Where the bloody hell had he got that particular bit of information from, Paniatowski wondered.
And she was not alone in wondering. All the other journalists in the room were looking directly at Traynor now, and the atmosphere was crackling with feelings of envy and resentment.
‘Would you care to make any comment on that, Chief Inspector?’ Traynor asked.
‘No, I would not,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘Next question,’ she continued briskly, scanning the room for more hands.
But there were no more hands, because the pack had clearly decided that they were likely to learn more from listening to Mike Traynor’s questions than from asking any of their own.
‘Isn’t it true that as a result of the evidence you’ve already gathered, there is one man who clearly stands out as a prime suspect?’ Traynor pressed on.
‘I have no idea what basis you have for asking that question,’ Paniatowski replied, as she felt her stomach turn over.
‘In fact, wouldn’t it be fair to say that any other chief inspector on the Force would already have arrested him – and the reason you haven’t done the same is because he’s one of your own people?’
‘My own people?’ Paniatowski repeated. ‘I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’
But she did. She bloody did!
‘I thought I’d already spelled that out more than clearly enough,’ Traynor said, parodying Paniatowski’s earlier comment. ‘But if it will help you to fully grasp what I’m saying, then I’m perfectly willing to dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s for you.’
There was no easy way of getting out of this situation, Paniatowski thought. No easy way at all.
But she was damned if she was going to leave the podium and go scurrying away with her tail between her legs.
Her best course of action, she decided – the only course she was even prepared to contemplate – was to take whatever Traynor threw at her squarely on the chin.
‘Let’s hear what you have to say, Mr Traynor,’ she invited. ‘And let’s have it in plain speech, shall we, without any of your usual nasty little innuendos or snide suggestions?’
Traynor smirked. ‘Certainly, Chief Inspector. Always glad to oblige. In plain speech, then, isn’t it true that this prime suspect would have been in custody long ago, if it hadn’t been for the fact that you’re both Poles?’
Paniatowski’s eyes filled with an angry red mist. How could the bastard suggest that? How dare he suggest that?
Get your temper under control! she thought savagely. Get a bloody grip on yourself, Monika!
But she knew she was fighting a losing battle.
She turned towards the uniformed constable who was standing on duty by the door.
‘I want that man ejected from the briefing!’ she said, knowing – even as she spoke – that she was making a big mistake, yet unable to prevent herself from doing it. ‘I want him ejected right now!’
‘Hang about – you can’t do that!’ Traynor protested. ‘I’m a reporter. I’ve got the right to ask any questions I want to, and I refuse to be thrown out just because you don’t like some of those questions I do ask.’
The constable had drawn level with Traynor, and, before taking any further action, looked up at Paniatowski to see if she’d changed her mind.
How could she change her mind, she asked herself. If she changed her mind now, she’d look an even bigger fool than she was looking already.
She nodded, and the constable bent down and took hold of Traynor’s arm.
For a second or two, it looked to Paniatowski as if the journalist was thinking of making his body go limp, like the Vietnam peace protestors she’d recently seen on television. But that was not really Traynor’s style at all. Besides, he probably thought that making a dignified exit – or at least, as dignified an exit as someone like him could make – would be much more impressive.
Traynor rose to his feet, and allowed the constable to guide him to the door, but once there he took the officer by surprise by suddenly swivelling round and calling out, ‘What’s the matter, Chief Inspector Paniatowski? Don’t you believe in the freedom of the press?’
The constable re-established his grip – slightly more firmly this time – and bundled Traynor out through the door.
‘As a matter of fact, I do believe in the freedom of the press,’ Paniatowski told the remaining journalists. ‘I believe in it passionately. But it’s a freedom which has to be used responsibly, for public information rather than for personal glory.’ She paused for a second. ‘I’ll take more questions now.’
But no further hands were raised. The other hacks might not like Mike Traynor – in fact, they’d made it quite plain, only minutes earlier, that they didn’t – but there were times when it was necessary to show solidarity, even with an odious man like him.
And this was one of them.
TWENTY
Paniatowski sat alone in her office, a cigarette burning down in one hand and the morning’s reports from Beresford’s team – unread – on the desk in front of her. It was more than an hour since the press conference had ended, but the pounding in her head – which had begun when Traynor had started to move in for the kill – still refused to go away.
A uniformed WPC appeared in the open doorway, stood there uncertainly for a moment and then coughed.
Paniatowski looked up, straight into the WPC’s eyes, and was almost certain she saw pity in them.
So it had come to this! A female constable – an officer at the very bottom of the ladder that she herself had worked so very hard to climb – was feeling sorry for her.
‘Yes, what is it, Margaret?’ she asked wearily.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but there’s a feller here who says he has to see you.’
‘And does this feller have a name?’ Paniatowski snapped.
‘Yes, ma’am, but—’
‘I’m sorry, Margaret, there was no call for me to speak you like that,’ Paniatowski said contritely.
‘It’s all right, ma’am. I know you’ve been under a lot of strain.’
Pity again!
‘What is his name?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘It’s something Polish, ma’am. It’s very complicated. I tried my best to remember it, but . . .’
‘Is it Szymborska?’ Paniatowski suggested.
‘That’s it,’ the WPC agreed, with some relief.
‘You’d better show him in, then,’ Paniatowski said heavily.
Paniatowski was shocked at Stan Szymborska’s appearance. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since she’d last seen him in the bakery, but in that short time he seemed to have aged at least ten years.
‘Do you want me to stay, ma’am?’ the WPC asked.
‘No, thank you, Margaret, that won’t be necessary.’ Paniatowski turned towards her visitor. ‘Do please take a seat, Mr Szymborska.’
Szymborska lowered himself carefully into the chair, like an old man who was afraid that he might slip and hurt himself.
‘Can I get you a hot drink, Mr Szymborska?’ Paniatowski asked, concerned. ‘A cup of tea? Or perhaps coffee?’
‘No thank you.’
‘Or, if you would prefer it, I have a bottle of good Polish vodka in the drawer.’
Stan Szymborska shook his head ‘At this particular moment, I do not think vodka would be a good idea for either of us,’ he said.
The bloody nerve of the man! Paniatowski thought.
‘If there’s one thing I really don’t appreciate,’ she said, ‘it’s being told when a drink would – or would not – be a good idea for me.’
Stan Szymborska shrugged, almost imperceptibly. ‘Then by all means pour yourself a drink if you want to, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘But I will not be joining you.’
She didn’t want to drink alone, she thought.
And anyway, he was right. In her current mental state, it wouldn’t be a good idea.
‘Shall we get straight to the point of
this meeting, Mr Szymborska?’ she asked crisply.
A thin ironic smile crossed Szymborska’s lips. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘In fact, I have been waiting to get straight to the point for quite some time.’
This was her office, and she was a senior police officer, Paniatowski thought. So why did it feel as if Stan Szymborska was in charge?
‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
‘I saw your press conference on the television,’ Szymborska said, ‘and it would seem from what I saw that I am your number-one suspect.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Paniatowski pointed out.
‘No, you didn’t,’ Szymborska agreed. ‘But the fact that you didn’t say it doesn’t mean you aren’t thinking it. Is that what you think?’
‘We naturally look very closely at the husbands of murder victims, especially when they don’t have an alibi for the time at which the murder was committed,’ Paniatowski said cautiously.
‘Of course you do,’ Szymborska agreed. ‘You asked me why I am here. I am here to tell you that I would never have hurt my wife. I am here to tell you that I loved her.’
‘You’d be surprised how many murderers claim to have loved their victims,’ Paniatowski said.
‘I would not be surprised at all, but that does not mean that they are not liars,’ Szymborska countered. ‘When you love someone – truly love them – you would never harm them, whatever they did to you. You would sacrifice your own life for them – even if you knew, deep down, that they were not worthy of such a sacrifice. You would do it not because you wanted to, or because felt you should, but simply because you had no choice in the matter.’
‘And would you have sacrificed yourself for your wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whatever she’d done to you? However much she’d humiliated you, and made a public laughing stock of you?’
‘Yes.’
I half-believe him, Paniatowski thought.
She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t help herself.
‘When did you first fall in love with Linda?’ she asked.
Stan shrugged again, as if he could see no point to the question.
‘Why should that matter?’
‘It matters because I’m trying to build up a picture of your relationship in my mind.’
‘For what reason? Because you think that will make it much easier for you to pin the murder on me?’
‘Because I think it will help me to discover the truth.’
Szymborska nodded. ‘All right. I will believe you, though I can think of no reason why I should.’
‘Thank you,’ Paniatowski said, before she could stop herself.
‘When did I fall in love with Linda?’ Stan Szymborska mused. ‘It must have been ten years ago, when the company I owned first started making deliveries for her father’s bakery.’
‘Jenny says you didn’t fall in love with Linda until after her father’s death,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘She says you had too much respect for Seth Brunskill to allow yourself to fall in love.’
‘Ah, poor Jenny. She would say that,’ Szymborska replied.
‘But she’s lying, is she?’
‘No, she is not lying – she simply does not know the truth. She worshipped her father, and so she assumed that everyone else around him did, too. Linda suffered from the same delusion, but she’s better now . . . she . . . she was better.’ A sad smile came to Szymborska’s face. ‘You should have seen Linda when I first met. She was like a beautiful, delicate bird – but with a broken wing.’
‘I take it from what you’ve just said that you didn’t share the daughters’ admiration for their father.’
‘He was a swine of a man. I have known prison-camp guards with more humanity.’
‘And yet you went into business with him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘To spare my Linda from more suffering.’
‘Would you care to explain that?’
‘The business was failing, but that could not be Seth’s fault,’ Szymborska said. ‘Nothing was ever his fault. So the blame had to rest with the girls, and every day, in every way he could think of – and believe me, he could think of many ways – he punished them for it.’
‘I still don’t see why you invested in the bakery,’ Paniatowski confessed. ‘You already had a successful business of your own. Couldn’t you have simply told Linda how you felt, and asked her to marry you, then and there?’
‘I could have done, but she wouldn’t have listened.’ Szymborska hesitated for a second. ‘What do you know about prisoner-of-war-camp punishment cells?’ he continued.
‘Almost nothing at all,’ Paniatowski admitted.
‘When I was in the camp, there was a punishment cell which the Nazis kept exclusively for the Poles, who they regarded as less than human,’ Szymborska told her. ‘In fact, it was not really a cell at all – it was a metal box, out in the yard. I was sentenced to a week in it, once. It was the longest week of my life. There was no light in there, and no room to move. For the first day or so, I tried to hold on to something of the world I had left behind me. But by the third day, the box had become my world – the only world that seemed to have ever mattered.’
‘Go on,’ Paniatowski said.
‘The cramps began on the first day, but the fourth day they had become truly agonizing. So I twisted and turned as much as I could, and sometimes, just once in a while, I managed to ease them.’
‘It must have been terrible,’ Paniatowski said.
‘You are completely missing the point,’ Szymborska told her bluntly. ‘Such terms as “terrible” meant nothing inside the box. It was not terrible at all – it was just the way that things were, and you lived with it because there was nothing else you could do.’
‘I understand.’
‘I am not sure that you do – yet!’ Szymborska continued. ‘It was an offence to talk to the man in the box, and anyone caught doing it was likely to be placed in the box himself. Yet my comrades took the risk, and whenever they could, they whispered a few words of encouragement to me.’
‘But those words meant nothing to you?’ Paniatowski asked.
Szymborska smiled sadly. ‘Now you are starting to understand. As it happens, I didn’t even hear those brave words – not because any physical barrier prevented it, but because of what was going on in my head. But even if I had heard, they would have made no sense to me.’
‘You say they kept you in there a week?’
‘A week. It doesn’t sound too long, does it? But when the Nazis finally let me out, the other world into which they released me seemed all wrong. It was too bright. There was too much noise – too much happening. I wanted to go back into my box, where I understood the rules. But slowly, this feeling went away. Slowly, I came to terms with the real world again. And later, when other comrades had taken my place in the box, I would do as they had done, and risk the whispered words – even though I knew it would be pointless.’
How heroic, Paniatowski thought. How admirable!
And then she remembered that she was talking to the man who – whatever he had, or had not, done in the past – was now the chief suspect in a truly horrific murder case.
‘I suppose that your wartime experiences are all very interesting in their own way,’ she told him, almost having to force the words out of her mouth, ‘but I don’t see what they have to do with the matter we were discussing.’
‘Don’t you?’ Szymborska asked, as if he knew that he had touched her – as if he knew that she was lying.
She felt a wave of shame sweep over her, but fought it back.
The man across the desk from her had, in all probability, cut off the hands of his wife and her lover, she told herself.
Yield no ground to him!
Give him no breaks!
‘Perhaps you could explain to me why you think it’s so relevant,’ she suggested.
‘Imagine if, instead of being placed in the box once you had grown up
, you were born into it,’ Szymborska said. ‘Imagine if you had never known anything else. That was the situation that Linda and her sister were in – placed in the box by their father at birth, and never allowed to see the outside. Of course I could have asked her to marry me – whispered the words through the wall of the box – but she would not have heard them. And even if she had heard them, they would have made no sense to her. So I bought into the business, and I waited until she could be liberated from the box.’
‘By which you mean you waited until her father died?’
‘Yes, that is what I mean. I led her gently into the sunlight, using my hand to shield her eyes from the brightness. And then I waited again, as she grew accustomed to this new world. And only when she was finally ready – only when she had lost all desire to return to the box – did I ask her to marry me.’
‘What about her sister Jenny?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘How did she escape from the box?’
‘She hasn’t escaped,’ Szymborska said. ‘And I don’t think she ever will.’
When Paniatowski entered George Baxter’s office, the chief constable was at his desk, with a pile of balance sheets stacked up in front of him.
‘I’d have asked you to come and see me sooner, Monika,’ he said, ‘but for the last three hours I’ve been tied up in a finance meeting, so I’ve only just had a chance to review the video recording of your press conference.’
‘Is that right, sir?’ Paniatowski asked, noncommittally.
Baxter stood up and walked around his desk.
‘Shall we sit down?’ he said, gesturing at the two comfortable chairs at the other end of the office.
‘If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d rather—’
‘It wasn’t a request,’ Baxter interrupted her.
Once they were seated, facing each other across the coffee table, Baxter said, ‘You are aware the press conference wasn’t good, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Paniatowski agreed, dully. ‘I am aware of that.’
‘In fact – and I have to be totally honest with you about it – you completely lost it in there, Monika. You were doing very well at the start – and then you completely lost it.’
The Dead Hand of History Page 17