Part Six: Marek Słowik
The investigation would take eleven weeks to fully establish what had happened.
The man in the coffin was identified within forty-eight hours: Marek Słowik, forty-four years old, formerly the chief accountant of a construction company called Horyzont Development, based in Warsaw. He had been reported missing nine days before Marta’s funeral by his wife, who had been told by the police at the time of her report that missing adults were common, that most returned within days, that she should not assume the worst.
She had been right to assume the worst.
Horyzont Development had been under investigation by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau — the CBA — for fourteen months. The investigation concerned fraudulent contracts, falsification of invoices related to public infrastructure projects, and the laundering of approximately forty million zlotys through a network of shell companies registered in Cyprus and Malta. It was a significant case, the kind that ended careers and began prison sentences, and it had been built slowly and carefully from the outside in.
Marek Słowik had been building it from the inside.
He had not, initially, intended to become an informant. He had been the accountant — had known what the numbers were doing, had signed documents he should not have signed, had participated in the architecture of the fraud at the level of his professional function. But at some point in the previous two years, something had shifted. His daughter, some of the investigation’s later reporting suggested. She had asked him, according to a colleague who spoke anonymously to a journalist, what he did at work, and he had not been able to answer her in a way he could live with. He had gone home that evening and begun compiling a document.
The document — a dossier of approximately three hundred and forty pages, with attached copies of internal financial records, emails, and contracts — had been delivered to the CBA prosecutor’s office via an intermediary three weeks before Marek Słowik disappeared. The prosecutor had sent acknowledgment. The first interview had been scheduled.
He never made it to the interview.
The people who ran Horyzont Development had known about the dossier before it arrived at the prosecutor’s office. There were, the investigation later found, two individuals within the CBA’s administrative apparatus who had provided early warning, not of the document’s specific contents but of its existence and approximate timing. This information had been sufficient.
Słowik was killed on a Tuesday. The specific circumstances were reconstructed from physical evidence rather than witness testimony, because no witness had survived the event except the people who committed it.
