Last Room

by Reah, Danuta

  ‘I’m here to see Professor Karzac,’ he said to the woman who answered his summons.

  ‘Do you have an appointment? He’s…’

  ‘I’m Ania Milosz’s father.’ His voice seemed to echo around the bleak space.

  The woman dropped her pen. ‘Ania’s… I’m so sorry. We all are. We…’

  ‘I need to see Professor Karzac.’

  ‘Of course. Yes. Just… Please. Take a seat. Can I get you…?’

  He shook his head and waited while she made the call.

  ‘Professor Karzac is on his way, Mr Milosz…’

  He didn’t correct her. ‘Thank you.’ He walked away from the window and looked at the notice board on the wall. Someone had put up a rogues’ gallery of staff members with a brief outline of their expertise: Darren Greaves, digital forensics; Oz Karzac (Director) forensic phonetics, CCTV analysis and enhancement, speaker profiling; Penny Jones…

  He stood in front of it, looking at the faces, looking at people Ania had worked with every day, most of whom he’d never met. Her picture wasn’t there. There was a space where a photograph had been removed. A torn piece of paper stuck to the board as if it had been taken down in a hurry: …eaker profilin…

  A door at the other side of the lobby opened and Oscar Karzac came through. Karzac was a plump man with a neat white beard and bright eyes. Ania had once described him as Father Christmas. He usually exuded bonhomie and a casual charm that must have served him well in the business world. His grip, as he took Will’s hand, was firm, but his face was drawn and weary. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘More sorry than I can say. Come through to my office – we can talk in there.’

  Karzac led him into a small, cluttered room. The desk was barely visible under piles of paper and books, and the shelves that lined every wall were stacked high with boxes, books and envelope folders with papers falling out. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ Karzac said unapologetically. ‘We’re getting ready for the move and we’re desperate for space.’ He cleared a stack of folders from a chair and looked round for somewhere to put them, settling on the floor. ‘Please. Sit down. Liz will bring coffee.’

  Will didn’t want to wait. ‘What happened?’ he said. ‘The Haynes case. How did she get it so wrong?’

  Karzac took out a pair of spectacles and settled them on his nose, then he studied Will over the top. ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘That my daughter was facing charges of perverting the course of justice.’

  Karzac held his gaze then gave a single, abrupt nod. ‘Yep. She probably was. If she’d talked to me, given me some warning, I might have been able to do something, but it just blew up in my face. The first thing I knew was when I got a heads up from our liaison guy on the investigation team – he warned me that Haynes’ appeal lawyers were going after Ania’s evidence.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Monday. The day before she flew to Poland.’

  ‘What else did he tell you?’

  ‘That was all, but he sounded concerned.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I went to Ania, of course, and told her.’

  ‘And she…?’

  Karzac held Will’s gaze. ‘I think she was expecting it.’

  ‘Expecting…? How do you work that out?’

  ‘She wasn’t surprised.’

  ‘Worried? Concerned?’

  ‘No, not as such. Just… not surprised.’

  Will filed that for further consideration. ‘OK. Then what?’

  ‘I asked her to check everything and write a report for me. She was leaving for Poland later that week, so I’d have to deal with whatever it was they thought they’d found.’

  ‘How could she check? The police must have taken all the recordings.’

  ‘No. We hold the evidence here. All the digital forensics in the area is handled by these labs. The rule is: you don’t touch the original unless you have no other way of analysing the data, you work from copies. Voice analysis we have to do from originals, but Ania always took copies as well – you never know if something’s going to be booby trapped. She was qualified to do that – all our staff are. This is...’ He shook his head. ‘The implications of this for us...’

  ‘Ania did her checks on the originals?’

  ‘No. Those are sealed. She was going to do her checks using the copies. She was getting started on it when I left that evening.’

  ‘And then?’

  Karzac’s bluff assurance faded and he looked confused. ‘I don’t know. She said she would e-mail me at home if anything came up – you know, if she found any serious problems. Ania’s a professional and defence lawyers – they’ll grab anything. Someone farts on a recording and they think they’ve found the holy grail. I wasn’t too worried but I’ll admit I was relieved when she didn’t send me anything. It was just another legal team having a go. Good luck to them. I expected to find her report on my desk when I went in the next day. Nada. First thing Liz tells me is that Ania had changed her flights. She’d left that morning. Gone, just like that, and she wasn’t answering her phone. I was pretty pissed off by then. I went to her office to see if there was anything there, and when I switched on her computer, I found that she’d wiped it. The whole lot was gone. Even our technician couldn’t retrieve anything and we employ the best. She’d cleaned out her filing cabinet – all her notes for the Haynes case and all the copies of the recordings.’

  Will sat in silence. What he had just heard was damning. ‘You’re sure it was Ania?’

  ‘Who else? This place is secure. The alarms were set and the CCTV didn’t show anything, except Ania leaving the building that evening.’ He took off his glasses and slipped them in his pocket. His gaze met Will’s and held it. ‘She was carrying a box that looked as though it was full of papers.’

  And a few hours later, she had made that odd call to him from the airport. He wanted to go back in time, to be woken up again by the sound of the phone cutting through the storm.

  Ania, tell me what’s wrong. Let me help you.

  ‘When did she change her flights?’

  ‘Monday night. Look, I am truly sorry about what’s happened to her. I didn’t know she suffered from depression until Liz told me. If I had known, I’d have thought twice about giving her the case. Hell, I can understand what happened. Anyone would. But I can’t protect her. That’s with the DPP and the courts now. She didn’t have to run away. We’d have helped her get psychiatric reports, all that stuff. I think they might have been lenient.’

  Will didn’t think so. Depression was no excuse. Even with Ania’s background, the history she’d tried so hard to conceal, it was difficult to find extenuating circumstances. If she had fabricated those tapes, it had been premeditated and calculated. If she’d done it, she had stood by it in court and watched Haynes convicted. It couldn’t be glossed over as the impulse of a moment, quickly regretted. And it wasn’t understandable. Anyone would want a predatory paedophile convicted, but no one would want an innocent man imprisoned for the rest of his life.

  ‘If she did it…’ He still wasn’t prepared to accept that she had. He couldn’t. ‘If she did it, how could she have altered the recordings without the police spotting it?’

  ‘The recording – it wouldn’t have been difficult for Ania to replace it. Technically, it’s no challenge at all. The difficult bit is making the new recording. It had to be Haynes’ voice. She had to have enough recorded speech from Haynes to take it apart and put it together again to make an authentic sounding disk.’

  ‘So where would she have got that?’

  ‘She had about twelve hours of police interviews. They’d given her those for comparison. She must have faked the recording using those. That’s the hard bit. It would have been a major job. It isn’t just finding the words and phrases. They have to be the same volume and tone, people’s voice quality changes – if your mouth gets dry, your voice sounds different, if you’re anxious or tired, that affects it too, so if you put a recording t
ogether like that, you end up with a kind of aural Frankenstein – you can hear the stitches.’

  ‘So…’

  Karzac’s face hardened. ‘We have a technician here, Shaun, who’s a genius with sound recordings. He’s developed some software that can isolate stuff that we couldn’t do before. While she was doing the analysis, Ania asked him to smooth something out for her. She said there was some fuzz – clicks and glitches – on something she was working on. He did it for her – why wouldn’t he? But he was developing the software at the time so he kept recordings of anything he’d done. He checked them when the news broke. It was the Haynes material. I listened to it. It was almost perfect – there were just some bits where you could tell that there was something going on. If I hadn’t known what I was listening for, I would have missed it. Of course, once you spotted it, it was a dead giveaway. She got Shaun to complete the last bit of the fabrication and now I’m going to have to work hard to convince the police he wasn’t in on it.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Of course not. He wouldn’t even have listened to it. He’d just have taken out the bits she didn’t want. I find it hard to forgive her for that. He’s a talented guy and she implicated him in what she did. He’s going to carry the Haynes debacle with him for a long time.’

  And once she had that, she could load it onto the hard disc she had been given by the police, destroying the original evidence in the process. Will tried to picture her at her desk, working intently as she carefully put together fabricated evidence that would convict a man of a crime that carried a life sentence with an almost certain whole-life tariff.

  She wouldn’t have done that.

  She wouldn’t.

  But you aren’t sure, are you? Her voice in his head was sudden and shocking.

  ‘Ania!’

  Karzac looked at him with alarm. ‘Gillen. Will. Can I…’

  ‘Ania…’ He calmed his voice with an effort. ‘Do you think she would have done that?’

  Karzac’s hesitation was an answer in itself. ‘She was very down on Haynes. She worked closely with the police team and she kind of got on board with their picture of the case. She said she didn’t like paedophiles. As if any of us did. She worked late on it most nights – she said she didn’t want that video playing when there were other people around. It wasn’t healthy, her on her own here and that… thing, playing. I never wanted her to take the case. I told the SIO I’d do it, but I was away when it came in. By the time I’d got back, Ania was working on it and the police didn’t want any changes. I should have realised how obsessed she was getting.’

  Self-recrimination was an easy way out: easy words to say, with no penalties attached.

  Had Sagal Akindès, the murdered child, become Louisa in Ania’s mind? Listening to the recording, watching the video must have brought back that day in the park, must have filled in the gaps that none of them had wanted to think about. Would that have been enough?

  Karzac cleared his throat. ‘It seemed as though…’

  Will didn’t want to talk about it any more. He interrupted before Karzac could complete what he was going to say. ‘If there’s anything of hers left here, I’ll take it with me.’

  Karzac nodded. ‘The police took some stuff. I asked Liz to pack the rest of it up.’

  Will had to use his arms to push himself up out of his chair.

  ‘Are you going to Łódź?’ Karzac stood up as well.

  ‘Yes. As soon as I can get a flight.’

  ‘Do you want any contacts? If you let me know when you’re going, I could…’

  ‘I don’t know. Yet. I’ll be in touch.’

  He collected the small box from reception that contained Ania’s few possessions. Slowly, heavily, feeling like an old man, he left the building. He went back to his car and eased himself in behind the wheel.

  ‘Why?’ he said out loud. ‘Why did you do it?’

  But she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell him.

  Chapter 18

  DCI Ian Cathcart was a tall, energetic man. He had agreed to meet Will as soon as he had phoned shortly after leaving FLS. His old rank still had its privileges. ‘We’re gutted,’ Cathcart had said when Will called to arrange a time to see him. ‘She was one of the team. Just let me know how I can help.’ He didn’t seem to be angry with Ania, just confused.

  He greeted Will with a vigorous handshake and took him into his office, a small room that was barely large enough for the basic desk, chair and filing cabinet it contained. It was meticulously tidy, the desk clear, the in-tray holding only a single sheet of paper, a list of tasks and dates written neatly on a whiteboard on the wall.

  Cathcart pulled a chair in from the main office into the room, kicked the door shut behind him then said, ‘OK. What can I do?’

  ‘I want to know what happened.’

  Cathcart shook his head. ‘I’ve gone over it a hundred times. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’

  ‘Do you think she did it?’

  Reluctantly, Cathcart nodded. ‘She must have done. But I can’t understand why.’

  ‘Tell me about the case. Tell me about Ania’s involvement.’

  Cathcart sighed, blowing his cheeks out as he thought. ‘It’s hard to know where to start. We were investigating a disappearance, a kid. That makes everyone a bit tense. But it was an odd case. She was in Moreton. It’s a detention centre south of Manchester. The family were waiting to be deported. The father had already been sent back, but one of the kids – the girl – wasn’t well enough to travel. That gave the mother enough time to find a good solicitor and they were fighting it every inch.’

  ‘Why were they in a centre?’ As far as Will understood it, families with children were put in flats or houses.

  ‘The father was involved with a radical Muslim group. He was arrested and the mother absconded with the kids, so they had to go into detention. It was after the father had gone that the little girl disappeared. It wasn’t the mother that reported it – it was staff at the centre. The mother wasn’t saying anything. We thought she’d smuggled the kid out to stop her from being sent back. We were worried – the kid was only eight – but it didn’t look like an abduction, not then. It was a couple of weeks later when the paedophile unit found some photographs on the net – the missing girl – and there were some serious questions being asked.

  ‘The location of the photos – it was a basement in one of the outbuildings of the centre. You have to ask: how much did the mother know? Someone’s making kiddie porn using her daughter not a hundred yards from where she is. Some people reckon she had to know.’

  ‘Why?’ The logic didn’t follow. ‘The person who abducted her…’

  ‘These pictures had been posted before the abduction. They were a kind of – I don’t know – aperitif. Watch this space if you want to see more, kind of thing.’

  Then there had been a long-term abuser at the detention centre.

  ‘We didn’t find the kid until a few weeks later. She’d been shoved into a ditch, covered up with branches.’

  There was something horribly familiar about this story: an abducted child whose body had been hidden in a ditch. Louisa had been found in a drain by the river in the park, dumped like a bit of rubbish someone had no further use for.

  ‘It was our paedophile unit that broke the case. They monitor the chat room scene and they found those first pictures. Here.’ He pushed a folder across the table to Will.

  Will picked it up reluctantly and slipped out one of the sheets. It was a print-out from an internet site, grainy images of a child dancing in a short, frilly skirt and strapless top, smiling flirtatiously at something just beyond the camera, enjoying the attention and the dressing up. Even with the poor quality of the print, he could see it had been taken by a good photographer. There was a real sense of movement in the image. The child had just completed a twirl, and the camera had caught the way her skirt had momentarily flounced up, revealing the edge of white, lacy knickers. It was a parody of
a cheesy glamour shot, the partly clothed one before the real images that were to follow.

  He saw that her feet were in sparkly party shoes. He felt sick. Louisa had had a pair of shoes like that. She had loved them.

  The scene around the dancing child was incongruous. There was a brick wall behind her. Metal shelves ran along the wall and Will could see a box with torn flaps, a coil of wire, a lidless tin full of nails, the detritus of a place that was used for long-term storage, cold, damp and neglected.

  He looked away. He didn’t need to see any more.

  ‘We knew someone in the centre had to be involved. Someone who knew how to bypass the security systems had taken her out. The kid’s mother said it was Haynes, said he’d handed her over to someone in the support group, someone called Dave, she claimed.’

  ‘Did you ever find Dave?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Wasn’t that enough for a conviction?’

  Cathcart grimaced. ‘Haynes denied it, and the mother wasn’t a reliable witness. That’s why Ania’s evidence was so important. The computer wasn’t enough. Thing was, it wasn’t his computer, not exclusively. It was in his office but other people had access to it. The files were hidden. It was conceivable that someone could have put them there without Haynes knowing. We had to identify him as the abuser. Ania told us she couldn’t pin the voice to Haynes, not 100%, they can’t do that yet, but she could eliminate the other users. And she could say if the voice was consistent with being Haynes’. That’s what she did.’ He frowned. ‘I can remember when we found the recording, she came in and talked to the team. We’d heard the voice and we couldn’t tell if it was Haynes or not. She listened to it a few times, and she gave us an off-the-cuff profile.’

  ***

  Central Police Station, Manchester 2006

  One of the DCs had bypassed all the modern equipment and had recorded the video sound onto an audio cassette using a machine he’d dug out of the back of some cupboard. It gave the recording an echoey, metallic quality. Cathcart, making a mental note to give the man a bollocking, could see Ania Milosz grimace as she listened to it. When it came to an end, she pressed the button and replayed it without comment.