by Reah, Danuta
Cathcart stayed where he was, sitting on the edge of his desk and waited. When it had played for the second time, she snapped off the machine and looked at him. ‘OK. This is just a preliminary assessment. Your equipment is lousy, by the way.’
He grinned in rueful acknowledgement. ‘What can you tell me?’
‘He comes from Lancashire,’ she said. ‘There are some characteristics in the vowels and the way he pronounces the ”l” that is very distinctive of that area – it’s usually a feature that’s gained in early childhood, and it tends to stay unless someone makes a real effort to change it.’
Cathcart felt depression settle over him at the prospect of working with another expert who went all around the houses to tell them what they had already worked out for themselves. OK, the guy was local. Big surprise.
If she was aware of his reaction, she didn’t show it. ‘Listen to the way he pronounces the “r”,’ she said. She let a small part of the recording play and the flat, dead voice spoke into the sudden silence:
…that’s right...
...over here…
She played it again, and again. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Over here, over here, over here… ‘That’s interesting. It’s quite restricted, that pronunciation. You’ll find it north of Manchester, Rochdale or Accrington if you’re looking at urban centres. You’ll find it in the country areas around Preston and in the north of the county. It’s a feature that’s vanishing. I’d be surprised to find it in a young man – I’d say he’s thirty plus, possibly older.’
‘OK.’ That was better. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
She hadn’t finished. ‘Listen to the way he says get and it. He’s saying them higher in the mouth than a Lancashire speaker – than any English speaker – would. And the way he says the vowel in you. That’s diphthongised and coming to the front of the mouth.’ She was speaking almost to herself, her head tilted in concentration as she played a section of the tape again. ‘There. That’s come from somewhere. For that to have stuck, I’d look at someone who has spent some time in Australia.’ She looked up at him. ‘That’s as much as I can give you without taking it back to the lab.’
Now, Cathcart was impressed.
***
Cathcart looked at Will. ‘She listened to that tape cold, and described the man I had just arrested. Derek Haynes, the man who owned the computer. He was 45, he came from Rochdale and he’d lived in Australia between 1986 and 1992. Her boss was going to take the case over when he came back from a conference. He’s got a bit of a rep for hogging the limelight in high profile cases, but after that, I wanted Ania. I didn’t know about your… about her history.’ He frowned. ‘The computer was sealed and went straight to the lab.’ He nodded to Will’s unspoken query. ‘FLS. I’ve followed the chain of evidence. It went straight to Ania. FLS made a copy for us for our investigation. They got the interview tapes as well – they transcribe all our tapes for us, so she used those for comparison.’
‘But you got the copy at once?’
‘I’ve been looking at the evidence logs. We didn’t get the copy for seventy-two hours. I went to have a look and there was a note from Ania apologising for the delay. She said they’d got held up in their system.’
Seventy-two hours was presumably enough time to collect what she needed for a fabricated recording. Will felt sick as he saw the pieces of evidence slotting together, and the picture that was forming.
‘Anyway, a week later she was back. She couldn’t say it in her report, but she told me that personally she was certain: it was him. By then, we’d found the basement where the recordings were made – in the detention centre where he worked. We’d got him. But now…’
‘What about forensics?’ If they’d found the location of the abuse, then traces of the abuser should be all over.
‘Yeah, plenty. But Haynes admitted to using the basement. He kept some equipment there. He said he hadn’t been in there much around the time the kid vanished, and he never saw anything untoward there. Everything pointed to him but there was nothing conclusive. And there were no forensics on the kid. We found her too late and she’d been in the water too long. We don’t even know how she died. We could put her in the basement and we could put him in the basement but we couldn’t put them there together. The voice was the one thing he couldn’t hide.’
His eyes met Will’s. ‘Haynes worked in that centre for five years. They detain kids in that place. I keep thinking about them.’
Locked up with a predatory paedophile, with few rights and no access to the law. And Haynes had used the basement a lot.
‘Will he get off?’
Cathcart shook his head. ‘Not if I have anything to do with it. We’re going back over the evidence now. There has to be something – I just need one thing, one thing that will link him to Sagal, and I’ve got him. We never had any other convincing suspects in the frame. The mother’s contacts didn’t have access to the kid, not while she was in detention.’
‘The father?’
‘He was deported before the kid was taken. He’s gone to ground. He never made any contact that we’re aware of.’
‘What happened to the mother?’ She had been implicated in her daughter’s abduction, Will recalled.
‘We investigated her as well. We thought she had probably made a bargain with Haynes – time with the kid in exchange for getting all of them out of there – she’s got another kid as well, little lad. The ”Dave” story was probably some kind of cover up for that but we could never prove it.’
‘What made you think…?’
‘She was the one who’d cosied up to Haynes in the first place.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She’s still here, still in the UK. She’s back in detention now – somewhere up north, I think. They were about to send her back but she’s in luck. We’ll need her here if there’s going to be a retrial.’
The indifference in his voice made Will look sharply at him. Cathcart shrugged. ‘That kid really drew the short straw. The dad was involved in terrorist shit. That’s why they deported him. The mum was a prostitute before the immigration people picked her up. The staff at the centre said she was a cold fish. She had this little lad as well as the girl, barely looked at him, called him ”the changeling” when she talked about him at all. What’s to feel sorry for? It’s those kids I care about.’
So did Will, but someone else’s dead child wasn’t – couldn’t be – his main concern. He had been running the information Cathcart had given him through his head. ‘Ania gave you a cold reading of that tape and it fitted Haynes. Why would she have needed to change anything?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that, trying to make sense of it. The guy on that tape was local – we all knew that. But the rest of it – it was just what she said. It was ”Can you hear this, can you hear that,“ but it was just a voice to us. I’ve been wondering… Did she know more than she told us? Did she have Haynes in her sights from the off?’
It would have been beyond coincidence anyway that a man with Haynes’ profile but who wasn’t Haynes would have had access to the machine. Cathcart’s first account had made nonsense of Ania’s fabricating evidence – if her initial analysis had been correct there would have been no need. But now… Haynes had been ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ by the time the video had been found. Ania would have known he was the man in police custody. In which case, why would she…? ‘That recording you made, the audio cassette – it’s the only copy of the original now?’
‘It would be, if we still had it. Ania came by and picked it up.’
‘When?’
‘A few days ago. Just before the shit… Just before the story broke.’
‘Where is it?’
Cathcart looked at him. ‘I don’t know. It’s vanished along with the rest of her stuff.’
Another damning fact, another dead end.
Chapter 19
It was evening by the time Will lef
t the police station. He’d had a vague plan to try and get a flight to Poland that night, but it was too late and he was too tired. He decided to go back to Ania’s flat. He needed to rest, and he needed to think through what he had found out. He didn’t want to sit among crowds in a restaurant, so he pulled in to a supermarket car park, negotiating shoppers pushing heavily loaded trolleys back towards their cars. He found a space next to a massive 4 x 4 that wouldn’t have looked out of place driving across the plains of the Serengeti, and leaned his head back against the headrest. The idea of going into the supermarket and selecting things off the shelves seemed like an insurmountable burden.
He remembered taking the girls shopping when they were small. If he was on his own, he let them ride in the trolley pretending they were animals in a cage. As he watched the shoppers go past the car, he could see the small faces looking at him from behind the bars, little girls with blonde curls, giggling with excitement. He could remember the knitted cardigans they had been wearing, lumpy and home made, buttoned up to their chins for warmth. From somewhere in the recesses of his mind, the voices came back to him faint now across the gulf of time:
Daddy, Daddy…
Concealed between the Serengeti wagon and the wall, he felt tears stream down his face.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
Will jerked upright. It took him a few seconds to reorient himself. He was in the car. The sheltering cliff of the 4 x 4 had gone, and the sky was dark. The bright yellow of street lights illuminated the car park. He checked his watch. It was after eight. He had been here for over an hour.
A man in the uniform of a security guard was knocking on the window. He pressed the button to wind it down. ‘Are you all right, sir?’ The man’s face was tight with suspicion.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Were you planning on doing some shopping?’
Will fought with the daze of confusion and fatigue. His face felt stiff. ‘Yes. I’m just…’ he made a vague gesture.
The man’s face didn’t relax. ‘They’ll be closing in five minutes.’
‘Then I’d better get moving.’ Will pushed the car door open, ignoring the man who moved away, speaking into his radio.
Cursing, Will walked quickly towards the supermarket entrance where attendants were already stacking up the baskets and lining up the trolleys. He stepped round a girl who seemed to be monitoring the door to keep new shoppers out. A blast of warm air hit him, followed by the chill of the coolers just inside the entrance.
He grabbed a bottle of milk, some bread and a paper and went to the kiosk to pay. He took his shopping back to the car, aware of the eyes of the security guard following him.
Chapter 20
This time, Ania’s flat evoked no memories for Will. He was glad, as he let himself into the block and took the lift to the third floor, that he couldn’t feel her presence, that he had no expectations of her waiting to greet him in her open doorway.
The flat looked almost clinically tidy. He was hungry, and tore a hunk of bread off the loaf he’d bought and ate it with some cheese while he waited for the kettle to boil. Coffee gave him an artificial boost of wakefulness. He knew he needed to sleep, but he didn’t want to. He felt as though something malignant and watchful was close by and he was scared of what his dreams might bring.
Instead, he sat down to put together the information he’d gathered into notes. He was looking for inconsistencies. These were the weak places where an investigator could insert a wedge and start the process that would crack an entire case wide open.
Just over a year ago, FLS had been asked to analyse the recordings retrieved from a computer used by Derek Haynes. The work had been given to Ania as an expert in voice recognition and speaker profiling.
He jotted down his first question.
Did she tamper with the recording?
Everything he’d found, and everyone he had spoken to, said that she did. Cathcart had delivered the sealed laptop to FLS. No one but Ania had had access to it during the crucial period. If the answer to that question was yes, then that led at once to the second question: why? He stared at the page in front of him, but his mind was blank. He couldn’t find an answer. He didn’t have the information – yet.
He was puzzled that Cathcart, or someone on his team, hadn’t noticed that the recording they sent was not the same as the recording that was used in Ania’s analysis, but as he thought about it, he realised it wasn’t so strange.
Cathcart and his team had heard the recording, but as long as what was returned to them was broadly similar in length and content, it was unlikely they would notice the changes. The child’s voice hadn’t been altered, just the relatively brief, terse instructions from the abuser. In twelve hours of interview recordings, it was probably possible to find everything needed to produce something that was almost identical in content to the original.
Then Haynes had appealed and Karzac was warned that there was going to be trouble. He had spoken to Ania. She hadn’t been surprised, but she hadn’t been worried either. She had gone over her report again, or at least she had told Karzac she was going over her report again. She had gone to Cathcart and collected the cassette. And then…
This was where it stopped making sense. She had destroyed any evidence remaining on her computer. She had packed up her files and notes and had taken a flight to Poland three days before she was officially due to leave. She’d run away.
Why?
Because she was afraid she’d be arrested? But she could be arrested in Poland just as easily. Everyone knew where she was.
To gain time? If she’d stayed in the UK, she would have been arrested and questioned more or less immediately. In Poland, she might gain a few days’ grace.
Just watch out for the letter, OK?
He put his face in his hands. He was too tired to think, and he needed more information. Blaise had promised to send him the autopsy report and a copy of the note Ania had left.
He took his laptop out of his bag and switched it on. It found Ania’s wireless connection and he was able to log on. She hadn’t changed her password. He found himself hoping there would be something from her, some last message, some explanation, some indication that she had forgiven him for letting her down, but there was nothing.
There were messages from friends sent in the shock and aftermath of Ania’s death. He opened them and scanned them quickly: tried to call you… So very sorry… shock… can’t believe… anything, anything at all. And in all of them: when will the funeral be? He didn’t send any replies. He couldn’t cope with the grief of others, not now, but he felt the pressure of urgency again. He needed to be in Poland. He couldn’t leave her there, a cadaver in a foreign mortuary. He had to bring her back.
Blaise’s e-mail was there. Will read through it. It said the same things that Blaise had said to him on the phone, with a reinforcement of the warning: you are not to get involved in any investigation. This was Blaise covering his back. Will intended doing what he pleased, which he suspected Blaise already knew.
Blaise had honoured his promise. He had sent Will not just the autopsy report, but the witness statements the police had taken from the man who had found her, and from the colleagues she had been working with on the last days of her life.
Will read through the witness statements first. They all told the same story: Ania had been distracted and uncommunicative. She had immersed herself in work, starting early in the morning and staying long into the evening. She had refused offers of social contact, saying that she was busy and would catch up with people later. One statement used the word ‘obsessed.’ They all indicated that she had not been herself, they had all recognised a change in her.
Blaise had not sent the photographs that Will knew must exist, the photographs of her lying broken on the ground, photos of her on the autopsy table, but there was one picture. It showed a small, dingy office, sparsely furnished. There was a filing cabinet against the wall, and a desk under a window.
A p
hone was upended on the floor, trailing its cord, and a shoe lay on the desk top.
Above it, the window stood wide open.
The autopsy report was simple enough. The fall had broken her legs, her pelvis, her back, her arms and her neck. Her skull was fractured. The chances of surviving a fall like that were negligible. Occasionally some freak event occurred and someone walked away, but that was not the case here. She had been smashed to pieces.
Both his children, dead by violence.
Blaise had scanned the note Ania had left for him. He didn’t want to read it, but he had to. This was what she had promised him, and this was a promise she had kept.
Daddy
I’m so very sorry. I wish I could think of a better way out but I can’t. I can’t face any more of this. Please tell everyone that I’m sorry about what I did. I thought it was for the best but I was wrong. Please forgive me.
Ania.
She hadn’t called him Daddy since Louisa had died. His eyes felt dry and painful. Was that all she could say to him? ‘Forgive you? How can I forgive you?’
He looked across the room and she was there by the window, her arm resting on the sill. He could see her silhouetted against the grey night. She turned her head away from him and the street light caught her face for a moment. She smiled, but her smile was sad. She shook her head.
And then he was awake, aware that he had lost time again, so tired that he had fallen into a waking doze even as he read his daughter’s suicide note. He went to the bathroom and stuck his head under the cold tap until he felt some kind of wakefulness return, then he went back to his seat towelling his hair, cold water trickling down his neck.
He printed off the statements, the autopsy report and the letter, then looked to see what else was waiting for him. There was only an e-mail from someone called Walter Gilman, inviting him to become a friend on Facebook.