to reveal a shiny black cube.
‘I thought you said it was a wooden box?’
‘Aye, it is. But it’s covered with bituminous paint-that black stuff. It’s used for waterproofing.’ He poked gingerly at a corner of the dark shape and his finger came away covered with black goo. ‘You’d get in a real mess trying tae get it off now tae get at the screw heads holding the lid down. Do ye really need tae get into it?’ Finn looked doubtfully at Brock. He was panting with his exertions, his breath steaming white in the glare of the arc lights which had been set up overhead for Kathy’s rescue, and were now being dismantled.
‘What did Peg put inside?’
Finn shook his head. ‘I don’t know. She came down tae the site office about 6 this evening with this big handbag she carries, and I left her alone for a couple of minutes. I offered her plastic bags tae put the canister of ashes and whatever else she had in, but she preferred tae wrap them in newspaper. I suppose suggesting plastic bags was a bit tactless under the circumstances. Then I screwed down the lid, and the two men from the security firm carried it down here with me. I had a drum of the bitumen paint, and I more or less poured it all over the box tae seal it. It won’t set in this cold. Does it really matter what’s inside?’
‘Probably not. When will it get concreted in?’
‘Depends on the weather. Supposed tae be tomorrow, but with this cold, and more snow forecast tonight… We’ll just have tae see.’
‘Will you keep the security men on?’
‘Aye. I promised Peg they’d stay till the concrete’s poured. I want tae find out where the hell they were when Kathy and that bastard were down here. By the time I’ve finished with them, they’ll never move from this spot again, I can promise ye that.’
Kowalski was talking in a calm, almost amused tone when Brock entered the interview room. Bren stopped him, and had him repeat the earlier part of his story for Brock’s benefit. He had been on his way home from the conference he had been attending at the University of Nottingham, he said. When he arrived back in London, he decided to go to Eleanor’s funeral before catching the train home to Enfield. He had read the announcement in The Times while he was away, and the arrival of his train at Euston just gave him time to catch a taxi out to the crematorium for the service. He wasn’t really sure why he had bothered, apart from curiosity. When he heard Peg’s strange announcement about her sister’s remains, he recalled something his father had once mentioned, about the sisters owning valuable family papers which they were unwilling to part with. He wondered if this was their way to hide them, and thought it at least worth investigating. It was a stupid thing to do, he now acknowledged-he was guilty of trespassing on the building site-but then it had seemed a fortuitous way in which the sisters might repay his parents for the trouble and distress they had suffered through Meredith’s meddling. The beauty of it was that, though technically a theft, no one would know that the papers had been removed, and so no one would be the worse for his actions. He paused briefly to look over his shoulder and smile with satisfaction at Brock, then continued his story. The accident with the woman police officer was very distressing. While he was trying to get at the box, he heard her on the scaffolding. The noise alarmed him, and he began to leave. However, when he saw her walk across the plank, then slip and fall, he tried to go to her assistance, but had been prevented by the security men, who without provocation had assaulted him.
Felix Kowalski related these details in a normal voice, and when Gurney probed and questioned his account, responded quickly with an air of confident reasonableness. Nevertheless, Brock, from the other side of the room, thought he detected the unnatural glitter of shock and adrenalin in the man’s eyes. And something else. Whenever his interrogator looked away, Kowalski would flick up his eyes and glare at him, only softening his gaze once Gurney returned his attention to him. Brock recalled this vividly from the interview which he and Kathy had had with Kowalski the previous September in his father’s empty shop. It was the flicker of an intense anger. Why anger? It seemed an odd, almost involuntary response, as if anger had rooted itself so deeply in the man that it had taken the place of fear, shame and guilt.
For half an hour Brock watched silently as Gurney tried to shake Kowalski, then he got up quietly and left.
There were endless waves of nausea. Each time the brain struggled through the nightmare dark into consciousness it was only to achieve a few moments of agonized retching, hot with curry and bile, and then to slide back into the foul dark again. The eyes wouldn’t open, and the struggle went on with her unaware that Brock was there, frustrated at his inability to help her.
When finally the retching stopped, the brain was overwhelmed by a sensation of clammy claustrophobia. It tried to tell the mouth to cry out a warning. Someone is trying to suffocate me. But nothing came, and the brain slid away into darkness.
Brock watched her become calm at last, falling back into sleep. He sighed, nodded to the nurse and left.
Brock and Gurney spoke in the corridor outside the interview room.
‘I can’t shake him on any of it. He’s a superior little prick. He talks as if he’s not got a worry in the world.’ Gurney didn’t try to hide his anger from Brock, just as he hadn’t from Kowalski.
Brock thumbed through a draft record of the interview to date and nodded. ‘Well rehearsed, I should imagine. I’ll have a go now, Bren. Does he know about his mother?’
‘Doesn’t seem to. He evidently hasn’t contacted his wife in the past twenty-four hours.’
‘All right, let’s keep it that way for the time being.’
When Brock took the chair opposite him instead of Gurney, Felix Kowalski gave a little smirk to himself. He believed that Brock and Gurney were intending to use a nice-cop, nasty-cop routine, and he was reassured by their predictability. When Brock asked him what he could possibly find amusing in his present circumstances he looked away without answering.
However, Brock didn’t offer him a cigarette, or try to reassure him that his co-operation would somehow be appreciated and rewarded. Instead he went back, coldly and without emphasis, over details of Felix’s statements to Bren, of his movements the previous day, and on the day of Eleanor’s death and key dates before that. It seemed to Brock, as he studied Felix’s face during his responses, that the effect of the adrenalin was beginning to fade and that he was having more difficulty controlling his voice.
They finally reached Kowalski’s account of Kathy’s fall. Brock paused, staring at Felix with an intensity that made him shift in his chair. When Brock spoke again, his voice remained quiet, yet Kowalski found that it was difficult to focus on anything else, as if it were filling the room.
‘The piece of wood you used has fibres of your gloves at one end where you gripped it, and fibres of Sergeant Kolla’s coat at the other where you hit her on the shoulder. There is also her blood on that end of the timber, over the fibres, where you hit her the second time, across her knuckles, from which the surgeons have removed splinters of wood, from your weapon.’
Brock was improvising, in the absence of a forensic report, but he had studied the length of timber closely and knew that he was close enough to the truth. Listening to his accuser, a phrase entered Kowalski’s head which he could not drive out: dies irae, the day of wrath.
The room, which had been formed by subdividing a larger space into four small offices, was barely large enough for the two detectives to carry out their search without getting in each other’s way. When the night security man showed Brock to the place, they had already gone through all the books which filled the metal shelving on both side walls, and were now on their hands and knees, one going through a stack of files and student essays heaped in the corner below the tiny barred window, and the other pulling up sections of the vinyl tile floor coverings. Brock squeezed in and the detective pulling up the floor straightened up to show him what they had so far.
‘None of the books on your list, sir. But this one is interesting.’
The officer handed Brock a battered old copy of Scouting for Boys . Brock frowned.
‘Open it, boss.’
He did so, and found that the centre of the book had been neatly cut out, the hollow refilled with a wad of banknotes.
‘Almost a thousand quid, in twenties and fifties mostly,’ the detective said.
‘Anything else?’
The man shrugged. ‘What you’d expect, really-teaching materials, class lists, stationery. Diaries for the past three years, but they only seem to have class times and staff meetings, stuff like that. And a bottle of whisky, nearly empty, in the top drawer of the desk. The one that locks. With his passport.’
Brock took the passport, the old type with stiff covers, issued in 1983, valid ten years. There were visa and