Last Room

by Reah, Danuta

  Will glanced in the carrier. It contained a magazine, a couple of paperbacks, some pens and Ania’s iPod. The backpack contained a washbag and some cosmetics. ‘Thank you.’

  Jankowski nodded. ‘Now I will tell you what I know.’

  He explained that Ania was there to help them with an expansion of the forensic linguistics work done in the department. FLS contracted work out to the university, but they lacked equipment, and their specialists kept moving on. ‘We can’t match the salaries in other professions,’ Jankowski said. ‘Academics are not well paid here. We lost our expert on recorded sound recently which means we will have to return some of our work to Manchester incomplete.’ He frowned, preoccupied with his own problems. ‘Ania was planning to transfer here so we were setting her up with her own work as well.’

  That fitted in with what Dariusz Erland had told him. ‘What kind of work? Forensic linguistics for the local police?’

  Jankowski shook his head. ‘Our police don’t use outside experts to do these analyses. They use their own people and I’m afraid the standard of the work is not good. No, Ania had started some research and she was doing some teaching for us.’

  So this was to have been her future, teaching at a Polish university, surviving on a Polish salary, living in an apartment with a self-styled union activist, following the roots that led from her dead mother, the mother who had died blaming her… He stepped hard on the self pity he could feel welling up inside him. Ania had chosen a life she thought would make her happy. Wasn’t that what he had wanted for her?

  It was, but she had deserved better than this.

  ***

  Łódź University

  Konstantin Jankowski customarily started his working day early. He liked the quiet of the building in the morning before the students and the rest of the staff arrived. It was around six fifty as he reached the top of the stairs, his mind already running through the various tasks he had to complete that day, starting with his 8.00 a.m. lecture.

  He noticed with surprise and some annoyance that the door to the computer room was standing open. Someone must have forgotten to lock it the night before and the caretaker must have missed it on his rounds. He went to check – they could ill afford to lose any equipment – and was surprised to see that for once he wasn’t the first person at work. Ania Milosz was sitting at one of the workstations with headphones on, staring blankly ahead. She must have caught his movement in her peripheral vision, because she pushed the headphones back. ‘Konstantin.’ She clicked the mouse and the screen she had been studying closed, leaving her work screen open.

  ‘You’re here early.’ He could see waveforms across the top of the screen and spectrograms across the bottom. She must be doing some comparison work on sound files, but it hadn’t looked as though she was working. It looked as though she had been surfing the internet, indulging in the electronic wool-gathering they were all prone to from time to time.

  ‘I brought some work with me from Manchester that I need to finish. Is that OK? I’ll make a start on yours this morning.’

  ‘That’s fine. By the way, I had a call from Oz Karzac last night. He wants you to call him – he needs to talk to you.’

  All expression vanished from her face. ‘OK.’

  ‘He said he’s been trying your number. You left earlier than he expected. He sounded quite… upset.’ Oz had sounded furious. Jankowski had never heard him like that before.

  She sighed and swivelled round to face him. ‘You’d better know that Oz and I are having a bit of a tricky time just now. He isn’t happy about this case – the one in the UK, you know? I think he’d have preferred it if I’d put off my visit, but there would have been no point. There’s nothing I can do at the moment. I’d rather sit it out here.’

  ‘I read about it.’ They had all seen the toll it was taking on her, but he had issued his instructions: no one was to mention it until she brought it up. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  Her face softened as she smiled. ‘That’s kind of you, Konstantin. It’s OK. It truly isn’t as bad as it looks. I guess I’m a bit pissed off with Oz for not trusting me.’

  ‘He must be concerned about…’

  ‘His business? Yes.’

  ‘About you, I meant. He must be concerned about you. I am.’

  Her eyes were suddenly shiny and he had the impression that she was on the edge of tears. ‘I’d better get this finished.’ She turned back to the screen and he went on to his office, more worried about her than he had been before.

  ***

  ‘Do you know what she was working on?’ When Karzac told him she had taken files from the labs, it had sounded sinister, but maybe she had simply taken work that she needed to complete.

  Except that she had deleted everything from her hard disk.

  Jankowski shook his head. ‘I don’t know for sure. I couldn’t say. To be honest, I don’t think she was working at all. She was surfing the net when I saw her.’

  ‘Surfing the net?’

  ‘She was looking at Facebook when I came in. She had some work on the screen, but I don’t think she was doing much with it. She was listening to music as well. She borrowed an old Walkman from me. I lent her some tapes – traditional Polish music. She liked that.’

  A Walkman? Why had she wanted that? She’d had her iPod. ‘I’d still like to know what she was working on. Do you have it?’

  ‘The police took it all. After…’

  The police. He hoped Blaise had smoothed the way for him. He needed to be prepared for that meeting, but for the moment, he needed to concentrate on what he was doing. Jankowski was looking at him expectantly. Will made himself say, ‘I’d like to see the room now.’

  Jankowski put down his cup and nodded. ‘I have kept it unused until your visit. But…’

  ‘You’ll need to use it again. Of course. I understand.’ He was grateful that Jankowski didn’t try and dissuade him from seeing the place where Ania had died.

  Jankowski led Will across the landing to the partition wall. The door was open and students were milling round on the landings. He could hear their chatter and laughter, which faded to silence as he passed.

  Jankowski led him through the door. He found himself in a narrow corridor that ran between the flimsy cream painted walls. There was no natural light, just the pale flicker of a ceiling bulb. Doors opened off the corridor.

  ‘In here,’ Jankowski said, opening one, ‘is where she worked.’ They were in a room where computer terminals were lined up on long benches. A couple of students sitting at work stations glanced up. Jankowski made to pull the door shut, but Will stopped him.

  ‘One moment. Please.’ He smiled an apology at the students and crossed the room to where windows lined the wall. They were large windows, the sills only about four feet above floor level. They were closed, locked by handles that turned to release them. He went to one and gave the handle a firm tug. It moved, stiffly. He pushed the window outwards, feeling the resistance of something that hadn’t moved for a long time. Outside, a fire escape ran down the wall. Beneath it, the wall dropped straight down onto concrete.

  He pulled the window shut and locked it again, then went back to where Jankowski stood in the doorway, his face wary and unhappy. Will offered no explanation or apology.

  Jankowski continued down the corridor. ‘This is the room where she… the last room.’ He pushed open another door and a wash of cold air flooded out.

  The last room.

  It was small. There was a desk under the window and a filing cabinet against the wall. There was a phone on top of the filing cabinet, but otherwise there was none of the equipment Will would expect to find in an office, no computer terminal, no desk furniture. It looked bleak and unused.

  He stepped through the door. The desk chair was pushed in. If it had been pulled out, the few items of furniture would more or less have filled the space. There was no sign of any habitation, no papers in the in-tray, nothing on the surface of the desk.
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br />   The window was behind the desk. It was smaller than the ones in the computer room they had just visited. The metal frame had collected dirt over the years and the paint was chipped and dingy. The flicker of doubt planted by Dariusz Erland faded. No one could have forced her out of that window, and no one could have lifted her up to it if she had been unconscious. It would take immense strength, and why try, when there were perfectly accessible windows in the room next door?

  Two paces took him across the room. He had to lean over the desk to look out. The wall dropped away sheer, fifty feet or more down to a patch of waste ground where a few cars were parked. Pipes ran down the wall. A few feet away, the metal of the fire escape was visible. Blaise’s voice spoke in his mind: she hit her head on an overflow pipe on the way down. Cast iron… stove her head in…

  He turned away abruptly and stared at the floor until he could lift his eyes and look round the room again. Ania’s story seemed to have been told in a series of just such cramped offices: Karzac’s with its mess of papers, the clinically neat office of DI Ian Cathcart, Konstantin Jankowski’s cluttered room. And now there was this one. It was so small it was barely viable as office space. He could see the dark marks of fingerprint dust on the desk, on the sill, on the phone, on the window frame. There was more on the door handle. The floor looked as though it had been swept clean – maybe the forensic people had been more thorough than he had anticipated. It seemed a bleak place to die.

  ‘Who uses this room?’

  ‘It’s space we give our PhD students. Ania used it as an office when she came here’

  ‘But she worked in the other room.’

  ‘Yes, if she needed the analytical software we use. This room isn’t on the network.’

  ‘Was it like this when she was found?’

  Jankowski nodded. ‘The police asked me if anything was out of place. There were…’ He gestured towards the floor, ‘…papers scattered. The chair was pulled out.’ He frowned, trying to remember. ‘The phone was on the floor. And… there was a shoe, her shoe, just there.’ He pointed to the desk.

  ‘She wrote a note on the computer.’

  ‘The police took it.’

  ‘The machine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was in here?’

  ‘No. It was in the computer room. There isn’t a terminal in here. We aren’t as well equipped as we would like.’

  There was nothing here for him. The police had taken everything. He turned away, defeated. Jankowski watched him. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

  Will shook his head. He couldn’t trust his voice. The two men walked silently back down the corridor.

  When they reached his office, Jankowski studied Will, his face troubled. He looked at the bags Will was carrying, the bags containing the few possessions Ania had left behind. ‘You can leave these here,’ he said. ‘Collect them later. I have a lecture now, so my office is free if you need any time to…’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Thank you,’ Will said again. He needed a place where he could close the door behind him. ‘Thank you.’

  Chapter 27

  Will sank into the chair at Konstantin Jankowski’s desk. Now he was alone, he could relax the fierce hold he had kept on his emotions. There was a pain in his chest as though something was gripping him tighter and tighter, and for a moment, he had trouble breathing. He sat very still until the grip loosened and his breathing steadied. He was glad of the silence, glad to be on his own so he didn’t have to act a part any more.

  He was beginning to get a clearer picture of what had happened. Ania had been sitting at her desk, surfing the net, listening to music. In the days of iPods, Ania had borrowed a Walkman from Jankowski, and to make her request less strange, she had borrowed some tapes of traditional Polish music. As far as Will knew, she couldn’t care less about traditional Polish music.

  She must have been using the Walkman to listen to the recording Cathcart’s team had made. It was the only surviving copy of the Haynes original, the one she had taken from Cathcart, and that had subsequently vanished. Was she having doubts about what she had done? Was she having doubts about Haynes’ guilt? If she believed she’d sent an innocent man to prison... He shook his head in disgust. All the paths he was finding led back to the same place: the room, the window and the drop.

  There was a knock on the office door. Before he could respond, it opened and a man came in, a tall, heavy-set man whose grim face looked tired and drawn. It was a moment before he recognised Dariusz Erland. Today, he was clean-shaven and his clothes looked neat and freshly laundered. There was only his pallor and a weariness around his eyes that remained from the day before. He looked at Will. ‘They told me you were here. What time is your appointment with the police?’

  Will made a point of checking his watch. ‘Soon. I need to get going.’ In fact, it wasn’t for another half hour and the central police station was on the same road as the university. It would take him all of five minutes to get there, but he didn’t want to spend time with Erland, nor did he want Erland to accompany him.

  What remained of Ania was his.

  Erland looked at the notebook. ‘What are you doing?’

  Will gestured at the computer. ‘Checking my mail.’ He waited for Erland to say what he had come to say. He wasn’t going to listen to any more accusations from this man – he knew what he had done as a father and he knew what he hadn’t done. He didn’t need anyone else to tell him.

  Erland crossed the room behind his chair and stood by the window, his frame silhouetted against the light. He looked like someone whose response to adversity would be to shoulder his way through obstructions with a ruthless disregard for others, refuse to take no for an answer, continue doggedly to whatever end he perceived. He was probably excellent at what he did.

  But he had some information Will needed. ‘You said they stonewalled you when you asked about Ania.’

  ‘Yes. No one wanted to tell me.’

  ‘Because…?’

  ‘Because I was with her, we were together?’

  But Erland sounded unconvinced.

  ‘Or…?’ Will prompted.

  Erland looked away and shrugged. He wasn’t prepared to discuss it. He obviously trusted Will as little as Will trusted him. ‘You were going to marry her and they wouldn’t tell you anything,’ Will persisted. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have told you. There’s nothing else…’

  ‘She was my daughter!’

  He hadn’t meant to shout. In the following silence, their eyes locked until Erland looked away.

  There was a knock at the door, and after a slight pause, Konstantin Jankowski came in. He looked at the two men, a faint line appearing between his eyes when he saw Erland standing there. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I need to get…’

  Will closed his notebook and stood up. ‘I don’t want to be in your way.’

  ‘We are going to the police station,’ Erland said. ‘I came to take Mr Gillen.’

  ‘Of course.’ Jankowski’s lips were thin. He said something rapidly to Erland that Will’s Polish couldn’t catch, and Erland grinned.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in English. ‘I will take good care of him.’ He nodded to Jankowski. ‘Cześć.’

  As they left the room, Jankowski called Will back. ‘Are you sure you want him with you?’ he said, his voice low.

  ‘I can get rid of him if I need to. Don’t worry.’

  ‘He and Ania were friends.’ Jankowski’s gaze wouldn’t meet his. Will wondered if Polish society, with its strong adherence to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, was still prudish about relationships that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the UK.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Be careful of him.’

  Will nodded, then left the room and crossed the landing to where Erland was waiting for him.

  Chapter 28

  Police stations were police stations the world over. The one in Łódź was no exception. It was a relatively modern building, i
ts concrete brutalism reflecting the influences of Stalinism on Polish architecture.

  The main entrance opened onto a busy street, where patrol cars were parked outside. Erland led Will through the entrance into a lobby that smelt of cigarettes and unwashed bodies. A few people sat on benches in the waiting area, their down-at-heel shabbiness creating a different impression of the city than the one Will had had so far, as if the new Łódź , the renewed, innovative city was a mask beneath which the poverty and corruption of the Soviet days still lurked.

  There was a reception window at the far end where a man was filling in a form in a leisurely way, ignoring a cluster of people waiting for his attention.

  Erland spoke suddenly. ‘They won’t tell you anything important.’ He went straight to the desk, pushing through the crowd as if it wasn’t there. He rapped on the counter and said, ‘Commander Gillen. He has an appointment with Komendant Król.’

  The man straightened up, his gaze first on Erland. He seemed about to speak, then looked at Will. ‘One moment.’ He picked up the phone and almost immediately, a man wearing the black, military-style fatigues and cap that were the uniform of the Łódź police appeared at a door behind them and addressed Will. ‘Sir. The Komendant expect…’ He began.

  ‘I speak Polish,’ Will said.

  ‘Of course. Komendant Król is expecting you.’ He looked at Erland and his jaw tightened. ‘He isn’t expecting…’

  Erland shrugged. ‘I’ll wait.’

  Will followed the uniformed man. He was led through a maze of corridors to a closed door. His guide knocked, then waited until a voice responded. He opened the door and led Will into another small office, lit by artificial light as there was no window. ‘Komendant. DCI Gillen,’ he said.

  The Komendant stood up as Will came into the room. He was a big man, heavy set with the high colour that spoke of raised blood pressure, an occupational hazard for police the world over. ‘Mr Gillen. I am Piotr Król. I’m sorry about your daughter’s death. Now, how can I help you?’