The sun shone lazily on the city centre streets, bathing them in an orange glow, as the young man in his shell suit and Decathlon sweatshirt jogged another kilometre towards the Saxon Garden.
He had originally planned to play squash once a week, but jogging turned out to be much more his style.
The area was not particularly well suited to it, especially when you did ten kilometres in the morning – the hard surfaces weren’t great for the knees. Living in the city centre, however, had its advantages, and undeniably saved on commuting time.
Previously he had had to spend almost two hours trundling back and forth between work and Żoliborz; now Oryński lived just a stone’s throw away from the Skylight building. He was renting a small studio flat in a block in Emilia Plater Street, paying one thousand five hundred a month. Daylight robbery, but he wasn’t concerned. As a Junior Associate at Żelazny & McVay he earned enough that he could also afford the occasional salmon at the nearby Hard Rock Cafe.
He had just passed kilometre five of the course. It was always a breakthrough point in his morning jogging routine, after which he felt ready to run a marathon. That was a bit of an exaggeration, although in recent months he had built up enough stamina to maybe manage a half marathon. However, he never ran more than ten kilometres, because that was all he had time for. He began his run at six and was back home before seven, so that by eight he could be at work, in office attire and briefcase in hand.
He no longer worked in the newbie-burrow; as a Junior Associate he was now entitled to his own office. Somewhat smaller than the McCarthy Cave, but that didn’t bother him in the least.
The new job title sounded good, but in reality, it was not all that much of a promotion. Every lawyer in full-time employment at the firm started out as a Junior Associate. After two years, he could become an Associate, and later, after completing his training and ruining an appropriate number of companies in court, he could hope to become a Senior Associate.
A salary of six thousand gross a month was not staggering compared to what other lawyers were getting, but perfectly adequate. Oryński was satisfied with the direction in which his career was heading.
Professional life flourished, and even his social life was not too bad, bearing in mind the limited number of acquaintances he had. Everything was in good order, apart maybe from the fact that all the full-time employees referred to Żelazny & McVay as ‘the firm’ and constantly used English expressions, even in private conversations. It was a trend all legal firms seemed to encourage. To this day Kordian could not understand what was wrong with the Polish expression ‘młodszy wspólnik’, Junior Associate. The worst was the commercial law division, with that quintessentially English title of ‘Mergers and Acquisitions’.
At the ninth kilometre, Kordian picked up the pace and stopped thinking about mergers, trademarks and other English language loan words. A few minutes later he was back home. He ate his standard breakfast – natural yogurt with a banana and oats. Then a shower, a suit, a spray or two of aftershave and he was ready for work.
Getting to the Skylight building took less than a minute. Refreshed and pleasantly geared up by the running, he passed the interns smoking outside the building and winced. For several months now, he’d hated smoking.
‘Good morning,’ said one of the interns. They were more or less the same age, but now there was a gulf dividing them.
Kordian raised his hand, smiled warmly and entered the building. He was on time, so he expected to meet his mentor by the lifts. He wasn’t mistaken. Chyłka was wearing a tight graphite skirt, noticeably tapered at the hem. It was hard to ignore.
‘Hi Zordon,’ she greeted him.
‘Hi Chyłka,’ he replied, before they entered the cabin.
‘Couldn’t you find anything tighter to wear?’ he asked looking back and trying not to ogle her behind.
‘I chose this so you could at least get a look, because that’s all you’re getting.’
After they had won the Langer case, their relationship had remained essentially unchanged. Maybe it would have been different if not for the mentor – mentee status; traineeships lasted three years, and Kordian hoped that when that time elapsed, they would be able to have another look at it.
Or perhaps not. He was unsure what he really meant to her.
‘I have a case,’ announced Joanna. ‘A doctor carrying out illegal abortions. Pretty messy.’
‘Want me to help you?’
‘Know anything about placenta, other than in the botanical sense?’
He shook his head and shuddered at the thought.
‘Besides, you have your own case,’ Joanna added a moment later. ‘What about your Bald Man?’
‘He was the killer, no doubt about it.’
‘I can tell that just by looking at him. Can you prove that he didn’t do it?’
‘Maybe,’ replied Kordian, moving his hand to and fro as if the matter of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ was still fluid.
Initially, he had felt that he would be reluctant to defend people who were clearly guilty. However, he soon came to the conclusion that once he started treating his efforts simply as work and not as a morbid mission, it was much easier to avoid getting emotionally involved. So his work lost some of its initial passion and charm, but at least he felt more comfortable with himself. He was doing his job, and nothing beyond his statutory duties.
The Langer case, however, was different, because Langer had been the innocent victim of a series of unfortunate events that cast a shadow over his entire life. Not only was he innocent of the crime, but he hadn’t deserved to be in that particular swamp in the first place. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: a hackneyed expression, but applicable in this particular case.
The legal duo, on the other hand, were exactly where they should be.
After winning the case at the Supreme Court, it was the turn of the district court to reassess Langer’s guilt. This time the Żelazny & McVay lawyers were in a better position, having a clear statement from the court of the highest instance that earlier courts had failed to step up to the plate.
A few weeks later their advantage was so great that Rejchert himself asked for a meeting, and made a deal whereby their client would get a suspended sentence in return for confessing to inadvertently causing death.
The advantage was that they could include the Grey-Haired Man and an autopsy of Antoni Wansel’s body in the retrial. The first of these two had gone underground so the hearing had to be conducted in his absence, but this didn’t prevent him from being found guilty and receiving a sentence. Wansel had been identified as a member of a climbing group to which Daniel Relichowski and Agata Szylkiewicz – Langer’s alleged victims – also belonged. It turned out that the murder of Wansel had been a slip-up, and the body had to be removed fast so as not to cast doubts on Piotr’s culpability.
Antoni Wansel was murdered with the same hammer as the one in Langer’s apartment. A court expert for God-alone-knows-what – Chyłka maintained he was probably a stock keeper at Castorama, Praktiker or some other DIY outlet – identified it as a locksmith’s hammer weighing approximately 1,500 grams, with a 145 by 43 millimetre steel face. The marks on Wansel’s body were identical to those on the bodies in Langer’s flat; the difference was in the DNA found on Wansel’s body, which corresponded with that found on Oryński after he had been assaulted. Wansel was killed by Gorzym, there was no doubt about it.
Everything came together neatly and logically, and they had no difficulty defending Langer. The trial was a mere formality, and there was no real need to make a deal with Rejchert. The case inspired the prosecutor to move to the private sector. He qualified as a legal counsellor, and in all probability was rather content with his decision.
Piotr Langer was acquitted, and the local police chief resigned, praying that the news media would leave him alone. For them this was a brilliant story, shedding light on how the Polish justice system and law enforcement agencies worked. The problems were of course exaggerated, which further publicised the case. Żelazny & McVay were besieged by clients who were particularly interested in working with the lawyers who had dealt so proficiently with Langer’s case – that is, either Joanna Chyłka or Kordian Oryński.
The firm’s partners could not have been more pleased. All the disagreements with Artur Żelazny were now quite forgotten, and he was prepared to shower his two lawyers with gold. Contrary to McVay’s suspicions, Żelazny was probably not involved with the Grey-Haired Man, although no one could be absolutely certain.
‘Lunch as usual?’ asked Chyłka, distracting Oryński from his thoughts.
‘Sure,’ replied Kordian, and turned left down the corridor, allowing Chyłka to walk to her office alone. At this time, the corridor was already packed, and without advanced skills in elbowing your way through, it was difficult to reach your destination.
An hour later, Chyłka entered Oryński’s room. Without knocking, she opened the door and slammed it loudly behind her.
‘What was that?’ Kordian managed to say before Chyłka placed her laptop in front of him and opened it.
‘Watch.’
‘But what?’
‘Kormak.’
‘Kormak, what? Did he die?’
She clearly wasn’t in the mood for joking. He had never seen this expression on her face before, so the joke was maybe not a joke at all. Joanna shook her head, and a moment later Oryński could see for himself what she meant. A group of thumbnail pictures appeared on the screen; looking at the first of them drained the blood from Oryński’s face, and he began to feel faint.
‘Who took these?’ he asked. Not the best question, but with the shock, nothing else came to mind. Chyłka ignored it. Instead, she took a chair and sat at the desk. Her hands were shaking.
Oryński looked at picture after picture and couldn’t believe his eyes. Kormak must have had a very good lens, probably even better than the telescopic one he used to take photos of the Grey-Haired Man on his estate. This time the photos were of a shopping centre car park.
It was the ideal hiding place – crowded, constant comings and goings, and teeming with people quite oblivious to the rest of the world. It must have been the weekend because there were so many cars. One of the pictures even showed a traffic jam at the exit.
‘When did he—’
‘Last Friday,’ said Chyłka.
‘And since then . . . how did it happen? Didn’t he say anything?’
‘Nothing,’ she replied and instinctively reached into her jacket pocket, where a few months ago she was certain there was a packet of cigarettes. If she’d found the cheapest, most mangled cigarette on earth right now she’d have happily smoked it, and to hell with all that rubbish about cleansing the body of nicotine. ‘He was instructed by McVay and Żelazny. Directly.’
‘He could have told us, for God’s sake.’
‘Yes, he could,’ agreed Joanna. She still couldn’t quite process what she’d seen. ‘No doubt I got this email because Rusty and the Old Man already know everything.’
Kordian stared fixedly at the monitor. There was a long, heavy silence. He looked at the photos again and again, hoping it was all some terrible misunderstanding.
He stopped at a picture of a smiling Piotr Langer patting the Grey-Haired Man on the back.
It wasn’t a friendly gesture. These people weren’t chums. Langer looked like the godfather, and the Grey-Haired Man like his henchman.
They both looked like people pleased with a job well done.