They take a step towards the chairs.

Jarczyk: No! I beg you, no! You can't leave me alone with him! You mustn't go. Please don't go, don't leave me alone. Please, please, please.

Kaim turns to face her.

Kaim: Don't be angry, Mum. We have to do it for Dad.

Jarczyk faints. Clearly alarmed, Rudzki runs up to her and kneels down.

Rudzki (to the others): OK, that's all for today, we'll finish this tomorrow morning. It's a bad thing we're stopping, but there's no alternative. Please go to your rooms, please don't talk or read any books. We'll meet up at breakfast tomorrow at nine.

Kwiatkowska and Kaim stare at each other as if shaken out of a trance. They let go of each other's hand and leave the frame. Rudzki lays Jarczyk on her side and goes up to the camera. The entire time Telak is on his knees in the background, staring into s.p.a.ce.

The screen went fuzzy. The therapist and the prosecutor sat side by side in silence. After quite a while Szacki got up, went over to the camera and took out the tape.

"That's dreadful," he said, staring at the black plastic box. "Weren't you afraid he'd commit suicide?"

"I admit it occurred to me. But I wasn't afraid."

"How come?"

"I'll tell you something. It's a well-known story - it happened in Leipzig some time ago. h.e.l.linger arranged a woman, and during the constellation it emerged that she was frigid, incapable of love. Her children were afraid of her and wanted to go to their father, whom she had rejected. h.e.l.linger said: 'Here is a cold heart.' Soon after the woman left the room. The other partic.i.p.ants in the therapy were afraid she might kill herself, but h.e.l.linger didn't go after her."

"And then what?"

"She hanged herself a few days later, and left a letter saying that she couldn't go on living."

"Pretty effective therapy," muttered Szacki.

"You think you're joking, but in fact you're right. How can we be so sure a premature death is always a loss? That it's always the worst solution? That you have to be saved from it at any price? Perhaps something emerges from life that is greater than it. We all have a need in our souls for the end to come once life is fulfilled. In some people it appears earlier. Do you understand that?"

"I do, but I don't accept it."

"So you must be an omnipotent person if you want to stand in the way of death. I feel humble towards it. If you deprive someone of the right to die, you're actually showing that person a lack of respect. Standing in the way of death is an unreasonable belief in one's own greatness."

The therapist was standing next to Szacki by the French windows. An ambulance was driving down Grojecka Street towards the City Centre with its siren on. The piercing noise was growing more and more insistent. Rudzki closed the window and total silence reigned in the apartment.

"You see, the root of it all is love," he said. "Kasia killed herself to relieve Telak, to take part of his guilt with her. But you say we must stand in the way of death at any cost. How can we not respect such a beautiful act of love and self-sacrifice? We should accept this child's gift. Otherwise after death she will feel rejected. Love simply exists. There's no way of exerting an influence on it. It's helpless. And it's so deep that it hurts. A deep bond and pain go hand in hand."

"That sounds very nice," replied Szacki. "But maybe that's all. It's hard for me to believe someone would commit suicide because his father ran away from home. A person is responsible for his own actions."

"It's impossible not to be entangled - so says h.e.l.linger."

"It's possible to be free, and so say I."

Rudzki started laughing, but his laughter changed into a coughing fit. He escaped to the bathroom, and when he came back, wiping his wet face with a towel, he said: "But is it possible to be free from eating? In the system no one is free."

II.

Szacki had a terrible headache. He got into the car, let Pink Floyd play 'Hey You' very quietly, and swallowed some ibuprofen. He opened the window and tried to organize his thoughts. Now he realized why none of the people taking part in the therapy had mentioned the therapist during their interviews - because the therapist was really just an observer, standing in a safe spot, outside the storm of emotions raging under the cross-vaulting in the cla.s.sroom on azienkowska Street.

What had happened on the night of Sat.u.r.day to Sunday? He could imagine each scene perfectly. The cla.s.sroom plunged in darkness, yellow light coming from the sodium lamps outside, and shadows moving in columns across the walls whenever a car went down the street. Henryk Telak trying his best to make as little noise as possible as he creeps out of the building. He thinks no one can see him, but that's not true.

Because Barbara Jarczyk can see him. The woman who fainted a few hours earlier, unable to bear the emotions of Telak's wife. Supposing Rudzki's right, thought Szacki reluctantly. Suppose there is a field that allows you to feel other people's emotions during Family Constellation Therapy, and Jarczyk could feel Mrs Telak's emotions. Hatred, aversion, anger, the pain caused by her child's suicide; the fear that her other child would soon be gone too. Except that Jarczyk, unlike Telak's wife, was aware that Henryk was the "culprit". That it was because of him, or for him, that the daughter had committed suicide and the son had fallen ill. Who knows, maybe the idea has sprung up in Jarczyk's head that she can save her "son" by killing Telak. She seizes the skewer and goes after him. Telak hears footsteps, turns round and sees Jarczyk. He's not afraid, he just feels silly that he's going to have to explain himself. Jarczyk strikes. "For my child," she says, but Telak can no longer hear her.

But in that case would Jarczyk have remembered to wipe off the fingerprints? Would she be able to lie so well? And would she have gone to discover the body herself, or rather wouldn't she have waited for someone else to find it?

Scene two: Telak is walking across the hall. He thinks no one can see him, but that's not true. Kaim is watching him, and for the second time that day he's feeling a sharp pain in his heart. The field is working. Kaim is thinking about his dead sister, and about how much life he's still got left. He wants to stop Telak. He wants to complete the therapy and save "himself". But Telak doesn't want to stay there. Kaim insists. Telak refuses and starts heading for the exit. Kaim blocks his way and strikes.

In this particular case, Szacki was sure Kaim would have quickly come to his senses, tidied up and wiped off the fingerprints. And he was capable of lying in a convincing way.

Scene three: Telak thinks no one can see him, but that's not true. Kwiatkowska, his dead daughter, is watching him from a corner of the room. Like a phantom. Maybe she's thinking about how much she has missed, how many years of life, how much happiness, how much travel, how many men, how many children. She has lost everything, purely to help a man who is now sneaking away. He doesn't care about her sacrifice, he's not concerned about her death. "Why are you running away, Daddy?" she asks, emerging from the shadows. "I'm not your dad, you lunatic," replies Telak, and tries to get past her. "How can you? When I've done so much for you," says Kwiatkowska reproachfully. Grief and sorrow mix with rage inside her. "What c.r.a.p! You didn't do it - go and get cured, woman," says the p.i.s.sed-off Telak.

Kwiatkowka strikes.

The pill was starting to work. Szacki felt a little better, and kindly allowed Roger Waters to sing 'Bring the Boys Back Home' a touch louder. He called Kuzniecow and drove to the police station. He wanted to have a chat, and to take the opportunity to examine the victim's wallet. He didn't think it had any significance, but Telak was the key to this case. The better he got to know him, the more likely he was to understand the culprit's motive. Or the motive of the virtual culprit, controlled by the ego of a stranger.

My G.o.d, isn't it all a bit too screwed up? he thought, as he waited for the light to change, allowing him turn from Pruszkowska Street into wirko i Wigura Avenue.

III.

In the canteen at the City Centre police station on Wilcza Street Kuzniecow ordered a coffee and a chocolate cake, and Szacki ordered tomato juice. He'd already swallowed too much caffeine in all those mugs of coffee and tea at Rudzki's place. He told the policeman about yesterday's interviews and today's visit to the therapist.

"Twisted," said Kuzniecow, unsuccessfully trying to slice off a bit of cake with his fork without letting whipped cream squirt out in all directions. "So in a way Telak's wife and son are just as much suspects."

"Not suspects. It's more that if they have a convincing motive, the people involved in the therapy could have been driven by that motive. I'll interview them tomorrow - we'll see."

"If that turns out to be true, any second-rate lawyer will get them out of trouble. Just think - you see a person for the first time in your life, then a quarter of an hour later you pretend to be his son, and as a result you grab a skewer and stick it in his eye. In other words, you as yourself have absolutely no motive at all."

Szacki shook his head. He'd already thought of that too. He asked if they'd managed to establish any facts at azienkowska Street.

"Not a thing. There are a couple of people left to question, but I don't think we'll get a result. They arrived on Friday, sat there locked in and didn't communicate with anyone. The girl who brought them food and did the washing-up spoke to Rudzki twice. She never saw any of the patients. The priest who rented out the room had one meeting with Rudzki, and the conversation lasted five minutes. Rudzki is a member of the Christian Psychologists' a.s.sociation - he was recommended, so the priest had no doubts. Now he's sorry and he hopes we catch the criminal. Very nice fellow, I talked to him myself. Looks a bit of a w.a.n.ker, like all of them, but he's quite businesslike."

"Is there anything missing from the church?"

"Not a bean."

"Security guard?"

"Stop or I'll choke laughing. A sixty-eight-year-old man dozing in front of a tiny television in the porter's lodge. I could have gone in there at night with ten mates, shot the entire company with a machine gun, and he'd still have sworn it was all peace and quiet with no one hanging about. There are no signs of a break-in, but the door was probably open."

Szacki raised his hands in a gesture of impatience and brought them down on the table.

"Brilliant," he growled.

"What do you mean?" asked Kuzniecow, raising his voice.

"As usual you've established s.h.i.t all."

"What do you think I'm supposed to do? Turn back time, tell them to employ an observant doorman and install cameras?"

Szacki buried his face in his hands.

"Sorry, Oleg, I'm having a rotten day. That therapist's given me a headache - for all I know he's infected me with something. What's more I've forgotten why I'm here."

"You wanted to see me because you like me," said Kuzniecow, stroking the prosecutor's white hair.

"f.u.c.k off."

"Aaaww, what a rude prosecutor."

Szacki bust out laughing.

"Someone's said that to me every day lately. I was going to take a look at Telak's things, mainly his wallet, and I wanted to tell you to take fingerprints from the bottle of sleeping pills and question the people at Polgrafex. Any enemies, conflicts, badly placed investments, relationships at work. You should also show them pictures of Rudzki and the whole fabulous threesome. Rudzki was there once, they should recognize him, but if they recognize any of the others, that'll be something. I'll show them to Mrs Telak and her son. It might turn out they weren't strangers at all."

Kuzniecow grimaced.

"I doubt it too," replied Szacki, pulling a similar face, and he drank the dregs of his tomato juice. Only now did he remember that he liked it best with salt and pepper.

He had only seen Henryk Telak's face once and he'd done his best to do so for as short a time as possible, despite which he could be sure the daughter looked incredibly like him. The same thick eyebrows meeting gently above the nose, the same nose with a thick bridge to it. Neither the former nor the latter ever made any woman prettier, so the girl staring at him from the photo looked common. And also provincial, which she undoubtedly owed to the coa.r.s.e features she had inherited from her father. Telak's son looked as if he'd been adopted. Szacki couldn't find any features to connect his boyish appearance with his father and sister. Nor was he particularly like his mother, who didn't look transparent and ethereal, which seemed from the picture to be her son's main characteristics. Surprising how very dissimilar children can be to their parents.

The girl and boy were not smiling, though these weren't pa.s.sport photos, but two pieces of a family photograph taken at the seaside, with waves visible in the background. The photograph had been cut in half, and there was a black velvet ribbon running through the half showing Kasia. Szacki wondered why Telak had cut the photograph in two. He must have been afraid the mourning ribbon would imply that both his children had died.

As well as the photos, the wallet contained an ident.i.ty card and a driving licence, from which it emerged that Henryk Telak was born in May 1959 in Ciechanow and that he knew how to ride a motorbike. A few credit cards, two marked "business", surely for company accounts. A prescription for Duomox - an antibiotic for tonsillitis, if Szacki remembered correctly. A speeding ticket - 200 zlotys. A postage stamp with a picture of the Olympic ski-jumper Adam Maysz - Szacki was surprised it had ever been issued. A card for the Beverly Hills video library in Powile. A card for collecting points from BP. A card from the Coffee Heaven chain, almost entirely filled. Just one more stamp and Telak would have got his next coffee for free. A few faded, illegible till receipts. Szacki did the same - he'd buy something, take the receipt as a guarantee, and the saleswoman would advise him in a friendly way to photocopy it, or else it'd fade, so he'd agree, stick the receipt in his wallet and forget about it. Two lottery tickets confirming that bets had been placed, and two lottery forms filled in by hand. Evidently Telak believed in the magic of figures rather than random luck. He had some lucky numbers too. On each coupon and each form one set was identical: 7, 8, 9, 17, 19, 22. Szacki wrote down these numbers, and after thinking for a while he noted down all the sets of numbers Telak had listed for Sat.u.r.day's lottery. After all, no one had checked it in Monday's paper, and who knows? Maybe Telak had got all six right. Szacki felt ashamed at the thought that he could keep the coupons for himself instead of handing them over to the widow. Could he really? Of course not! Or maybe he could? A round million, maybe more - he wouldn't have to work for the rest of his life. He had often wondered if it was true that everyone had his price. How much would it take for him to drop an inquiry, for example? A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand? It'd be interesting to see at what price he'd start to wonder, instead of simply saying "no".

IV.

Henryk Telak hadn't even got three numbers right. Szacki had dug out yesterday's paper at the prosecution front office and checked the numbers. Two right three times, and of the "lucky numbers" only 22 was correct. He also got a copy of Rzeczpospolita and read Miss Grzelka's article about the murder, confirming his opinion that this paper was capable of turning any case into a sensation on a par with a new type of margarine appearing in the shops. Boring, boring and more boring. Despite which he still felt bad at the thought of how he'd treated the journalist yesterday. He could still remember her smile as she said: "You're a very rude prosecutor." Maybe she wasn't his type, but that smile... Perhaps he should call her? All in all, why not? You only live once, and in twenty years' time no young journalist would want to go out for a coffee with him. He'd been faithful as a hound for the past ten years, yet somehow he didn't feel particularly proud of the fact. Quite the contrary - he couldn't help feeling as if life were pa.s.sing him by as he gave up the best side of it.

He took Grzelka's business card out of the desk drawer, turned it in his fingers for a while, took the decision, put his hand on the receiver, and just then the phone rang.

"Good afternoon, Ireneusz Nawrocki calling."

"Good afternoon, Superintendent," replied Szacki, putting the business card aside with some sense of relief.

Nawrocki was a policeman from City Police Headquarters, perhaps the most original of all the cops in the city. Szacki thought highly of him but didn't like him. They had worked together twice, and each time trying to get information out of Nawrocki on what he was doing, what he'd done and what he was planning to do had been like an inquiry in itself. Nawrocki went his own ways, but none of them ran past the prosecutor's office, and hardly anyone was as bothered by that as Szacki, who wanted tight control over every stage of the proceedings. But both their inquiries had ended in success, so Szacki had to admit that thanks to the information gathered by the policeman he'd written an unusually powerful indictment.

"Do you remember the corpse they dug up at the playschool?"

Szacki said he did. It was a well-publicized case. They'd been renovating the play area at a nursery school on Krucza Street to replace the ancient swings with an adventure playground, a sports pitch and so on. They'd dug up the play area and found a body. An old one, so everyone had thought it might date from the war, from the Uprising. But it soon appeared that it was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl from the school next door to the nursery who'd gone missing in 1993. They'd located all her cla.s.smates and teachers, it had been a huge job. Of course it was all a waste of time, because hardly anyone could remember what they'd been doing on one particular night ten years ago. They had some files from the inquiry into the girl's disappearance, but that sort of case is conducted in a completely different way - certain questions are never asked. Finally the inquiry was suspended because they hadn't been able to establish the addresses of several of the girl's friends. The police had tried looking for them, but not very persistently. He knew that Nawrocki was still plodding along at this case, but he had given up begging him for information. He knew that if the policeman did find anything, he'd still have to ask for the inquiry to be reinstated.

"So this man rang the police anonymously," Nawrocki told him in a monotonous tone, which reminded Szacki of an academic lecturer, "and told a very interesting story."

"Well?" Szacki didn't believe in anonymous stories.

"He said that Boniczka - that was the girl's name, Sylwia Boniczka - was raped by three boys from another cla.s.s in her year, one of whom was repeating the year. You remember what happened - she left a friend's house on Poznaska Street late at night and never got home. She must have walked past the school on the way. And there are always various guys hanging around outside school, at any time of day or night, you know what I mean. Maybe not nowadays, but at one time that was the case."

Szacki started to wonder. Indeed, they hadn't questioned any pupils apart from her cla.s.smates, they'd just relied on the old inquiry files, which hadn't brought any results. The pathologist had been unable to establish whether the girl had been raped, so they'd spent the whole time conducting it as a murder case, not a rape. As far as he could remember, Boniczka hadn't been in contact with the kids from other cla.s.ses. They would have checked at the time.

"Did the guy who called anonymously give any names?" asked Szacki, not even trying to hide the mockery in his voice.

"No. But he did give some extra facts. Very interesting ones and, in my humble opinion, demanding a follow-up," Nawrocki went on in his monotone. "He said it wasn't the rapists who killed her. That after the incident she went to her father, and he was the one who killed her and buried her in the playground. That he couldn't bear the shame. That he didn't want people to find out."

Teodor Szacki felt the skin on the back of his neck and shoulders go numb.

"Prosecutor, do you remember who Boniczka's father was?" asked Nawrocki.

"Yes, he was the school caretaker," replied Szacki.

"Exactly. So maybe you'll get the files out of the cupboard?"

"Of course. Please just send me a message confirming this conversation. Try to find all the pupils repeating a year from the other cla.s.ses and put the necessary pressure on them, then I'll interrogate the father."

"I can interrogate him myself, Prosecutor," suggested Nawrocki.

Szacki hesitated. He had a lot to do, including a huge pile of paperwork, but he didn't want to give way to Nawrocki.

"We'll see," he said, trying to put off the decision. "First let's test the theory about the rape. And there's one more thing, Superintendent." He paused, but there wasn't the slightest cough from the other end. "I don't think you've told me everything."

Silence.

"I mean, nowadays you can quite quickly and easily trace anyone who calls the police. Are you sure you don't know who it was?"

"Do you promise it won't have any bearing on your decision?"