by Reah, Danuta
The bottom drawer contained miscellany: heavy walking socks, exercise sweats, a faded swimming costume, and, at the back of the drawer, another photograph. Two children waved at him from a playground climbing frame. One of them was sitting high up, hazardously secured by one leg hooked over a bar, the other was kneeling at the top of the slide. The sky was the pale blue of forget-me-nots.
He sank back onto the bed and closed his eyes. He was looking into a terrible emptiness. He didn’t know what to do next. He didn’t know, because now both his children were dead.
***
It had been one of those hot August days towards the end of summer. They were planning a holiday – a fortnight’s camping in the south of France. They’d planned to leave that day, but then he’d had to work.
‘You could go on ahead,’ he’d said to Elžbieta.
‘No way. It’ll just give you an excuse to take on more work. Tell them you are on leave, as of tomorrow.’ She’d tapped his arm with a peremptory finger and held his gaze.
He’d laughed. She was accusing him of not pulling his weight, but he was looking forward to the break. He’d planned to take Ania canoeing on the Orb. He’d tried to interest Louisa, but when he’d taken them to a stretch of the river one weekend where it was safe for beginners to learn, she had taken one look at the small boat and the wide river, at people doing rolls and retrieving themselves in the water, and refused to have anything to do with it.
He and Ania had ended up on the river together, while Louisa watched them from the bank. Ania’s small face had been set with determination as she had steered the canoe, done rolls, paddled herself up and down the stream while Louisa read her book.
He’d been proud of Ania and hadn’t attempted to hide it. Louisa had watched him, casting quick glances from behind the hair that tumbled across her face. She had known he was disappointed in her for not being braver.
He wondered afterwards if Ania had used that. Sometimes, they quarrelled, fought over the things that seemed so trivial to adults and so important to children. Maybe there had been a disagreement in the playground – Ania, white-faced and distraught over her missing twin, had never mentioned anything. She had never said anything since, but it was after Louisa’s death that the depressions she came to personalise as Brown Jenkin began to stalk her through her life.
Come on the monkey bars! Come on!
You do it. I don’t want to.
You can’t! You’re useless. Can’t do the monkey bars, can’t canoe!
Shut up! Shut up!
Just a quarrel between children who were irritable and disappointed, children who were sometimes rivals for their father’s affection.
And somewhere in the shadows of the trees, a monster had been waiting.
It was a figure that had lived in the back of his head since the day of Louisa’s abduction. Then, he had believed that one day – and soon – the monster would be forced into the daylight of identification, exposed, convicted, destroyed.
More than anything, he wanted to look into the eyes of his daughter’s killer. But he never had. All he was left with was the monster lurking in the shadows, Brown Jenkin who had come back and claimed his surviving child.
Chapter 15
Will realised he still had the photograph clutched in his hands. He looked at it, and saw with surprise the marks on the paper where tears had fallen. He wiped his hands over his face. He didn’t have time for this.
Ania was standing by the window looking out over the city. As he became aware of her, she turned round and smiled at him, opened her mouth to speak.
The phone rang.
His head jerked up. He’d been daydreaming. He was sitting on the bed with the photograph in his hands, and he’d drifted away. The phone buzzed insistently. He located it on the dressing table. Ania’s phone. Someone was calling her. He hesitated for a moment, then picked it up. ‘Yes?’
‘Will? Is that you?’
It was John Blaise, the familiar Yorkshire voice sounding firm and reassuring. The last time he’d seen Blaise was when Will had accepted the offer that Blaise had made him: no resignation, nothing to stir up the press. Retire under the conditions we are laying down and your reputation intact; or you and your team face the consequences.
The threat to the people who had worked for him over the past five years had made the decision for him. He had accepted.
‘Yes.’ He didn’t bother asking how Blaise knew he was here. Blaise had probably known his movements from the time the news about Ania first broke.
‘Will. I’ve been trying to call you all morning. Then I realised where you’d be.’
‘My phone was switched off. I drove down from the cottage as soon as… early. I drove down early.’
‘It’s a bad business, Will. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’
There didn’t seem anything to say.
‘It’s a tragedy,’ Blaise went on. ‘We all get over-enthusiastic at some time or another. She had strong feelings about the case, of course she did. How much do you know?’
‘I know she fell. That’s all.’
‘I got on to the people over there.’ Will heard a rustle of paper. ‘They were very good. They’ve sent me copies of all the statements, everything they’ve got so far. It’s early days of course. How much do you want me to tell you?’
‘Everything.’
‘OK. Now, the set up – well, you know that. This guy Karzac, her boss, he franchises a lot of their work over there. They knew Ania well – they’re gutted. The man in charge…’ There was a rustle of paper. ‘Jankowski, Konstantin Jankowski. He says that they knew there was something wrong. She wasn’t like herself. She was very quiet, very subdued. Now usually she organised her own accommodation, but this time she needed somewhere to stay – she arrived earlier than they expected so they put her up in the university accommodation outside the city. Pretty place by all reports, but maybe not the best if you’re feeling a bit low. It’s out in the middle of the woods, long way from anywhere. They said that she got straight down to work. That bit was fine – she got her head down and got on with it. Anyway, that evening she was working late – seems they had a bit of a backlog. This Jankowski character said he asked her if she wanted to go for a drink when he left. That was around eight. She said no, she wanted to get the stuff out of the way. That’s the last time he saw her.
‘The security guard that found her was doing the rounds in the small hours. He found the window open – she was on the ground below. Five storeys – it was a long drop. The police can confirm that was the window she fell from. Her prints were on the glass and on the sill. She hit her head on an overflow pipe on the way down. Cast iron. They found… Well, evidence. She was dead, Will. She probably died when she hit that pipe. She wouldn’t have been conscious when she hit the ground, that’s certain. The fall would have killed her instantly. Her neck was broken.’
Will shut the images out of his mind. ‘So what’s the progress on the investigation?’
The silence stretched for a moment too long. ‘Will, you have to understand the set-up they found. The office door was locked. The key was in her pocket. And she left a note.’
His response was instant. ‘I don’t care what she left. She didn’t do that.’
I tried to tell you. I did what I had to. Brown Jenkin was on my back.
Blaise’s voice was gentle. ‘I know it’s not what you want to hear. I know it’s hard to believe that Ania of all people… But she was in a bad mess, Will. When it all started coming out, I thought about you. I should have got in touch at once, but I thought you wouldn’t want… reminders. I’ve seen the reports. She didn’t make a mistake. She falsified the evidence. She would have been facing criminal charges for perjury. There’s no doubt about that.’
Will remained silent. Everything in him wanted to reject what Blaise was telling him, but he had seen the start of the investigation himself.
‘I looked for all the loopholes, Will. I didn’t want to believe it
any more than you do. But no one else tampered with that evidence – she worked with the originals. They were delivered to her under police seal. And she stood by that analysis in court. What she did was planned. She perverted the course of justice and she may have sent an innocent man to jail – or given a guilty one a way out. They were going to throw the book at her. The maximum sentence for perverting the course of justice is life. Now she wouldn’t have got that, but five years? More? Will, that’s what she was facing.’
Now he didn’t have anything to argue with. One by one, Blaise had knocked down the arguments he was trying to put forward. Ania wasn’t a quitter. She never had been. She could have faced down the public shaming. But jail. He didn’t think Ania could have stood the prospect of going to prison – not if she was contemplating it when she was ill, tired and alone. And he’d been too dazed from sleep to hear the dread in her voice that must have been there.
She hadn’t phoned to warn him it was going wrong: she’d phoned for help, and he’d let her down. Brown Jenkin’s on my back today. Of course he was. And Will could have helped – he still had all his contacts, he could have got good witnesses to back her up. He could have got her the best defence. Medical witnesses – if she’d done what Blaise had implied, there must have been something wrong with her. He could have saved her from jail, he knew he could.
Why hadn’t she asked him? ‘I could have helped you!’
Her smile was rueful. ‘There was nothing wrong with me, Dad. I was of sound mind, isn’t that what they say?’
‘Then… why?’
But her voice had faded and he could hear Blaise speaking again. ‘… anything I can do. You know that.’
‘There is.’
‘Name it.’ Blaise sounded relieved.
‘I want the contact for the senior officer over there. I want the introduction to come from you so they’ll take me seriously. And I want to see the note she left.’
There was silence while Blaise considered this. ‘OK. I’ll do that for you, Will, because I trust you. But you’ve got to promise me you’ll keep out of it. I don’t want you barging in on their work, right?’
‘I won’t.’
‘You’re a relative, not an investigator.’
‘I know.’
There was silence again then Blaise said, ‘I can let you have a copy of the note. It was addressed to you.’
Just watch out for the letter, OK?
He couldn’t breathe. The pain seemed to crush his chest. The letter. The letter that had never arrived – she was warning him what she planned to do. She had gone there to die. The letter she had promised him, the letter she had written to him… ‘I want that. It…’
‘It’s part of the evidence Will. If you’re sure you want it, I’ll get a copy to you. I can e-mail it.’
‘She left it for me.’
‘OK, Will. OK. It’s done. Now, you know where I am – if there’s anything, I mean it…’
‘One more thing. I want to see her.’ The words were out before Will had realised he was going to say them.
‘No you don’t. You know what jumpers… What people who’ve fallen look like.’
‘I want to see her.’
He heard Blaise sigh. ‘Will, the overflow pipe stove her head in. Don’t do that to yourself. Do you think she’d have wanted you to see her like that?’
She wouldn’t.
Blaise recognised the assent in his silence. ‘Call me if you need anything else.’
Will sat in the chair for a long time after he had put the phone down. The images were pouring into his mind unstoppably. He didn’t even try to stop them. Ania, sitting in a room alone. He couldn’t see the room. He had no image in his mind. All he could see was his daughter, sitting at a desk with her bowed head resting on her hand.
Thinking.
Round and round. It must have gone round and round.
No way out.
No way out.
She’d come to do this, but now she was here… Maybe she’d tried to call him at the cottage, maybe he’d been asleep and hadn’t heard the phone.
She picked up the phone, keyed in a number. Listened, then put the phone back down.
It was getting dark and she was on her own with no one to talk to. Just an empty room in an empty building. Offices were lonely places after hours, the silence where there had been the bustle of people, the sound of her footsteps echoing along the corridors.
Perhaps she would have changed her mind, but all she had to go back to was her room in an isolated block in the middle of the forest, somewhere else to sit alone and think. She was exhausted from the stress and the worry, but the stress and the worry wouldn’t let her sleep.
No way out.
The window was in the centre of her vision, the solution she had come here to find, the escape route her mother had used when she had left them, when her life became unbearable.
There would just be the drop, maybe a moment… then all her troubles would be over. If, if she made the final decision, then she didn’t need to worry any more. Her gaze wandered round the room, passed over the window, closed and locked against the night, then came back.
Stopped.
Stayed.
She stood up and pushed the window open. The sky was dark and cloudy. Climbing up onto the sill didn’t mean she had decided anything, it just meant…
Thinking about it. Just thinking about it.
The intensity of this moment took away the gnawing stress. This was something she could focus on. But each time she inched herself forward, just a bit, towards the drop, she came closer to the point of no return, the point when the decision was made for her.
The winter wind was strong up here, cutting through her clothes and chilling her fingers as they gripped the window frame. The brick wall dropped away below her, sheer, down to the dark and empty car park.
Her foot slipped and she grabbed frantically for something to steady her. The shock brought her back to her senses and she knew she didn’t want to die down there. Her hand closed round the edge of the frame and she breathed again.
OK. It’s OK.
But the metal frame was slick and her grip was failing. Her feet had no purchase on the sill that tilted away and down, worn smooth by decades of wind and rain. Time slowed as her hands scrabbled frantically for something, anything that would restore her equilibrium.
Then her foot slipped into space and the frame was torn from her grip.
After that, there was the fall.
‘Ania!’
He sat upright. He must have drifted off into a twilight world between sleeping and waking. It was a place he never wanted to go again. ‘Why?’ he shouted. ‘For God’s sake! Why did you do it?’
But he had let her die in his mind, and there was no reply.
Chapter 16
From The Rules of Interrogation, a paper presented to The International Conference on the Threat of Global Terrorism by John Martell Blaise, London, March 2003
Finally, I think we can all agree that as a means of getting information, so-called robust interrogation – let’s call a spade a spade here, we’re talking about torture – is flawed. Personnel involved in questioning suspects don’t want it and they don’t need it. It isn’t a useful tool. History teaches us that, over and over again.
There are, however, situations in which the judicious use of coercive interrogation can enhance techniques known to be reliable, and here I think our laws can be restrictive.
Psychological methods of interrogation are effective and we can prove that. In situations of national or even international threat, these should not be considered in the same light as methods of physical coercion. The lowering of an individual’s threshold of vulnerability can only be desirable. Well-attested methods of disrupting sleep patterns, inducing unfounded fear, physical discomfort, isolation can lead a suspect to cooperate with the authorities. Until such methods are freely available to our own security forces, we shouldn’t reject out of hand the possibilit
y of, if you like, outsourcing (laughter) this work to interrogation teams who have more leeway. Carefully supervised, these methods can provide our own security forces with valuable, with life-saving, information.
Q&A
Question: I’d like to thank the speaker for a clear, lucid and rational account of the issues facing people working in our field. I would be interested in the speaker’s view of the death penalty. Surely the threat of this is the ultimate psychological weapon?
Answer: As we know to our cost, the possibility of martyrdom can be an inducement rather than a disincentive. Death offers an end to any form of coercive interrogation that may, at the time, seem desirable to the subject. If we imposed the death penalty for parking offences, I’m sure we’d solve our parking problems overnight. Otherwise, I’m not impressed. (Laughter)
Chapter 17
The company Ania worked for was based in an old school building on the edge of the city centre regeneration area. It had been an astute move on the part of Oz Karzac – he had acquired offices on a premium site for a guaranteed low rent and as the regeneration bulldozer rolled over the area, the company became eligible for compensation to cover the expense of moving to the new, modern premises that were waiting for them in the city centre when the building was demolished.
Will had only been there once before. The old school was in the middle of a warren of residential streets, the red brick terraces that were typical of Manchester. The building itself was single storey, small, stone-built, with a glass and concrete extension that probably dated from the late 1960s. The playground had become a car park. Will found a gap and edged carefully in next to a Lexus LX, the incongruity of a high-end vehicle in these poor streets reminding him of Sarah Ludlow’s BMW in St Abbs.
The company sign over the door partly obscured the word Infants that was carved in the stone lintel above the entrance. Ania had made a joke about it as she showed him in.
The faint school smell of chalk and cooking still seemed to hang around the place and the cream paint added to the institutional effect. He went to the small window in the wall marked Reception and rang the bell.