Last Room

by Reah, Danuta

  The expression of regret was formal but sounded sincere. Will could see a certain wariness behind the Komendant’s eyes. He could understand it. He wasn’t simply a grieving relative to be told what the police chose to tell him. He had been an officer in the UK force, and his visit here had been backed by Blaise, a significant name in pan-European security. Despite Erland’s warning, Will knew this man had no choice but to cooperate with him and give him what he wanted.

  ‘Thank you for your assistance. I’d like the see the case files on the investigation, everything you can show me.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise? You understand that we have effectively closed the case on your daughter. She took her own life, Mr Gillen. I am sorry to tell you this, but there is no other conclusion we could come to. There is a lot of witness evidence to tell us that she was unwell, she was not herself, and, forgive me, there were the… unfortunate events at home.’

  Suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed. She had been upset and distracted while she was here – everyone he had spoken to had commented on it – except Erland. He had claimed she was much the same as always – a bit anxious, under pressure from work, but calm and in control.

  ‘I understand, but I need to know everything I can. She seemed to be coping, from what I can tell and then something happened to tip the balance. I think it happened that night and I want to know what it was.’

  ‘Who can tell?’ In this deeply Catholic country, suicide was doubly shocking. The person who died at her own hand had committed the one unforgivable sin, the sin of despair, a sin that would condemn them to hellfire for all eternity.

  ‘You can’t repent, you see,’ Ania had explained to him once, ‘because you’re dead. That’s it. You’re lost forever.’

  Not Ania. Not his child.

  Piotr Król was still speaking. ‘There’s very little more than you will have seen already.’ He had a file in front of him. ‘Before I show you this, I have to say something. All of this is confidential. It goes nowhere beyond these walls.’ He held up his hand before Will could respond. ‘I say this because the man you are with is known to us. Under the circumstances, I must ask for your assurance…’

  Will nodded. He had come here accompanied by a man who described himself as a political activist. He could sympathise with Król’s caution. ‘I understand.’

  Król apparently found this sufficient and he pushed the folder across the desk to Will. His gesture indicated that Will was free to browse as he chose.

  Will had seen these reports. Blaise had sent him copies, but he read through them again, making sure that nothing had been added or changed since he last saw them, that nothing further had been identified.

  The story they told was the same.

  The security guard, Jerzy Pawlak, had done his rounds as usual. The last people had left, to his knowledge, at around ten that evening. Well after midnight he had been checking the rooms on the top floor trying to track down the source of a strong draught. He’d found an open window in one of the small offices at the top of the building, and when he’d looked out of the window, he had seen Ania’s body in the car park far below. The man was adamant that the room had been locked – he had had to use his pass key to open the door. The key had been found later in Ania’s pocket.

  The office had been examined by a forensic team who had found various unknown fingerprints, to be expected in a room that was used by a number of people. Ania’s prints were on the window sill and on the window frame. They were the only clear ones, though there were some smudges that her prints overlaid. There was nothing identifiable on the phone, the door handles or the desk. It sounded much as Will would have expected.

  They had found no evidence of a struggle in that room, or in the computer room where Ania had been seen working earlier – no disturbance, no blood, no body fluids. The only slight anomaly was the phone in the small office. It normally stood on the filing cabinet, but it had been on the floor, the plug pulled out of the jack. It would have taken only minor force to do that, but there was no explanation other than a conjecture that Ania had done it herself.

  He turned back to the folder, aware of Król’s gaze on him as he turned the pages over. He’d seen the post-mortem report once. He didn’t want to see it again. He knew his daughter had died in the fall and he knew what the fall had done to her.

  He looked across the desk. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘There’s just a couple of things. I understood that the last person to see Ania alive was Professor Jankowski when he left the building at eight. Is that correct?’

  Król shook his head. ‘The professor was the last person to speak to her at any length. The caretaker saw her when he did his rounds between nine and ten. She was working in the computer room where the professor saw her. He asked her if she had a key to lock the room when she left and she said she did.’

  ‘And after that?’ If he was doing his rounds hourly, then he should have checked again before midnight.

  ‘He didn’t see her. He assumed she had left. We now realise of course she must have been in the small office. The man says he didn’t check it because the door was locked.’

  Will was still turning the pages of the file. There was a section of photographs, and he opened it reluctantly. The first one was of a room which he recognised at once: the room where Ania had fallen. The last room.

  It was the same as he had just seen it except the window was wide open and the phone lay on the floor beside the filing cabinet. There was a shoe on its side on the desk under the window. It was the kind of shoe that Ania always wore, insubstantial, with an impossibly high heel and a filigree of fine straps.

  ‘Not a shoe for running in.’

  He looked up.

  She was watching him again, standing by the exit. Her head inclined towards the folder in front of him, then there was just the battered wood of the door.

  Still holding the picture, he started reading the notes, skimming them because they told him the story he knew – the time of the call, the location of the body – and focusing on the bits where the gaps appeared.

  Two questions were clear in his mind, and he couldn’t see that the investigation had answered them: what had she been doing so late at night, and why had the caretaker assumed she had left? She had been in the computer room when Jankowski spoke to her, and again when the caretaker saw her. He had asked her if she had a key to lock up, and she’d said she had. She wasn’t there when he checked later. He’d assumed she’d gone, or that was what he claimed. If so, why hadn’t he seen her go? There was no way out other than past his desk. It was Mickey Mouse security.

  She must have locked the door to the computer room, or the caretaker would have noticed, and moved to the small office at the end of the corridor. Why? The office was poorly equipped. There was no computer terminal, nothing for her to use.

  He looked at the photo again.

  The phone. He was pretty sure there wasn’t a phone in the computer room. Students had free access to the computer room during the day. The university wouldn’t leave a phone with an outside line in a room where students could use it. She may have gone to the small office to use the phone.

  When he had been in the room that morning, the phone had been on top of the filing cabinet. The filing cabinet was behind the door, out of the way of the desk and the window. It couldn’t have got knocked to the floor accidentally. There was no reason for Ania to have gone near the line. But it was there, on the floor, with the plug pulled out of the socket.

  He looked at the police officer. ‘Did you take prints from the phone and the phone wire?’

  ‘We took prints from everything.’

  Will looked at the photo, then checked through the notes again. There was nothing that looked like a report from a scene of crime team. ‘Do you have the forensic reports? I’d like to see the results of the fingerprint analysis.’

  Król reached across and turned the pages of the file. ‘The summary is there.’

  ‘I’d
like to see the original.’

  Król’s mouth tightened, but he spoke rapidly to the man who had brought Will to the room and who was standing by the door. The man nodded and went across to a filing cabinet, where he began flicking through files.

  ‘There is nothing there,’ Król said. ‘But…’ He shrugged, glancing not quite discreetly at the clock on the wall. Will ignored this. He needed to see the report. In his mind, there was the image of a hand gripping a phone line and pulling it out of the socket, of the wire coiled round the hand and held firm by the thumb pressed against the side of the index finger.

  The man produced a sheaf of papers from the filing cabinet. Will held out his hand. The man hesitated then glanced at Król, who nodded. He passed it across. Will flicked through the pages as though he were searching for the images that would show the matching comparisons, but his eyes were scanning the pages as he went.

  It was there. They’d found a partial print on the phone line, a thumb print that wasn’t hers, but gave insufficient detail for identification purposes. The report gave no more information than that.

  He kept his face emotionless as he flicked on through the pages. Nowhere in the file was there any reference to a cassette tape. He handed it back to Król. ‘Thank you. What was she doing there? Do you know what she was working on?’

  Król indicated a section of the report that Will’s eye had skimmed over. The transcript of the Haynes recording had been on the desk where she had been working, and the disk was in the computer. ‘But she did no work on it,’ Król said. ‘All she had done was play it, over and over. The computer records show that clearly.’ His eyes didn’t leave Will’s face as he pushed another folder across the table. ‘And this,’ he said. ‘So you have seen everything.’

  Will opened it.

  Her body was twisted as if the impact with the ground had shattered her spine. Her legs were sprawled out, looking floppy and shapeless. If he touched them, if he tried to lift her, they would drape and sag because the bones no longer held them together. Her head was misshapen, distorted and smashed. Her face was mercifully turned away from the camera, her hair stuck to it, the pale gold stained dark and sticky with her blood.

  She was like a rag doll thrown out of the pram by a fractious child.

  His daughter.

  Chapter 29

  Dariusz Erland called out to Will as he strode out of the police station. ‘Gillen. Gillen!’

  Will could feel the rage surging inside him. Evidence was there in the file and it had been ignored. They’d opted for the simple solution, that a distressed woman had killed herself. Only the evidence that fit the pattern had been considered. Everything else had been dismissed: this room is much used. Of course there are prints.

  ‘Gillen!’ Erland had caught up with him and was moving beside him now. ‘What is it? What did he tell you?’

  ‘That they don’t give a shit what happened to Ania.’

  ‘He told you…’ For once, Erland’s assurance left him.

  ‘There was someone else in that room.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  The impetus of Will’s anger had slowed, and only grief remained. He shook his head.

  ‘This way.’ Erland took his elbow and steered him round the next corner, where a small, run-down café opened onto the street. When they were sitting at a table, Erland said, ‘Now. How do you know?’

  ‘There was a thumb print on the telephone cord, a partial, as if someone had…’ He made a gesture to show the action of gripping a cord and pulling it free.

  Erland lit another cigarette. His face was white, but his voice was matter-of-fact. ‘So now you know your daughter again. Now there is evidence, you know she didn’t kill herself.’

  ‘I have always known my daughter, and I know that she could… If the wrong things happened at the wrong time, she could have done that.’

  ‘Once, perhaps. Not now.’

  Will shook his head. ‘Do you think I want to believe my daughter killed herself? It’s you who didn’t know her.’ He stopped Erland before he could respond. ‘That window, the one where she… She had to have done that herself. There’s no other way. All I know is they haven’t looked at the evidence properly.’ His daughter’s death, and they had carried out a shoddy investigation. His daughter’s death!

  Erland’s face was expressionless. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. ‘So what is this evidence?’

  ‘Small things. Questions that any half-decent investigation would have answered. Why did she go into the small office? The windows in the computer room were more accessible. Why did the security guard think she’d left earlier? The fingerprint.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. It may mean nothing – probably does. But they should have checked it all before they closed the case.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to start with the fingerprint. I need to know why the police aren’t chasing it up.’

  Erland was frowning as he thought about it. ‘Do they know whose it was?’

  ‘The report just said there wasn’t enough for an identification.’ His first reaction to what he had seen was fading, and he felt the familiar weight of discouragement. A partial fingerprint in a room that was used by a large number of people was hardly surprising, and it was in a place where a print could have been left undisturbed for months. Even so… ‘The phone wire was pulled out. They have to consider it, even if it’s only for elimination purposes. And there’s no evidence that they checked the phone. Ania probably went to that room to use it but there’s no record of any calls.’ He would check the phone himself when he went back.

  Erland stubbed out his cigarette. ‘She called me that night. I was out. I tried to call her back but her phone was switched off. I thought she must be on her way to the hotel. I thought she’d call me again, only she didn’t. I didn’t see her again until…’ His mouth tightened and Will realised Erland must have been the person who had identified her body. Against his will, he felt a surge of pity for what that must have cost him. ‘All the time I thought she was safe, but she wasn’t, and I wasn’t there.’

  Will had no answer to that. He didn’t want to allow Erland the luxury of guilt over Ania’s death. That was his, and his alone. ‘I have to go.’

  He still had something to do. She had left him something. This was what she was trying to tell him. The tape. He would find it – if it existed, he would track it down. He could well be in the wrong place for that, because he had one lead left to follow.

  Sarah Ludlow.

  She had been outside the court when Ania gave evidence. She had come to St Abbs looking for Ania and had found him instead. He had told her that Ania was in Poland, and she had left. A few hours later, Ania was dead.

  Chapter 30

  The message light was blinking on his phone as Dariusz let himself into his flat. He’d kept his mobile switched off. He didn’t want anyone to be able to contact him today. There were five messages, all from Krysia, the woman he had been involved with before he met Ania. He sighed. He didn’t want to talk to anyone and Krysia was the last person he wanted to contact. He wanted to think about what Will Gillen had told him. Gillen’s findings at the police station were no surprise to Dariusz. He had known from the start that they weren’t doing a proper job on the investigation. What he didn’t know was why.

  But he couldn’t ignore messages from work. There were people relying on him. He keyed in Krysia’s number. ‘Krysia. It’s Dariusz.’

  ‘Dariusz. I’m glad you called. How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Oh that. Mr Mielek’s going crazy. I told him you’d phone as soon as… He’s been on to me all day to get hold of you.’

  It was typical of Leslaw Mielek to make trouble over what was a simple enough matter. ‘Tell him I’ll call tomorrow. Wait. Don’t tell him you’ve spoken to me, just leave it with me. I’ll call him.’

  ‘OK… Listen, Dariusz, I’
m worried about you. I don’t think you should be on your own right now. Beata thinks…’

  ‘I’m fine, Krysia. Thanks. I’ll be back in a couple of days, OK? I’ll call Mielek now.’

  He put the phone down and took some deep breaths to calm himself. He was angry at his sister’s interference. She’d obviously been on the phone to Krysia as soon as she heard the news about Ania.

  He didn’t want to deal with Beata’s schemes for his future. He didn’t want to upset Krysia again, but he couldn’t cope with this on top of everything else. He picked up the phone and dialled Beata’s number.

  ‘It’s Dariusz,’ he said abruptly as soon as she answered.

  ‘Dareczek!’ The diminutive from his childhood usually had the power to disarm him, but not today.

  ‘I’ve just spoken to Krysia…’

  ‘Good. You need to have people…’

  ‘She told me what you’d said to her. Stay out of my business, Beata. If I need people, I’ll choose my own.’

  ‘Dareczek, don’t get angry with me. Krysia’s worried about you. We all are.’

  There was genuine concern in her voice. He felt weary at the prospect of an argument. Maybe he should just leave it. ‘I know.’

  She sensed his capitulation and pushed her advantage. ‘Krysia cares about you a lot, Dareczek. You need someone who…’

  ‘I need Ania.’

  ‘She’s dead, Dariusz. She killed herself. She didn’t care about you, did she? She wasn’t thinking about you when she jumped out of that window.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Ania didn’t kill herself.’

  Beata sighed. ‘Oh, Dareczek. You always were such an…’

  He was glad they weren’t face to face. He wasn’t sure what he would do if she was in the room with him. ‘Stop it, Beata.’

  ‘You never want to hear the truth, do you? She wasn’t right for you. You need…’

  He lost it. ‘Beata. Shut up. Just shut your fucking mouth and listen for once.’ The obscenity silenced her, as he knew it would. ‘Don’t interfere in my life. And don’t say anything more about Ania. I don’t want to hear it.’