Entanglement (39 page)

Without a word Szacki raised an eyebrow. They had all seen too many American films. Murder is not like firing wads of paper in the classroom. You can’t just get up and take the blame on yourself, so your pals will be pleased and the teacher lady won’t suss it out.

“How exactly was it meant to look?” he asked.

“What? I don’t understand. How was the suicide meant to look?”

Szacki shook his head.

“How was it meant to look from the beginning, ever since you hit upon the idea of driving Henryk Telak to suicide. I realize such things are not prepared in a weekend.”

“The hardest bit was the beginning, in other words getting close to Telak. I ordered leaflets at his company for a lecture on life after the death of a child, to catch his interest. Then I made a scene at Polgrafex saying they hadn’t done things the way I wanted, which wasn’t true, of course. I demanded to see the director. I succeeded in steering the conversation so that he started talking about himself. I suggested meeting at my office. He was defensive, but I persuaded him. He came. He kept coming for half a year. Do you know how much it cost me, week in, week out, to get through a whole hour with that bastard who murdered my son? To conduct his bloody ‘therapy’? I sat in my chair and the whole time I kept wondering whether to just hit him with something heavy and get it over and done with. I kept imagining it non-stop. Constantly.”

“I understand we can put the word ‘therapy’ in quotation marks,” put in Szacki. “The aim of your sessions was not any kind of cure, was it?”

“Henryk was in a terrible state after those meetings,” said Jadwiga Telak quietly, staring intently at Kuzniecow throughout. “I thought it was worse after every session. I told him to stop going, but he told me it had to be like that, that was how it worked, and that before an improvement the crisis always worsens.”

“Did you know who Cezary Rudzki was?”

“No. Not at that point.”

“And when did you find out?”

“Not long before the constellation. Cezary came to see me and introduced himself… He brought back all the ghosts from the past. Really. He told me what Henryk had done and what they wanted to do. He said they’d leave him alone if that was what I wanted.”

She fell silent and chewed her lip.

“Was that what you wanted?”

She shook her head.

“You’re right, the aim of the therapy was not therapy at all,” said Rudzki, quickly picking up his thread, evidently in order to draw Szacki’s attention away from Mrs Telak too. “At first I wanted to find out if it was definitely him who had caused me to lose my son. I had fairly complete information, but I wanted to confirm it. The bastard admitted it at the very first session. Of course he skirted around it somehow, maybe he was afraid I’d go to the police, but his confession was unambiguous. Then… Never mind the details, but my aim was to arouse the greatest possible sense of guilt in Telak for the death of his daughter, and to persuade him that if he departed too, it might save his son. Which was in fact true.”

“And did you talk to him again about Kamil, about your son?”

“No. We probably could have, if I’d pressed him, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to. I concentrated on his parents,
on his present family; several times I threw something in to increase his sense of guilt. I was quietly counting on succeeding in manipulating him like that so he’d commit suicide without a constellation, but the bastard clung to life tightly. He kept asking when he’d be better. As God is my witness, those were hard moments for me.

“Finally I prepared the constellation. I spent a long time writing the scenario, various versions, depending on how Telak might behave. I analysed the session that had led to the suicide of Hellinger’s patient in Leipzig dozens of times, and sought out the strongest emotions, the words that would prompt them. I had to do the whole thing as a dry run - practising that on people would have been impossible and cruel. Barbara and I came to the conclusion that it’d be easiest for that coward to swallow some pills, and that he wasn’t likely to go for hanging or cutting his wrists. That’s why after breaking off the therapy at the worst moment for him we offered him some pills, bloody strong ones.”

“We were walking down the corridor,” Jarczyk suddenly cut in, ignoring her husband’s reproachful look, “I was barely alive, he was grey in the face, hunched, devastated, with his head drooping. For a moment I felt sorry for him, I wanted to give up and tell him not to lose heart. But then I remembered Kamil, my first-born child. I gathered my strength and said I was sorry about his children, and that in his place I’d prefer to die than live with it. He admitted he was thinking about that too - that in fact he was only wondering how to do it. I replied that I would take pills, and that in my case it would be easy, because I took strong sleeping pills anyway. I’d only have to take a few more. I told him it was a beautiful death. To fall asleep peacefully and simply never wake up. He took the bottle from me.”

Jarczyk fell silent and glanced fearfully at her husband, who ran a hand through his grey hair - it occurred to Szacki that he
did exactly the same himself when he was tired - and went on describing the sophisticated murder plan.

“I wouldn’t be saying this if not for that bloody Dictaphone of his and his mania for recording everything, but as it has been revealed anyway, I must. The idea of Hanna imitating Telak’s dead daughter was a bit theatrical,” - Kwiatkowska gave her father a look that left no doubt that ‘a bit’ was not the right phrase - “but I realized it would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. I knew after something like that Telak would run to the bathroom, take the pills and that would be it. Vengeance taken.”

Teodor Szacki listened with outward calm. He had enough self-control not to show his disgust. Once again he felt sick. The aversion he felt for Rudzki was almost physical. What a cowardly old fool, he thought. If he wanted to get revenge, he could have shot him and buried the body, and counted on succeeding. It usually works. But not him - he had to drag his wife into it, then his daughter, making himself resemble Telak in the process, and he dragged in Kaim too. What for? To blur the responsibility? To burden them with the blame? Hell knows.

“You can congratulate yourselves,” he said sarcastically. “Henryk Telak recorded a farewell letter to his wife, in which he said he was planning to commit suicide for the good of Bartek, and then he went back to his room and took the pills. The whole bottle. You almost succeeded.”

Cezary Rudzki looked shocked.

“What? I don’t understand… But in that case why…”

“Because immediately afterwards he changed his mind, vomited, packed and left his room. Maybe he chickened out, or maybe he was simply putting it off for a few hours to say goodbye to his family. We’ll never know. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that at about one a.m. Henryk Telak finishes packing his case, puts on his coat and quietly leaves. He walks down the corridor, goes into the classroom, where only a few hours ago
the therapy took place, and…” He pointed an encouraging hand at Rudzki, and felt his stomach turn, as the stain the shape of a racing car appeared before his eyes again.

The therapist had become subdued. The jacket that had hugged his proudly erect figure had suddenly become too big, his hair had gone dull, and his gaze had lost its haughty expression and wandered to one side.

“I’ll tell you what happened next,” he said quietly, “if you’ll answer a couple of my questions first. I want to know how you know.”

“Please don’t make me laugh,” bristled Szacki. “This is a trial experiment, not a detective novel. I’m not going to tell you exactly how the inquiry proceeded. If only because it’s a laborious procedure involving hundreds of elements, not one brilliant investigator.”

“You’re lying, Prosecutor,” said the therapist, smiling gently. “I’m not making a request, but setting a condition. Do you want to know what happened next? Then please answer my question. Or I’ll start insisting I can’t remember.”

Szacki hesitated, but only for a short while. He knew that if they dug their heels in now, it would be impossible to prove their guilt in court. He’d even have a problem with the legal classification of their twisted revenge.

“Four elements,” he said at last. “Four elements that I should have linked up much earlier. Curiously, two of them are entirely accidental, they could have appeared at any point. The first element is the constellation therapy, which for you has proved a double-edged sword. You could manipulate everyone, but not Telak.”

“Who did you consult?” put in Rudzki.

“Jeremiasz Wróbel.”

“He’s a fine specialist, though I wouldn’t invite him to give a lecture at a seminary.”

Szacki didn’t smile.

“Throughout the therapy Telak was stubbornly staring at someone. Who was it? I had no idea. I was misled by the principle that, if they haven’t been allowed to depart, former partners are represented by the children. And that a child from the next relationship symbolizes the lost partner. I was sure Henryk Telak had a former lover whom he had lost in dramatic circumstances. I suspected that he might have felt guilty about her death. With Dr Wróbel’s help I established that this was extremely likely. And that in an unconscious way Kasia Telak identified so strongly with his lost love that she followed her into death. And Bartek was heading the same way, to remove his father’s guilt and fulfil his wish of joining his beloved sister. But all the police’s efforts to dig into Telak’s past brought no result. No trace of any lover or any great love was found. It looks as if the only woman in Henryk Telak’s life was you -” he pointed at the widow. “It would have been a blind alley, if not for Henryk Telak’s wallet - leaving it behind was a big mistake on your part. And this is the second element. The most interesting thing in it were the lottery coupons on which he regularly repeated the same set of figures. It meant nothing to me, until I discovered the date and time of Kasia Telak’s death. Then I realized that the numbers on the coupon were a date - to be precise, the seventeenth of September 1978, or the seventeenth of September 1987, and the time was ten p.m. That same day, at that same time, on the twenty-fifth or sixteenth anniversary the girl committed suicide. I started looking through the newspapers and among many others I found information about the murder of Kamil Sosnowski. In theory, there was nothing to connect the cases, but at some point I started wondering if the missing link could be a man. Did that mean Henryk Telak was gay? Or maybe all that time I’d been focusing on the wrong half of the Telak marriage? What if the missing link in the constellation was the
dead lover of Mrs Telak? Henryk’s rival? His death would have been one of the luckiest moments in Telak’s life. Lucky enough to use the date for his lottery numbers.

“At this stage I reckoned there was a sort of twisted meaning to it all, and the whole therapy did indeed have a causative power. Hellinger claims that a person wishing to remain faithful to a deceased partner goes after them - into death, into illness. That would make sense, except in this case Mrs Telak was replaced by her daughter. In addition, the ABC of constellations is the principle that if a woman loved some man very much in the past, she often sees him in her son. Which in turn explained Bartek’s illness. Your son had a weak heart too, didn’t he?”

Rudzki nodded.

“I myself can’t say how it’s possible,” continued Szacki, “but I came to believe in a fantastic hypothesis: Henryk Telak was in some way - perhaps as directly as possible - mixed up in the death of his wife’s lover in the late 1980s. During the therapy he discovers that the crime he committed led to his daughter’s suicide and is connected with his son’s fatal illness. In some inexplicable way, thanks to the ‘knowing field’, his wife senses that too. Her emotions, including hatred and a desire for revenge, are so strong that her representative in the therapy, Barbara Jarczyk, picks them up, and commits the murder. It’s neat, but I didn’t even have circumstantial evidence to link Telak and Sosnowski, or Mrs Telak with the victim from the past. The police were unable to locate his family, and the files from the old inquiry are missing - end of the line. Besides, something kept bothering me, all those little cracks. The mistakes you made in your art during the constellation, the pills, the recording on the Dictaphone. Too many coincidences. And here we reach the third element - my daughter.”

Kuzniecow gave him an anxious glance. Pretending not to notice, Szacki went on.

“Of course, she has nothing to do with this case, she’s just very like me and not at all like her mother - next to her she looks adopted. It’s amazing how very dissimilar children can be from their parents. I was thinking about it one day, and I was also thinking how very different your son -” he indicated Mrs Telak again - “looks compared with you or your husband. Sometimes it’s just tiny gestures, using similar phrases, a manner of intonation, things that aren’t noticeable in a conscious way that bear witness to kinship. And suddenly it leaped out - I had both your interviews before my eyes.” He nodded towards Kwiatkowska and Jarczyk. “Two completely different people, different types of appearance, different - now I think perhaps deliberately exaggerated - ways of talking. Yet the identical sight defect - a slight astigmatism - and a one hundred-percent identical way of adjusting your spectacles. Leaning your heads to the left, frowning and blinking, straightening the frames with both hands, and ending by pressing them to your nose with your thumb.

“As we’re on the subject of my daughter,” said the prosecutor, smiling at the thought of his little princess, “fathers and daughters are linked by an exceptional, special bond. That also set me thinking, when during our one conversation you leaped on me to defend Miss Kwiatkowska. In the first instant I thought you were lovers, only later did I understand. As often happens when some things go wrong, everything does. When some things start to fall into place, everything else does too. At the same time, it turned out Henryk Telak was mixed up in Kamil Sosnowski’s murder, though he didn’t do it with his own hands - perhaps that case will be passed on for a separate hearing, and you’ll be interviewed again.” Szacki was lying through his teeth - he knew nothing would be ‘passed on for a separate hearing’, and even if it was, the matter would be hushed up within a week. The whole time he took great
care not to say or let any of the others say anything that could mean he’d have to launch an inquiry into the murder case from the past.