A Grain of Truth (11 page)

Szacki meanwhile was looking at Basia the principled pussy’s attractive profile, at the crow’s feet next to her eyes and the laughter lines in the corners of her mouth, which told him she smiled a lot
and had a good life. And he wondered why Budnik hadn’t wanted Basia Sobieraj to question him. Because he didn’t want it to be tough for her? Rubbish. He didn’t want her to notice something. But what?

V

As Jack the Ripper’s assistant was busy stuffing crumpled newspaper into the white corpse of the town’s most beloved citizen by the light of the fluorescent strips at the Sandomierz morgue, prosecutors Teodor Szacki and Barbara Sobieraj were sitting on a sofa in their boss’s office, each eating their third piece of chocolate cake, though they hadn’t really felt like a second one.

They had told her about Budnik’s interrogation, about the autopsy, about the badge with the strange symbol, and about the knife, which – perhaps – was a tool for ritual slaughter. Misia had listened to them with a maternal smile on her face, without interrupting, but occasionally putting in a fact to help them with their account, like the model graduate of an active listening course. Now they were done, and she lit a scented candle; the aroma of vanilla floated about the office, and together with the dusk falling outside and the amber light of the desk lamp it produced a nice, festive atmosphere.

Szacki felt like some raspberry tea, but he thought he might be going too far by asking for it.

“Time of death?” asked Miszczyk, extracting crumbs from her large, flaccid bosom, probably worn out by several children. Szacki gave her a hard stare.

“There’s a problem with that, the range is quite large,” he replied. “Definitely more than five or six hours, taking rigor mortis into account, in other words she was murdered at the latest on Tuesday at about midnight. And at the earliest? The pathologist claims she could even have been dead since Easter Monday. The blood was drained out of the body, which means it’s impossible to draw any conclusions on the basis of livor mortis. It was as cold as hell, so the putrefaction
hadn’t started. We’ll know more if it turns out someone saw her. For now, the period from when she left the house on Monday until midnight the next day comes into play. Of course that’s supposing Budnik is telling the truth. She may just as well have been dead since Sunday.”

“Is he?”

“No. I don’t know exactly when he isn’t telling the truth, but I’m sure he isn’t. He’s under round-the-clock surveillance. Let’s see what comes of searching the house and grounds. For the time being he’s the chief suspect. He lied to us and he hasn’t got an alibi. Maybe she was a saint, but apparently things weren’t going well between them.”

“People always gossip like that when someone else is doing all right,” protested Sobieraj.

“Every bit of gossip contains a grain of truth,” retorted Szacki.

“What about other scenarios?” asked Miszczyk.

Sobieraj reached for her papers.

“We’re provisionally ruling out homicide related to robbery or a sexual motive. There’s no evidence of rape, and it’s too elaborate for a mugging. I’m checking up on everyone she ran her campaigns with, her family, and friends from the theatrical world. Especially the latter. Ela had connections with the theatre, and you’ll admit this has something of a performance about it.”

“Fakery,” commented Szacki. “But for the time being that’s of secondary importance. Above all we’re looking for the blood. We have to find evidence of the several litres of it that drained out of her. The police are going to search public places in the city and the suburbs, and all private premises that feature in the inquiry will be checked from this angle too.”

“As we’re on the subject of blood,” said Miszczyk, then paused and sighed, finding it hard to broach the subject, “what about the ritual murder theme?”

“Naturally we’re rounding up all the Jews in the area,” said Szacki with a stony look on his face.

“Teodor’s joking,” Sobieraj quickly put in, before Szacki had uttered the final syllable of his remark.

“In all my life I never would have imagined you’d be on first-name terms so quickly! You’re totally forbidden to talk to the press about the inquiry, especially Prosecutor Joker here – send them all to me. I’ll do my best to make sure the rotten egg doesn’t break.”

Szacki had a ready-made opinion on that subject – not for this had someone gone to so much trouble – the killer clearly wanted it to leak out. He’d have placed a large bet on the fact that tomorrow morning it’d be hard to push one’s way through the broadcasting vans here. But if Miszczyk was taking the press on herself, well then – not his circus, not his monkeys. He kept these considerations to himself, and also his view that the lady district prosecutor had just signed up for the centuries-old Polish tradition of sweeping things under the carpet. She could have had a brilliant career in the Church.

VI

Perhaps it was because Oleg Kuzniecow, the police detective he’d worked with in Warsaw, was completely different – burly, bawdy and jovial, always trying to get a stupid joke into every sentence. Perhaps it came down to the fact that he and Kuzniecow had known each other for years, worked together, drank together and used to meet up at each other’s houses. Or maybe it was to do with the fact that Kuzniecow was a real friend of his, and that Prosecutor Teodor Szacki loved him like a brother. Maybe that was why he was incapable, he couldn’t and didn’t want to like Inspector Leon Wilczur.

It was quite another matter that Inspector Wilczur was rather far from being likeable. He had arranged to meet him in the “Town Hall” bar, a dreadful dive in the basement of a tenement house on the market square that stank of the cigarette smoke which had infused every bit of the decor for decades, and was full of weird customers and weird waiters. Szacki was sure that behind the scenes there were weird cooks weirdly preparing weird meat, so he limited himself to coffee and cheesecake. The cheesecake smelt of an old sofa which
everyone sits on, but no one fancies cleaning. The coffee was real, but made in the cup.

Wilczur looked like a demon. In the gloom and the cigarette smoke, his deeply set yellow eyes shone feverishly, his pointed nose cast a shadow across half his face and his cheeks sank with every avid drag on his cigarette.

“A shot each, perhaps, gentlemen?” The waiter’s tone was funereal, as if he meant a shot of fresh blood.

They refused. Wilczur waited for the waiter to go away, and then started to speak, occasionally glancing at the documents lying in front of him or at a small laptop. Which at first surprised Szacki. The inspector looked more like the sort of person whom one should spare the torture of explaining what text messages are.

“We know Budnik’s version of events, and now we can supplement it with various statements. On Sunday they were definitely at the cathedral at about six p.m., and they definitely left before mass, which starts at seven. We have two independent witnesses to that. Then they went for a walk, and at a quarter past seven they were caught by a camera on Mariacka Street.”

Wilczur turned the computer towards him. On a short recording he could see the vague outlines of a couple walking along arm-in-arm. Szacki magnified the image, and for the first time he was able to see Elżbieta Budnik alive. She was the same height as her husband, with dark blonde hair spilling down her sports jacket; she wasn’t wearing a hat or a cap. She must have been telling him something – with one hand she was gesticulating vehemently; at one point she stopped to adjust her boot top, while Budnik went on a few paces. She caught him up in three small hops, like a little girl, not a mature woman. Next to the solemn Budnik, dressed in a brown raincoat and a felt hat, she looked like his daughter, not his wife. She drew level with her husband at the edge of the camera’s range of view, and stuck her hand into his pocket. Then they disappeared.

“Everything’s all right, isn’t it?” Wilczur tore the filter off another cigarette.

Szacki knew what he meant. There was no visible tension between them, no argument or stubborn silence. There you had a couple out for walk on an Easter evening. It testified in favour of Budnik’s story that they had spent the holiday period as usual, given each other a dressing-down, she had gone off and… and quite, and what?

“Didn’t that camera catch her on Monday or Tuesday?” he asked.

“No, I had two people on the job of looking through everything from that moment until the time the body was found yesterday morning. Every single minute. She’s not there. We checked this camera and another one by the castle – if you want to leave for the city from Katedralna Street you have to go past one of them. The only other way is through the bushes, or over the cathedral wall and across the garden towards the Vistula.”

“What about the neighbours?”

“Nothing. But please look at this.”

The second recording was from a camera on the market square, covering part of a row of restaurants including the Ciżemka, the Staromiejska, the Trzydziestka and that café whose name Szacki had forgotten, because he had never dropped in there. The camera clock showed it was Tuesday, shortly after four in the afternoon. There was nothing going on, just the occasional passer-by hovering about. The door of the Trzydziestka opened and out came Budnik, with two “laptops” – polystyrene food containers – in a transparent plastic bag. He headed energetically towards Mariacka Street, and quickly left the camera’s field of vision.

Szacki knew perfectly well why Wilczur had shown him this piece of film.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” The old policeman leant back in his chair, pressing himself so far into a dark corner of the room that part of him must have been in the next-door property by now.

“Very. Because if it’s true that his wife left him on Monday…”

“Then why on earth take her dinner on Tuesday?”

“Which would tally of course, but with his first version of events, the totally improbable one that even he has dropped.”

Wilczur nodded – in the gloom his prominent, pale nose stood out. Szacki was thinking. He had only smoked one cigarette today, so he had two more left. Intuition told him it would be worth saving them for his date with Tatarska, besides which, simply by being in this room he had smoked a packet and a half. Nevertheless, he took out a cigarette. Wilczur gave him a light. Even if he was surprised the prosecutor smoked at all, he didn’t show it. He kept quiet while Szacki tried to sort out the possible scenarios in his head. The pieces went whirling around in his imagination, but each one was from a different set, and he felt as if he were forcing them to fit.

On Sunday the Budniks were still together. Then he appears on Tuesday at the restaurant and buys two dinners. But she only turns up on Wednesday, as an alabaster corpse in the bushes by the old synagogue. What happened?

Let’s suppose they really did have a row on Monday. She left, and set off across the fields in a rage towards the Vistula, unobserved by the cameras. There a mysterious madman got hold of her and murdered her. But why in that case did Budnik buy two dinners the next day? Why was there no evidence of a struggle or any attempt to escape on the victim’s body, why was there no sign of any blows?

Let’s suppose they quarrelled on Monday so badly that Budnik battered his wife. Back a step – there were no marks on the body. Let’s suppose they quarrelled so badly that he smothered her with a pillow that night. Or he murdered her in the cellar and drained out her blood. Back a step, there’s no trace of blood anywhere in the house. In that case he drove her off to a secluded spot, murdered her there – back a step, the cameras hadn’t recorded Budnik leaving by car. He carried her out wrapped in a tight bundle – because once again there aren’t any traces – through the bushes to a secluded spot, murdered her and drained out the blood. To cover his tracks and make everything look normal, on Tuesday he went to the office, and got two dinners in order to have an alibi. That night, he went through the bushes again, dragged her to the other end of the Old Town and left her there. Does that sound credible? Totally and utterly, a thousand times no.

So maybe let’s suppose he had the plan prepared for ages. That he had a motive which for the time being remains a mystery. He works at the city council, he knows the security system, the layout of the cameras. On Sunday he paraded past the camera, then dragged her out for a walk to a spot near where the body was found. So he wouldn’t have to lug the corpse right across town. He stunned her, murdered her and bled her dry. Once it was all over, he left the body there.

“However you look at it, it’s clear as shit, isn’t it?” wheezed Wilczur out of his dark corner.

Szacki agreed. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see any motives or proof, and the murder weapon had turned out to be as sterile as a surgical instrument made ready for an operation.

“Here’s one more clip,” said Wilczur, pushing the laptop towards him.

The image on the screen was completely white, the contours of the tenement houses so pale that they were virtually invisible. Szacki was reminded of
Silent Hill
.

“Where is that?”

“Żydowska Street. The camera is on the wall of the synagogue,” – Szacki noticed that Wilczur didn’t use the word “archive” – “set to face the castle. On the right there’s the parking area, and behind that there are the bushes where Mrs Budnik was found. The recording is from Wednesday morning, a few minutes before we were notified. Please watch this.”

As Szacki watched, several seconds went by, then minutes, then the thin mist cleared a bit as it started to get lighter; now he could see that the camera was above a street, not submerged in a bowl of milk. Suddenly at the bottom of the screen a black semicircle appeared, and Szacki shuddered. The semicircle was advancing down the street, and as it moved away from the camera, it became apparent that it was in fact the upper part of a hat shaped like a bowler, but with a very wide rim. Beneath the hat there was a black coat reaching to the floor, long enough to make it impossible to see any feet or shoes. The effect was ghostly, as the black phantom in the hat levitated for a moment in the grey milk, only to disappear entirely soon after. Szacki rewound the image and pressed pause. He very much wanted it to remind him
of something else, but there was no helping it – there, floating in the mist shrouding Żydowska Street in Sandomierz, was the phantom of a Hasidic Jew.