by Reah, Danuta
Will studied it. It looked as if it had fallen from someone’s boot. There was part of a tread pattern, nothing that would give much away, but it didn’t come from anything he owned. It was clay, not local soil. Someone had been careless. He looked round. Everything was as he’d left it, some papers scattered on the table, his coffee cup in the sink. He could see the dent in the cushion where he’d sat that night, after the police had given him their deadly message and gone.
It was cold. He lit the stove and turned on the water heater, then he peeled off his wet clothes. He pulled on the heavy jersey he wore when he was out on the boat, and a pair of old jeans, then emptied the bag of shopping Jack had left. Milk, butter, eggs, bread, beer, all the basics. He abandoned his plan to make coffee and opened a can of beer, wandering round the room as he drank it.
The storm was still blowing, rattling the windows and sending gusts of cold air through the cottage. Keeper had taken up her position by the stove, sitting upright and alert as her gaze followed him.
He wasn’t surprised someone had been here, and he was pretty sure he knew who it was. He still couldn’t accept that the security services had been responsible for Ania’s death, but he knew they were taking a keen interest. What he couldn’t understand was why.
He checked the phone. Most of the messages were from friends wanting him to get in touch, expressing concern about his welfare. There was a message from Oz Karzac asking Will to call as soon as he got back and one from DCI Cathcart making the same request. He felt no sense of urgency to get back to them. He’d said everything he had to say in his last call. It could keep. There was a pile of post in the wire cage on the inside of the door. He checked through it but he knew there would be nothing there. If Erland was right, if Ania had hidden the recording somewhere else, she wouldn’t have sent it here. If she had, then it was in the hands of the security services, for whatever reason it was they wanted it. He felt a curious urge to call Blaise and ask him.
Instead, he ran a deep bath and once he had soaked the ache and the chill from his bones, he went to bed. He propped a boathook against the wall within reach of his hand and let Keeper curl up on the mat on the floor beside him. It wasn’t just the need for security that stopped him sending her down to her bed in the kitchen. She was the last of his family and he needed her with him.
He was waiting.
That night, he didn’t dream.
Chapter 47
In the days after Gillen had left Poland, Dariusz let himself drift. He didn’t challenge the decision to send him on leave. It was as if he’d lost the energy to fight. He changed the locks in his flat, getting a locksmith to put in the highest security system he could. He installed a burglar alarm. He couldn’t think of anything else to do.
As the days went by, there was no further contact from the police. Krysia called him and told him they’d found nothing on the office systems. He had to assume the lack of contact meant they’d found nothing further on his laptop. Krysia’s voice sounded wary as she spoke to him, as if she was speaking to a stranger.
His days stretched out in front of him, smooth, uneventful, dreary. He told himself it would get better. With time, it would get better.
For now, he was waiting.
***
The phone started ringing for Will the first morning he was back. He fielded calls from Ania’s friends and from family friends, thanking them for their condolences, and telling them that he would contact them about the funeral as soon as he had news. He implied that a further post-mortem was a legal requirement. He wanted to keep speculation to a minimum.
He tried to avoid the press, refusing to give any interviews. As a result, when they reported the story, he became the man who bungled the Birmingham raid, and a grieving father who wasn’t able to accept the truth about his daughter’s death. The Haynes case was rehashed, with the news that there was to be a retrial and Haynes had been released on bail in the meantime.
He barely went out, just brief, monosyllabic visits to the village shop, and short walks along the cliff top with Keeper. The thin, persistent rain of winter made the ground treacherous. Once, close to the edge, his foot had slipped on the wet grass and he had seen the headlines in his mind, headlines that condemned him and his daughter as cowards who were unable to face the consequences of their actions. After that, he stayed indoors, living on bread and coffee. The level of the whisky bottle fell and fell.
It wasn’t until the fifth morning that he heard from Blaise. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘You don’t sound OK. I’m reading about you right now. Will, is this doing any good? Is it helping you come to terms with it?’
‘Not really.’
He heard Blaise chuckle. ‘Stubborn to the end. I had a call from Poland, from Król. You remember Komendant Król?’
‘Of course.’
‘He isn’t happy with you, not happy at all. I thought I told you not to go investigating, not to get in the way?’
‘What did you expect me to do?’
‘Exactly what you did, Will. Exactly what you did. That’s what I told Król. If he can’t run a tight ship, don’t expect one of my people to go in there and play along with it.’
He wasn’t one of Blaise’s men, not any more. ‘What else did he say?’
‘Not much he could say. Look, are you sure he got it that wrong?’
‘He got it wrong. There was someone else there.’
‘Based on?’
Will was pretty sure that Blaise already knew. There was no reason to keep it secret anyway. ‘The caretaker heard someone in the building that night, and there was a print on the phone cord. No one investigated those’
‘They did. He’s not as incompetent as you think. That caretaker is ex-SB turned informer. He used to make a good living selling information to the police, but he got greedy. Król looked into the footsteps story – there was no evidence of anyone else there. And a partial fingerprint in a room that’s used by any Tom, Dick and Harry? None of it adds up to murder, Will. You know that.’
An account of footsteps on the stairs didn’t sound like a lucrative informer’s story, and even though Pawlak had managed to make some money out of it from Will, he wasn’t convinced. ‘Why come up with something like that?’
‘Just trying it on. Now, aren’t you going to tell me about the second post-mortem?’
‘Let’s just say I’m hedging my bets.’
He heard Blaise sigh. ‘OK. As you like. I’ll be honest with you. I think you’re clutching at straws. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why. Maybe you’re right. If you are, I’ll do everything I can to make them follow it up. If you’re wrong – Will, I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life as one of those conspiracy obsessionals. Promise me one thing: once the post-mortem is done, bury her. Don’t leave her in the morgue.’
He rang off, leaving Will staring at the phone, puzzled. He’d expected something different. He picked up the whisky bottle and poured himself what was probably a triple measure of Scotch, the start of an evening’s drinking that was the only way he knew to make the hours pass into sleep, or at least into oblivion. Ania had tried to explain it to him once when she talked about her depressions, about being in the grip of Brown Jenkin’s claws. ‘The seconds are too long. There doesn’t seem to be any way through them.’ He picked up the glass, and Keeper came and laid her chin on his foot. She whined.
He looked at her properly for the first time in days. Her coat was matted, her eyes dull. Since he retired, she had been used to going everywhere with him, taking long walks on the cliffs or across the fields where she could chase rabbits and play with other dogs. Her life and his had been spent outdoors. For the past week, she had been shut up here with an owner who was rapidly becoming a drunk, curled up for long hours in her bed while he slept off the whisky he’d used to bring about sleep in the first place. If he couldn’t look after her properly, he didn’t deserve her.
He found her brush and spent h
alf an hour gently grooming the coat he used to brush every day until it was smooth and glossy. ‘OK. That’s you done. What about me?’
She studied him intently, her head cocked to one side.
‘A bit of a scruff?’ He looked in the mirror. His hair was a wild tangle and it was so long since he had shaved that he effectively had a beard. His eyes were bloodshot. His clothes were dirty and crumpled. He reminded himself of Dariusz Erland the way he had appeared that evening in the hotel when Will had first seen him.
He stripped off his clothes and dumped them in the washing machine, then went upstairs to the shower. There was no hot water, so he doused himself in cold, then shaved off five day’s growth of beard. The man who looked back at him as he ran the comb through his hair was pale and hollow cheeked, with the shadows of stress and sleeplessness under his eyes, but he no longer looked like a vagrant, like someone who had lost all interest in living and all pride in himself.
He put on clean jeans, a shirt and a heavy jersey, then pulled on his waterproof and called Keeper. If he was going to drink, he’d do it at the hotel where pride at least would stop him from drinking himself into a stupor.
Keeper’s pent-up energy made her dance round his legs as they set out through the village in the moonlight. When they reached the cliff path, she snaked her way into the undergrowth, coming back with a stick that she laid at his feet, watching him with bright eyes. He threw it a short way for her and they made their way along the path like this, Keeper bringing her stick back, Will throwing it in the kind of mindless routine that had marked their walks in the years since she first came to him as a boisterous, undisciplined puppy. The rain had stopped but the ground was still wet. Will walked slowly, watching the clouds as they rolled across the moon.
The bar was its familiar self, the threadbare carpet and smoke-stained walls comforting in a way that Will couldn’t explain. An open fire had burned down to embers and the room was warm and welcoming. There were a few other customers: one or two gave him a quick nod of greeting, their eyes avoiding his.
The embarrassment of bereavement – he had become too familiar with it in his life. He took his whisky over to the chair by the fire where he usually sat and sank down into it. Keeper stretched out on the rug, groaning with pleasure as the warmth flowed over her.
He knew he wouldn’t be disturbed. The people of St Abbs had a strong sense of privacy. They preferred their own not to be breached, and respected that of their fellow villagers. Will was still a bit of an outsider for all the years he had been coming here, but he knew that no one would intrude on him.
Last time he had been here, he had spent the evening talking with Sarah Ludlow. He wanted to find her, but he was waiting for the results of the new post-mortem before he challenged her. He wanted to be on unassailable ground before that confrontation.
He had two singles of malt whisky, making them last through the evening. As he stood up to leave, Iain, the landlord gestured him over with a jerk of the head. ‘Good to see you back,’ he said.
‘It’s good to be back.’
‘You missed yon bawbags. We had them in here asking questions.’
‘I’m sorry you were bothered.’
Iain’s normally gloomy face lit up with a grin. ‘No bother. There’s no law against asking. Can’t say the same about telling, mind, and I got some good money across the bar.’
If the invading journalists had swelled the hotel’s profits for a night or two, then something good had come out of the whole business. ‘That’s OK then.’
‘I got this for you.’ Iain passed a bag across the bar, nodding at Will as he did so.
Will slipped it into his pocket. ‘Good night.’ He whistled to Keeper and stepped out into the winter night.
It looked as if the waiting was over.
Chapter 48
When Will arrived back at the cottage, he towelled Keeper off, wrestling with her as she attempted to shake her coat free of the rain, hung his waterproof on the back of the door and went across to the table, still carrying the small package that Iain had given him.
He turned it over and over in his hands. It was addressed to Iain at the hotel, and inside, there was a second package. This one had his name on it in writing he knew very well. William Gillen. It was scrawled as though she had written it quickly. Folded up in the package was a piece of paper. He unfolded it and spread it out on the table in front of him. Again, he saw the familiar writing and felt a sense of her presence so clearly that his breath stopped in his throat. He looked round the small kitchen, at the familiar stove, the flagged floor and the wooden shelves that ran up the wall. He knew she was there – just beyond the door, just on the stairs, maybe she had just stepped outside for a moment, but she was there…
And then there was nothing, just a package and a note written in black ink on a piece of notepaper headed with the logo of the English Language Department, the University of Łódź .
Dear Iain
Can you give this to my father the next time he comes into the bar? Don’t take it to the cottage or give it to anyone else, just hang on to it until you see him. I’d be grateful if you could keep it quiet.
Many thanks
Ania.
So simple. Behind the dust cloud of websites and e-mails and things hidden in teddy bears, she had simply posted it, relying on the closed nature of the St Abbs community to get it to him. Her faith hadn’t been misplaced. Iain had kept the package, waiting until Will came into the bar, handing it over almost as an afterthought at the end of the evening. He slipped his finger under the seal, and opened it.
An audio cassette tape dropped onto the table. A note was wrapped round it, held with an elastic band. Will unfolded it and her voice spoke in his head as he read it.
Dad, I’m sorry for all this cloak and dagger stuff but I’ve got a better idea of what’s going on now. I can’t get this done here – my mistake. If it goes through official channels, I’m afraid it might disappear. I’m working on the other stuff, but in the meantime it would help a lot if you dealt with this for me. Can you give it to:
Sarah Ludlow
Merchant Matheson
The Cotton Warehouse,
Merchants Quay
Manchester
M50 2DA
Tell her it needs to be authenticated and analysed. She’ll know what to do.
Love, Ania
x
PS. See you soon.
The missing tape. It must be the copy of the original recording, the one DCI Cathcart had made that she had listened to and given the off-the-cuff analysis that had impressed him so much. He held it in his hand, puzzled. Why was it so important? It was a poor quality recording – Cathcart had admitted as much – that would have no value in court. Could it be the only extant copy of the original file? Even so, it had no value as evidence, none at all, and yet it had cost his daughter her life.
He saw a dark staircase in an empty building, and heard footsteps, soft and stealthy, climbing up towards a room where Ania sat staring at a computer screen, her head resting on her hand. When had she heard the sound, and when had she realised what it meant?
Will had not been impressed by what Blaise had told him. Pawlak couldn’t have expected money for reporting an unseen intruder on the stairs. There was no reason to make that story up. That person would have been central to any investigation, not dismissed as an informer’s fabrication.
He remembered his dream of opening the door to the car park, of standing above a huddled figure, consumed by rage and frustration because… Because he had failed to find the audio cassette, the cassette that was now in Will’s hands.
He read her note again. There was something about the tone that disturbed him. It was dated the day after she had arrived in Łódź . She obviously didn’t trust the authorities with whatever evidence this tape held, but there was no sense of the danger she was in. And there was something else. She addressed him as though he knew what she was talking about – all this cloak and dagge
r stuff, a better idea of what’s going on, my mistake, the other stuff – as if they were half way through a conversation, except he hadn’t heard the first part.
Then just on the edge of hearing, as if the sound was coming to him across a gulf of distance and of time, he heard the sea surging against the rocks in the storm, and the sound of thunder. Her voice was faint and far away. Look, you’ll get a letter, OK? I don’t want to take you unawares. You’re around for the next couple of days?
The letter she had promised him. It wasn’t the suicide note she had meant. It had never been the suicide note because she hadn’t written it. She had sent him a letter about the Haynes case, explaining what was going on, explaining what she was doing. He’d never got it. It had never arrived.
The dried mud under the dresser – if the letter had arrived after her death, then Brown Jenkin had claimed it.
He had no choice now but to work with what he had, which were Ania’s instructions, clear and simple. They gave him a direct line to Sarah Ludlow but he knew things now that Ania did not. He knew that Sarah Ludlow had come looking for her, had come asking questions not openly but surreptitiously. She had found out what she wanted, and then Ania had died.
Ania might have trusted her. He could not.
He sat at the table, turning the cassette over and over in his hands. He knew it had to be important, but he also knew that it was impossibly contaminated. It was a copy made casually on poor equipment. The chain of evidence had broken as soon as Ania took it, and the fact that it had been in her hands, unsupervised, meant that whatever was on it would not be verifiable, would never stand up in any court.
And yet she must have known that herself. She was familiar enough with the rules of evidence. He read the note again: I can’t get it done here – whatever ‘it’ was – my mistake. She’d taken it to Łódź with very clear plans, plans he might understand if he had received her letter. Get it authenticated and analysed. What did she mean by authenticated? It couldn’t be authenticated, not now.
