Last Room

by Reah, Danuta

  The doctor tapped his notes with his pen. ‘You understand there’s a chance this event does indicate problems with your heart? If you were to have another attack…’ He spread his hands to indicate the potential seriousness of the situation.

  ‘I had a full health check six months ago. My heart was fine. It’s…’

  ‘I know about your circumstances, Mr Gillen. I’m very sorry.’

  Will nodded abruptly.

  ‘It would be unwise for you to leave hospital without further tests.’

  ‘Am I fit to travel?’ He didn’t know what time it was and he had to get his flight. ‘I’m leaving tonight. My flight goes at seven.’ He looked at his wrist, but his watch was gone.

  Erland spoke from his chair. ‘I cancelled it.’

  ‘You did what? Call them. Now.’ He could feel the anger starting, and the ache in his chest. ‘I have to get back.

  ‘Do you want to kill yourself?’ The question hung in the air, then Erland said, ‘It’s almost six thirty. You’re too late.’

  ‘I could…’ He pictured himself pulling on his clothes, running into the street and hailing a taxi. Just for a moment, it seemed feasible. He could send for his luggage, he could… But the plane would be boarding. Even if he could get to the airport, get through security in time, the gate would be closed. ‘Where are my clothes?’

  Erland had produced a bag from somewhere before Will asked. ‘They’ll extend your stay at the hotel. It’s never full. I’ll call them and arrange it. I can drive you there.’ His face was impassive.

  ‘I want to check you over once more,’ the doctor said, ‘then if you choose to leave, it is up to you.’ He waited until Erland had left the room, then said something to the nurse, who nodded and followed Erland out. ‘She will see to your medication. I have prescribed a mild sedative.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Will had no intention of taking anything that would dull his alertness, but he wasn’t going to argue. Then he realised that the doctor had another agenda. ‘Your daughter,’ he said, coiling his stethoscope into his pocket after a fairly cursory check of Will’s chest, ‘they brought her here that night.’

  ‘Here?’

  The doctor’s fingers touched his wrist. ‘This stress is dangerous. You must take that sedative if you are to continue.’

  ‘Ania. They brought her here?’

  ‘Yes. My colleague did an external examination, then the matter was turned over to the police pathologist.’

  ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘In cases where there is suspicion, yes. It becomes their jurisdiction.’

  ‘So what are you saying? What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘Just that – maybe you should ask for another post-mortem. Their pathologist, to be honest, is not as skilled as the team we have here.’

  ‘She died in a fall.’ Working that out required little skill on the part of the pathologist. The question that Will needed answering was how she had fallen, not how she had died. The pathologist couldn’t tell him that.

  ‘My colleague had some concerns.’

  ‘What are you saying? That it wasn’t the fall that killed her?’

  ‘No. Not that at all. He just thought there were some peculiarities that the police report didn’t cover. It may be nothing.’

  ‘Can I speak to him?’

  ‘Not now. He’s on secondment to a hospital in Poznan.’

  ‘I need to talk to him.’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘I don’t know that he would want… Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.’ His gaze met Will’s. ‘Get another post-mortem.’ His bleep went, and he looked relieved. ‘You must excuse me. Remember, you have to rest. Your body has given you a warning – heed it.’

  Will dressed quickly, noticing that Erland had brought clean clothes, not the ones Will had been wearing when he was admitted. Erland must have taken his key, had full access to his hotel room. He felt angry at the thought of Erland going through his things, maybe reading the notes he had made, handling the stuffed toy, wondering what its significance was. There was nothing he could do about it. He had to think about what the doctor had told him.

  Ania had died in the fall, but he should get another post-mortem… He tried to keep the information clinical and distant, aware all the time of the tightening in his chest, the way the tension restricted his breathing, the dull ache under his breast bone. Her body would be on its way back to the UK – the undertaker had arranged the transport.

  He went along the corridor to where Erland was engaged in conversation with the nurse. They were laughing together as the girl, an attractive young woman with soft dark curls, put together a series of forms. She sobered as she saw Will. ‘Mr Gillen.’

  He spoke to her in Polish. ‘Dziękuję.’ Thank you.

  She handed him an envelope, and a box with a pharmacy label on. ‘These are for you to take every morning and at night. The doctor says you must do this.’ Her gaze sought out Erland.

  ‘I’ll make sure he does.’ Erland smiled a farewell at her and led Will along the corridor following the exit signs.

  ‘Did you get her phone number?’ Will couldn’t resist the dig. Ania was dead only a few days and Erland was already flirting with attractive women.

  ‘Sure. They took Ania to this hospital first, you know,’ Erland said, giving the information he must have had all along but had not until that moment chosen to share with Will.

  ‘And you think she can tell you something?’

  ‘Who knows.’ It was already dusk as they headed through the car park. Erland led Will to a battered old Ford. ‘I’ll take you back to the hotel.’

  He didn’t speak as he drove them back into the city, weaving through the fast-moving traffic with the skill of familiarity. He pulled up in a side street next to the main entrance. ‘You’re in the same room. You didn’t check out, so there’s no need to check in again. I’ve sorted it.’

  Will knew he should be grateful to Erland for the efficiency that saved him from all the tedium of unnecessary paperwork, but he still felt angry, and the anger made him churlish. He was aware of Erland following him in through the door and into the lift. ‘I’ll be fine now. Thank you.’

  Erland didn’t answer, just led the way to the room and, using the key he must have taken earlier, opened the door. He waved Will past him then followed him in and shut the door. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About what you have been doing. I owe it to Ania not to let you kill yourself.’

  ‘Ania’s my concern now.’

  Erland picked up the bottle of vodka that was standing on the desk, poured himself a large slug and tipped it down his throat. He looked the way he had the day Will first saw him, unshaven and pale with dark shadows under his eyes. His gaze met Will’s. The hostility between them was overt. ‘Look, Gillen, you don’t like me. That’s fine. I don’t like you. But I want to know what happened. I want to know for Ania. She deserves that and there’s just you and me now. It was almost just me, so we’d better start talking to each other before it’s too late.’

  He reached into the bag he had been carrying and took out a bundle. He opened it and the dismembered remains of a soft toy spread out across the desk. ‘I could ask you about this. I know it. It was Ania’s. She took it with her wherever she travelled.’

  Small Bear.

  Erland’s smile contained no humour. ‘You see, I didn’t waste my time while you were ill.’

  ‘You went through my things?’

  ‘Of course. And I’ll tell you what I found. I found that the fingerprint in the room is lost – for the moment. If you really think it is important, go to Król. Get it. He’s an honest man. I know what Pawlak told you, about hearing someone on the stairs. If you’d talked to me, I could have told you about Pawlak. He used to work for Służba Bezpieczeństwa, the SB, the police of the Soviet times. There are many such – they did the dirty work for the state, and the state got rid of them when they became an embarrassment. Now
, he lives by other means. One of them is selling information to the authorities.’

  ‘You’re telling me he was lying?’

  ‘No. But he may have been.’ Will didn’t say anything. He could remember the satisfaction on Pawlak’s face as Will passed money across the wooden counter.

  ‘I also found a Facebook page that goes nowhere.’ Erland indicated the remains of the toy beside him. ‘And this, of course. Did you find anything? Was there anything hidden there?’

  ‘You’ve been busy.’

  ‘What do you expect? We lived together. She was part of my life. We were going to get married. It doesn’t matter what you and I think about each other. We’ll probably never see each other again once this is over. What matters is Ania, what really happened that night. We have to talk to each other, tell each other what we know. What else did you find?’

  Will could feel his fists clenching. He didn’t want to listen to this. Ania was his daughter. She’d come to him for help, not Erland. She’d sent the Facebook e-mail to him, asked him to go to her flat, she’d… come to him. If she wasn’t prepared to trust Erland, then why should he?

  After waiting out his silence, Erland sighed impatiently. ‘OK. I’ll tell you what I know. I’ll tell you what I’ve worked out. When the Haynes appeal broke, Ania must have found something that scared her. She stopped using her phone. All her calls to me were on landlines. She didn’t e-mail me. She didn’t stay at the flat.’

  Maybe it was you she was scared of. Will didn’t say it, but he could see Erland reading the thought from his face. ‘So who was she hiding from?’

  ‘I think the security services were after her.’

  That thought had crossed Will’s mind as well, ever since he’d realised Blaise was taking a close interest in the case. He remembered her call in the early hours of the morning to tell him she was leaving. I’ll need a long wire. I’m using the phone booth. He’d wondered why she was using a landline, but hadn’t given it much thought. And the e-mail – she’d used the Facebook site because it was a way of sending an e-mail that wasn’t linked to her.

  He no longer believed the Polish police were incompetent. The evidence he had uncovered couldn’t have been missed by them. They might have preferred Ania’s death to be suicide, they might have been willing to ignore some inconclusive evidence, but what he had been told at the hospital showed that they had taken specific steps to keep the details of the investigation within their own domain. Someone had put pressure on them.

  The only people who could exercise that kind of influence were the security services, and that made no sense at all. If they’d wanted Ania, if they’d wanted to question her, they had more than enough to arrest her.

  And her death? He had no illusions about the people he’d worked with. They functioned in a hard world and they brought hard solutions to it, but they didn’t carry out botched assassinations because a court case had gone wrong.

  The security services hadn’t killed Ania. They didn’t need to. They had had the option of burying her alive.

  He didn’t share these thoughts with Erland. ‘Why?’

  ‘I had to ask myself why she sent this to you, not me.’ He flicked the ruined toy on the desk in front of him. ‘The Facebook page, the toy, all of that shit.’

  ‘Because she trusted me.’

  ‘Or because she knew the people who were after her didn’t need to worry about you. You wouldn’t cause them any trouble. You were already bought and paid for. You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The Birmingham shooting. You walked away from that. What did you give them that they let you do that?’

  Will felt a strange calm settle over him. In a way, Erland was right. Will had been offered a price for his silence, and he had accepted it. ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  Will had never talked about it, not even to Ania. She thought he had taken early retirement after the enquiry ended because he couldn’t live with the fact his operation had killed an innocent youth. That was the public version and he had never contradicted it, not even to her. She’d never know, now. She was gone, and he didn’t think he would see her again. He sighed. ‘We had intelligence about a bomb factory.’

  The intelligence had been sudden and urgent: the threat was imminent. They thought they’d got the house covered in time, the area quietly evacuated: a textbook operation.

  And then one of the neighbours told them about the young man who had left the house during the night, slipping out through the yard gate as the sky began to lighten. He had been wearing a heavy anorak despite the mild weather, and he had been carrying a rucksack.

  It was sheer luck – ill-luck as it turned out – that he had been spotted on CCTV, heading towards the station. There had been no time for an evacuation. They couldn’t risk anything that would alert him.

  He should have known. Will always believed – whether it was with hindsight or with justification – that he should have known. He had been a policeman for three decades. He should have listened to the voice of disquiet that had been speaking in his head, but in cases like this, you didn’t act on hunches. You acted on evidence.

  In his dreams, he was always running through the station, running through crowds to find the men he’d sent and call them back. In fact, nothing so dramatic had occurred. He hadn’t even been there. He had been at the control centre. The young man had entered the station before they could intercept him. When he saw the police in pursuit, he had reached under the bulk of his anorak and they had shot him dead. When the body was examined, he was holding his identity card in his hand.

  ‘The house was let to asylum seekers,’ Will said. ‘Landlords get contracts to take them on, and the rules are strict: you live where you’re put and you don’t let anyone else stay there. The lad that was shot – he was destitute. Someone in the house had befriended him and let him stay. They must have realised someone was watching them, so he had to get out of there without anyone seeing him. They probably expected a raid.’ The Borders and Immigration teams always came in the dawn hours when their actions could be carried out unobserved.

  ‘Where did the intelligence come from? Interrogation?’

  Will knew what Erland meant, the men whisked off the streets from countries around the world and taken to places where they could be questioned by means that were – still – not legal in the west. ‘No one ever confirmed it but that’s what I believe. The official story was we were set up by a malicious informer. Whatever happened, we killed an innocent man.’ The mop-up had been good. Blaise had been in charge and he knew what he was doing. By the time the enquiry began, there was evidence to show the young man had doubtful connections. It had been easy enough to find those in the life of a destitute youth. The only other people who knew the story, the men in the house who had befriended him, had been deported.

  Erland’s face gave no clue to what he was thinking. Will shrugged. ‘I’m realistic. I know how these things work. But I didn’t want it happening again. The men who pulled the triggers – one of them is still on sick leave. I don’t think he’ll ever recover, not really. I wanted a guarantee we’d stop using information that had been tortured out of people. I didn’t get it.’

  ‘So you retired. Fair enough.’

  ‘I told you – it wasn’t that simple. There were other people I had to protect, my team. That was the deal. I’d take the rap and keep my mouth shut, they’d clear the men on my team and let me take early retirement. I agreed.’

  ‘Bought and paid for. If you speak out, they’ll destroy you.’

  ‘Not any more. I don’t give a shit any more. They can do what they like.’

  ‘So it was the security services after Ania.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think she believed that. She had to buy herself time. Don’t you get that?’

  ‘No. I don’t. Because…’ Erland reached past him and picked up the file.

  ‘Because?’

  �
��Because Ania didn’t fold up under pressure. She didn’t run away. She came here for a reason. I’ll tell you what I don’t understand. It’s this.’ He brandished the file. ‘Messages on internet sites. Things hidden in teddy bears. It’s bullshit. Ania has something important she wants to tell you, so instead of just telling you, she sets up a fucking website link, and instead of sending you whatever it is she wants you to have, she hides it in a stuffed toy. Christ, Gillen, you must think she was stupid, playing spook games when someone was trying to kill her.’ His gaze met Will’s. ‘You accept that now, right? Someone killed her?’

  Will nodded, once. He couldn’t say the words. ‘I don’t think she was stupid. She thought she couldn’t send me anything – she thought we were both under surveillance and it would never arrive. She had to improvise.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she knew someone was after her.’ In his head, lightning flashed and the crash of thunder dragged him out of sleep to the sound of the phone ringing. ‘She called me. Three days before she died. She knew the night before they were on to her about the fake recording. That’s why she ran.’

  ‘You believe she faked the recording?’

  ‘No one else could have done it.’

  ‘She told me she had done nothing wrong.’

  ‘She thought she’d done the right thing. She believed Haynes was guilty and…’ He saw Erland open his mouth to object and held up his hand to stop him. ‘And she thought that he was the man who killed her sister.’

  Erland looked at him. The silence stretched out. ‘She thought…?’

  ‘When you told me what had happened, that she’d left Louisa in the playground, I began to understand. It took me a bit of time, but I got there in the end. She must have seen him in the park that day, only she didn’t realise what it was she’d seen, not then. That’s why she felt guilty.’ You see? I know my daughter after all.