Page 62 of Girl, Entangled

Now it was time to find out this man’s name.

The barrier at the outer gate went up faster than it had any right to, because the guard manning it had been on the same post two nights ago and he recognized the car and the woman in it, and a federal badge held flat to the windscreen at thirty miles an hour was enough to make a man choose the easy option. Ella was through before he’d finished waving her on. She took the visitor lot at an angle that left the car straddling two bays and didn’t go back to fix it.

The reception desk was a woman she hadn’t met before, on the phone, mid-call. She looked up at Ella and said something into the receiver and put it down.

‘Roy Kowalczyk. I need to see him,’ Ella said.

‘Ma’am? Do you have a meeting?’

‘No. Agent Dark. FBI.’ Ella slapped her badge down. ‘Is Roy here?’

‘I’m afraid he’s in a meeting.’

‘Where?’

The receptionist pointed to a door with a frosted glass panel and a light on behind it. Ella rushed toward it.

‘Ma’am, you can’t-’

Ella banged on the door non-stop until it burst open. Roy Kowalczyk was standing there with a phone pressed to his ear. He moved it away.

‘Miss Dark? I’m in a meeting.’

‘Cancel it.’

‘It’s the union rep.’

‘Call them back, Roy. I need to know something, and I need to know it now.’

Roy gingerly brought the phone back to his ear and said, ‘Davies, can I call you back? Got an emergency here.’

Ella waited.

‘Great, thanks.’ Roy ended the call. ‘Okay, what do you want?’

‘Classes. Workshops. You ran them here, yes?’

‘Yes. Of course. We have some kind of workshop every day. Why?’

‘Sewing. I need to know about your sewing class. Who was the teacher in the sewing class?’

That was what it came down to. Ella could confidently rule out the possibility of her killer being a prisoner or guard here. Ella had scoured the details of all of them and none of them fit the physical characteristics.

But there was one type of staff member that Ella wouldn’t be able to find, because they weren’t public.

‘Our sewing teacher? We don’t have one. It wasn’t exactly a popular workshop, so we ditched it.’

‘I don’t mean now. I mean years ago, when Thomas Greaves and Billy Hayes were still here. Who ran your sewing class?’

Roy puffed his cheeks and let the air out. ‘I’m not going to be able to tell you off the top of my head, Agent Dark. I didn’t run the workshops. I oversaw the wing, not the classroom. That’s a different department. And most of the time I worked the evening or night shifts – still do, as you can see – and workshops were done in the daytime.’

‘Then who would know?’

‘Miss Dark, you’ve got to understand. The workshops were never our priority. The wardens before me, and me when I took over, we were happy to have someone come in and run them. We didn’t pay much attention to who.’

‘Someone signed off on it. Someone had to vet them.’

‘Vetting happened higher up than me. By the time anyone got to my desk, they’d already been cleared. I’d see a name on a roster and that was it. I couldn’t have told you who was teaching what on any given Tuesday.’