The door swung wide. Łukasz looked in through the open doorway. The apartment was empty. Hollow. It was just one step away, but to step inside her home was somehow to accept the emptiness. Admit the loss. He stayed where he was, looking in.
He could see straight through the apartment to the window looking out over the Praga Południe district of Warsaw. The view showed more of the same, gray apartment buildings that lined the streets in this part of the city. Tall, square, thick, undistinguished.
A kitchenette ran along part of the wall to the right. To the left, a small table pushed against the other wall left just enough room for a person to pass through. A low bookcase had been placed strategically at the far end of the kitchen to create a break between the eating and living spaces. At the other side of the long, narrow room, a sofa, chairs and coffee table created a cozy seating area. Łukasz knew that the sofa pulled out into a bed.
A small apartment, perhaps, but enough for one young woman living alone. Her ability to cover her costs of living was a point of pride for Łukasz. His daughter had always been independent. He had raised her that way — to work hard and to aim high.
He lifted his chin and smiled as the pride surged through him once more, then his face crumpled and his head dropped as he was swamped by the grief that now dominated everything, all the time. There was no escaping it.
He stepped into the room.
Basia had been dead for almost a week now but the scent of her in the apartment was so strong Łukasz felt as if she were standing next to him. He closed his eyes and inhaled. His hand reached out, but there was no one there. He stood, imagining, for a few minutes more.
It would almost have been better had these memories been taken from him as well. He could have stayed in that alley, in the dark and the cold, without remembering the loss or the pain.
Parts of his mind were still blocked to him, black holes where no memory floated, no ideas emerged. Had there been something else? Someone else? Someone he wanted to remember — or someone he wanted to forget?
Shaking his head in frustration, he opened his eyes.
Someone had attacked him, beaten him and left him for dead. It must have been the same people who killed Basia and it could only have been because he’d found something. Something that brought him too close to the truth to be safe. But what? Hours spent searching the one box of files left from his research had produced nothing definitive, just ideas. Wisps of ideas, really.
Four steps took him through the kitchen into the living room. A plant drooped on a shelf near the window, its leaves withered and dry, but Łukasz turned his attention to the shelf below it. Books filled that shelf and another like it farther along the wall. Books on structures of government, economic policy, analyses of voting practices and European Union policies.
He ran his eye over the spines of the books neatly shelved, then turned to the few still lying on the coffee table. A report from the World Bank, Jacek Kuron’s book about student involvement in the Solidarity movement, a pile of old newspapers.
Basia had loved Polish politics, had lived for it. When she received the offer from Minister Novosad to join his staff in the Polish legislature she had almost cried with joy. And Łukasz had rejoiced with her. She had taken him out to eat. Nowhere fancy, it was true, but it was her turn to treat him, she had explained, now she was a working woman. After all her father had done for her.
Łukasz picked up the World Bank report and flipped through it. Charts and summaries comparing governments of various Central and Eastern European states. Comparing the structures of government and levels of corruption. Łukasz was familiar with the book by Kuron, every journalist was. His firsthand account of what it had been like as a student at Warsaw University, recognizing the Poland that could be and fighting to make it a reality. This is what Basia had been reading when she was killed.
There was no sign that anyone else had been in her apartment. No books knocked off a shelf, no wrinkles in the rug that covered the floor, no furniture out of place. Not like his apartment when he’d returned from the hospital.
Yet someone had killed her. Łukasz knew that. Basia was too alive, too full of hope for the future to have killed herself. Whoever had done this had covered his tracks well, but there was a clue somewhere, he just needed to find it.
He would keep digging and he would keep pushing the police to reopen the investigation. He didn’t care if that meant he had to set up a tent in front of the police station. He would spend every day there if he had to. He wouldn’t give up.