Last Room

by Reah, Danuta

  He typed in his password, remembering it hadn’t worked last time, but the system accepted it. He must have mistyped it previously. He’d been drunk. He loaded the data onto his system and set the software running to try and descramble the damaged files. It would take a bit of time before he knew if it had been successful. He lit a cigarette and moved round the small room, stretching his legs.

  The door of the wall cupboard was slightly open. The hinge was loose and he kept thinking he should repair it, but he’d never got round to it. The whole flat was in need of an overhaul, something he and Ania hadn’t bothered with as they would be moving out soon to their own place. It was untidy as well. These past few days, he hadn’t done anything. He’d left stuff out, dumping his things as soon as he got in rather than putting them away. He had always been organised – an essential skill for someone who had lived in the crowded conditions of his childhood. Ania had been the messy one, scattering her clothes on the floor, leaving her possessions lying around.

  ‘Don’t you ever pick up after yourself?’ he’d said to her once in exasperation when he hadn’t been able to find a clear surface to put his bag down.

  She’d been sitting on the side of the bed changing to go out. She met his gaze and dropped her camisole deliberately on the floor. ‘Are you going to make me?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’ He’d wrestled her down onto the bed and the memory faded into a blur of eroticism and sadness.

  He poured himself a vodka and tipped it down his throat. On impulse, he pulled the cupboard door wide open. Maybe he could fix it now. Ania’s clothes faced him, hanging in a neat line along more than half of the cupboard space. His own wardrobe was more modest: jeans, trousers, a jacket, an overcoat for the cold weather. Winters in Łódź could be bitter.

  He could remember her wearing each one of the garments that hung here, and he slipped them off the hangers one by one, a dress in some soft fabric that had served if they went out, trousers, jeans, T-shirts, a blouse, a jersey. There was a shelf filled with underpants, bras, stockings, and on the floor of the wardrobe, a pair of insubstantial shoes, sandals with a high heel and fine leather straps. He could remember walking down Piotrkowska with her, window shopping for their flat. She’d worn a thin cotton dress, a gold chain round her ankle, her bare feet pushed into these sandals. Her toe nails were painted scarlet, and he hadn’t paid any attention to the shops at all. He’d just wanted to take her somewhere secluded and make love to her.

  He turned away. Ania was dead. She was gone. He was here and he had a life to pick up and get on with. Tomorrow, he would take all the clothes, all her things and throw them out. Keeping them was a pointless act of self-pity and sentiment.

  Then he noticed something. The hangers on her side of the wardrobe were always lined up with the hooks facing inwards so it was easy to lift them off the rail. He’d teased her about this one bit of order within the chaos she tended to spread around her. Now, the hanger that held her raincoat was on the rail with the hook facing outward.

  He looked at it. He hadn’t touched her clothes since she died. He hadn’t touched them since she was last here. It was the way they preserved their privacy in the tiny space, being meticulous about each other’s possessions.

  He shouldn’t have had that last vodka. Something was flashing urgent warnings into his mind and he couldn’t focus. He hadn’t touched that hanger. Ania had not left it like that – he would have noticed.

  Someone had been here.

  While he was out, someone had been here.

  He was moving round the flat as the realisation came to him, checking the window locks, checking the doors. There was no sign of a break-in.

  He checked the desk drawers where he kept his credit cards. His wallet was still there, intact and apparently undisturbed. Something rattled as he swept his hand round the inside, and he pulled out a small bunch of keys on a leather fob. He stared at them blankly, then he realised what they were.

  Ania’s keys. She’d been here. While he was away, she must have...

  But she wouldn’t have left them here. They would have been in her handbag. They must be among her possessions, her effects that would be – where? With Will Gillen? But why would Gillen break into his flat? Gillen was so destroyed he could barely organise himself to walk around the streets of Łódź. With the police? Why would they break into his flat?

  Or it could be...

  He slipped the bolt across on the door. The adrenaline rush was starting to counteract the effects of the vodka. He stood very still, letting his breathing steady, making himself calm down and think. Someone had been here. It wasn’t a burglar. His possessions were intact. They must have searched the flat, must have been looking for… what?

  The missing tape.

  His gaze moved to his laptop sitting on his desk. As a minor security precaution, mostly against the possibility of its being stolen, he’d booby trapped it. Anyone switching it on would see the user name and password already entered, the mark of a careless user, or someone who had nothing to hide. But if anyone clicked the login button using that password, the computer locked.

  A couple of days ago, he had found his computer locked and hadn’t realised the significance of what he’d seen. If the vodka hadn’t made him careless, he would have realised at once what had happened. Someone had searched his flat, someone had tried to break into his computer. Beneath his anger, he felt a cold tension. He had seen Ania’s body, seen how the fall had smashed and shattered her.

  Who would be surprised if Ania’s heartbroken lover followed her example to the grave?

  His laptop. They’d tried searching that but they hadn’t got beyond the password trap. Whoever was looking must have run out of time, and then, of course, Gillen had led them to the website and to the soft toy. The question was, had the searcher been on the right track? Was the missing recording – or a lead to its location – stored on his laptop? These days I put my faith in technology.

  He opened the search facility. A cartoon dog wagged at him from the screen, an irritating and distracting piece of whimsy. He searched for document names first, trying the ones that seemed obvious, the ones she might expect him to try: Ania, Brown Jenkin, Louisa.

  Nothing. Then he tried document names that linked to the case, though that seemed risky. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to spot the file: Sagal, Haynes, FLS, but that search came up empty as well.

  He was going to have to look for something in the document that… Then he realised and cursed himself for an idiot. It wouldn’t be a document. It would be a sound file, or even a video file like the ones Strąk had sent him. That was simple – he had few enough to check all of those manually. It was possible she had hidden it in plain sight where he would see it at once as an extra, as something that shouldn’t be there, but no one else would be aware of its significance. He opened his audio and video folders, but there was nothing there he wasn’t familiar with. He opened each file briefly to make sure that it contained what it said it contained.

  Nothing.

  OK. There might still be something. He set the search to check his C drive and asked for all audio and video files. The search ran for a few seconds and listed the results.

  At first, he thought he had hit another dead end as he saw the list of the same files he had just checked, but then he spotted it. Hidden away in a Russian doll of folders, down among temporary files, under folders with cryptic number references – all stuff he never checked, stuff most computer users never checked – there was a video file.

  It was labelled ‘Dolls_4’. He felt a leap of excitement. The missing file – it was here. These days, I put my faith in technology. Except… there was something that wasn’t right.

  If Ania had put the file here for him to find, she had left it very much to chance. He could have used this machine for the next 20 years and never have known it was there. The name was strange as well. Dolls? It meant nothing to him.

  Someone had been playing games with his comput
er.

  Puzzled, he checked the activity on the folder. It had been downloaded from the internet. His stomach started to clench as he saw the date: three days ago, long after Ania’s death. There had been other files here as well, files that had been deleted but had left their traces: Dolls_1, Dolls_2, Dolls_3.

  They had got beyond the password trap. Someone had managed to log on without the password and download these files onto his system. A premonition gave him a feeling of sick dread as he clicked on the file. The media player opened, and the video began to play.

  Later, he was glad he had left the sound turned down. At the time, all he could do was slam the lid of the laptop shut. He was at the other side of the room, as far away from it as he could be before he was conscious of taking any action.

  The image he had seen was burned in his mind. A baby. A child of about six months old. He didn’t know where, he didn’t know when, but he knew from what he had seen that the child in those pictures would almost certainly be dead. He hadn’t heard it. At least he hadn’t heard it.

  He closed the file. His head was spinning. Someone, somehow, had put that file onto his computer, put it where he would never look, left it there until… Until someone else found it, someone who had been tipped off it was there.

  He could feel his heart hammering. His first instinct was to delete the file, but he didn’t have the software to do that beyond all possibility of retrieval. And if he deleted it, he would be destroying the evidence that led to the person who had put it there.

  Now he had to move fast. The file had been on his computer for three days. He didn’t know why the police weren’t there already. He had to get this to them before they came to him. It was his only chance of convincing them he wasn’t responsible for downloading it.

  He didn’t like the idea, not at all. It was a high risk strategy. If he got it wrong, if he couldn’t convince them – if he couldn’t convince a jury – then he faced jail and disgrace.

  His relationship with the city police was edgy at best. Several of his most high-profile cases had involved people facing the criminal law. On a couple of occasions he had got people off on what even he could recognise as dodgy grounds, making the understaffed, underpaid and overworked police look foolish. They didn't like him. Even if they believed him, they would relish the opportunity to give him a bad time.

  He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water over his face. He was shaking. Then he went through his address book to find the number of the most senior, and most reliable officer he knew. Ironically, the name he came up with was Piotr Król’s. Król detested him, but he had a reputation for honesty. Despite the debacle of the investigation into Ania's death, Dariusz believed he would get a fair hearing from Król.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he picked up the phone.

  He forgot, until he saw the police car pulling up outside the block twenty minutes later, about the files Strąk had sent him. They were still on his pen drive. He couldn’t be found with these as well. He made a snap decision and pulled it out of the machine, opened the window and threw the small object out into the night as hard as he could.

  Then he faced the door and waited.

  Chapter 41

  Will shut himself away in his hotel room, away from the press who had tracked him down and were bombarding him with phone calls. He told the hotel switchboard to refuse them all, and settled down to wait.

  He’d done everything he could here. He’d contacted a pathologist he knew, someone he’d worked with often enough in the past, Euan Kingsley. He could trust Kingsley with Ania. If Kingsley found anything, then he could push for a coroner’s inquest. It was the best he could hope for now.

  He checked his mobile to see who had been trying to get in touch with him. Anyone he wanted to speak to would use that number, not the hotel. Among the messages from various UK news media, there was one from Oz Karzac at FLS.

  Karzac deserved a call. Ania’s actions had damaged the professional reputation of his company almost beyond repair, yet he had defended her even after he must have known she was guilty. He keyed in the number for FLS and was put straight through when he gave his name to the switchboard.

  ‘Gillen. Will. How are you?’

  ‘You wanted me to call you.’

  ‘Yep. I wanted to let you know we’ve started a memorial fund. There’s quite a sum. It’s well into four figures. A lot of people admired your daughter. Someone suggested the money should go to ChildLine. Would you be OK with that?’

  ‘Whatever you think.’

  ‘OK. Thanks. I’ll get it organised.’ He was quiet for a moment, then said suddenly, ‘I keep hoping it’ll die down but there’s a lot of stuff in the papers again today.’

  ‘Not from me.’

  ‘I know. Not from here either. We’re closed up tighter than a… We’re closed up tight. Are you OK? It said you’d been in hospital.’

  ‘I’m fine. It was nothing, Just a check-up, really.’

  ‘Oh. OK. What’s this about a second post-mortem?’

  The question came abruptly, catching Will off his guard. He didn’t want to go into details. ‘The coroner asked for it.’ Not exactly true, but the coroner would ask for it if Will managed to provide enough evidence.

  ‘Why would the coroner want to second guess the Polish police? Is there something I don’t know about?’

  Plenty, Will wanted to say. ‘Nothing. It’s just – a formality, really. That’s all. Anything they find will be in the papers.’

  ‘That’s just it. Look, I know this sounds selfish, but the longer it’s in the papers, all over the news, the more damage… Shit, Gillen, Ania cared about this business. She helped me build it up. She wouldn’t have wanted… Sorry. It’s not your problem. It’s going to delay the funeral, isn’t it? I’d like to be there. We all would.’

  ‘It’s still going to be on the sixth. I’ll let you know if…’

  ‘Thanks.’ The call tailed away into silence. Karzac said, ‘Keep in touch.’

  Will called DCI Cathcart who sounded tired and harassed. ‘Nothing,’ he said abruptly to Will’s question about progress. ‘The bastard knew how to cover his tracks. It means he’s almost certainly done it before. We’ll get him. Somehow.’ But he sounded as though he was speaking by rote, saying the right things but not believing them. The conviction that had been in his voice earlier was no longer there. ‘This second inquest – it isn’t helpful. It’s muddying the waters.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s like we don’t know what we’re investigating any more.’

  After he put the phone down, Will reflected that Karzac was wrong. It was very much his problem. He just didn’t understand it.

  Chapter 42

  The police took Dariusz into town. They arrived on the attack, with an arrest warrant and a warrant to search his flat. They couldn’t have processed the paperwork between his call and their arrival. He realised they must have been preparing to do this, they must already have received the tip off. He’d been only just in time.

  As they came through the door, he’d moved away from the window, standing still with his hands slightly raised, knowing how quick they could be with their batons and their boots. Król wasn’t there and Dariusz’s requests to be taken straight to the Komendant were ignored.

  He was arrested on a charge of owning illegal material, and he was handcuffed and loaded into the van with a routine amount of pushing and shoving. He did manage to find out that Król wasn't available until the next morning. Until then, he was at the mercy of juniors with a grudge to work off. He made a mental note of each breach of their code, and told himself he would sue the arses off them once this was over. In the meantime, he kept his head down and made no objections. He didn't want to give them any opportunity of charging him with assault or resisting arrest.

  When they got to the police station, he was processed then thrown into a cell, underground and windowless, where they left him with his hands still cuffed behind him. He had fallen, unable to
balance and unable to use his hands to defend himself. After a struggle he managed to get his legs underneath him and kneel up, then get to his feet, feeling a damp stickiness on his face where it had lain against the floor.

  The cell stank. It smelled of sweat, of urine, of vomit. There was a faint light coming from the grille in the door, otherwise he was in darkness. He felt his way round and found there was a wooden bench just about wide enough to lie down on and a blanket that was thin and stiff with dirt. He lay on the bench, edging himself onto his side so he wasn’t lying on his cuffed hands, and tried to suppress the panic that was bubbling up inside him.

  They hadn’t beaten him up. At least they hadn’t beaten him up. His status as a lawyer might have stopped them, but if they found his pen drive… He felt a cold dread start to flood through him and trod on it hard. He had to stop thinking like that. He forced himself to start working on the problem of what had just happened. Set it out, think it through… He could feel the mantra start to work, feel himself start to focus. You have to do this, he told himself. To save yourself, you have to do this!

  Who? Who had planted that file on his system? There was something else he hadn’t considered. What if there was more to find? What about his work computer? Jesus, he hadn't thought about work. He hadn't thought this through at all. In his panic to get to the police before they got to him he'd missed the possibilities of what else the intruder might have done.

  It was still possible the police had set him up. It had been a professional job, one that he wouldn’t have known about if it hadn’t been for the misplacing of one coat hanger. If the police had done this, he was finished.

  He tried to reassure himself. It didn’t make sense. His relationship with them wasn’t the most cordial, but there was no reason for them to do something like this. And if they had, why hadn't they picked him up immediately? Why wait?

  It wasn’t the police. He knew who had done this. It was someone who had left enough traces, tenuous, but there – a voice on a lost recording, footsteps on the stairs the night Ania died, a fingerprint on a phone cord. This was the person who had put him here, handcuffed in a police cell.