A Grain of Truth by Zygmunt Miloszewski

church, a pile of red bricks arranged in the shape of the gates of hell, ugly, oppressive, and totally unsuited to its surroundings and to this city in general.
    “I have an eleven-year-old daughter. She lives in Warsaw with her mum. I feel as if she’s getting more and more alien, fading from sight by the day.”
    “Even so, I envy you.”
    Szacki was quiet; he had been expecting anything but this sort of conversation. They came to what was rather grandly called the bypass and turned towards the Vistula.
    “We’ve had a bad start,” said Sobieraj, without taking her eyes off the road for a moment. Szacki wasn’t looking at her either. “I was thinking about it yesterday, that we’re both trapped by our own stereotypical thinking. To you I’m a stupid little provincial, and to me you’re an arrogant jerk from Warsaw. And of course we can go on playing that game, except that I really do want to find Ela’s murderer.”
    She drove off the bypass into a small side street and parked outside the surprisingly large hospital building. It was L-shaped with six floors, built in the 1980s. Better than he’d thought.
    “You can laugh and call it small-town overdramatizing, but she was different. Better, brighter, purer, it’s hard for me to describe. Iknew her, I knew everyone who knew her, I know this town better than I’d like to. And as for you, well, this is no time for bullshit, I know how many times you were offered a transfer to the regional court, to the appeal court, and what a career they predicted for you. I know your cases, I know the testimonials and the legends about Teodor Szacki with the snow-white hair, that brave defender of Justice.”
    Finally they looked at each other. Szacki held out his hand, and Sobieraj gently shook it.
    “Call me Teodor.”
    “Basia.”
    “You’ve parked in a disabled parking space, Basia.”
    Sobieraj took a card out of the glove compartment with a blue logo on it symbolizing disability, and put it on the dashboard.
    “Heart. Two attacks. I probably wouldn’t be able to give birth anyway.”
    IV
    “Artur Żmijewski should come and live here,” said Szacki, as he looked around the tidy hospital admissions area, referring to the famous actor, popular for his TV roles as a priest-cum-detective in a show filmed here in Sandomierz, and as a doctor in a serial that had run since 1999. “He could ride his bike from his parish straight to his medical practice.”
    “He has been here anyway,” replied Sobieraj, leading the way downstairs into the basement. “Rumour has it that when they were filming Father Mateusz he fell off his bike and had to be treated in hospital. It’s a well-known story – have you really not heard about it?”
    He waved his hand in an indeterminate way. What should he say? That no, he hadn’t, because he hadn’t been socializing, but had been going through a depression in solitude? He steered the conversation onto the hospital. He really was surprised – he had been expecting a dismal building stinking of mould, some sort of old army huts in thecity centre, but although admittedly it had the feel of the 1980s, this one was almost attractively done up inside. It was modest and nice, the doctors were smiling and the nurses were young, as if they were making an advert for the National Health Fund. Even the autopsy room wasn’t disgusting – compared with the Warsaw morgue inundated with corpses it was like a charming B&B alongside a barrack at a labour camp. On the one and only dissecting table lay the alabaster remains of Elżbieta Budnik.
    Szacki tried to think of her as Budnik’s wife, but he couldn’t do it. He had never admitted it to anyone, but in the presence of corpses he was incapable of thinking about them as people who were recently alive; treating them like pieces of meat was the only thing that prevented him from going insane, even though he had had such a lot to do with death. He knew the same thing went on in the pathologists’