The Chosen Child Read online

  ‘What about your friends at Vistula Kredytowy?’

  ‘They wear red braces and they all think they’re Wall Street tycoons. But they wouldn’t be party to murder.’

  Rej had at last located his lighter. He held it up triumphantly. ‘See? Now I can smoke.’

  Sarah snatched it out of his hand and threw it out of the window. ‘See? Now you can’t.’

  Rej dropped Sarah outside the new airport terminal. The sun was momentarily reflected on her face from a low-flying 727.

  ‘I’ll probably have to talk to you again,’ he said, trying to sound grave, but smiling.

  ‘What for? I can’t tell you anything more.’

  ‘Of course you can’t tell me anything more. So far you haven’t told me anything.’

  Sarah gave him a testy little sigh. ‘Komisarz Rej, if Senate Hotels were going to be stupid enough to take out a contract on some small-time commentator from some ditsy Warsaw radio station, don’t you think they would have had more sense than to leave his body on the site of their own hotel?’

  ‘Who am I to say how stupid anybody is? I’m not a judge. I’m just looking for the truth.’

  ‘The truth? I thought you were looking for a murderer. Only a hopeless optimist looks for the truth.’

  ‘Are you as tough as you pretend to be?’

  ‘Pretending? Who said I was pretending?’ She smiled at him platinum-bright, her pale eyes shining with a greater challenge than he was prepared to face – just for now, anyhow. ‘Now I really have to go – my friend will be wondering where I am. Good afternoon, comrade.’

  Rej stuck another cigarette in his mouth and sat in his battered old car watching her walk into the airport entrance. He was only thirty-eight, but for the first time in his life he began to feel old. Not just old, but redundant, like a man in a vast moving throng of people who suddenly stops, and looks around him, so that everybody else jostles past him, leaving him behind.

  Sarah had stung him, calling him ‘comrade’. She meant that he was still showing signs of a pre-1987 mentality: and it was true that he didn’t believe in God and that he still missed the certainties of communism, as many other people did. More than half of the electorate had voted-in Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former member of the Communist party, in place of Lech Walesa. Rej had, too. That didn’t mean that he was any kind of dinosaur. Life in Warsaw was more colourful and open and there was much more to buy, if you could afford it. Crime had changed, too, becoming far more international and at the same time far more violent. These days the casinos of the city centre hotels weren’t crowded only with Polish gangsters, but Russians and Bosnians and Turks and men of indeterminate nationality in circus-tent Armani suits and new BMWs and with rolls of zlotys as thick as small joints of meat. They were secretive and quick-talking, all doing business in computers and automobiles and wood-pulp and probably drugs too; and guns; and although Rej was especially skilled at making contacts and winkling out possible informers, he was finding it increasingly difficult to gain any kind of entrée into the inner circles of organized crime.

  Most of the time, the best he could do was pick up the casualties – five Romanians, burned alive in their VW camper on Kasprzaka Street in the western district of Wola; three Russians, shot dead in their room at the Sobieski Hotel on Tarczynska Street; and, worst of all, the seven headless bodies that had been found in the city centre in the past three months.

  None of the seven seemed to be remotely related to each other. Two were female, the rest were male. Jan Kaminski, the seventh, had been a radio commentator, and his remarks about Senate Hotels might have made him some enemies. But the first six had been a mailman, a doctor, an assistant from a food store, a taxi driver, a music student, a tourist guide and a pharmacist. What the hell had they ever done to anybody?

  Rej reached instinctively towards the dash, and then remembered that he didn’t have a lighter any more. He didn’t believe in spirits, or messages from beyond the grave, but lately he had repeatedly felt as if somebody were trying to warn him that his life was in danger. Perhaps it was time for him to change his life: to give up police work and do what his father and his grandfather had done, and tend a small plot of land, and keep bees, and watch the sun coming up and the sun going down, until he died. It would make more sense than searching for a random madman who cut off people’s heads and took them away with him.

  His radio crackled. ‘Komisarz Rej? Can I have your location, please?’

  ‘Okecie. Why?’

  ‘Nadkomisarz Dembek wants to see you at 1500 hours this afternoon.’

  ‘Tell him to – No, don’t tell him that. Tell him I’d be delighted.’

  *

  On the way back to the city centre he stopped off at Oczki Street, parking his car at an odd angle on the kerb. The day had suddenly turned to the colour of mother-of-pearl, the way that it could in Warsaw, and the buildings and the lime trees turned grey, too. He walked across the cobbled sidewalk and up the steps of the Department of Forensic Medicine. The swing doors grunted like discontented pigs.

  Inside, it was cool and dark and smelled strongly of disinfectant. On the wall in front of him was a huge stern portrait of the great Polish surgeon Johannes von Mikulicz-Radecki, the first surgeon to wear a face mask during operations, and the first surgeon to be arrested by the police in Breslau for racing teams of horses through the streets. The corridors echoed.

  A sharp-faced woman in a dark suit was sitting at the reception desk, peering at the screen of a word processor as if she expected it to speak to her.

  ‘Is Dr Wojniakowski still here?’ asked Rej.

  ‘Upstairs. Room Three.’

  Rej waited. The woman knew perfectly well who he was. Her phone started to ring but the look on his face told her not to answer it and that he was still waiting.

  ‘Sir,’ she added, after one of the longest pauses in the world history of pauses. Nadkomisarz Rej inclined his head in acknowledgement and climbed the concrete staircase to the second storey. Here there were more portraits: the Pomeranian surgeon Rudolf Zirchow, who discovered how blood clots are formed, and who fiercely fought for the sanitary conditions of Polish peasants in Silesia. And right at the end of the corridor, by the door to Room Three, a dark portrait of Marie Sklodowska, the Warsaw scientist who became world famous as Marie Curie.

  Rej pushed open the doors of Room Three. The lighting was harsh and blue. There were three stainless steel autopsy tables positioned side by side. Two of them were empty and gleaming. On the third one, on the far side of the room, a naked body was lying, white-skinned and ribby, its arms politely crossed over its chest, with thin hairy legs and a little dark tuft of pubic hair.

  God, thought Rej, how irrelevant our cocks and our balls look, when we’re dead. No more sexy than dead fledglings fallen from the nest.

  Even less sexy when we’re headless, as this body was. Nobody could even kiss Jan Kaminski goodbye.

  He approached the body as if he were trying not to alert it, walking circuitously around the other autopsy tables. Dr Wojniakowski was bent over it, a bony, angular figure in a long white coat, his white hair sticking up in a cotton-candy frizz. He was carefully scraping debris from underneath the headless cadaver’s fingernails and dropping the debris into little numbered polythene bags. As usual, he was smoking Extra Mocne, a particularly pungent brand of untipped cigarettes.

  ‘That you, Rej?’ he asked, without turning around.

  ‘That’s right, Teofil. How’s it going?’

  ‘Slow but sure. It looks like the other six, superficially, but don’t quote me on that.’

  ‘Head cut off with a cleaver?’

  ‘All the signs of it. I haven’t tested the skin for steel fragments yet. Lots of bruising, though. This one put up quite a fight. He may even have managed to snag some fibres from his assailant’s clothing. That’s the best we’ve had so far.’

  Rej approached the end of the autopsy table and couldn’t help looking into the corpse’s neck. His
head had been taken off at a sharp angle, so that the flesh on the left-hand side went almost up to ear level, while the right-hand side had been cut right down to the collar bone. It was horribly interesting to see all the parts of his larynx and his trachea, a thick collection of tubes and pipes, reds and darker reds and gruesome beige colours. Unconsciously, Rej placed his own hand over his Adam’s apple.

  ‘There’s a lot of sewage contamination, of course,’ said Dr Wojniakowski, looking up through clouds of smoke. He had an enormous pitted nose but a pasty, triangular face that seemed to be much too small for it, and a straggly white beard that grew right out of his undervest, like a bramble bush in a fairy tale. ‘Judging from the condition of his clothes, I’d say that he’d been standing almost up to his waist in it.’

  ‘But in that part of the sewer the water was only six or seven centimetres deep.’

  ‘So perhaps you can conjecture that he had visited other parts of the sewer, where the waste matter was much deeper.’

  ‘Well...’ said Rej, ‘our witness did say that Kaminski had gone down into the pipe to look for a child. We found him by the opening, but I suppose he could have wandered around anywhere. We searched the sewers but we didn’t find anything.’ He coughed. ‘Apart from what you’d expect to find in a sewer.’

  Dr Wojniakowski stood back from the table and peeled off his plastic gloves with a theatrical snap. ‘I suppose the only difference between this killing and the previous six is that the assailant took three strokes to cut off his head instead of one.’

  ‘Maybe the killer – I don’t know – maybe he hesitated.’

  ‘Oh, no. Each of these three strokes was equally powerful. Look... you can see how the first penetrated through to the larynx, and the second cut through the spinal column, and the third finished the job off by taking the head clear off. In my opinion, the only reason it took three strokes instead of one is because of the limited amount of space in the sewer pipe. He was killed inside the sewer rather than outside and then being dropped into it. The assailant couldn’t swing his arm back far enough.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Rej.

  ‘I’ll let you have a fibre analysis as soon as I can,’ said Dr Wojniakowski. ‘The DNA’s going to take longer. Meanwhile, there is one oddity you could be thinking about.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘From the lacerations on Kaminski’s hands and inner wrists, and the amount of builder’s debris under his fingernails, it looks as if he was desperately trying to climb out of the sewer pipe.’

  ‘You mean – ?’

  ‘I mean the probability is that his assailant didn’t follow him into the pipe. His assailant was down there already.’

  Rej looked at him hard, expecting him to come to some further conclusion. But Dr Wojniakowski simply made a dismissive face, and lit another Extra Mocne from the glowing butt of the first.

  *

  Rej drove back to the demolition site. It was still cordoned off, although there was only a handful of onlookers. However, a television crew had just arrived, and as Rej made his way to the door a determined young woman bustled up to him, carrying a clipboard.

  ‘Komisarz Rej! Anna Pronaszka, from Panorama, TVP 2. Can we ask you some questions?’

  ‘Not at the moment, Ms Pronaszka. I’m a little busy.’

  ‘We just want to know if the murder of Jan Kaminski is connected with the other six headless murders.’

  Rej sighed. ‘There’s no conclusive evidence that any of the six other headless murders were connected with each other, let alone with this one.’

  ‘Do you have any new leads, komisarz?’

  ‘I have a new body, and every new body provides valuable new evidence.’

  ‘How many bodies do you need before you have enough evidence to catch the Executioner and lock him up?’

  ‘No further comments,’ said Rej and began to walk away.

  ‘Wouldn’t you say that the Executioner is beginning to make you look like clowns, komisarz?’

  Rej stopped, and turned around. His face was transfigured. He walked the three or four paces back, and then he said, ‘The police are doing everything they conceivably can to find a violent and determined murderer. Yes, it’s a difficult case. Like I said, it may even be seven totally separate and unconnected cases. But we’re using all of our resources to find who committed these crimes and eventually we will. The only clowns I see around here are those people who try to turn a series of particularly horrible killings into a public circus.’

  Anna Pronaszka gave him a sweet but glacial smile. ‘We’d still like to know why you can’t catch him.’

  Rej took a deep breath to control himself. Less than seven years ago nobody could have spoken to him like that. ‘You want to know why, Ms Pronaszka? Because nobody has ever seen him; and nobody has the slightest idea who he could be: and he leaves almost no physical evidence. Also, he seems to kill people at random, with no discernible motive whatsoever.’

  ‘What about Jan Kaminski? He was investigating Senate Hotels, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He made a couple of critical remarks about the Senate Belgrade on his radio show, that’s all.’

  ‘We heard that he was looking into their finances, too.’

  ‘Who did you hear that from?’

  ‘That’s privileged, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What?’ Rej barked at Anna Pronaszka with such fury that she took an involuntary step back. ‘There are seven people dead and you have the brass neck to quote privilege at me?’

  At that moment, Rej’s deputy, Jerzy Matejko, came out of the demolition site. He was a tall young man with protruding ears and a gangly, marionette-like way of walking, which was emphasized by his cheap, flappy brown suits. In spite of his physical awkwardness, however, he was one of the cleverest young detectives in the homicide squad.

  ‘Komisarz! Can I – ah?’

  Rej gave Anna Pronaszka one last glare, and followed Matejko through the partition onto the site. The site was crowded with idle demolition workers, uniformed police and sewage workers in waterproof overalls and high boots. Everybody was smoking and drinking and laughing and nobody seemed to be doing any work.

  ‘What the hell’s this?’ Rej demanded. ‘A garden party?’

  ‘We’ve found something,’ Matejko told him, soothingly. He took him by the arm and led him across to the excavated basements. ‘By the way, I’d be careful what you say to the media, sir, Nadkomisarz Dembek has been getting a lot of flak from the inspektor about these murders. There was a story on CNN this morning, and he’s spitting nails.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They’re calling them “The Pole Axe Murders”.’

  Rej shook his head. ‘These TV people can make a joke out of anything, can’t they?’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, I don’t think they’re going to make much of a joke out of that remark you just made about new bodies and new evidence.’

  ‘So what? It’s true. I just went to see Wojniakowski. He’s managed to dig some clothing fibres out of Kaminski’s fingernails.’

  ‘Well, maybe he can make something of this, too.’

  Six or seven aluminium ladders had been propped up against the walls of the basement, and Rej and Matejko climbed down. They were met by two young uniformed officers and a balding forensic investigator with staggeringly deep bags under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for three years.

  ‘What have we got, then?’ asked Rej.

  One of the young officers held up a large plastic evidence bag. Inside it was a small greasy-grey doll, its smile almost obliterated. Rej took it, and turned it over and over.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ he asked. ‘I thought we’d searched these sewers already.’

  ‘It was underwater, komisarz, trapped against a grating, about seventy-five metres north of here. We missed it the first time, that’s all. Anybody could’ve.’

  ‘Well... it may not mean anything,’ said Rej. ‘But Kaminski was looking for a child, or so t
hat Marek lad said. Take it over to Oczki Street and have it tested.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Matejko. He nodded to the second officer, who produced another bag, this one filled with a lump of wet, greyish fabric, with a single metal button on it.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Rej, holding it out. Even in a plastic bag, it felt disgustingly cold and squishy.

  ‘That we found fifteen metres south of the hole, in the other direction. Again, it was very easy to overlook. It’s a piece of old velvet by the look of it.’

  The baggy-eyed forensic investigator stepped forward. ‘It looks as if it was torn, forcibly.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Rej. ‘Part of a coat, or what?’

  ‘I can’t tell. Not until we look at it properly.’

  ‘All right,’ said Rej. ‘Is that everything?’

  ‘I wish we had more,’ said Matejko.

  Rej gripped his shoulder. ‘You look tired, Jerzy. That new baby of yours isn’t keeping you awake?’

  ‘Of course she is. That’s what babies do for a living.’

  ‘How’s Helena coping?’

  ‘Helena’s fine. She can’t wait to get back to work.’

  ‘What’s the matter? We’re not paying you enough?’

  ‘Some overtime would help.’

  ‘Okay then, finish up here, and then go round to Radio Syrena. That ginger-haired bitch from TVP 2 said that Kaminski was working on some kind of investigation into Senate Hotels, and maybe Vistula Kredytowy, too. See if he left any research material, any notes. You two!’ he snapped at the uniforms. ‘What the hell are you doing? You should be round at Oczki Street by now!’

  The two officers clambered up the aluminium ladders as if their trousers were on fire. Rej watched them go, and then he lit a cigarette and tiredly pushed his hand through his hair.

  ‘There’s no obvious logic to this, Matejko. The media are all trying to make out that it’s some kind of contract killing. But who kills a mailman and an ear-nose-and-throat doctor and a piano student and a girl who cuts kielbasa at a neighbourhood food store?’