Blind Eye

42

Outside the carriage window there was nothing but fields and trees. Every now and then they'd pass a village — little more than a handful of houses with wooden outbuildings slumped in defeat. Chickens strutting back and forth in the mud.

The rain had stopped about an hour out of Warsaw, but the landscape still lay beneath a lid of heavy grey clouds.

'And this was the last one.' Jaroszewicz poked the file in Logan's hand. 'He was a baker in Sromowce Nizne. Arrested two times for drug dealing. They found him in the garage: he hanged himself six months after he was blinded.'

There was a photocopy of the note he'd left, and a police photo of the body dangling from a roof beam.

Logan stuck them back in the file. 'Twenty-three victims since 1974. So if it's the same man doing them he's got to be, what… mid fifties, early sixties by now?'

'If it is the same man.' Jaroszewicz accepted the folder and put it back in her bag. 'Before 1989 all our victims are dissidents, and after 1989 they are all criminals.' She snapped her bag shut and hefted it into the overhead rack. 'I think the men who are doing this are copying what happened under the Communists. It is a warning to everyone who will not do what they are told. In Poland it is not a serial killer, it is mob enforcement.' By quarter past eight they were in the dining car, getting scowled at by the evicted students. Jaroszewicz sat with her back to them at one if the five long tables that stuck out from one side of the carriage, leaving an aisle at the end just big enough for the waitress to walk down, carrying plates of food from the little kitchen by the door. The smell of frying chicken filled the air.

A couple of businessmen sat at the other end of their table, poking away at laptops and drinking bottles of lager. Everyone had to perch on little bar stools that had been bolted to the floor, as the train swayed and rattled its way across Poland.

'It will be too late to do anything when we get to Krakow,' Jaroszewicz was saying, 'so we will start first thing tomorrow morning. Hit the local police for information.'

'Information?'

'Addresses for the Krakow victims.' She took another mouthful of unpronounceable beer. 'The only records I could get in Warsaw are out of date. They…' She stopped talking as a smiling woman in an apron appeared at the table with their food — flattened slabs of chicken fried in breadcrumbs, mashed potatoes covered in dill, and pickled gherkins. Served on paper plates with plastic cutlery.

A long way away from British Rail sandwiches.

Outside the sun was setting, a heavy orb of red fire just visible between the clouds and the fields, gilding a three-storey house made entirely of breeze blocks, all on its own in the middle of nowhere.

Logan scooped up another forkful of mash. 'If the records are out of date, how do you know the victims are still alive?'

'I do not.' She took one look at the expression on Logan's face and laughed. 'Relax, they cannot all be dead. I spoke to the Komisariat Policji yesterday, there is at least one they have heard about recently. Now eat your chicken.' The first sign of Krakow was the local football team's name, scrawled in red spray-paint on a dilapidated building at the side of the railway tracks, just visible in the fading glow of a setting sun. The distant sparkle of houses gave way to huge blocks of concrete apartments, with the chimneys of a massive steelworks in the background — crowned with blinking red and white lights to ward off aircraft.

Then mile after mile of densely packed houses and tower blocks, sulking beneath thick grey clouds.

The students braved a return to the carriage, grabbing their luggage and grumbling as the train pulled into the station. Not quite defiant enough to make eye contact with Senior Constable Jaroszewicz.

Logan followed her out onto the platform. A cold wind whipped a discarded newspaper apart and sent it dancing across the expanse of grey concrete. Warsaw had been depressing, and right now Krakow didn't look much better. The taxi dropped them outside a hotel in the old city, on a street packed with people, bars and kebab shops. The high buildings and narrow streets cut out the worst of the wind, and it was almost balmy. Tourists wandered through the fading twilight wearing T-shirts and shorts, taking photographs.

Logan couldn't blame them, it was actually pretty impressive, just the way old Eastern European cities were supposed to be. Cobbled streets, ornately carved frontages… like something out of a Hammer House of Horror film. Well, except for all the neon and flash photography.

Jaroszewicz pushed through the wrought-iron gates into the hotel, and after a pause, Logan followed her. 'So, what's the plan for tonight then?' Hoping it would involve beer.

She puffed out her cheeks and made a deflating noise. 'I am going to have a bath and go to bed.' She checked her watch. 'You can meet me for breakfast at eight o'clock.' Upstairs in his room, Logan pulled the net curtains wide and stared out at the street below. He'd already unpacked everything and laid it away, played with the room's safe, checked out the contents of the mini-bar, thought about stealing the little plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and read all the tour leaflets.

And then he remembered to switch his phone back on. Three messages, all from DI Steel, telling him to phone her back, urgently.

He checked his watch: half nine. That would make it half past eight back home. He dialled Steel's number and rested his forehead against the window, watching a pair of drunken girlies staggering out of what looked like an off-licence.

Then Steel's voice barked out of the earpiece: 'What took you so sodding long?'

'Had my phone turned off. Airline safety rules.'

'Blah, blah, blah. I went to that address you got from your fat pornographer, and you know what I found?'

Outside, one of the girls slipped and clattered bum-first onto the cobbles. Her friend started laughing. 'No idea.'

Steel blew him a big, wet raspberry. 'That's what. No' a damn thing. The whole place was empty.'

'You sure you went to the right-'

'Finish that sentence and you're getting a shoe-leather suppository. Of course we went to the right place: manky wee Portakabin on Greenwell road, backing onto the railway line. Anonymous and sodding empty. A rest home for spiders and dead wasps!'

'Oh… Sorry.'

'Aye, well "sorry" doesn't help Krystka Gorzalkowska, does it?'

Logan closed his eyes and counted to ten.

'You still there?'

'Did you want me to phone you back urgently just so you could shout at me?'

'Don't get lippy.' Pause. 'Susan wants you to come over for dinner when you get back.'

And he knew what that meant. 'Ganging up on me?'

'Nope. Just a nice family dinner, couple bottles of wine, and if you still don't want to get Susan up the stick you can tell her your-self.' Then she hung up.

Logan snapped his phone shut. Swore. Then doinked his head gently off the window.

Sod it. He hadn't travelled one thousand, two hundred and sixty-seven miles just to sit in a hotel room. It was time to see what the local pubs were made of. The alarm on his mobile phone sounded as if someone was trying to ram a xylophone up a chicken. Half past seven. Logan cracked one eye open and prepared for the hangover to hit. He'd stayed in the nearest bar till nearly midnight, drinking the local beer and experimenting with different kinds of flavoured vodka until the place shut. So he should have been feeling dreadful this morning. Only he wasn't.

Shower, shave, and down to breakfast. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop on his head from a great height.

Senior Constable Jaroszewicz was already sitting at a table for two, eating a huge mound of muesli. She pointed at him with her spoon. 'Your hair is wet.'

He helped himself to the buffet — ignoring the cold meat in favour of cheese, gherkins and bread, then sat down and perused the menu. Looking for a vegetarian fry-up. There wasn't one, so he settled for the scrambled eggs with mushrooms.

'I was thinking,' he said, while Jaroszewicz went back to her muesli, 'how well known are these blindings?'

She chewed for a while. 'No idea.'

'Well, how would someone from Aberdeen find out about them?'

'The Internet?'

'I tried that before I left yesterday and couldn't find anything.' A waitress turned up with his scrambled eggs. 'Oh, thank you. I mean: Dziekuje.' The young woman smiled at him and wandered off. Then Logan saw what he'd actually been served.

Jaroszewicz watched him pulling faces. 'What?'

'This isn't scrambled eggs… Looks like someone's sneezed on the plate.' Instead of a fluffy mound of yellow, it was a ribbony mix of white and yoke, oozing out across the plate, speckled with brown lumps. Not exactly appetizing.

'We will go to the police station straight after breakfast.'

He risked a bite. It actually wasn't that bad. 'What about jurisdiction?'

'Juris…?'

'Are you allowed to interview people here? Or do we need a local officer to hold our hands?'

'Pffffff. Warsaw and Krakow do not get on very well. We call them "villagers" they call us "freaking yuppies". They sulk because they used to be the capital of Poland, and now we are.' She shovelled in another spoonful and chewed. 'We are unlikely to get any help from the local police. I will be amazed if they even give us addresses for the victims.'

Somehow that didn't exactly fill Logan with confidence. The street outside the hotel was a lot less crowded than it had been last night; the kebab shops dark and lifeless, the tourists still asleep, or enjoying a leisurely breakfast of something almost entirely unlike scrambled eggs.

Jaroszewicz took a right at the hotel's front gate, heading down towards the main square, under the shadow of the looming red-brick spire of St Mary's Basilica. Up above, the sky was a crystal blue, the sun already warming the cobblestones. Little cafes were setting up for the day, unfolding awnings and umbrellas to shade tables clustered around the outside of the square. The smell of charcoal fires and barbecued sausages filled the air, wafting out from a half dozen food stands, part of the permanent market that sprawled alongside the ornate rectangular bulk of the Cloth Hall.

She led Logan around to the other side of the square, marching towards a small, nondescript shop front on the ground floor of a yellow-painted building. The windows on the upper floors were surrounded by elaborately carved architraves, but the police station looked more like a minicab office, only blander. If it weren't for the little red sign mounted above the dark frontage with 'KOMISARIAT POLICJI I WKRAKOWIE' on it, there would be no indication it was there at all.

Jaroszewicz stopped about a dozen feet from the entrance. 'You had better wait out here. Go get yourself a cup of coffee or something.' And then she marched inside.

Logan wandered over to a nearby cafe, settled into the shade of a green Heineken umbrella and ordered a cup of coffee.

He checked his watch: twenty past nine. Twenty past eight in Aberdeen. He thought about calling Finnie to see if they'd got anything useful out of Gilchrist yesterday, but that would probably sound a bit needy. Much better to call when he had something to show for his trip to Krakow. So he sent Rennie a text instead, then sat and debated sending one to Samantha too. But what would he say? 'SRY I SED U WR A FR3K — MSSNG U — LGN.' Not exactly Shakespeare, was it?

His phone squawked: Rennie replying.

'NO PROGRS — STL IS A TTL BIATCH:-(FNY IS A DIK:-(BT IS A WNKR:-(HWS POLAND?' Which made even less sense than normal. Maybe getting an iron bounced off his head had rattled something loose in that great big empty space between Rennie's ears?

Logan fired off a quick response about vodka and dancing girls. Then drank his coffee, watching a pair of armed policemen get off their bicycles to buy cigarettes from a small, round kiosk.

He was thinking about ordering another coffee, and maybe a sticky bun, when Jaroszewicz finally reappeared.

She hoiked a thumb over her shoulder. 'They played nice and gave me three addresses to try.'

Logan stood. 'What about transport?'

'Are you on expenses?'

'Yes.'

'Then we will take a taxi, and you can pay.' By half past eleven the morning had gone from pleasantly sunny to stiflingly hot and sticky. Logan slumped against the roof of the taxi, sweating, as Jaroszewicz emerged back onto the street, slamming an old wooden door behind her.

The buildings in this part of town looked just like the ones around the hotel, only shabbier. Their paintwork faded and peeling, as if the inhabitants had given up a long time ago. Some were so dirty it was impossible to guess what colour they'd started off. It should have been quaint and olde-worlde, but it was just drab and oppressive. No wonder they'd shot Schindler's List here.

'Any joy?'

Jaroszewicz scowled back at the building she'd just stomped out of. 'The apartment has been empty for six years, according to the man next door. He says Mr Gibowski moved to America to be with his daughter after his wife died. He could not cope on his own with no eyes.'

'Three for three.'

She did a slow pirouette, staring at the shabby street. 'That is it. I have no more idea what to do.' By the time she came round to face Logan again, her eyes were shining. Bottom lip trembling. 'All this time…'

And Logan didn't know what to say. So he tried, 'Are you sure the police gave you all the info they had? I mean, if Gibowski's been gone six years?'

Sniff. She ran a palm across her eyes. 'I told you they hated us "freaking yuppies".'

The taxi driver stuck his head out of the car window and said something too quickly for Logan to catch any of it, but Jaroszewicz rattled back a brittle reply, then climbed into the back, saying, 'Are you hungry?' Lunch was in a labyrinthine restaurant called Chlopskie Jadlo, five minutes walk from the main square, with some sort of witch carved out of dark wood standing guard outside. The place was nearly deserted, just a woman and a small child stuffing themselves with dumplings. Jaroszewicz picked a table in another room, far away from the roaring fire.

She slumped into her chair and sighed at the menu. 'So that is it, we are finished. You had a wasted trip. I am sorry.'

'You seem to be taking this very… personally.'

She shrugged, eyes scanning the menu. 'You should try the pierogi — potato dumplings. Very good.'

'Come on, you were nearly in tears back there.'

'I…' Pause. 'This is a big case for me. If I… My sergeant says that if I do not get this one right, my career is over.' She turned the menu over in her hands. 'Do you want a drink? I want a drink. Let us get something to drink.'

There was a pause, then Logan stuck out a hand. 'Let me see those files again.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm not going home without a connection between Ricky Gilchrist and what happened here. And I don't care how tenuous it is — there has to be something. He didn't just come up with the exact same MO as your Polish mobsters by accident.'

She dug the file out of her cavernous handbag. Then went back to the menu.

Logan spread the individual case files out on the table. It was a cut down version of the huge stack he'd seen on the train from Warsaw, with all the non-Krakow victims removed. Five victims: all men.

He arranged them in date order, '1973, 1981, 1993, 1997, and 2004. Five victims. Gibowski is in America, Wisniewski's dead, and no one's seen Bielatowicz since 2003. Which leaves us Gorzkiewicz in eighty-one, and Lowenthal in ninety-seven.'

The waiter turned up, but Logan hadn't even looked at the menu, so he let Jaroszewicz order for them both, and went back to the two remaining files, trying to remember the details. Lowenthal was allegedly involved in people-trafficking from Russia to the UK, and the odd spot of gun-running. Ex-Soviet weaponry being sold off on the cheap by soldiers who hadn't been paid for months, then passed on at a huge mark-up to gangs all over Europe.

Gorzkiewicz was a different kettle of borscht entirely. He'd been a lance corporal in the Polish army, under the Communists, invalided out after some sort of accident. A law-abiding citizen whose only transgression was being active in the Solidarity movement in the early eighties.

Logan pulled Lowenthal's file to the front. 'Right, this is the guy we have to concentrate on.'

She sniffed. 'Why him? Why not Gorzkiewicz, surely he would be more-'

'No he wouldn't. Gorzkiewicz was blinded in 1981: while the Communists were still in power. Anything we got out of him would be nearly thirty years out of date. And if this is mob enforcers copying what happened back then, it wouldn't help us anyway. But Lowenthal was done in 2004. What he knows might still be worth something.'

'But we have no idea where he-'

'We hit the land registry, census records, telephone books. We talk to informers, known associates.'

She sat back and frowned. 'Oh… I had not… Yes. Of course.'

The waiter returned with two large glasses of beer and a wooden board covered in bread, a tub of what looked like lard, and a huge knife. Jaroszewicz thanked him, then handed Logan one of the beers, their fingers touching on the cold glass. A droplet of condensation ran down the side and dripped onto the tabletop.

'Er… thanks.' Logan took a mouthful, pretending not to notice that Senior Constable Jaroszewicz was blushing. 'I'll call my DCI after lunch: get him to speak to whoever's in charge in Krakow. If they won't play with the Warsaw police, maybe they'll cooperate with Aberdeen?'

She helped herself to bread and lard. 'Just make sure you tell him not to mention me. If they think a freaking yuppie is using Aberdeen to put pressure on them, they will deny everything.'