found out who it’s from - her obliging friends gave her away. But I don’t know. So it’s not something for the prosecutor then?”

“So what do you think - did one of your group kill Mr Telak?”

She stiffened.

“Of course not. Surely you don’t imagine one of us is the murderer?”

“Can you vouch for people you’ve only just met?”

She folded her arms across her chest. Szacki behaved like a basilisk, never letting his gaze drop from her eyes. She had a tic; her right eyelid kept steadily twitching.

“Well, no, but they’re normal people - I heard about their lives. It must have been some cut-throat, some horrible criminal.”

Rascal, rogue, thug, thought Szacki spitefully.

“Perhaps. But maybe it was one of you. We have to consider that scenario too. I realize it’s hard for you, but please try to remember if anything happened, anything at all, some tiny thing, that made the idea pass through your head, even if it was a totally unjustified thought, ‘maybe it was him’ or ‘maybe it was her’. Hmm?”

“I find it very awkward to cast aspersions, but, er… at the therapy it emerged that Henryk’s wife hates him terribly, and Barbara enacted her anger so vividly, I don’t know, it’s silly to say it…”

 

 

She really did look like an accountant, or a retired teacher. Plump, in a suit that must have been bought at a shop for plump ladies. With a plump face and fluffy hair. Wearing glasses. Szacki had never imagined people of her age went to therapy. He had always thought it was more the thirty- to forty-year-olds, worn out by the rat race, who went in search of a cure for their fears and depression. Though on the other hand, it was better to drain the marsh of your soul late than never. He frowned, unable to shake off his surprise at having come up with this idiotic metaphor.

She spoke in a flat monotone, her voice showing no emotion. Szacki automatically noted down almost word for word the same thing he had heard from Kwiatkowska, wondering if there were any languages in the world that entirely lacked intonation. Mrs Jarczyk could definitely have learned them in a week.

“Just before ten I came out of my room and set off towards the therapy classroom. On the way I passed Mr Rudzki, who was going in the opposite direction.”

Szacki came to.

“Are you trying to say Mr Rudzki saw the corpse before you did?”

“I don’t know that. I doubt it. The room where we ate our meals was next to the therapy classroom, in another part of the building from our bedrooms. He could have stayed there longer at breakfast, I have no idea. I did give him a look of surprise, because he was going the opposite way, but he said he was just coming, and I felt embarrassed, because then I realized he was simply going to the toilet. I don’t think he’d have been quite so calm if he’d found Henryk’s body.”

He noted this down without passing comment. What do these therapists do to people to prevent any of them from coming to the most obvious conclusion: that he was the murderer?

“I went into the classroom. I remember that I was feeling very scared, because the therapy was going to be about me this time. I had a glimmer of hope that without Henryk we’d have to postpone it, because there’d be too few people, you see. So I was scared, and in the first instance I didn’t notice him, I couldn’t stop thinking how I should place Hanna and Euzebiusz in the role of my children.”

Mrs Jarczyk fell silent. Szacki did not push her.

“I saw his legs,” she said at length. “I went closer and saw the body, and that skewer in his eye, and that was all. And when I realized what I was looking at, I started to tremble.”

“Who came running first?”

“Hanna.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I think I am. Then Mr Rudzki, and lastly Euzebiusz.”

“Please tell me what happened when you were all standing over the body. Who said what, and how they behaved.”

“If I’m being frank, the main thing I remember is that skewer sticking out of his eye. It was horrible. But the others? I don’t remember Hanna at all - she may have left the room very quickly. I think Euzebiusz checked Henryk’s pulse, and wanted to pull it out of his eye, but the doctor shouted that we mustn’t touch anything and that we should call the police, and we had to get out of there as soon as possible, because we’d destroy the evidence.”

“Like an ace cop from an American thriller,” said Szacki, unable to deny himself a small comment.

“Did we do the wrong thing?”

“You did very well. Really.”

The phone rang. He apologized to Jarczyk and picked up the receiver.

“Hi, Teo. I didn’t want to come in because you’ve got a witness, but Pieszczoch got fifteen years.”

“Excellent. How was the judgement?”

“Superb. He didn’t reproach us for anything, in fact he repeated your wording from the indictment and closing speech to the cameras. You should claim royalties. There might not even be an appeal. Pieszczoch is a really horrid little shit, and in his lawyer’s place I’d be afraid he’d get a few years more on appeal.”

Ewa was right. Pieszczoch had killed his wife with malice aforethought, out of totally unjustified hatred. It was a nasty domestic crime of the kind that not even the gutter press are interested in. A squalid one-room flat, an unemployed couple, tears, screaming and rows, then he’d banged her head against the corner of a cupboard instead of the usual slapping about the chops. For fifteen minutes without stopping. Even the pathologist was shocked. And that, in the opinion of the defence, was supposed to be “a beating with fatal consequences”. Good God, Szacki would rather sweep the streets that hire himself out as a mouthpiece in criminal cases.

“Thanks, Ewa. I owe you coffee.”

“Take me to bed?”

He stifled a smile.

“I’ve got to go. Bye.”

Jarczyk’s gaze was wandering around the room. There was nothing of interest in there, apart from the view of the grey Ministry of Agriculture building outside. There were some funny children’s drawings above Ala’s desk, and next to Szacki’s there was just a calendar with pictures of the Tatras and Sztaundynger’s words in a frame: “Whether the wind blows from far or near, the breath of the Tatras is always here”.

“What do you think - which of your group murdered him?” he asked.

The question surprised her.

“I don’t know. I have no idea. I just found the body.”

“I see. But if you had to single out one person, who would it be? Please trust your instincts. I’m asking off the record - there certainly won’t be any consequences. After all, you observed those people for two days almost non-stop.”

Barbara Jarczyk adjusted her glasses. She sat very still, without looking at Szacki, but at some point on the wall behind him. Finally, without turning her head, she said: “At the session Euzebiusz played the role of Henryk’s son. And that son, at least in Euzebiusz’s rendition, was dreadfully sad, but you could also see how much he’d been wronged by the father. And so I thought perhaps it was him, out of vengeance against his father, you see. That he had no love for him, or in general.”

Only now did she look at Szacki, who couldn’t understand this at all. An adult man was supposed to have killed another guy because during therapy he had pretended to be his son who wasn’t loved enough? What nonsense.

“I see,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

She read the transcript carefully before signing it. Several times she pulled a face, but didn’t say anything. They said goodbye, and Szacki warned her that he would be sure to call her back again, maybe several times. Jarczyk was standing by the door when one more question occurred to him.

“What did you feel when you found him?”

“At first I was horrified, it was a dreadful sight. But once I’d calmed down I felt a sort of relief.”

“Relief?”

“Please don’t get me wrong. Henryk told us a lot about himself and about his family, and I…” she said, nervously locking her fingers as she searched for the right words, “I’ve never met anyone so unhappy. And I thought perhaps someone did him a service, because there really can’t be any worlds where Henryk could be worse off than here.”

 

 

In Oleg’s opinion, rich, arrogant, and hell knows what he was doing in therapy. In Szacki’s opinion too. Next to this guy’s suit, the prosecutor’s smart outfit looked like a rag dug out of an Indian second-hand shop. Szacki could appreciate that, and he felt a stab of envy as Kaim sat down opposite him. He would never be able to afford clothes like that.

Kaim wasn’t just superbly dressed. He was also muscular and tanned, as if he’d done nothing for the past three weeks but go running and play tennis on a beach in Crete. Despite his flat stomach and regular sessions at the pool, Szacki felt as pale and flabby as a worm from the nematode family. His ego was bolstered a bit by the thought that he was the representative of authority here, and this pretty boy might turn out to be a murderer.

In a nice, manly voice, matter-of-fact and specific, without going over the top or omitting any details, Kaim made his statement. He remembered the scene with the corpse the same way as Jarczyk, but Szacki was interested in something else.

“What sort of a person do you think Henryk Telak was?” he asked.

“An unhappy one,” replied Kaim without a moment’s hesitation. “Very unhappy. I realize not everyone’s life works out, but he had exceptionally bad luck. I’m sure you know his daughter committed suicide.”

Szacki confirmed that he did.

“And do you know his son has a bad heart?”

Szacki said he didn’t.

“They found out about it six months after they buried Kasia, their daughter. Dreadful. I get
slivers
down the spine just
thinking about it. I’ve got a son of a similar age, and it makes me weak at the knees to imagine us going to get the results of routine tests and having the doctor say there’s something odd about them and they’ll have to be done again. And then… well, you know.”