Part Nine: Irena
Irena Wójcik had insisted, from the first conversation with the investigating detective, that she had known nothing.
This was examined, as it had to be, with thoroughness and without sentimentality. Her phone records were reviewed. Her contacts were mapped. Her financial history was examined. Her relationship to anyone connected to Horyzont, to Słowik, to the events that had unfolded around her daughter’s funeral was traced.
There was nothing.
She was a retired schoolteacher from Kielce. She had spent thirty-one years teaching primary school mathematics to children who were now adults and who were, in some cases, reached by the investigation for confirmation of her character, which they provided uniformly and without apparent coordination. She had no financial complexity. She had no connections to the world that had used her daughter’s death and her grief as an operational cover.
She had simply been a woman who had lost her daughter, and whose loss had been exploited by people who understood that grief was a confusion, that the family of the dead were focused inward, that a sealed coffin in a rush of mourning and paperwork was something no one looked at carefully.
The detective who delivered the final clearance to her, a man named Major Krakowski who had been doing this work for nineteen years, said afterward to a colleague that it had been one of the more difficult conversations of his career — not because of any complication but because of the specific nature of what he was confirming for her: that her daughter’s funeral had been used as a hiding place, that the weight the pallbearers could not lift had been the weight of a murdered man beneath her murdered child, that the grave into which Marta had nearly been lowered had been designed, by strangers who had never known either of them, to be permanent.
She had listened to him.
Then she had said: “My daughter. Was her death — “
He had waited.
“Was it connected to this?”
He had told her, honestly, that it was not. That the accident report was accurate, that the staircase had failed, that Marta’s death had been coincidental — terrible word, in this context — to the events around it. She had died, and her death had created an opportunity, and the opportunity had been taken.
Irena Wójcik had looked out the window of the interview room at the gray November sky.
“So they chose her,” she said, “because she was available.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said: “I want her moved. I want her in a different grave. I want — I don’t want her in the same ground as — “
“We’ll arrange it,” he said. “Whatever you need. It will be done.”
