Book Read Free

Last Room

Page 18

by Reah, Danuta


  For the first time, Erland seemed to be listening, not just looking for reasons to shout him down.

  ‘Haynes left the country shortly after Louisa was killed. God knows what he got up to in Australia. When he came back, he took work in a place where he could get access to vulnerable children. The murder of that little girl – it was almost a copycat for Louisa’s murder. He knew what he was doing. She was left in a culvert. The water destroyed all the evidence. They couldn’t pin it on him.’

  ‘So why destroy the recording? If it was him, why...’

  ‘Because...’ This was where the ground became less firm. ‘I don’t think it was conclusive.’

  ‘If it wasn’t Haynes’ voice, whose was it?’

  That was the question, the one that had been haunting him ever since he’d worked it out. ‘I don’t know. I think Haynes must have had an accomplice.’

  ‘And she let that man go free?’

  ‘No. She had to get Haynes off the streets. No one knew who the other man was. No one knew he existed. I think she was looking for him. I think she was working on that recording. I think she was looking for the other man.’

  Chapter 38

  Now, Will had Erland’s attention. ‘That means she must have kept the original.’

  ‘I never believed she’d destroy that evidence. She must have kept it.’ As he spoke, he could see how thin his theories were, how they were built on hope and speculation. The whole story he had created was falling apart like a house of cards as he told it. ‘It’s the only way I can account for what happened.’ It was a plea.

  ‘So the thing someone is looking for, it’s the original recording? It still makes no sense. She had plenty of time to get it to you – she didn’t have to play stupid games with the e-mail. Did you find it?’

  ‘No. It was gone by the time I worked it out.’

  Erland chewed his lip, his eyes scanning the papers in the file. ‘It just doesn’t… She left a trail, and they were onto it at once.’

  ‘That’s because I didn’t see what she was trying to tell me.’

  ‘How does it work? This “code” you’re supposed to have. The one that you didn’t see in time.’

  The note of scepticism and challenge was back in Erland’s voice. ‘It’s a short story. One she used to read when she was younger.’ When I knew her and you did not. He took the print-out he had made in the internet café from his bag and passed it across.

  Erland flicked through the pages, skimming the text. ‘Her tastes changed,’ he observed. Then after a moment, ‘Brown Jenkin. Of course.’

  Will knew it was unreasonable, but it hurt that she had shared this with Erland. ‘I’m not saying she still read it. I’m saying she knew I would pick up the references.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘I let her down. I know that.’

  ‘No. I think she didn’t care whether you picked up the reference or not. It wasn’t for you. It was for someone else.’

  Will stared at him. Erland was talking rubbish. Ania had left a trail and he’d followed it. She had been guiding him, telling him where to go. She had said, You have to know where to look.

  ‘You were looking for the wrong code. She read this story when she was a teenager, right? What did you think of it then?’

  ‘Trash.’

  ‘And she knew that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So – that’s what she’s telling you. That’s what the code says: this is trash. It never meant anything. It’s there as a distraction, something to get them looking in the wrong places. If she had the original recording, it was never here.’ He shook the bear and they watched as the remains of the stuffing fell to the floor. ‘It’s trash.’

  Ania’s voice spoke from behind him. ‘Not all of it. I had to do what I could.’ He turned sharply, but the room was empty.

  Erland’s gaze followed his. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I thought I heard something. If she thought it was trash, why did she send it to me? She sent it the night she died!’

  ‘Maybe it was the only way she had of alerting you that something was wrong.’ Erland moved to the window and glanced out, using the curtain to conceal him. ‘They took the bear apart. They must have found something.’

  The Walkman. She’d borrowed a Walkman from Jankowski, telling him she’d forgotten her iPod. She hadn’t been listening to traditional music. Maybe she’d used it to record something onto a cassette tape that she could conceal inside the stuffed toy. They’d found it, but they must know by now that they didn’t have what they wanted.

  That left him, and Dariusz Erland. Did it mean they were both in danger? He looked at Erland who was staring out into the grey evening, a brooding expression on his face. They didn’t like each other, they’d admitted as much, but that didn’t matter. Whatever happened, they were bound together by what they felt for Ania. As he looked at Erland, he understood for the first time that Ania had cared for this man, and that Erland had lost someone he valued as greatly, in his way, as Will had valued her. ‘We should work together,’ he said.

  Erland looked round, surprised. ‘That’s what I thought we were doing.’

  Not quite. Will had remembered something, and Erland’s dismissal of what he had found – the website and the story – was going to keep him quiet. He wanted to check it before he told Erland, if he ever did.

  After Erland had left, Will forced himself into action. He called the airline and found that they had a cancellation for a flight in two days’ time. He booked it, then took stock of his situation.

  Exhaustion was overtaking him. It was as if he’d used up all his reserves of energy so that even the short walk from the car to the hotel was more than he could manage. He could feel the ache starting again in his chest, and knew he needed to rest.

  He wanted to be home. Ania had told him he could go home, and there was nowhere else he wanted to be. He didn’t want to stay any longer in a country that seemed more alien with each passing day, but there seemed to be no way back now. He would have to wait.

  The simple act of planning helped to calm him, but when he lay down on the bed, his mind refused to be quiet. When he closed his eyes, Ania was struggling with a shadowy figure in a cluttered space where her quick thinking and her agility were hampered by obstacles that kept blocking her routes of escape. The pain in his chest intensified and the blackness threatened at the edge of his vision…

  …the basement was in darkness. His hands slid across the door to find the bolt then he drew it and stepped out into the night. The air was freezing and took his breath away. The ground was uneven under his feet

  There was just a glimmer of moonlight to guide him. The huddled shape lay on the ground and he checked quickly to make sure no one was watching as he approached it. Her head was a bloody mess and a dark pool was slowly spreading around her. He stepped carefully to avoid contaminating his feet. He removed his glove to touch her neck lightly. No pulse. She was dead. He slipped the glove back on, and took a key out of his pocket, the key to the room. He looked up at the window still hanging open into the night. He tucked the key into her skirt pocket then walked quickly away.

  Will’s eyes snapped open. He felt cold all over. The images from the night time car park were as vivid as any memories he had.

  Crazy. He was going crazy.

  He got out of bed. He couldn’t risk a dream like that again. He had to hang on to his sanity. For Ania’s sake, he had to keep everything together. He reached for the box of sedatives he had been given at the hospital and checked the dose: one to be taken at six-hourly intervals. He opened the box and swallowed two then sat in the armchair by the desk. He wasn’t going back to bed until he could feel them start to take effect. The last thought he had before he drifted into oblivion was that he had been angry. As he stood over Ania’s body in the car park, he had been consumed by a blazing frustration and rage.

  Chapter 39

  Dariusz Erland spent the next morning at his desk. He told his
secretary to hold his calls, and he raced through a backlog of work. He completed reports that were overdue, caught up with his correspondence, and spent an hour on the phone rescheduling appointments he’d had to cancel while he was absent.

  He was pretty sure that Gillen had got it right. They were looking for the original recording from the Haynes case that Ania must have brought to Poland with her to work on before the law caught up with her. The trail of red herrings Ania had set up seemed to have worked. Where the actual recording was, where she had hidden it, he could only guess. It had to be findable. If she had hidden it too well, then she had done her killer’s job for him.

  He knew her – had known her – so well, he should be able to work it out. She may have been relying on him to work it out. She’d chosen not to go to the police in Manchester, and she certainly couldn’t have gone to the police in Poland. The good wardens stood in her way.

  Who could she trust? She could have trusted him, she could have told him. It hurt him that she hadn’t, but he hadn’t been there. When she had needed him, he hadn’t been there. Who else? Jankowski? Her relationship with Konstantin Jankowski had been friendly enough, but they were just colleagues, and Jankowski was a systems man. He would always play by the rules. He would have given anything she had left with him to the police.

  She had friends among the post-graduate students, friends among her colleagues but he doubted she would have wanted to put them at risk, and she must have known it was dangerous. Why else had she run away?

  He closed his eyes, remembering.

  ***

  Łagiewniki Forest, August 2006

  The chapels were deep in the forest. It was summer, and trees were heavy with leaf. The paths Dariusz and Ania had walked had been in shade, but the clearing was full of sunlight, the timbers of the ancient buildings glowing with warmth, two wooden Baroque chapels dating back to the 18th century.

  Ania dumped her backpack on the ground and stood in front of the nearer one, staring up at the minaret surmounted by a cross. ‘It’s beautiful. Can we go in?’

  ‘They aren’t locked.’

  She looked at him in surprise, and tried the door. It swung inwards and she walked into the shadows. He followed her, pleased to be showing her this. The interior was tiny, a small space in which maybe eight people could have stood to attend the celebration of the mass. There was a pump in the middle of the space and the floor around it was wet as though someone had recently drawn water there.

  Light shafted down from a high window illuminating an image on the wall where the all-seeing eye of God, an eye in a triangle with beams of light radiating from it, observed its scant congregation.

  Ania looked at in silence for a moment. ‘That’s creepy.’

  ‘That’s what Catholicism is: God is watching you.’

  ‘Why does it sound so threatening? My mother was a Catholic. Did I tell you?’

  He stood behind her and slipped his arms round her waist. He already knew about her mother, the closeness of early childhood and the story of rejection and neglect. If she wanted to talk about it again, he was prepared to listen.

  ‘She used to tell us, me and Louisa, that if we were good, God would watch over us like that, that he would keep us safe. When Louisa died, after they found her, I thought we must have done something wrong, because he didn’t, watch over us I mean, which meant there was only us. I used to have nightmares. I thought that she had been alive in that drain, you see. I thought she had died in there and I used to dream that she was calling to me and it was deep and dark. I would have to crawl in there and then I would be trapped and die too. I’d hear her calling, and I was waiting because I knew He would come… only He didn’t. There was only me and I couldn’t save her.’

  He thought about the children of the Litzsmannstadt ghetto who had been given up to the Nazis by their Jewish leader. Give me your children, he had said, and they had done it. Their parents had dressed them in their best clothes, as if they were going on holiday, as if they were going to a celebration, and watched them as they were loaded onto the trains and sent to their deaths in the gas vans of Chelmno. Give me your children…

  ‘And with all of this, you still want children of your own?’

  They had talked about it, their own children, hostages in an uncertain world.

  ‘Since I met you… Yes. Maybe I do. These days, I put my faith in technology. And you.’

  ***

  And you. When it came to it, he hadn’t been there.

  They had walked a long way that day, eaten Polish sausage and bread and drunk beer under the trees. It was a good memory. He still had the good memories. Watching over, she had said. Keeping safe… Could she have remembered the Chapel of St Roch, there under the trees of Łagiewniki, hidden something under the watchful, all-seeing eye?

  He dismissed the idea. It was the same kind of thinking that lay behind the mystery website and the teddy bear. Whatever she had done with that recording, she had to be sure it would be safe – she wouldn’t have left it to chance like that. These days, I put my faith in technology.

  Technology hadn’t helped her either. The Haynes case, with all its dependence on technology, had destroyed her. He could remember when she had started work on it, her distaste when she talked to him. ‘Do you want to take this on, kiciu?’ he had asked her, concerned about what it might do to her.

  She had been adamant. ‘That little girl – it’s like Louisa,’ she had said. ‘Stuffed in a drain. Dumped and left to rot.’

  Will Gillen had said the same thing as well. Like Louisa. That early tragedy had shaped their lives, still held them in its web and had slowly devoured them. Gillen thought that Ania had found Louisa’s killer, and this was the reason she had died, because she had his voice on record, and she was the only person who could identify him. Dariusz had never really looked into the details of the case – like most people, he suspected, he didn’t want to know too much about a paedophile killing.

  He logged on to his web mail. He didn’t use this address often. An e-mail was waiting for him, with a large attachment. He didn’t have to open it to know what it was. It was the video and photographs from the Haynes case. Strąk had come through.

  Dariusz locked the door of his office, and detached the computer he was working on from the network. He didn’t want anyone sneaking glances at what he was doing.

  He slipped a pen drive into the port and downloaded the files onto it, then he opened the drive to see what he had got. There was a video file, and a set of jpegs. It was the video that was the most important, but he hesitated before opening it, and clicked on the images instead.

  And she was there, Sagal Akindès, the murdered child. The first thing he noticed was her smile. She was small, with thread-like arms and skinny legs. The photographs were accomplished, catching a real sense of movement as she danced. Her body was half turned away as if she had performed a pirouette for an observer. She was looking slightly beyond the camera, and she was smiling with the cajoling appeal of a child who hopes for treats. It could have been an innocent picture of a child dancing. She looked happy. It had never occurred to him that Sagal Akindès had been a happy child.

  He moved his cursor to the video. He hesitated, but he couldn’t start being squeamish now. Whatever was contained in the file, it had happened a long time ago, and it was over. He turned the sound down – he didn’t want to listen, not yet, then opened the file and braced himself.

  The image was dim. The camera wobbled round a damp basement, as if someone was levelling it or steadying it. Dariusz could see metal shelves lining the brick walls which were thick with flaking whitewash. The floor was flagged stone. He recognised the background from the photograph. The image steadied and brightened.

  A child was sitting on the floor facing a chair, an old fashioned kitchen chair. Her ankles were tied to the legs. Dariusz felt nausea in the pit of his stomach. It was the same child, but she wasn’t smiling now. Her face was contorted, and tears ran down her cheeks.
She was staring at the camera, straight at him, straight through the lens, as if she was pleading with him to help her. ‘I can’t.’ He almost spoke aloud. She was beyond any help he had to give.

  He wanted to turn away, but he kept watching.

  He saw her lips move again as she said something then the image fuzzed and the screen went blank. Dariusz stared at it. He checked the file and played it again, but the same thing happened. He sat staring at the blank screen.

  Was that it? The implications of what he had just seen were disturbing, but the actual video itself was barely… Then he realised the file must have got damaged in the course of the transfer. There was more. He just hadn’t seen it.

  He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and tried to think. Ania had told him she wanted to see Haynes convicted, not only because of the murder of the child, but because she believed he was part of a paedophile ring, kidnapping and abusing children not just for his own enjoyment, but to feed the depravities of other men: they in turn kidnapped, coerced and raped, spreading their poison and drawing yet more people in.

  He closed the files down and slipped the pen drive into his pocket. It was after six, time to finish for the day. He could hear Krysia moving about in the office next door. She seemed to be waiting for him and he didn’t want any company this evening. He wanted to get home and think about his next move. He packed his bag and left the office quickly, pretending he hadn’t heard Krysia’s call of ‘Dariusz!’ as he headed for his car.

  Chapter 40

  When Dariusz got back to his flat, he made himself a sandwich. Carrying a doorstep of bread, cheese, salami and pickle in one hand, he switched on his laptop and searched through his bag for the pen drive with the files Roman Strąk had sent him.

  He had software on his system that might sort out whatever had happened to them in transit. Otherwise, he was going to have to go back and ask for them to be re-sent. He wanted to avoid that if possible. Strąk had been cagy enough the first time.

 

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