Forest Ghost (21 page)

‘I wish I’d never mentioned it.’

‘Jesus.
I
wish you hadn’t, either.’

Sparky didn’t respond to that. Jack waited for over a minute but Sparky said nothing more, and a few minutes later he began to breathe deeply and evenly, with a little catch at the end of each breath, and Jack knew that he had gone back to sleep.

Krystyna joined them for a late breakfast the next morning at the same table in the DownTown Café where they had sat only yesterday with Borys.

Outside it was a warm breezy day and Krystyna had arrived wearing a pale pink cardigan with embroidered flowers on it, and jeans. Her hair had been blown by the wind but Jack thought that only made her look fresher and more attractive.

‘Komisarz Pocztarek will be coming here at one,’ said Jack. ‘I told him that you would be here as well, so he can interview us all together.’

‘It was on the TV news this morning,’ said Krystyna. ‘It’s in the papers, too. “Massacre in Kampinos Forest”. I tried to call Borys’s wife, Kasia, last night, and again about an hour ago, but I there was no answer.’

She looked across the table at Sparky, who was listlessly pushing a slice of smoked sausage around his plate with his fork.

‘How are you today, Sparky?’ she asked him. ‘Feeling any better?’

Sparky shook his head but didn’t even raise his eyes to look at her.

‘Well, it was very traumatic for you,’ said Krystyna, laying her hand on his arm and smiling at him. ‘But I’m sure that you’ll get over it, given some time.’

Sparky pulled his arm away and said nothing. Jack said to him, ‘If you don’t want to eat that, why don’t you go back upstairs and watch TV?’

Still without saying anything, Sparky pushed back his chair, stood up and said, ‘I’m going out for a walk, if that’s OK with you.’

‘Of course it is. Try to get back here around one, though. That’s when Komisarz Pocztarek is coming to talk to us again.’

Krystyna said, ‘Why don’t you go across to the
Patyk
– the Palace of Culture? I believe they have a James Bond exhibition at the moment, with all the props from the movies, and his car.’

Sparky looked at her as if she had said something completely unintelligible. ‘I might,’ he said, and then he left them.

‘Hard work, bringing up young people,’ said Krystyna, when he had gone.

‘Tell me about it. His Asperger’s makes it even harder. And of course he’s old enough now to realize how different he is from the other kids at school. He has regular therapy sessions, and I’ve tried everything. Even herbal remedies, like St John’s Wort. But, you know – it’s not a condition you can really cure.’

‘It’s sad. He’s such a good-looking boy. Like his father.’

‘I think he looks more like his mother,’ said Jack. ‘But his mother was always very open, very sociable. Sparky keeps things bottled up. I’m worried about how that experience in the forest might have affected him.’

‘Yes. He was behaving very strangely on the way back to the city last night.’

‘He got out of bed in the middle of the night and locked himself in the bathroom, and started whispering, and switching the lights on and off. Even when he went back to sleep he was very restless. I asked him what he was whispering and he said it wasn’t whispering, it was “tree talk”, whatever that means.’

Krystyna put down her coffee-cup. ‘Tree talk – is that what he called it?’

‘That’s right. He wouldn’t tell me what he meant. He said I wouldn’t understand and he wished he’d never mentioned it.’

‘But tree talk, in Greek mythology, that’s the conversation that trees have when somebody intrudes into their forest. If you learn the language of the trees, apparently, you can hear them whispering and understand what they are saying to each other. Usually, it’s a warning. Haven’t you ever been into a forest on a day when there is no wind at all, but suddenly you hear this swishing of leaves? That is supposed to be the trees, telling each other that you are trespassing.’

‘You don’t seriously think that trees can talk to each other?’

‘I don’t know. It’s possible. They have found out that houseplants react to sound, like music, or human conversation, so that they are aware when somebody comes into the room. They can also make a clicking sound, with their roots, to warn each other that somebody is there.’

‘Now that is seriously creepy.’

‘Professor Guzik was telling me about it once,’ said Krystyna. ‘He teaches ancient culture at the university. He said that the Greeks believed the trees would alert each other whenever a human entered the forest, and that they would pass the message on to Pan, who of course was the god of the woods.’

‘
Pan
.’ Jack frowned. ‘That was what Robert said, isn’t it?’

Krystyna stared at him, but then she said, ‘No. He couldn’t have meant Pan. It’s ridiculous.’

‘It’s more than ridiculous. It’s insane. But it’s what he said, isn’t it? And with his very last breath, practically.
Pan
. Maybe he wasn’t saying “mister” at all.’

‘No. This isn’t possible. It’s all just mythology. It’s no more real than, say, Medusa and the Gorgons. Or Pegasus the flying horse. Or – I don’t know – Cerberus the three-headed dog, who guarded the gate to hell.’

‘I still think there might be something in this tree talk,’ said Jack. ‘When Sparky and I went into the woods at the scout camp in Michigan, we both heard this rustling sound. Pretty much the same thing happened here, in the Kampinos Forest. Both times, this strong wind started blowing, and both times we started to panic.’

‘Perhaps you should meet Professor Guzik,’ said Krystyna. ‘He’s a great expert on mythology, and what was probably real and what wasn’t. I remember him telling me that Polyphemus – the giant with one eye in the middle of his forehead – he probably existed. He was a shepherd on a Greek island who would catch stranded fishermen and kill them and eat their brains.’

Jack looked down at the pale yellow scrambled eggs on his plate. ‘Thanks, Krystyna. You sure know how to kill a man’s appetite.’

Komisarz Pocztarek was over thirty minutes late. He came up to Jack’s suite on the twenty-seventh floor, accompanied by a young female detective with a large mole on her upper lip and a dark gray suit that was two sizes too tight for her.

Sparky had returned from his walk, although he wouldn’t tell Jack or Krystyna where he had been. He sat at the desk in the corner of the living room, staring out of the window and tapping out an irritating rhythm with a pencil.

Komisarz Pocztarek looked as if he hadn’t slept. He was wearing the same black leather jacket and the same shirt as yesterday, with his red necktie loosened. He smelled of cigarette smoke and Jack noticed that the fingers of his right hand were tinged amber with nicotine.

He sat down and flipped open his notebook. ‘First of all, I have to tell you that it appears as if Robert Wi
ś
niewski did actually cut off his own feet. We found the blade of his camping knife and it was covered in his own blood, and the fingerprints on the handle were his. It also looks certain that he impaled himself on that tree stump. It was probably broken off beforehand, but before he severed his feet it appears that he used his knife to whittle the top of it so that it was even sharper, and would penetrate his body more easily. We found no traces that anybody else was involved.’

‘What about Borys and Lidia?’ asked Krystyna.

‘All the circumstantial evidence suggests that Borys Grabowski shot Lidia and then his dog and then reloaded his shotgun and shot himself. Murder-suicide, or possibly a suicide pact. We have no idea what the motive could have been, apart from what you have already told us about you all panicking. But unless some new evidence turns up, we are not actively looking for anybody else.’

‘So, does that mean that my son and I can go back to the States?’ Jack asked him.

‘Of course, although I will need to know how to get in touch with you, if it is necessary. And today I would appreciate it if each of you could give me again your account of what happened when you went looking for Mr Wi
ś
niewski in the forest.’

‘Sure. The sooner we get this over with, the better.’

Komisarz Pocztarek interviewed each of them separately, while the other two waited downstairs in the bar. His questions were detailed and laborious. Where were you standing in relation to the others when you first began to feel panicky? Why do you think you became so frightened? When did you hear the shotgun blasts? How long do you think it was between each blast? How long was it before your son reappeared from the forest? Did he say anything to you? If so, what?

Jack told him about the white figure that he had seen behind the trees. What did he think it was? Komisarz Pocztarek asked. A person, or an animal? Could he describe it in detail? How many times did he see it, and how long did each appearance last? Could it have been a trick of the light – some kind of optical illusion?

‘You don’t think I really saw anything?’ asked Jack.

‘Of course I do. But our sniffer dog found no trace that anybody else had been in that part of the forest except for you five. So I am inclined to think that if it wasn’t an optical illusion, it was an animal of some kind. And no matter how well-trained it might be, there is no animal that I know of which can cut a man’s feet off and stick him on a tree stump, and then kill two people and a dog with a shotgun.’

Jack felt like telling him not to be facetious, but then he thought:
Let’s just get this over with. All I want to do now is go back to Chicago and back to my restaurant. I want to get Sparky away from here, too.

It was Krystyna’s turn to be interviewed next. She was only twenty minutes or so, but when she came out she looked tired and strained, and her eyes were swollen, as if she had been crying.

‘Sparky, it’s your turn,’ she said. Sparky stood up and marched out of the bar without a word, while Krystyna sat down in the chair that he had just vacated and ordered herself a vodka-tonic.

‘Are you OK?’ Jack asked her.

‘Not really. Robert was such a good friend to me, always, and Lidia, too – and Borys. I think when Komisarz Pocztarek started to ask me questions about them it really hit me for the first time that they were all gone, and that I will never see them again, ever.’

Jack reached over and squeezed her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Krystyna. This has been some kind of nightmare, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes! But the trouble is that we still haven’t woken up from it, have we? We still don’t know why we panicked so much and why they killed themselves like that. It could have been
us,
too! We came so close to doing it ourselves!’

‘Maybe we’ll never know. I’m just going to make sure that from now on I stay well clear of
any
woods, believe me.’

The waiter brought Krystyna’s cocktail and she stirred the ice noisily before she drank it. ‘God – I needed that,’ she said, relaxing back in her chair. But then she looked across at Jack and said, ‘Komisarz Pocztarek told me that you saw something in the forest when we found Robert – something white. He asked me if I had seen it, too, but of course I hadn’t. You didn’t tell me that.’

‘I just didn’t want to scare you any more than you were scared already,’ Jack told her. ‘I only saw it for a second, and I have absolutely no idea what it was. Borys thought that it could have been an elk.’

‘What did it look like?’

‘I don’t know. It was always behind the trees. White, and very quick. It could have been an animal, I guess. It looked more like somebody dressed up in a sheet, pretending to be a ghost.’

‘My God. That
is
scaring. But you really can’t think what it was?’

Jack shook his head. He could see it, in his mind’s eye, but its shape and its flickering movement still made no sense.

After another fifteen minutes, Sparky reappeared, with Komisarz Pocztarek and his partner close behind him.

‘How was it?’ Jack asked Sparky, but all Sparky did was shrug and say, ‘OK, I guess. Can I have another Coke, please?’

‘Sure. Just go to the bar and tell them to put it on twenty-seven-twelve.’

When he had gone, Komisarz Pocztarek came and sat down next to Jack. ‘I talked to your son,’ he said, with cigarette breath. ‘You told me about his psychological condition and of course I took this into account.’

‘But? I sense a “but” coming.’

‘Well, yes. There is nothing to suggest that he was in any way involved with the killings of these three people, but he gives me the strongest feeling that he knows something about it which he did not wish to tell me.’

‘Any idea what?’

Komisarz Pocztarek looked at Jack steadily. ‘I have been in this business for a very long time, sir, and I know when somebody is trying to hide something from me. I also think that you agree with me – and that you, too, believe that your son is not telling us everything that happened to him in the forest.’

He turned around to make sure that Sparky wasn’t yet returning from the bar. ‘I am not trying to suggest that he is lying. I am not saying that. But I am ninety-nine percent sure that he is not telling us the whole story.’

‘I don’t know what he could possibly know that I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘He was with me the whole time … well, except for those ten minutes or so when we got separated.’

‘Yes?’

Komisarz Pocztarek could obviously sense that Jack was thinking hard.
Should I tell him how much Sparky’s mood had changed, when he reappeared out of the forest? What had caused him suddenly to start being so sulky and stand-offish? Had it been nothing more than shock and exhaustion, or had he seen or done something that he didn’t want anybody to know about?

‘I think he found the whole experience very traumatic,’ said Jack. ‘It seems like he’s hiding something but that’s only because he doesn’t want to think about it. I feel pretty much the same way myself.’

‘Well, OK,’ said Komisarz Pocztarek. ‘But if he should tell you any more about what happened in the forest, I would like to be the first to know.’

They both stood up, and shook hands. He had left the bar by the time Sparky returned with his glass of Coke.