Entanglement (13 page)

The older doctor gave him a derisive look as he pulled on his latex gloves.

“Was it you who asked us to check if the deceased had stuck the skewer in his own eye?”

For pity’s sake, thought Szacki, spare me a wisecracking pathologist. That’s too much so early in the day.

“We have to know,” he replied calmly.

“A very cunning theory,” said the doctor, smiling mischievously, and began to give the body a thorough examination.

The assistant took notes.

“There are no signs of bruising, cuts, stab wounds or lacerations or bullet holes on the limbs and trunk,” dictated the pathologist. He carefully lifted the sunken eyelid under which Telak’s eye had once been. “Right eye missing, fragments of vitreous body and cornea visible on the cheek.” He put a finger in the eye socket and dug out the remains of something grey; Szacki squinted to lose focus. “Skull bone behind right eye socket crushed, pushed
inwards, in all likelihood by a sharp instrument.” He lifted the head and examined it closely, parting the hair. “Otherwise the head shows no evidence of other injuries.”

“I’m shuddering at the thought of the next instruction,” the surgeon said to Szacki, as with a confident movement he made a Y-shaped incision in Telak’s ribcage and belly, folded back the skin and hooked it on the chin; meanwhile his assistant “scalped” the skull. “Now let’s think, maybe this’ll be it: ‘We want you to establish if the deceased, found with his head cut off under a tramcar, could possibly have cut it off himself with a pair of scissors, then lain down on the tracks and waited for an approaching vehicle’.”

“People do all sorts of things,” said Szacki, raising his voice to shout over the noise of the electric saw the younger pathologist was using to cut the skull. As usual at this moment he wanted to leave - he couldn’t bear the wet squelch that went with opening the head. He belched biliously when he heard the loathsome sound. Just like the noise when you try to clear a blocked sink.

Szacki was expecting more jokes, but the surgeons concentrated on their work. The younger one was tying something up deep inside the trunk, while with expert movements the older one was using an instrument deceptively similar to a bread knife to remove Telak’s internal organs and put them on a spare table top at the corpse’s feet. Then he went up to the open skull.

“Good, cutting up the offal can wait - there’s nothing there anyway. Let’s take a look at this head.” He moved a small aluminium table up to the open skull, gently removed Telak’s grey-and-red brain and put it on a tray. He peered inside the skull. Suddenly he frowned.

“He must have found it intolerable - maybe he really did kill himself,” he said seriously. Szacki took two paces closer.

“What is it?” he asked.

The doctor rummaged inside Telak’s head, clearly trying to
pull something out that was putting up resistance. A scene from
Alien
appeared before Szacki’s eyes. The pathologist twisted his hand, as if trying to turn a key in a lock, and slowly withdrew it. There between his fingers was a rolled-up condom.

“I think he had an obsession but he couldn’t live with it. Poor guy…” The doctor lowered his head pensively, while his assistant shook with suppressed laughter, and Szacki bit his lip.

“You must be aware there’s a paragraph in the penal code about desecrating corpses,” he said coldly.

The pathologist threw the condom in the bin and gave Szacki the sort of look children in class give the teacher’s pet.

“How do you people manage to be such boring bureaucrats?” he asked. “Do you get special training?”

“We have psychological tests during our studies,” replied Szacki. “Will you carry on, or do I have to call the office and ask for two days’ leave?”

The doctor didn’t answer. In silence he examined the inside of the skull and, very carefully, the brain, then cut the internal organs into slices. Szacki recognized the heart, lungs and stomach. He belched again. He should have drunk tea that morning, not coffee, he thought. Finally the surgeon looked inside the stomach; the air was filled with a sour odour.

“Your client was sick shortly before he died,” the doctor told the prosecutor. “Pretty thoroughly.”

Szacki immediately thought of the empty bottle of sleeping pills found in his room.

“Can we tell what did it?” he asked

“You mean was it the carrot or the chops?” said the pathologist, unable to resist a little irony.

“I mean toxicology.”

“Of course we can, we just need instructions. Should we check everything, or for the presence of a particular substance?”

“A particular one.”

“You know what? We could write out a toxicology form on the spot. It’ll be quicker.”

Szacki replied that he’d find out the name of the substance while they were sewing him up.

“OK,” said the pathologist. “The victim was healthy, there were no pathological changes in the internal organs. Heart fine, lungs of a non-smoker, no cancer, no ulcers. I’d like to be in that sort of condition when I’m fifty. Cause of death obvious, in other words damage to the brain caused by a sharp instrument. The skewer pierced the substantia nigra and medulla oblongata, the oldest parts of the brain responsible for the basic life processes. The perfect thrust. He died instantly. Compared with this, a bullet in the temple is a long and painful death. The skewer went through the brain and stopped at the occipital bone - you can see the mark from the inside. In other words the blow was pretty hard, but not powerful enough to make a hole in the skull.”

“Could a woman have delivered a blow like that?” asked Szacki.

“Easily. The skull bone in the eye socket is thin, it doesn’t take much force to pierce it, and after that it’s just jelly. It’s hard for me to tell the height of the attacker, to forestall your next question, but I think he can’t have been either very small or very tall. There’s a seventy per cent chance he was the same height as the victim, but that’s just for your information, I can’t write that in the report.”

“Could he have done it himself?”

The doctor thought for a while. Behind him the other surgeon was unceremoniously packing the organs into the dissected Telak, filling the empty spots with crumpled-up newspaper.

“I doubt it. Firstly, it’d be the first time I ever heard of someone committing suicide this way. And I don’t mean the skewer, just the very idea of sticking something into one’s own brain through the eye. Can you imagine anyone doing that? I can’t. Secondly,
it would be technically difficult. The skewer is long, it’s hard to get hold of, and hard to apply force. But of course it is doable. I can’t rule it out one hundred per cent.”

Szacki thanked him and went outside to call Oleg and find out the name of the drug.

“Tranquiloxyl, active ingredient alphazolam, two milligram tablets,” the policeman read out from his notes. “By the way, we’ve done the fingerprints.”

“And?” asked Szacki.

“Telak’s and Jarczyk’s are on the bottle. No others.”

Cautioned
re
criminal responsibility under Article 233 of the Penal Code, her statement is as follows:

 

Teodor Szacki was sorry there weren’t two more boxes to fill in on the interview form. The information they would contain could not constitute proof or circumstantial evidence in the case, but for those conducting or resuming an inquiry they’d be priceless. The first would be a description of the person being interviewed, and second a subjective appraisal by the interviewer.

Opposite Szacki sat a woman of forty-three, well-groomed, tall and slender, a classic beauty. And yet she gave the impression of being old and troubled. Was it because of death, which had so violently invaded her home? First her daughter, then her husband, soon her son as well, probably. How long would she hang on until she went too? She spoke about her tragedies in a tone entirely devoid of emotion, as if she were describing an episode from a television series, not her own life. Where was the hatred he had seen on the tape at Rudzki’s? That the participants in the therapy had told him about? Hatred that had the magical force to push a stranger into committing murder? Could it be that pain had brought her to such a state? And could she really be feeling any pain at all, if she hated her husband so much and desired his death so strongly?

“Do you personally know Cezary Rudzki?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Please reply in complete sentences.”

“No, I don’t know Mr Rudzki. I’ve never set eyes on him. Not counting the photo on the jacket of the psychology manual I have at home.”

“And do you know Barbara Jarczyk, Hanna Kwiatkowska or Euzebiusz Kaim?”

“The names mean nothing to me,” she replied.

He showed her some photos, but she didn’t recognize anyone in them. A blank look, no emotion at all. Szacki tried to find a way to shake her out of it. If she were playing games it wasn’t going to be easy.

“Why did your daughter commit suicide?”

“Is this necessary?”

“Forgive me, but this isn’t a friendly chat, it’s a witness interview in a murder case.”

She nodded.

“You asked why. No one knows. Why does a fifteen-year-old girl decide to swallow some pills? I don’t think God himself could tell you the answer to that question. When my son found her…” Her voice faltered and she fell silent.

“When my son found her,” she said after a pause, “we thought it was an accident. It was in the morning, and she hadn’t come down for breakfast. I shouted to tell her to get up now, or she’d be late for school. I was cross because I’d made an appointment with a friend who had come all the way from Poznań and I didn’t want to keep her waiting. I told Bartek to hurry her up. Of course he made a face as if to say I was exploiting him. But off he went. I heard him going up the stairs, singing: ‘Get up, get up, you sleepyhead, stop fooling around, get out of bed…’ I was making them sandwiches and got a blob of mayonnaise on my trousers. I almost lost my temper because those were the trousers I wanted to go out in, and if I put on another pair my blouse wouldn’t go with them, the usual sort of women’s concerns. I tried wiping the mark off with water and drying the trousers with a hairdryer. It really was getting late. I was just wiping the stained spot with a bit of damp paper towel, when Bartek came back into the kitchen. I took one look at him and didn’t ask any questions, I just ran upstairs.”

She closed her eyes. Szacki’s mouth felt dry, and the room had become small and dark. Helka was seven years old. Could he imagine her being fifteen and not coming down to breakfast, then himself getting cross and going to drag her out of bed because he didn’t want to be late for an autopsy? Yes, he
could imagine that. Just as he had often imagined her blue and lifeless, the victim of some idiot or just bad luck. Or lying on the dissecting table at Oczko Street - her skull opening with a wet squelch. “Jolly good, we’ll cut up the offal later.”

He felt short of breath. He stood up, poured some still mineral water into two glasses and put one in front of Mrs Telak. She glanced at him.