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To hell with that.”

    Instead of answering, Igor poured a drink - Cutty Sark with two lumps of ice and a dash of soda. He handed it to the Chairman, who had meanwhile fetched a laptop out of the safe. They sat down on either side of the desk.
    “Now tell me what happened.”
    “Henryk was murdered on Saturday night in the church buildings on Łazienkowska Street.”
    “What the bloody hell was he doing there?”
    “He was taking part in group therapy. It may be that one of the other participants killed him, or maybe someone else who knew he’d be in the place and that suspicion would fall on someone there. Or maybe a burglar, so the police claim.”
    “A bastard, not a burglar. They always say that to get the press off their backs. Who’s in charge of the investigation?”
    “Kuzniecow on Wilcza Street, and Szacki on Krucza.”
    “Excellent,” said the Chairman, laughing out loud. “To think they had to go and rub him out right in the City Centre. Couldn’t they do it in Ochota? Or the Praga district? It wouldn’t be any problem there.”
    Igor shrugged. The Chairman put down his empty glass on the desk, logged onto the system, put a special key in the USB port that enabled access to a coded folder and found the right file. Any attempt at opening the folder without the key would have ended in irreversible deletion of the data. He quickly ran through the contents, which were more or less familiar to him. He paused for thought.
    “What shall we do?” asked Igor. “The first procedure is already in motion.”
    “We’ll stick with it.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes. I don’t think the person who killed Henryk wanted to go any further - if that’s what it’s about. I think we can feel safe.”
    “What about Szacki and Kuzniecow?”

    “Let’s wait and see how things develop.”
    Igor nodded. Without being asked he picked up the elegant, heavy-bottomed glass, in which the ice lumps were still rattling, and reached for the bottle.

IV
    Teodor Szacki signed his name on the “Prosecution Reference File”, made a note that an inquiry was being conducted “in the case of the taking of the life of Henryk Telak in the church building rooms at 14 Łazienkowska Street, Warsaw, on the night of 4th-5th June 2005, i.e. an offence covered by Article 148, paragraph 1 of the Penal Code”, and stopped writing at the box marked “versus”. Unfortunately he would have to leave it blank. Experience had taught him that investigations conducted “in the case of” were definitely more than likely to finish many months later with a document being sent to the Regional Prosecutor’s office asking them to approve a decision “to dismiss by reason of failure to identify the offender, in accordance with Article 322, paragraph 1 of the Penal Procedure Code”. There in the record you entered the words “perpetrator unknown”, and took it back to the archive with a bad taste in your mouth. Better to have a suspect from the start, then you didn’t have to wander about in the dark.
    He carefully read through the material provided by Kuzniecow, but didn’t conclude much more from it beyond what the policeman had told him. Nothing had been found during the searches; the only deviation from the norm was an empty bottle of sleeping pills left by Telak in the bathroom. Strange, thought Szacki, someone taking that sort of pills shouldn’t really be getting up at night, dressing and leaving. He wrote on a sheet of paper: “medicine - prescription, fingerprints, wife”. All they had found in Telak’s suitcase were some clothes, toiletries and a
book, a crime novel called Headland of Pseuds . Szacki had heard of it - apparently it was largely set in Warsaw. He was ready to bet a hundred hard-earned zlotys that the word “prosecutor” didn’t appear in it once, and that meanwhile a brave lone cop did it all by himself, including establishing the time of death. In Telak’s wallet there were some documents, a little cash, a