A Devil Under the Skin

‘Oskar!’ Janusz pressed himself back into his seat as the van veered to the left. ‘Anyway, this guy had it coming – he went for her with a samurai sword.’

‘Kurwa mac!’ Oskar gave an appreciative whistle. ‘The girl’s got bigger jaja than you, kolego!’

‘Yeah, and in any sane country they’d give the girl a medal, but here she’ll probably get a big black mark on her record.’

‘It’s “health and safety gone mad”,’ said Oskar. It was one of his favourite English phrases and one he used often, even when it signally failed to fit the circumstances.

Janusz stared at the front-page headline. The girl might have threatened him with arrest in the past, it was true, but she’d also saved his life once, and he’d grown to respect her uncompromising stance, her determination to nail the bad guys. He wondered if he should call her. And say what, exactly? That shooting the fruitcake had clearly been the right thing to do? As though his opinion on the subject would mean anything to her.

The last time he’d seen her, in a Walthamstow pub, she’d been recovering from the knifing, an attack that he still felt responsible for. He remembered sensing a change in her then, a feeling that beneath her usual tough girl bravado she was as raw as a freshly skinned blister.

Three

‘Perhaps I can turn the question around. Why do you think you’re here?’ The sunlight streaming through the window bounced off the letterbox specs of the lady shrink, making it impossible for PC Natalie Kershaw to make out the expression in her eyes.

Kershaw picked at a loose thread that had escaped the inside seam of her jacket sleeve. ‘Because I shot a paranoid schizophrenic who was about to disembowel me on Leytonstone High Street.’

The shrink didn’t respond, but as Kershaw was already learning, Pamela – or was it Paula? – had the disconcerting ability to fill even her silences with meaning. She risked a sideways glance at the wall clock: barely twenty minutes into her first session of psych assessment and already she felt like chewing her own arm off. In the eleven months since she’d shot Kyle Furnell, every tiny detail of her actions on that day had already been picked apart, first by internal investigators, then by counsel at the inquest – and now she had to go through it all over again. She swallowed a sigh, hearing again her old Sarge and confidant, DS ‘Streaky’ Bacon, telling her to play the game and get it over with so she could get back to operational duties.

‘I totally understand it’s a big deal when somebody gets shot,’ said Kershaw, trying for a more conciliatory tone. ‘But like I told everyone from the start, when I pulled the trigger, I honestly believed there was an immediate threat to my life.’

Pamela/Paula bestowed a half-smile of what could be encouragement but still said nothing.

Christ on a bike.

‘The inquest did exonerate me,’ Kershaw went on, feeling sweat prickle on her scalp – it was stifling in here. ‘The coroner said it was wholly understandable, in the circumstances, for me to shoot him.’ She remembered his summing-up, and how he’d described Furnell as a ‘profoundly disturbed young man’. He’d gone on to remind the jury what Furnell had ingested that day, in the hours leading up to his fateful realisation that the staff at Leytonstone Maccy D’s were secret members of a cult bent on eliminating the citizens of E11 – presumably by poisoning their Chicken McNuggets. The list had included Temazepam, Ketamine, a four-pack of Special Brew and a bottle of Night Nurse, the last item prompting a few titters from the public benches. On hearing the coroner’s words, a great wave of relief had engulfed Kershaw as she sensed which way the verdict would go.

When she’d watched the TV coverage of the inquest at home that night, well on her way through the evening’s first bottle of red wine, it had stirred more complex emotions. The family’s solicitor – all sharp suit and professional outrage – did most of the talking on the court steps after the verdict, but it was the figure standing alongside him whom Kershaw’s eyes kept being drawn back to. Furnell’s mum.

Tanya Furnell was a shapeless lump of a woman in a shabby fake fur jacket with badly dyed red hair. She looked nearer fifty than her actual age of thirty-eight – and yet she held herself ramrod-straight on those steps, her expression defiant yet dignified. When the reporter asked for her response to the verdict, she said that all she’d ever wanted was some word of regret from the Met about the way her son had died. Dream on, Kershaw had thought, not unsympathetically. That just wasn’t gonna happen – not after the Met had won the case.

Almost a year on, Kershaw could barely remember the shooting itself beyond a series of blurred freeze-frame images, but for some reason, the look on Tanya Furnell’s face in the news report – that had burned itself indelibly into her memory.

She pulled at the errant thread on her sleeve again, before snapping it clean off.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable taking your jacket off?’ asked the shrink.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Kershaw bared her teeth in a facsimile of a grin. She’d never been on the wrong end of an interrogation before and she wasn’t enjoying the experience.

The therapist checked something in the file she had open on her knee. ‘The coroner did also say, didn’t he, that a more experienced officer would probably have reached for their Taser, rather than the, um …’

‘Glock 17.’

Oops. Now she was looking at Kershaw like she just said something really interesting.

‘And the other weapon you were carrying?’

‘A Heckler and Koch MP5.’

‘How would you describe that to a lay person?’

Kershaw shrugged, looked at the floor. ‘It’s a 9mm semi-automatic carbine, set to single fire.’

‘Carrying lethal weapons like that, I’d imagine it must give you a great feeling of power?’

‘Not really. It’s not like we go out planning to use them.’

The shrink’s face was arranged in a caring expression but behind the glasses, her gaze was unblinking. ‘It would be understandable though, to imagine shooting someone who was about to do you great harm.’

‘Well I never have,’ she lied.

‘Let’s go back a bit, to when you first applied to become an Authorised Firearms Officer.’ Pamela/Paula looked down at the file on her lap. ‘I’m sure it must have crossed your mind that being armed might have saved you from the very serious assault you’d suffered, just a few months earlier?’

Kershaw froze, her throat tightening. The cry of a seagull. The sight of the Thames far below, through a plate glass window. A bloody handprint on white paint. Mentally batting away the other images, she gripped the armrests of her chair, fighting the sudden swoop of vertigo.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ she said, abandoning all efforts to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘It had nothing to do with my decision to go into SCO19!’

Paula – yes, Paula, that was her name – fell silent again, but her gaze flickered down, just for a millisecond. Kershaw realised that her right hand had gone to her side, and was cradling the spot where she’d been stabbed. Feeling the warmth of her skin through her shirt, she pictured the line of stitches: they looked like the backbone of a swordfish, fading to silver now but still there to greet her every time she caught an unwitting glimpse of herself naked in the mirror. The place where her spleen had once nestled, thinking itself safe behind the bones of her ribcage; the place where sometimes she’d swear she could still feel an … absence.

She remembered what Streaky had drummed into her, years ago when she’d started in CID, his golden rule when interrogating suspects. Take control.

She cleared her throat. ‘If I could ask a question?’

Paula nodded.

‘I appreciate that it’s important to assess an AFO after there’s been … a fatal shooting,’ she said, choosing her words uber-carefully, ‘but I’d be really grateful if you could give me an idea of how long you expect … all this to take? It’s just, well, it cost a shedload of taxpayers’ money to train me up as a firearms officer and I think it’s my responsibility to get back to work as quickly as possible.’

Paula gave her a long, intent look. ‘I think your sense of responsibility is to be admired.’ Kershaw scanned her expression, but couldn’t find any sarcasm there. ‘You’re an intelligent woman, Natalie, so I’ll tell you frankly what I think. In my view, it was … unusual, to say the least, that you were accepted for firearms training so soon after suffering such a serious assault. It makes the process we have to go through now a more complex and potentially lengthy one. Because it’s my responsibility to ensure that officers are not returned to firearms duty unless I am one hundred per cent sure it is safe and prudent to do so.’

Smiling at Kershaw, she closed the file on her knee. ‘Time’s up for today. Please book another appointment at reception on your way out.’

As the door clicked shut behind her, Kershaw was struck by an infuriating realisation. For the entirety of their forty-five-minute encounter, it had been the shrink, and not her, who’d been in complete control.

Four

On Monday morning, as Janusz climbed the long up-escalator at Wanstead tube – a station so far east on the Central line it could make your ears bleed – he reflected that the new contract with the insurance company couldn’t have come at a better time.

His work as a private investigator, which largely involved chasing bad debts and missing persons for clients from East London’s Polish community, tended to follow the feast-or-famine model. Most years, it produced more than enough for a single man to live on, but with Kasia moving in he needed something more solidne – even if she was a successful businesswoman in her own right. Or perhaps because she was, he allowed, with a wry grin. An old-fashioned outlook perhaps, but that was how he’d been brought up – and at his age he wasn’t likely to suddenly come over all metrosexual.

Then there was Bobek, his son back in Poland, to think about. The boy might have been fathered in a single misjudged night of reunion with ex-wife Marta, but from the moment Janusz had laid eyes on the shockingly vulnerable scrap of humanity in the maternity ward crib, he’d loved him beyond reason. He made it a point of principle never to miss a single month’s maintenance cheque, even when times had been tough. And now Bobek was fifteen, would be sixteen in a couple of months – Mother of God! Incredible to think he was almost a man – there would be new expenses, university fees for one, to think about.

Five minutes’ walk from the tube, Janusz found the place he was looking for – the St Francis of Assisi Residential Home. Even with half the facade obscured by a lattice of builders’ scaffolding, the place was an imposing chunk of nineteenth-century Gothic, its pillared entrance so reminiscent of a church that Janusz had to check an impulse to make the sign of the cross as he stepped over the threshold. Having braced himself for the familiar undernote of old piss and Dettol he’d encountered in old people’s homes, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the only smell was the lavender whiff of furniture polish. Sure, the faded floral carpet and striped wallpaper hadn’t been in fashion since the eighties, but the double height lobby bisected by an old oak staircase made the place feel pleasingly airy and bright.

‘I have an appointment to see Mr Raczynski,’ Janusz told the apricot-cheeked girl on reception. ‘On behalf of Haven Insurance.’ She was no more than twenty, and clearly Polish, judging by her accent – not to mention a level of grooming rarely seen among English girls of that age. She started dialling a number but before she’d even finished, Janusz heard a gravelly voice close by his ear.

‘I just saw Wojtek going into the conservatory, Beata – why don’t I take our guest through?’

Janusz turned to see the beaky profile of an elderly man, tall in spite of his advanced age, if somewhat stooped.

Beata nodded, smiling. ‘Dziekuje bardzo, Panie Kasparek.’

‘English, please, Beata, English.’ As the old guy wagged a skinny finger at her, the tableau formed by the pair of them put Janusz in mind of some medieval engraving – Death warning Youth of the brevity of Life, perhaps.

He turned his gaze on Janusz – eyes dark as a sparrow’s and alive with intelligence – and in a sibilant whisper that could have been heard fifty metres away told him, ‘Integration. That’s the way to get on. No point coming to London and behaving like you’re still in fucking Poznan.’

Janusz grinned. ‘I agree.’ He put out his hand. ‘Janusz Kiszka. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

‘I’m forgetting my manners. Stefan Kasparek. Enchanté.’ The old man’s hand felt bony but his grip was a match for Janusz’s meaty fist, nonetheless. ‘You’ll need a guide – I’m afraid the place is an absolute rabbit warren.’ His English sounded unmistakably upper class, with only the trace of a Polish accent, and he was well turned out in a tweed jacket and tie, although Janusz couldn’t help noticing the worn elbows of the jacket, the shirt collar fraying at the edges.

‘Onward,’ said Kasparek. He grasped the younger man’s arm with the unembarrassed pragmatism of the old and they set out, Janusz adjusting his step to his companion’s determined – if somewhat lurching – gait. ‘Lost the kneecap, to a Boche sniper, in ’44,’ said Stefan, succinctly. ‘The son of a whore.’

Along the way, they encountered several residents making their dogged way to and fro, Stefan handing out greetings and advice like some cheerful early pontiff dispensing indulgences. ‘Bohuslaw!’ he cried, spying a shuffling bald man with a pronounced pot belly. ‘I’m going to the bookmakers later, if you’d like me to place a wager for you?’ Bohuslaw raised a shaky thumbs-up. ‘Used to shag anything that moved,’ Stefan confided, in his penetrating sotto voce, once he’d passed. ‘But now he’s down to one testicle, he sticks to the four-legged fillies.’

‘Is everyone here Polish?’ Janusz asked.

‘No, no,’ Stefan shook his head, ‘there’s a good few Irish and English here, too. Some Catholic do-gooder started the place back in the eighties, so there tend to be a lot of left-footers, but I’m reliably informed that a belief in the Virgin Birth isn’t compulsory.’

At a set of French doors, he paused to kiss the hand of an etiolated woman, who must have been a great beauty in her youth. Now, her well-cut frock seemed to mock her flat chest and wasted flanks. She smiled vaguely, in another world, until Stefan stooped to whisper something in her ear, making her laugh and returning the ghost of a blush to her once-pretty cheeks.

‘You should see pictures of her as a girl,’ sighed Stefan. ‘She’d have given Maureen O’Hara a run for her money.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Janusz. ‘You seem to know everyone. Have you been here long?’

‘Oh for ever,’ said Stefan with a dismissive wave. ‘As billets go, it’s not bad – but there’s no time off for good behaviour and when you do leave, it’s a one-way voyage to the boneyard.’ He pronounced ‘voyage’ in the French way.

In the conservatory, Stefan steered him to a rattan sofa overlooking the garden where a chubby man in his eighties sat eating biscuits, a mug of tea in his hand. ‘Ah, here he is,’ said Stefan. ‘Wojtek! You have a visitor, you lucky dog.’

After Stefan’s acerbic intelligence, Janusz found the interview uphill work. Wojtek Raczynski was a jolly soul, a little like a clean-shaven Father Christmas, but all too easily sidetracked onto the subject of his great-grandchildren, who he believed were learning okropne habits – swearing and cheeking their elders – from their comprehensive school in Leyton.

According to Tomek Morski, Janusz’s contact at Haven Insurance, the firm paid Wojtek a £25,000 annual pension, funded by an annuity he’d bought some twelve years earlier, and since they’d be shelling out till he dropped off the twig, they wanted to make sure he hadn’t done so already. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for family members to ‘forget’ to tell the insurance company to halt payments after their loved one had departed this life.

Janusz had been hired to run spot checks on a random selection of their Polish-speaking annuitants: with getting on for a million Poles in the UK, there was a growing demand for investigators who spoke the language and had a nose for anything fishy. As much as it grieved him to admit it, the scale of the recent influx of his compatriots had inevitably brought with it a number of scam artists and criminals. According to Tomek, if Janusz did a good job on this first round of work for them, he’d be up for a slice of the insurance fraud pie – fake whiplash claims, staged car accidents, and the like – cases whose complexity could make them highly lucrative.

Wojtek’s case promised to be child’s play by comparison. He was demonstrably alive and – judging by the number of biscuits he demolished during their half-hour interview – in robust health for a man of eighty-eight. The only hitch was that Janusz needed to see photographic ID to confirm beyond doubt that Wojtek was who he said he was – but he didn’t have anything to hand. Janusz arranged to return to check the old boy’s passport, which his daughter looked after for him, in a few days’ time.

Half an hour later, Janusz emerged between the Corinthian columns that framed the front porch into a surprisingly spring-like March day, with a powerfully positive impression of life at St Francis. He’d always thought he’d rather die than go into an old people’s home, but he had to admit that seeing out your final days at a place like this one mightn’t be the ordeal he’d feared, after all.

He’d just reached the street and was about to light a cigar when he heard a voice behind him calling his name. It was Stefan, one skinny arm raised as though hailing a taxi, the other leaning on a walking stick.

‘What a splendid day!’ he said, on reaching Janusz. ‘Walk with me to the High Street,’ he added, brandishing his stick like a battle standard. Suppressing a smile at the old boy’s imperious manner, Janusz fell into step alongside him.

At the corner of the High Street, he turned to bid Stefan farewell, but the old guy said, ‘Let me buy you a cup of tea. It isn’t often I get the opportunity to converse with someone still in possession of a full set of marbles.’

Janusz barely paused before bowing his head in acceptance: he wasn’t in a rush, and anyway, he enjoyed the company of old people. It wasn’t far to what was clearly Stefan’s regular café, judging by the effusive welcome he received from the Turkish guys behind the counter.

‘When I first came to London, in ’45, all the greasy spoons were run by Eyeties,’ said Stefan, in a whisper loud enough to turn heads as they made for a window table. ‘Now, it’s Turks. Next year, who knows!’ His chuckle sounded like a rusted iron door being wrenched open.

Sitting opposite each other, Janusz got his first proper look at his companion. Age had sculpted what remained of the flesh on Stefan’s face into dramatic folds and fissures, but he still had a luxuriant head of white hair, swept back from a pronounced widow’s peak in a style that had last enjoyed popularity in the fifties or early sixties. And yet there was something about his darting gaze and ever-changing expression that gave him an air of irrepressible youth, making it hard for Janusz to guess his age. Late seventies, perhaps?

The bird-like eyes caught Janusz’s gaze. ‘You’re wondering how old I am’ – an age-spotted hand waved away his polite murmur of protest – ‘Don’t worry. I’m used to it. Paradoxically, I find it’s always the young who are the most obsessed with age.’

He poured a stream of sugar into his black tea – Janusz noting, approvingly, that his commitment to integration stopped short of polluting the brew with milk – and stirred it briskly. ‘I was born in Lwow, which I believe the Ukrainians now call Lviv – in 1923.’

Kurwa! Janusz did the sums: the old boy must be ninety. He appeared in astonishingly good shape for his age – as well as being sharp as a tack. ‘You don’t look it,’ he said; the automatic response to learning the age of anyone over thirty, although this time, sincerely meant.

Stefan straightened his back. ‘My father lived to 101, God Rest his Soul. Never missed a day in his vegetable garden, and dropped dead hoeing the asparagus bed.’

‘So … were you in Lwow when the Russians invaded?’

‘Indeed I was. The tanks arrived the day after my seventeenth birthday. As a boy scout, I naturally took part in the defence of the city – until the generals kapitulowali.’ It was the first time he’d slipped into Polish, as if such a shameful event could only properly be named in their mother tongue.

The waiter delivered Stefan’s bacon sandwich but instead of starting to eat, he lifted off the top layer of bread and set it aside.

‘I ended up in Kolyma, in the camps, mining gold for Stalin.’ As Stefan talked, he retrieved a plastic bag from his breast pocket, and produced a pair of nail scissors, before starting to snip the fatty rind from a rasher, apparently oblivious to Janusz’s mystified look. ‘Mining!’ he chuckled. ‘That’s a fancy word for hacking lumps out of permafrost with a fucking pickaxe.’

After dropping the spiral of bacon rind into his plastic bag, he was just starting surgery on a second rasher when he noticed Janusz’s expression. ‘I have to watch my figure, you know,’ he said, patting his trim midriff. ‘The birdies are the beneficiaries. Waste not, want not – Kolyma taught me that.’

Once the bacon had been denuded of all its fat, Stefan cleaned his scissors on a paper napkin, continuing in a matter of fact tone, ‘It was minus 50 the first winter. Men died like snowflakes on a hot stove. I was young. I survived.’ Bracing his shoulders, he took a surprisingly large bite of his sandwich.

‘How long were you there?’

Stefan took his time finishing his mouthful, before dabbing his lips with a napkin. ‘They let me out in ’42 to join Anders’ Army – the Allies were desperate for young men by that time. So I exchanged Siberia for la bella Italia.’

‘You fought in Italy?’ Janusz was impressed: General Anders’ Second Polish Corps had played a decisive role in the Allied push through Italy, earning renown for their bravery at the Battle of Monte Cassino. ‘Yes. That was where I mislaid my kneecap, just outside Ancona.’

Janusz struggled to think of something to say that wouldn’t be a platitude: he always felt overawed to hear of the bravery and sacrifice made by the wartime generation of his fellow Poles. Stefan would have grown up under the Second Republic, when Poland had been one of the great European powers – until its invasion by the Nazis from one side, and the Red Army from the other. Then, to have survived Kolyma – the most brutal place in the entire gulag, graveyard to hundreds of thousands of Poles and countless other ‘enemies of socialism’ – to fight as an Allied soldier … and for what? To see America and Britain deliver his country into the arms of Stalin and decades of Soviet rule.

Stefan was frowning down at his stick-like wrists as if they belonged to someone else. ‘I was built like a bull, then, though you wouldn’t believe it now.’ Suddenly he flapped his free hand. ‘Anyway, that’s all ancient history, old men’s war stories. What about you? I take it you’re some kind of insurance investigator?’

Janusz paused. Put like that, he wasn’t at all sure he liked the sound of his new role. Private investigator was one thing, ‘insurance investigator’ summoned up something more corporate and somehow less … honorowy – especially when measured alongside Stefan’s life. He realised he felt something close to envy for the old man’s generation. He would never experience an existential fight, never be part of a band of brothers. He remembered something someone had once said on the subject that had always stuck in his mind: ‘War exists so that men can experience unconditional love.’