Last Room

by Reah, Danuta

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’ His head was starting to ache and the coffee was making his stomach churn.

  Erland assessed him dispassionately. ‘You need to eat.’ He raised his hand and the waitress came across. He spoke in rapid Polish that Will didn’t try to follow. ‘I have ordered us pierogi,’ he said abruptly.

  Pierogi.

  Sunday mornings, Elžbieta used to make pierogi using a recipe her mother had learned from her own mother. He was suddenly back in that kitchen. He’d just finished his morning shift and he’d followed the smell of coffee and fresh herbs from the front door. The sun poured through the window. Louisa was up to her elbows in flour as she mixed the dough, Ania was grating cabbage, her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration. Elžbieta glanced across at him when she saw him standing in the doorway and gave him the conspiratorial smile that parents share as they offer discreet help to children who are determined to go it alone.

  Then he was back in the stark café, and the memory stopped his breath in his throat. He forced himself to concentrate.

  ‘Tell me about Ania,’ he said. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Erland frowned. ‘I don’t know. I have contacts in the police and I’ve been asking questions, but it’s been – what’s the word? – stonewalling.’

  ‘They know about you and Ania?’

  ‘They know.’

  ‘I saw the reports and I saw the note she left. It said – the police report said she wasn’t herself, she was unhappy, distracted.’

  ‘I didn’t see her that week. My father was unwell. He lives in Gdynia and I took some time off to go and look after him. I wasn’t expecting her till the end of the week. She told me it didn’t matter, she was going to be very busy for the first few days, something important. Usually, she stayed with me but this time she stayed at the hotel. My flat is not so comfortable that she would want to stay if I am not there. So yes, she was distracted. And she was anxious.’

  ‘What was the important work?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me. She didn’t want to talk about it. I think she must have been working on those recordings. What else would have been important to her then? She had to clear her name.’

  Working on the Haynes files. Doing what? He needed to know. ‘Is that all she said?’

  ‘I called her when the news broke. I said I would come back at once. She told me not to – I would be back in a couple of days and it would have been difficult to leave my father then. She sounded… OK.’

  ‘Did she say anything else.?’

  ‘Only that she couldn’t tell anyone – tell you – what you wanted to hear.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Erland shrugged.

  ‘Did you ask her if she had done it?’ Why she had done it.

  Erland’s look said everything he needed to say.

  Will found it hard to continue. ‘She had reasons – she would have had reasons. Did she tell you about her sister? About Louisa.’

  ‘She told me. And you are saying she would send an innocent man to jail in memory of her sister?’

  ‘No. I’m saying that she accepted the police case that Haynes was guilty. She knew they were having trouble making that last link. She knew the evidence wasn’t conclusive. She couldn’t risk Haynes going free.’

  Erland was looking at him with an expression that was close to… what? Pity? ‘So you are saying she believed she was helping the police when she took an action that will wreck what case they had? One that destroyed her career, damaged the company she worked for, damaged her profession?’

  Will shook his head. He didn’t know. ‘She was carrying too much baggage from her sister’s death. They never caught the man who did it. It never ended for her.’

  ‘It never ended for her because she felt responsible. She believed it was her fault – her sister’s abduction and then her mother’s death.’

  His denial was instant. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘I do know, because she told me. And she believed that you felt the same.’

  It was like a punch in the stomach. ‘That’s not true!’ He didn’t know if he was denying what Ania believed, or what he had been accused of believing. ‘Her mother – after Louisa… she lost her mind. She was the one who felt responsible. She left the children on their own in the playground.’

  All she’d done was let the children play while she went to a café a hundred yards away, but she never forgave herself.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I… I never blamed her. I blamed the man who killed our daughter.’ But that wasn’t true. Deep inside, hidden away where it could rot and fester, he had blamed Elžbieta.

  Erland’s shadowed eyes didn’t leave his face. ‘Ania had a fight with her sister. She was angry, so she ran away and left her. When she came back to the playground there was no one there.’

  She’d never told him that. She never told anyone. The police hadn’t been able to understand how the abductor had got Louisa away without Ania seeing him. They’d assumed that Louisa must have wandered out of the playground herself. They’d never known that it was Ania who had gone.

  ‘And you see, as she grew up, she began to realise that if she’d spoken up at the time, maybe, just maybe they would have found Louisa before it was too late.’

  Will stared at him. He couldn’t think of anything to say. There was nothing to say. All he could think of was the guilt Ania had carried with her through her life, the guilt she’d never admitted to him.

  ‘So you see the only person Ania had a motive to frame was herself.’

  ‘You’re saying that’s why she…?’

  ‘She didn’t jump. Mr Gillen, did you know your daughter at all? She didn’t jump.’

  Chapter 24

  It was midnight. For all his fatigue, Will was unable to sleep. He lay on the bed for a while, fully clothed, but the images the darkness brought were more than he could bear. He switched on the light and the reassuring normality of the hotel room returned.

  He got up and found his bag. His laptop was stowed safely away in the central compartment. He put it on the desk and sorted out all the material he’d printed off back in the flat, the autopsy report, the suicide note and the witness statements, and laid them out on the bed. He read through them all again, carefully. He wanted to find something different, something that would change now that he read it with the knowledge Dariusz Erland had given him.

  But nothing changed. If what Erland had told him was true, then it gave him more reasons to think that Ania had been driven to the point where she would follow her mother’s example and kill herself.

  And by the same method.

  He had come home late that day – his work was taking him away for longer and longer. He had told himself that he was doing it for them, that his work would give them financial security, that he was doing what he should do as a father – providing for his family – for what remained of his family.

  Now, far too late, he could admit that he had spent so much time at work because that was the place he preferred to be. It was the place he could get away from Elžbieta. She wasn’t the woman he had married. She wasn’t the woman he knew. In the year since Louisa’s death she had sunk into a deep and unremitting depression. She drank. She became heavy and unkempt, the drugs slurring her voice and making her movements clumsy and uncertain. She’d stopped caring for herself and she’d stopped caring for Ania.

  ***

  Ashford, Kent, 1986

  It was well after eight when he pulled up outside the house. He checked the time. He’d promised to get back early, but he’d let the various small distractions at the end of the day delay him. He felt a leaden fatigue wash over him as he climbed heavily out of the car and braced himself to face Elžbieta’s reproaches.

  The windows were dark and the house closed and silent. Elžbieta’s car wasn’t in the drive. She must be out. Maybe she’d taken Ania out to the Italian café in the small shopping centre half a
mile away. He felt a slight lift in his spirits. If she’d done that, then maybe she was feeling better. Usually by this time, Ania would have eaten, and Elžbieta would be sitting in front of the television, channel hopping with blank eyes while Ania occupied herself in her room.

  He left his car in the road and walked up the short drive, feeling in his pocket for his key. It had been a long day, and he was looking forward to a glass of whisky. This was the routine of his life – home from work, a drink, grab something to eat. He didn’t like the mindless babble of the TV, so he would spend the evening in his study, catching up with work, reading the paper. At some stage in the evening, Ania would creep in and say goodnight.

  ‘Had a good day, sweetheart?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  Always the same colourless response.

  At some level he was aware that his bright, bubbly daughter had changed, had become a silent presence on the edge of his vision. He kept telling himself he would do something for her, but then his own misery pressed forward and engulfed him. She was young. She was resilient. Time was her best support.

  He was sorting out the key to the front door, when he realised someone was calling him.

  ‘Mr Gillen!’

  He turned round. It was one of their neighbours, waving to catch his attention as she came across the road. They’d moved here only recently in the aftermath of Louisa’s death and barely knew anyone. He was surprised she knew his name. He forced a social smile onto his face. ‘I’m sorry I don’t…’

  But this wasn’t a social call. ‘Celia Conway. I’ve got Ania with me. Your wife went out earlier this afternoon. I need to talk to you.’ Her tone was peremptory. She turned and headed back to her own house as Will followed her, any irritation at her attitude swamped by his sudden anxiety for his daughter.

  ‘Here’s your father, Ania,’ Celia Conway called as she came through the door. The house felt welcoming with warm lights and the smell of coffee and cinnamon. He used to come home to a house that welcomed him. These days, it felt cold and bleak and he realised with a sudden lurch of guilt that it was this way for Ania as well.

  He saw her sitting at a table in the main room, books laid out in front of her. She looked at him nervously, and then her eyes slid away.

  ‘She’s doing her homework,’ Celia Conway said. ‘Ania, I’ll just make your father a cup of tea, then he’ll take you home.’

  She confronted him as soon as they were out of earshot. ‘I found her sitting on your doorstep. It isn’t the first time. Do you have any idea what’s going on when you aren’t there?’

  He shook his head, silenced by her anger, and his sudden awareness of his own negligence.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with your wife, but she clearly isn’t capable of looking after the child. I’m not prepared to sit by and let this go on. It isn’t fair.’

  ‘I didn’t realise…’ He should have realised. And he had done the same – it was just that his neglect was less visible, was hidden behind the closed doors of the house while he pretended that her welfare was central to his life. He’d cared more about his next drink than he had about his daughter. ‘Elžbieta’s been ill. She needs…’ She needed a husband who would care for her and she needed professional help. He felt the weight of his responsibilities settle more firmly round his shoulders. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  She studied him in silence, then seemed satisfied with what she saw. ‘I’m sorry I was so blunt.’

  ‘It needed to be said. Thank you.’

  He went into the other room where Ania waited for him, all pretence of working gone. Her face looked pinched and pale. ‘Come on, sweetheart. We’re going home,’ he said, taking her hand. He wasn’t going to make any big declarations. He was just going to make things change. Somehow, it was going to be better, for Ania, and for Elžbieta. He’d see to that.

  ***

  But for Elžbieta, it had been too late. The knock on the door came later that evening. Elžbieta had fallen from the top storey of a car park in the city centre. Her car was parked close to the point of her fall. On the front passenger seat was a stuffed toy, Small Bear, a teddy bear that a friend had made for Louisa when she was a baby, that had been Louisa’s constant companion. No note was ever found, but Will knew – and he suspected that even from the time of her mother’s death, Ania knew too – that Elžbieta had jumped.

  After that day, he had tried to do better. He thought he had convinced Ania that she wasn’t responsible for the way her mother had abandoned her, that she hadn’t deserved it in any way, that it had been the illness, not the way Elžbieta truly felt. What he hadn’t known then was the secret that Ania had carried.

  And now, once again, she was being made responsible for letting a child killer go free. Could she have born the repetition of that responsibility?

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t you. You were only a child…’

  ‘You said that before. It doesn’t change anything. I was there. I know what I did.’

  ‘It still wasn’t your fault. You weren’t…’ But the voice had faded away. He had no answer.

  He read through the suicide note again. It had been written on the computer she had been using earlier that evening. He checked the police report. They’d dusted the keyboard and found what they would have expected – lots of prints, most of them too smudged to be useful. There were two identifiable traces, one that was Ania’s, one that belonged to a man called Konstantin Jankowski. He was the head of department and he and Ania had worked closely together. They’d both used the machine that day. Jankowski said he had spent a couple of hours with her the day she died, working through some analysis.

  The metal frame of the window had produced one identifiable set of prints along the bottom as if she had clung on with one hand that last minute before she let herself go.

  Or before her grip failed and she fell.

  He put his face in his hands and forced himself to think. Dariusz Erland didn’t believe that Ania had jumped. He seemed to despise Will for his belief that she had died at her own hand.

  Erland didn’t know Ania as well as Will did. He didn’t know the poisonous legacy that Ania carried from her mother’s death. He didn’t know how completely the despair engulfed her when Brown Jenkin had her in his grasp.

  So why was he here? If that’s what he truly believed, why was he here? The funeral director could have organised the transport of her body home.

  He was chasing shadows. He couldn’t clear her name. He’d read through everything Blaise had sent him, over and over again. There was nothing there, or nothing he could find. When he went to talk to the police investigating her death, they could only show him what Blaise had shown him.

  Dariusz Erland was insistent she had not committed suicide, but he was refusing to look at the facts. He was trying to absolve himself of the guilt of abandonment. She had needed him, and he hadn’t been here. That was Erland’s own agenda. Will didn’t want to know about that. To anyone else, her death was explicable. Blaise had seen the logic at once. She was overwhelmed by the consequences of what she had done.

  But he was her father. He knew her. There had to be a reason why she had tampered with the evidence, a good reason, a valid reason, even if it did leave her facing imprisonment and disgrace. That was what he was here to find out. He was here to clear his daughter’s name of corruption for personal gain, for adulation and attention. She had done what she had done for a reason, a reason she had seen as honourable and sufficient, even if, in the end, it had driven her to her death.

  He was here to find that reason.

  Chapter 25

  It was three in the morning. Dariusz Erland sat at his computer in the cramped studio flat that was all Łódź had had to offer for single men when he arrived in the city. At least the space was his own. When he was a child, the entire family had been crowded into the flat in Gdynia, not much larger than this. He could remember his parents sleeping on a pull-out bed in the living room, while he and hi
s siblings had slept in the one small bedroom. As Beata grew up, she had shared the pull out bed with her mother and their father had slept with him and his brothers. It was the way people had lived in those days. No one was homeless but no one – or only the powerful few – had privacy and space.

  Maybe that was why he had got out of the habit of sleep once he had left home. From his student days he had always thought that life was too good and too short to be wasted in sleep. He could remember long nights spent in crowded rooms, listening to music, drinking, talking, wandering back through the streets as dawn came, relishing the freedoms that the new Poland had brought to him and his contemporaries.

  Polish people had launched themselves into the EU with an unprecedented enthusiasm, had travelled beyond borders that had been closed by politics and poverty and now they were returning, bringing the fresh air of new experience with them, shining a light on the corruption that linked Poland with its past. Western Europe was old and stagnating. The future was in the east, and this was the future he and Ania had planned together.

  He lit a cigarette and watched the blue smoke curl up towards the ceiling. He had stopped smoking for Ania but now the self-denial seemed futile: the tobacco helped to clarify the thoughts that had been cluttering his mind since his meeting earlier with her father.

  Will Gillen.

  He had hoped that Gillen was here to defend his daughter, to ensure that her death was properly investigated. Instead, it seemed as though Gillen, tied in knots by different kinds of guilt, was all too ready to accept that Ania had died by her own hand. Gillen was caught up in his own past and his own obsessions, not able to see they were his, not Ania’s.

  Ania was more than her sister’s death.

  She had talked very little about her father. It wasn’t the silence of estrangement. It was as if she didn’t yet know how to bring her new life and her old life together. What Dariusz knew about Will Gillen he had gleaned for himself during the course of their relationship.

  When the story that had ended Gillen’s career had broken, there had only been a brief flurry in the Polish press: British intelligence bungles again. Now he had met Gillen, he wanted to know more. Ania’s concerns had been for her father’s welfare as press opprobrium landed on his head. It won’t last Dariusz had assured her. British papers loved it when the authorities got it wrong and they could thunder out moral platitudes, but in this case, the victim was not likely to arouse their sympathy.