The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  She began by ringing Reskimer. He was at a conference in Manchester, she was told, and would be back next week. She made a note in her diary to phone him as soon as he was back. “Reskimer”, she wrote, “eye-buttons”.

  The impulse to tell Stevens was strong. On her way back from the quintet that evening she dropped the violin-playing art teacher at her home and found herself at the end of a street which she suddenly recognized as his. She drew up outside his house, hesitating, glancing at her watch. There were lights on inside; a little Peugeot car was parked in front of the garage. She rang the bell and found herself looking at a small woman, with a spray of orange hair above a pale, much-creased face dominated by a pair of brilliant blue eyes.

  “Is Mr Stevens in?” she asked, so startled by this apparition that she forgot his official title.

  “No, not at the moment.”

  She was too old to be his wife; no other relationship suggested itself immediately. She was as interested in Zita as the latter was in her, gazing at her with a frankness of examination that was almost childlike.

  “Ah.” Zita was turning away indecisively.

  “… But he won’t be long. I’ve been expecting him back for the last hour or more.” She spoke with a precision that suggested that she was not English. “Would you like to come in and wait for him?”

  Zita hesitated again. “I can’t really stay long and it isn’t anything important. I can ring him sometime.”

  “It was important enough for you to stop in the first place. Come in for a few minutes. If he’s not back immediately you can try again.”

  Zita stepped inside. “I’m Zita Daunsey,” she said.

  The woman spoke over her shoulder as she led the way to the living room. “And I’m Barbara Przedziecka.” She turned to indicate a seat to her guest. “His mother.”

  Zita looked rather than spoke her enquiry.

  “He was Przedziecki when he was born, but he changed his name. Bruno Szczepan Przedziecki: it was not just Conrad who found the inability of Anglo-Saxons to pronounce foreign names too maddening to be borne. Now, let me get you a drink. No? Well, I’m not going to wait any longer; I shall have something.”

  She poured herself some whisky and disappeared into the kitchen for water and ice. While she was out of the room, Zita got up quickly and bent over the photographs she had seen last time she was here. She was holding the picture of the officer in jodhpurs and forage cap, when Mrs Przedziecka returned.

  “You’ve spotted my husband,” she said, extending her hand for Zita to pass her the little silver frame. She looked into it dispassionately. “Odd to think he has been dead for more than fifty years now. I was only married to him for two years, but I still go around talking about my husband. He disappeared in 1939 and I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. You can see, he was in the Polish Army: the cavalry. It’s quite true they still had their horses and their sabres in 1939. But my husband knew that the Germans would fight with aircraft and bombs and he sent me to England in August 1939, with Bruno. We got one of the last flights out of Warsaw. No sooner had I arrived here than war broke out and I never heard a word from him again.” She sipped her whisky thoughtfully. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You’ve probably heard it all from Bruno. God knows, it’s obsessed him all his life, totally dominated his existence, ruined his marriage. And he was a baby at the time and didn’t know what was going on. I’ve managed to forget it, why can’t he?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Zita said. “He’s never mentioned his father.” She did not explain that they had never met in circumstances that made such confidences likely. “Do tell me. What obsesses him? The war?”

  “No, not the war, his father, or rather his father’s disappearance. A very bad thing, you know, for a boy not to have a father. I should have married again. But, well, that’s easier said than done, especially if you’re poor, don’t speak English well and have a child. Are you married?”

  “I was.”

  “Children?”

  “One son.”

  “Just like me. Single parents they call us now. My advice is: find a man and marry him as soon as you can. Much better for your boy.” She sipped her whisky, thinking through the implications of her own advice. “And for you too. But don’t choose Bruno, for heaven’s sake.” Zita was feeling uncomfortable with Mrs Przedziecka’s assumptions about her relations with Stevens. “What happened to your husband?” she asked, to move the conversation back to the safer past.

  “About three and a half years after the outbreak of war, it was in the winter of 1943, the Germans discovered a mass grave in the forest at Katyn in what had been Poland. And then we knew what had happened to him.”

  “How awful.”

  “You know about Katyn? It means something to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know that the Russians split our country with the Nazis in 1939. My husband’s corps was in the Russian zone. He was captured and put in a prisoner of war camp in eastern Poland. He and everybody else there was taken out into the forest and murdered. Their greatcoats were tied over their heads and their arms twisted up to their shoulder blades and they were shot at the back of the skull. Then huge pits were dug and they were thrown in face-down, layer upon layer.”

  When you are faced with authentic accounts of horrors, even when they are told in the unemotional tone used by Mrs Przedziecka, there is nothing that you can say, Zita thought, that is not trivial in the face of enormity.

  “And for years the Russians tried to pretend that the Germans did it.”

  Mrs Przedziecka put the photograph face-down on a little table beside her. “Barbarians, the Russians.”

  “It’s been accepted now, I think, hasn’t it? that it was done by Stalin.”

  “Yes. They fought for ages, the Poles in exile, to get the truth accepted. Of course, the Poles in Poland knew very well, but they weren’t allowed to say. It’s odd.” Her voice was reflective, as it had been throughout her account. “I could never get worked up about it. I mean, about getting other people to acknowledge the truth. In some ways I was lucky in knowing, quite quickly, what had happened to him. And we knew who had done it. After the war the question went away for a time, but the Poles never forgot. He was one of the worst, Bruno, I mean. Not that he could remember because he was only a baby when it happened, and he never knew his father. But sometime in his teens, it started to become an obsession. He wrote a book about it, you know, proving that it was the Russians who did it.”

  “But he still changed his name?”

  “That was just practical. You try spelling Przedziecki every time you make an appointment. Later it was quite convenient for him. A book written by Bruno Stevens looks less partisan than one written by Bruno Przedziecki.”

  “So he is a man with his ambition fulfilled?”

  “Yes, you could say so. And not just over Katyn. The collapse of communism has been a wonderful time for him: the Russians themselves are allowed to speak and now we know that the old estimates of deaths from the famine in the Ukraine and the purges of the 1930s are far too low. Everybody knows what happened in the gulags. In the old days no one would believe Bruno’s research. He was thought to be a bit of a madman with a bee in his bonnet about Russians. And he was, of course. The more he discovered about them, the more he interviewed emigres who knew about the terror and torture, the more he hated them.”

  Zita looked at her watch. “I really think I shall have to get back. I have a baby-sitter waiting.”

  Mrs Przedziecka put down her glass. “You never know when he’s going to come in. I shan’t wait around myself much longer. I try to look after him a bit, fill his fridge, put out flowers, but I doubt if he notices. He needs a wife, yet he drove his last one mad. She couldn’t stand it, living with the horrors of the past, so she left him.”

  25

  Zita drove quickly home, her mind turning over the revelations of Stevens’ garrulous mother. When she had said goodb
ye to Lynne, she went to see what could be made out of the contents of her fridge. She was ravenous. Ignoring Tom’s purees and yoghurts and Lynne’s hamburgers and pies, she found a coil of black pudding. She took a couple of apples from the fruit bowl, peeled them and put them with some butter in a pan. She had just finished the preparations and was about to assemble the sausage and the apples on her plate, with some salad and cheese in front of her as the final stages of her meal, when the door bell rang. Frowning with irritation, she turned off the gas and went to the door. She could see a masculine shape which revealed itself as Stevens’.

  He blundered in without waiting for her invitation or explaining why he was there. She saw that he was looking distracted, barely aware of where he was. He began taking off his mackintosh. Why do policemen wear mackintoshes, Zita thought, even when it isn’t raining?

  “You’re back,” he said. “I called earlier, but you were out and your girl didn’t know when you’d get in.”

  “It’s my quintet evening.” They looked at one another for a moment. “You’d better come and join me. I know you haven’t had anything to eat yet. I called on you on my way home.”

  He was not taking in what she was saying, entirely absorbed in processing something else. He made none of the usual disclaiming sounds at her offer of food, sitting down, automatically, waiting to be served. Zita resignedly divided what there was in two. He began to eat immediately.

  “Why did you call on me?”

  “I wanted to tell you something about the skeleton. I met your mother and she invited me in to wait for a bit. That’s why I wasn’t here. And you? Why did you call? Not just on the off chance of some black pudding and apple?”

  “What? Oh, no.” He looked at his fork as if he were only now aware of what it was he was eating. “Why did I come in the first place? I can’t remember; there was something… But you weren’t in, so I went next door.”

  “To see Jean? Had you made an appointment?”

  “No. It was on the spur of the moment. Since I was here and she was just there, I went round.” There was a long pause. He pushed away the plate. Zita saw, to her annoyance, that he had left at least half of what she had given him. “She did it. She as good as said she did it. But I’ll never be able to prove it.”

  “Did it? Did what? What are you talking about?”

  “She killed the child, Peter Gilling, or whoever it is. She said so, I heard her say so.”

  “You’re wrong. She could not have said any such thing because it is not true. She could not kill a child. It is impossible.”

  “I heard her.”

  “This is mad. You heard her? You mean you asked her and she admitted it?”

  He was so adamant that Zita suddenly thought she was wrong. She had been wrong all the time, in her instinct and in her gradual building up of proof. The skeleton was Peter Gilling and Yevgenia had killed him. It was possible for her to have killed a child. It was possible to kill a child. Tom lay like a corpse under his sheet and she was free. Why had she fought so hard to insist that Yevgenia could not have killed those children, Eddie Cresacre, Peter Gilling, when she had no proof, not even a simple denial? Now she came to think of it, she had never asked Yevgenia directly, how could she? And Yevgenia had never rejected Stevens’ unspoken accusation. She had worked on an instinctive belief in a person, and she had been wrong.

  “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  “So what was it like? What do you mean?”

  “I walked up the path to her door and I knocked and waited. There was no reply, so I walked round the side of the house into the garden at the back.”

  “You were snooping,” Zita said. “I don’t believe you ever knocked.”

  He didn’t contradict her. “I came round into the garden and everything was quiet, then I saw that one of the sliding doors into the house was open. I was just going towards it, to see if she was there, when I heard a voice. She was talking. At first, I thought she was with someone, they were chatting together, so, naturally, I stopped to see what I would be interrupting.”

  “Naturally,” Zita repeated. He did not observe, or chose to ignore, the irony of her tone.

  “The voice went on and on. I kept waiting for a reply. Then I went closer, because I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She was talking to herself, thinking aloud, or something. I suppose it’s old age.”

  He had not originally intended to spy, simply to look around at the Russian woman’s new place, just to stand at the gate and think of her inside. The blankness of the house had tempted him, even though he knew she was unlikely to be out. The garden was green yet somehow barren, as though grass were grown to inhibit other plants, to deny them their life and to cover over with its sharp green fur all the shards of the past hidden below. He moved quietly, easily, over this suppressing carpet, not approaching the house like a normal visitor, skirting it, to come at it from behind. The murmur of a voice from within the house had made him hesitate, then drawn him on. Nothing he could say to Zita could convey the effect of that dry, elderly voice. It was rather low, rasping, the vocal cords frayed by a lifetime’s nicotine.

  “What did she say?” Zita was hostile.

  “She said… she said that she held the child against her. It’s funny; I can’t give you her exact words, they’ve gone already, but as she spoke I could see what she was doing. She pressed the child to her. She’d come up behind him, grabbed him, then she put her hand over his mouth and held it there while he struggled and tried to cry out and when the movement stopped she let him go. Then she stopped. She wasn’t talking all the time, you see. There were long pauses. Then she said that – about the child. And she began to laugh. Or perhaps she was crying. Great, hacking gasps. She sounded mad.”

  Zita waited, but he was now reabsorbed in his thoughts. She got up abruptly and began to pile the plates with a deliberate, domestic clashing of china.

  “This is nonsense,” she said, loudly. “This is complete fantasy. She didn’t say all this. You’re making it up. You simply want something to be so and now you have reached the stage of fabricating evidence.” He did not protest, sitting quietly under her accusations. “You aren’t the sort of man that beats up witnesses; you create the evidence you need in your own head. It’s sick. You’re sick, obsessed.”

  “And you, you won’t believe when you’re told the truth because your mind is closed. You think no woman could kill a child, because she’s a woman, so you won’t hear of anything that suggests that she killed a child.”

  “A closed mind. Mine is a closed mind.” Zita heard her own voice rise almost to a shriek.

  “I’m telling you what I heard less than an hour ago and you won’t believe me because your mind is fixed.” He was shouting.

  “Will you keep your voice down. My son is asleep.” She was hissing now. All pretence of civilized behaviour had broken down. “You couldn’t have heard it because it didn’t happen.” She was making coffee. The familiar actions helped to contain her rage. She measured coffee into the cafetiere, noticing it was not decaffeinated. Who cared, she would not sleep anyway. “What child are we talking about anyway? We know it wasn’t Eddie Cresacre. And the child found in the garden was not suffocated. It was hit on the back of the head. Or are you going to tell me that you now remember that she said that after suffocating him she threw him face-down on the ground and hit him?”

  If at that moment she had been more prepared to be just, she would have realized that his expression as she spoke was evidence of his truthfulness, at least as he saw or heard the truth. He was trying to fit the new material with what he already had. He had been so convinced by what he had heard that he had failed to put it alongside other information about the dead child. As it was, filled with rage, she could only see his puzzlement as a sign of her victory.

  “No,” he said slowly, “it’s not Eddie Cresacre. That is, not the child in the garden. It could have been Eddie Cresacre she was talking about, who was suffocated.”

  “It cou
ld have been, it could have been. What does that mean? It wasn’t. Eddie Cresacre, poor child, has gone. We’re not dealing with him; he’s out of it. The child in the garden.” She stopped for a moment. “I think I know who he was and how he got there.”

  “Oh yes? You’ve been doing your own detective work, have you, snooping too?”

  Zita had intended earlier that evening to share with him her hypothesis about the skeleton. She had been expecting to meet the amenable Stevens of recent days. This implacable Stevens enraged her. She looked at her feet. She was wearing her Turkish mules with the turned-up toes. “When I have proof, I’ll tell you.”

  “So you haven’t any evidence, you admit it. At least I have proof now. I know what I heard and that’s good enough for me, the evidence of my own ears, even if it can’t be used. You’re as prejudiced as you say I am. More so. You won’t allow me what I heard and yet you’re going to find your own proof, make it, make it up.”

  “Of course I’m not.” Zita’s voice was rising again and she dropped it abruptly on the last word. Tom, waking to hear raised voices, a man shouting, would be terrified.

  “Yes, you are. You’ve taken up a fixed position and everything you discover is going to be moulded to fit. You’ve discounted everything I’ve said or suggested all along, first on the grounds that policemen are all thick, right-wing thugs without the education or the cultivation of a person like you. Secondly, on the grounds that I’m a man. All men are stupid and violent and terrorize women. In every one of our dealings, everything you have said and done has shown it. You can’t deny it.”

  “What is this? Now, we’re into an examination of all those bits of my personality which don’t please you. Who are you to say what I do and don’t think? Talk about terrorizing women. This is a perfect example of male crassness and arrogance.”

  Zita’s fury was fuelled by the accuracy of Stevens’ perceptions. She recognized their justice at the same time that she denied them. She did not think that he was thick or imperceptive; she had early on observed the shrewdness of his judgements. But she did think he was authoritarian, illiberal, ungenerous, someone whose range of references were not the same as hers.