A Grain of Truth (4 page)

Now he knew what was wrong. The whiteness. The unreal, unnatural whiteness of the victim’s body. But there was something else too.

“Excuse me,” said Sobieraj behind him, “that’s my friend.”

“That was your friend,” snapped Szacki in reply. “Where are the technicians?”

Silence. He turned around and looked at the fat policeman, who was bald with a bushy moustache. What was his nickname? The Marshal? How original.

“Where are the technicians?” he repeated.

“Marysia’s just coming.”

Everyone here was on first-name terms. Nothing but old friends, blast them, a small-town clique.

“Send for a team from Kielce, too. Tell them to bring all their toys. Before they get here, cover the body, cordon off the area within a radius of fifty metres and don’t let anybody in. Keep the gawpers as far away as possible. Is the detective here already?”

The Marshal raised his hand, staring at Szacki as if he were from outer space and looking enquiringly at Sobieraj, who was standing dumbstruck.

“Great. I know there’s mist, it’s dark and there’s bugger all to see, but everyone in these buildings” – he pointed at the houses on Żydowska Street – “and those ones” – he turned round and pointed at the villas on the other side of the ravine – “must be interviewed. Maybe there’s
someone who suffers from insomnia, maybe someone’s got prostate trouble, maybe there’s a crazy hausfrau who makes soup before going to work. Someone might have seen something. Got it?”

The Marshal nodded. Meanwhile Sobieraj had regained her composure and was standing so close that he could smell her breath. She was tall for a woman – their eyes were almost on the same level. Country girls are always handsome creatures, thought Szacki, waiting calmly to see what would happen.

“Excuse me, but are you conducting this case now?”

“Yes.”

“And might I know why?”

“Let me see. Because for once it has nothing to do with a drunken cyclist or the theft of a mobile phone at a primary school?”

Sobieraj’s dark eyes went black.

“I’m going straight to Misia,” she hissed.

Szacki reached into the deepest, unexplored depths of his will-power to stop himself from snorting with laughter. Good God in Heaven – they really did call their boss Misia.

“The quicker, the better. It was she who dragged me out of the sack, where I was passing the time in a madly interesting way, and told me to deal with this.”

For a moment Sobieraj looked as if she was about to explode, but she turned on her heel and walked off, swinging her hips. Narrow, unappealing hips, reckoned Szacki, as he watched her go. He turned to address the Marshal.

“Will someone from the criminal investigation department be coming? Do they start work at ten?”

“I’m here, sonny, I’m here,” he heard a voice behind his back.

Behind him on a folding fishing chair sat an old boy with a moustache – almost all of them here had moustaches – smoking a fag with no filter. Not his first. On one side of the seat lay several torn-off filters, and on the other several dog-ends. Szacki masked his own surprise and went up to the old cop. His snow-white hair was cut short, his face was furrowed, like a Leonardo self-portrait, and he had pale, watery eyes. On the other hand his well-trimmed, modest moustache was
jet black, which gave the old boy an alarmingly demonic look. He must have been about seventy. If he was younger, evidently there had been plenty of astonishing ups and downs in his life. He gazed with a bored expression as Szacki stood in front of him and offered his hand.

“Teodor Szacki.”

The old policeman sniffed, discarded his fag-end on the correct side of the chair and shook hands without getting up.

“Leon.”

He held onto Szacki’s hand and took advantage of his help to get up. He was tall, very skinny, and under his thick jacket and scarf he probably looked like a vanilla pod – thin, bendy and wrinkled. Szacki let go of the old boy’s hand and waited for the next part of the introduction. Which did not come. The old man glanced over at the Marshal, who bounced up to them, as if he was on elastic.

“Inspector?”

Surely that was a mistake – too high a rank for a cop from the provincial investigative branch.

“Do as the prosecutor said. Kielce will be here in twenty minutes.”

“Take it easy – it’s almost a hundred kilometres,” protested Szacki.

“I called them an hour ago,” muttered the old boy. “And then I waited for you prosecutors to roll up. Good thing I brought my folding chair. Coffee?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you drink coffee, Prosecutor? The Ciżemka opens at seven.”

“As long as we don’t eat anything there.”

The old boy nodded with respect.

“He may be young and from outside, but he learns quickly. Let’s go. I want to be here when the kids with the toys turn up.”

V

The dining hall at the Ciżemka, as the hotel with the best tourist location in town was called – on the market square, by the street that led to the cathedral and the castle – was everything that restaurants
in civilized cities had ceased to be a decade ago. It was a large, unwelcoming space with tables covered in an underlay as well as a top cloth, and high-backed chairs upholstered in plush. There were lamps on the walls, and candelabra hanging from the ceiling. Tapping her heels, the waitress had to cross such a large expanse that Szacki was sure the coffee would go cold on the way.

It hadn’t gone cold, but he could taste a distant hint of dirty dishcloth in it – a sign that the espresso machine was not top of the list of items to be cleaned on a daily basis at this smart Sandomierz facility. Does that surprise me? thought Teodor Szacki. Not in the least.

Inspector Leon drank his coffee in silence, gazing out of the window at the pinnacles of the town hall. Szacki might as well not have been there. He decided to adapt to the old boy’s pace and wait patiently until he found out what he had been dragged here for. Finally the policeman put down his cup, coughed and tore the filter off a cigarette. He sighed.

“I will help you.” He had an unpleasant voice, as if it were badly oiled.

Szacki gave him an enquiring look.

“Have you ever lived outside Warsaw?”

“Only now.”

“In other words you know bugger all about life.”

Szacki did not pass comment.

“But that’s no sin. Every youngster knows bugger all about life. But I will help you.”

Szacki’s irritation was rising.

“Does that help only cover carrying out your duties, or something else on top? We don’t know each other, so it’s hard for me to judge how kind-hearted you are.”

Only now did Leon look at the prosecutor for longer.

“Not very,” he replied without smiling. “But I’m extremely curious to know who butchered that clown Budnik’s wife and threw her in the bushes. Intuition tells me you’re going to find out. But you’re not from round here. Everyone will talk to you, but no one will tell you anything. Maybe that’s a good thing – less information means a purer mind.”

“More information means the truth,” put in Szacki.

“The truth is the truth – floating in a cesspool of superfluous knowledge doesn’t make it any truer,” wheezed the inspector. “And don’t interrupt me, young man. Sometimes you’ll be struggling to understand who really did what with whom and why. And then I will help you.”

“Are you friends with all of them?”

“I’m not good at making friends. And don’t ask me questions that aren’t relevant or I’ll lose my good opinion of you.”

Szacki had a few relevant questions to ask, but he kept them for later.

“And I’d prefer us to remain on formal terms,” concluded the policeman; Szacki didn’t let it show how very much he liked that proposal. He nodded his consent.

VI

There were more and more gawpers, but luckily they were standing there politely. Szacki caught the name Budnik coming from the conversations being held in hushed tones. For a moment he wondered if he needed to know who the victim was right now. He realized that he didn’t. What he needed now was a very careful inspection of the crime scene and the body. The rest could wait.

He and Inspector Leon, who in the meantime had acquired the surname Wilczur, stood next to the body, which was now surrounded by a screen, while the technician from Kielce took photographs of it. Szacki carefully examined the precisely slashed throat, which looked as if it had been carefully sliced to make anatomical specimens to go under slides, and was furious that he still couldn’t identify the unbearable buzzing in his head. Something wasn’t right. Of course he would find out what, but he would prefer to understand it before he got down to the interviewing and the search for experts. The head of the inspection team came up to them, a friendly thirty-year-old with bulging eyes and the look of a judo fighter. After introducing himself, he fixed his fish-like gaze on Szacki.

“Just out of curiosity, where have you landed from, Prosecutor?” he asked.

“From the capital.”

“From the Big Smoke itself?” He didn’t try to hide his surprise, as if the next question were going to be whether Szacki had been kicked out for drink, drugs or sexual harassment.

“As I said, from the capital.” Szacki loathed the expression “the Big Smoke”.

“But did you get into trouble, or something like that?”

“Something like that.”

“Aha.” For a moment the policeman waited for this heart-to-heart to continue, but he gave up on it. “Apart from the body there’s nothing, we haven’t found any clothes, handbags, or jewellery. There are no signs of dragging, and no evidence of a struggle either. It looks as if she was carried here. We’ve made casts of the tyre tracks lower down and the footprints that were fresh. It’ll all be in the report, but I wouldn’t count on much, except from the autopsy.”

Szacki nodded. Not that he was particularly excited. He had solved all his cases by relying on personal, not material evidence. Of course it would be nice to find the murder weapon in the bushes and the murderer’s identity card, but he had long since realized that nice wasn’t an everyday occurrence in Teodor Szacki’s life.

“Commissioner!” yelled one of the technicians rootling about in the bushes on the escarpment.

The goggle-eyed man indicated for them to wait, and ran off towards the remains of the medieval wall, which had once tightly girded the city and now served mainly as a shady place for knocking back cheap, traditional Polish apple wine. Szacki headed after the technician, who was squatting by the wall, raking aside some still leafless twigs and last year’s grass. Goggle-Eyes reached out a gloved hand and cautiously picked something up. Just then the sun broke through the clouds and shone keenly on the object, dazzling Szacki for a moment. Only after blinking several times to dispel the black spots dancing before his eyes could he see that the technician was holding a bizarre knife. He carefully put it into a sealed evidence bag and held it out in their direction. But the tool must have been devilishly sharp, because thanks to the mere weight of it, the blade pierced the bag and it fell to the ground.
That is, it would have fallen, if the squatting technician hadn’t caught it at the last moment by the handle. He caught it and gazed at them.

“You could have lost your fingers,” said Goggle-Eyes calmly.

“You could have contaminated the murder weapon with your blood, you cretin,” said Wilczur calmly.

Szacki looked at the old policeman.

“How do you know it’s the murder weapon?”

“I assume it is. As we’ve found a precisely slashed throat under one bush and a razor as sharp as a samurai sword under another, there might be a connection between them.”

“Razor” was a good word to describe the knife, which Goggle-Eyes was putting into another bag, this time more cautiously. It had a rectangular blade as shiny as a mirror, but with no sharp tip and no curvature. The dark wooden handle was very fine compared with the metal part, completely inappropriate. Whereas the blade itself was huge – about thirty centimetres long and ten wide. A razor, a razor for shaving a giant with a face the size of a delivery van. Both the metal part and the handle – at least at first glance – were undecorated. It wasn’t a collector’s toy, but a tool. Maybe it was the murder weapon, but above all it was a tool with some application other than shaving the legs of the Fifty-Foot Woman.

“Finger prints, trace evidence, blood, secretions, DNA material, chemical analysis,” listed Szacki. “As fast as possible. And I want detailed photographs of this charming object today.”

He handed Goggle-Eyes his business card. The man put it in his pocket as he gazed suspiciously at the large razor.

Wilczur tore the filter off another cigarette.

“I don’t like it,” he remarked. “Much too fanciful.”

VII

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had no luck with his bosses. The last one had been a technocratic bitch, as cold and attractive as a corpse dug out from under snow. Many a time, as he had sat in her office absorbing
smoke and putting up with a person totally devoid of femininity trying to make a feminine impression on him, he had wondered if he could possibly do worse. Not long after, malevolent fate had answered that question.

“No really, please try it.” Maria Miszczyk, who to Szacki’s horror was called Misia, her nickname, in a most unbusinesslike way by everyone at work including herself, pushed a cake platter under his nose. The cake consisted of layers of something like chocolate brownie, plain sponge and possibly meringue.

His boss smiled at him radiantly.

“I put an ever-so thin layer of plum jam under the meringue. I’ve still got some left over from the autumn. Go on, please have some.”

Szacki didn’t want it, but Miszczyk’s friendly smile was like the stare of a cobra. Stripped of his mind’s control, his hand reached out for the cake, and in obedience to the woman’s will it took a piece and stuffed it into Szacki’s mouth. He smiled wryly, showering his suit in crumbs.

“All right then, Basia, tell us what this is about,” said Miszczyk, putting down the platter.

Barbara Sobieraj – known informally as Basia – sat stiffly on a leather sofa, separated from Szacki, who was comfortably ensconced in a matching armchair, next to a small glass table. If Miszczyk had wanted to create a homely atmosphere in her office by taking the average furnishings of the typical Polish small family house as her model, she had achieved her aim.