mind reader? He shifted in his seat. And how the hell did you get scars there anyway?
The student looked up and saw him staring at her tattooed chest. Their eyes met and Logan looked away, embarrassed. Great, now she thought he was a pervert.
'Bilet.'
Logan looked up. An official-looking man in a dark blue uniform was standing in front of him.
'Erm…'
Jaroszewicz dug about in her handbag, 'He wants to see your ticket.'
'Oh right…'
The conductor made his way around their little compartment, stamping everyone's ticket, before lurching back out into the corridor, pulling the sliding glass door shut behind him. As soon as he was gone, Jaroszewicz stood and rattled off something in quick-fire Polish to the students.
They complained, but she didn't seem to care. She pulled out a police ID and flashed it at them, then gave them another earful.
The students got to their feet and shuffled out of the compartment, full of bad grace, angry backward glances, and mutterings of, 'Kurwa, komucha…'
Jaroszewicz waited till the door was closed before dragging her bag out of the rack and collapsing back into her seat, grinning. 'They say I am a Communist bitch.' She pulled a swollen, green folder from her bag and handed it over. 'This is everything I could find.'
Logan removed the elastic band holding the file together, and opened it up. A bundle of photographs sat at the front
— each one showing someone's mutilated face in graphic close up. Most were taken pre-hospital as well, the sight making Logan's stomach lurch in time with the train on the tracks. The damage was identical to the Aberdeen victims: Ricky Gilchrist had copied the MO perfectly.
He flipped past, finding dozens of reports, statements, interview transcripts… Somewhere in this lot would be the connection between Gilchrist and whoever mutilated these poor sods.
And Logan couldn't read a word of it.
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
