Last Room

by Reah, Danuta

  ‘How can you speak to me like that? I know you’re upset, but...’ She sounded close to tears. ‘You phone me up and swear at me, and you don’t even want to know about Dad. When did you last phone him?’

  She was right. He was in a bad way, swearing at his little sister, neglecting his father. ‘Is he worse?’

  ‘Oh, so now you care. This has upset him, too. You know he isn’t well. She called him that night, you know. It’s preying on his mind.’

  ‘She didn’t call him, Beata. She called me. I was out at the late night chemist getting his prescription. I could have spoken to her if I hadn’t…’ He couldn’t go on. ‘I can’t talk now.’ He put the phone down on whatever she had been trying to say.

  He was so angry he couldn’t sit still. He paced the room, cursing under his breath. He was angry with himself, angry with Beata, angry with his father… And work. Fucking Mielek. He could do without Leslaw Mielek’s shit just now. One day – and soon – they’d have a showdown. The way he was feeling at the moment, Dariusz wanted the showdown to be physical. He wanted the satisfaction of driving his fist into Mielek’s face and feel the crunch of the bone breaking. Life had been a lot simpler before he became a professional.

  He picked up the phone and dialled Mielek’s direct number. He was ready for a confrontation. Ania would have counselled delay but his anger demanded action. Wait until you’ve calmed down. It was wise advice, but Dariusz was in no mood for wisdom. He was in the mood for conflict.

  ‘Leslaw Mielek.’

  ‘It’s Dariusz Erland. What the fuck are you doing harassing my staff when I’m on leave.’

  ‘What do you mean, harassing? Where the hell are you anyway? You were supposed to be in work yesterday.’

  ‘If you check your records, you’ll see I extended my leave to the end of the week.’

  ‘You didn’t clear it with me.’

  ‘You weren’t there, Mielek. I cleared it with Jan Stefanowski.’ Stefanowski was Mielek’s senior. ‘You’ll have a memo on your desk about it.’

  The silence at the other end told him Mielek hadn’t bothered to check. It took him a moment to rally. ‘I don’t like your attitude Erland. I’m making allowances under the circumstances, but…’

  I don’t give a flying fuck what you think about my attitude. ‘I’ll be back in two days.’ Dariusz hung up. The exchange had done nothing to get rid of his anger. It had only made it worse. He needed to focus. He had more important things to think about than a lump of horseshit like Mielek. He wasn’t angry with Mielek anyway, not really. His real anger was directed at himself, and, he admitted, at Will Gillen.

  Despite the galvanic shot in the arm Gillen’s visit to the police had given him, he still clung to his belief in Ania’s suicide. Her own father wasn’t going to fight for her. Dariusz was going to have to do this himself.

  At least Gillen had confirmed – and this was the view of a professional – that Król’s men had not investigated her death properly. Now Dariusz had to find out why. One explanation was simple inefficiency: they were short-staffed, they were always short-staffed, and he could see why Król would not want to complicate what looked like a straight-forward case. On the other hand, Ania was a foreign national, and one with friends in high places. Surely this was one case where Król would have pulled out all the stops.

  The other explanation was that a suicide verdict would prevent anyone from looking too closely at what had happened.

  If that were so... what was the secret? One of Ania’s past cases, a case involving child abuse and murder, had blown up in her face. She was accused of falsifying evidence. Instead of sitting tight and defending herself, she had run, and later, she had died. She had left a suicide note and had fallen from a high window. The bare facts looked damning.

  Dariusz knew she hadn’t killed herself. He knew she had been murdered. OK, there were anomalies. Gillen’s point about the window was one that Dariusz had seen himself. It would have been impossible to force a conscious, struggling woman out of that window, and unconscious? Ania wasn’t heavy. She weighed about fifty kilos, but even he would have had difficulty lifting that unconscious weight to that height and then manoeuvring it out through the small window.

  It must have been coercion, but even that presented problems. How could her killer have forced her out of the window? Ania had a thing about heights. Her mother had died in a fall. The killer couldn’t risk using a weapon if he wanted her death to look like suicide. He couldn’t risk knife or bullet wounds.

  It didn’t matter. It had to be possible because it had happened. It wasn’t the how he was looking for, it was the why.

  What was it about the Haynes case that had led to murder?

  Chapter 31

  It was dark by the time Will got back to his hotel. He went to the bar and bought a bottle of beer, then walked slowly up to his room. He still wasn’t hungry, but he ordered room service, then stripped off his jacket and lay down on the bed. He stared at the ceiling. A winter fly circled the light fitting, round and round, round and round.

  He’d learnt almost nothing from Król, except the investigation had been skimped. It was so obviously a suicide, they hadn’t chased up what little evidence they had. He could do that, but despite what he had said to Erland, he didn’t expect to find anything.

  The only lead he had now was Sarah Ludlow.

  He could see her clearly sitting in the bar of the hotel at St Abbs, her newspaper strewn on the seat beside her, her hands gesturing to emphasise something she had said. She claimed to be a lawyer and clearly earned a good income from somewhere. She drove an expensive car and dressed well. Who was she? Why had she wanted to know about Ania? Who was she working for? He remembered his race down to the harbour to try and stop her, the empty car park and Jack’s puzzled curiosity. He must have thought he was seeing the aftermath of a lovers’ tiff.

  She had made no attempt to find out about Ania that evening in the hotel bar, had done nothing to arouse his suspicions. Their encounter had been relaxed and friendly and her farewell had been warm. She had managed to put him completely off his guard with that last appeal to his male vanity.

  He switched on his laptop and Googled Sarah Ludlow. He got over a million hits. OK, he was looking for a journalist – or just maybe a lawyer. He knew which he would put money on. He tried +”Sarah Ludlow” +journalist. This time, he got forty-one hits, but only one journalist, a scientific writer based in Canada. Maybe she wrote under a different name. He tried again, replacing ‘journalist’ with ‘lawyer’, and found her at once.

  It looked as though she had been telling him the truth as far as that went.

  She worked for a company called Merchant Matheson. They were solicitors with offices in the City of London, and regional offices in Manchester and Birmingham. The Merchant Matheson home page showed a cityscape of towers, brightly lit against banking clouds. The firm offered corporate services and services for private clients. Their work covered conveyancing, matrimonial, personal injury, wills, trusts, probate, immigration, landlord and tenant law and employment.

  He clicked on the link About us, and then on Our team. Sarah Ludlow was a partner in the firm, and the head of the Manchester office. This might explain her association with Ania. Merchant Matheson would almost certainly have had contacts with FLS from time to time. It was the biggest private forensics lab in the area.

  But it didn’t explain what she was doing outside the court the day Ania gave her evidence.

  The site didn’t give any details about her areas of expertise. Employment law? A lot of Ania’s voice recognition work involved employment litigation. It was possible. Immigration? As far as Will knew, FLS only took this work on for the Home Office, using voice analysis to confirm or refute the claimed origins of refugees. They didn’t do any work for individuals because, Ania had told him, Oz believed this would jeopardise their lucrative government contracts.

  So why had Sarah Ludlow travelled to the Scottish Borders? It had to be connect
ed to the Haynes case. The news about the falsification of evidence had just broken. For some reason, she had raced north, presumably in search of Ania, under the mistaken belief his daughter had retreated to the St Abbs refuge. Sarah must have known Ania quite well to have made that assumption.

  She told him she had come to the Borders to see a client. He’d joked about lawyers who made house calls, and she’d been evasive: I don’t usually. This is an exception. Could she be working for Ania? Had Ania taken legal advice when the Haynes debacle first broke?

  He looked at the other pages his search for had found. He’d got seventy hits, and about fifteen of them related to the woman he had met in St Abbs. One site told him she’d been employed by a law firm in New Orleans that specialised in death penalty appeals. Another site referred to her as ‘…the human rights lawyer, Sarah Ludlow.’ He remembered she had told him she had gone to the US to complete her training and had stayed to work.

  It began to make sense. Why would a human rights lawyer be hanging round the Derek Haynes case? That was an easy one to answer. If the recording had been fabricated then Haynes was a victim and his human rights had been violated. If someone was convinced of Haynes’ innocence and was prepared to put the money in to back that belief, then a human rights lawyer like Sarah Ludlow would be the person to go to.

  If she was working for Derek Haynes, what had she wanted from Ania that day?

  He stood up and moved around the room, trying to clear his thoughts. His mind wouldn’t focus. The questions were filling his head and he couldn’t begin to look at the answers.

  ‘That’s not important now.’

  Ania was sitting at the desk where he had left his laptop. Her gaze was intent, focused on his face. ‘That doesn’t matter. You have to listen.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter? Ania, it matters more than…’ He stopped speaking. All he really wanted to say to her was don’t go! Please! Stay!

  But there was no one there.

  You have to listen.

  He had listened. What was it he hadn’t heard?

  At the airport. She had spoken to him at the airport: You have to know where to look, Dad.

  He’d missed something, that’s what she was telling him. He turned wearily to his papers to begin the process of going through them again, when he looked back to where she had been sitting.

  He went across to the desk and switched on his laptop. The hotel didn’t offer wireless, not in the rooms, so he logged on using his phone. His computer began downloading e-mails. He checked everything, even the ones he had ignored before, the ones from people who had known Ania. He would have to reply to these sometime, but not now. Not now. So sorry, dreadful news, can’t believe… so sorry, so sorry…

  He was looking for something else, something…

  He had downloaded e-mails before, in her flat in Manchester. He could remember impatiently deleting stuff he had dismissed as spam, but suppose it hadn’t been… What if there was something in there he’d missed? Something was nagging at his mind. He remembered what Jankowski had said, and realised what it was. When Jankowski saw her, she had been on the Facebook site.

  Facebook. Someone had sent him an e-mail from Facebook. He could remember deleting it. If he’d emptied the folder, it was irretrievable, at least via any system he knew of. Had he…?

  And then he could breathe again. It was still there, the invitation to become a friend on Facebook, an invitation from someone called Walter Gilman.

  Gilman. He’d missed the significance the first time, but now…

  Gilman. Walter Gilman and Brown Jenkin.

  He should have seen it earlier. Brown Jenkin was a witch’s familiar in a piece of pulp writing Ania had enjoyed in her teens. Walter Gilman was the name of a character who wanders with naive blindness into Brown Jenkin’s lair and pays a terrible price. Brown Jenkin was the hunter and Walter Gilman was the victim.

  He clicked on the link to the social networking site.

  The site wouldn’t let him on unless he signed up for an account. He wanted to hit the keyboard in frustration. He knew about surveillance techniques and tried as far as possible to keep his life off-grid. He didn’t shop online, he didn’t subscribe to websites. He used Hushmail for his e-mail accounts and his favoured browser was Xerobank, slower, but more secure. Facebook, on the other hand, was as public as it got. It was the cyber equivalent of jumping up and down and shouting, ‘Here I am!’

  But he had no choice. He registered for the site, giving the barest minimum of information he could get away with. He called himself James Pearson. Once he had signed up, he was allowed to proceed to the link that someone had sent him.

  The page was a profile of Walter Gilman. It gave very little information – most of the spaces were blank. It wasn’t the details of ‘Gilman’ that interested Will. It was the photo attached to the profile that drew his attention. It was a picture of a child’s pink teddy bear, rather battered and grubby.

  He recognised it at once.

  Someone had made it for Louisa when the twins were two. Ania had had one as well, a yellow one, but she had never been very interested in cuddly toys and hers had been discarded years ago.

  Louisa had loved hers. She had named it Small Bear and it had been her constant companion. He could remember having to turn back en route to a holiday destination because she had left Small Bear at home. The toy had been in the front passenger seat of Elžbieta’s car the night she died. If he had had any doubts about who had sent the message, the picture dispelled them. Next to the photograph were the words ‘Small Bear has a secret,’ and just above it, the words “5 days ago.” He couldn’t tell when she had added the page, but the message had been put there the day before she died.

  Ania was the only person who would know the significance of the bear, and of the name Gilman. She was trying to tell him something, but whatever it was, he couldn’t read her code. Small Bear has a secret. He didn’t know what she meant. The toy had been thrown out years ago, after Elžbieta’s death.

  Dead end.

  You have to know where to look.

  When had she sent the mail? He checked the date and felt something cold touch him – it had been sent at twenty-one thirty the night she died. This was her last message, not the suicide note. And it wasn’t linked to her because it had come from the Facebook site, which had almost caused him to miss it altogether.

  Quietly, without fanfare, another figure moved onto the stage that had held only Ania. Her killer emerged from the shadows, caught, just for a second, in the light.

  Chapter 32

  Dariusz went in to the office the next day. Mielek might be a hundred kinds of fool, but he was right in one respect. Dariusz’ work was piling up after his absence, and there was no one else who could take it on. He could continue his investigation into Ania’s death from his desk at work as easily as from his desk at home.

  Krysia looked up as he came in. ‘Dariusz. It’s good to see you.’ Her face flushed. ‘I mean...’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s time I was back.’

  ‘Of course. I understand. I’m sorry about…’

  ‘Yes.’ He went to his office quickly. He didn’t want to talk to her about Ania.

  He needed something to do, and his office was clearly going to provide it. There was a pile of correspondence waiting for him, at least a morning’s work here in front of him before he could get back to his cases.

  Before he started, he called Roman Strąk. ‘Got your watch working again?’ Strąk said in sour reference to Dariusz’ last call, when he realised who was speaking.

  ‘Sorry about that.’ Dariusz didn’t feel particularly repentant. ‘One more favour. I want information about the case Ania was working on – the Haynes case, you know?’ It hadn’t hit the papers in Poland, but Strąk would be aware of it.

  ‘What’s wrong with a newspaper library? Shit, Erland, I’m not your clippings agency.’

  ‘I want the stuff that isn’t in the public domain. I want the recording an
d I want the video.’

  There was a long silence. ‘The recording… I can do that. The other… that’s not so easy to get hold of.’

  ‘Even for someone with your contacts?’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Erland. That video is officially child pornography. It’s linked to a murder. Do you know how much trouble you could get into, being in possession of that stuff?’

  ‘I don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’

  ‘Can you get it for me?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Send it to my web mail, OK?’ He didn’t want these files downloading automatically onto his system.

  ‘OK. It won’t come from me, though. I don’t know anything about this one, got it?’

  ‘Got it.’

  Dariusz put the phone down. He wasn’t sure where he planned to go with this, but Ania’s death was inextricably linked with this case. He was hoping that somewhere in the evidence, there would be something to tell him what had happened to her.

  ***

  Will was up and out early the following morning. His discovery of the night before had given him back his energy. He wasn’t going to let Ania down, not again. He used the city guide he’d picked up to locate the internet cafés in the city centre. His suspicions about Sarah Ludlow had reminded him that Blaise was almost certainly keeping an eye on him. If Ania was trying to tell him something via the Facebook page she had sent, then she didn’t want anyone else to see it. He’d carry out his search where it wouldn’t be noticed.

  There was a café on Piotrkowska, but if Ania had gone there, he didn’t want to use the same place. Instead, he walked through the streets to the main railway station, Fabryczna.

  Here, the streets had a more raffish air. The station, like all stations, attracted the poor, the itinerant, the drunks, the casualties of the Soviet state and the fallout from sudden prosperity. A man, smelling strongly of some kind of raw spirit, lurched into Will and muttered something that may have been a request for money.