Death Can’t Take a Joke

As Janusz watched, a middle-aged woman approached, holding the hand of a little girl. She leaned down to whisper to the child, who, taking an awkward step forward, bent to add a bunch of yellow flowers to the pile.

He paused in the porch to take a couple of deep breaths, determined to master himself. Of course, Marika knew that the man who paramedics had rushed to hospital last night from this address could only be her husband, but as she hadn’t been able to face identifying his body herself, she’d still be inhabiting that hazy hinterland of denial – a zone Janusz had barely left himself.

She opened the front door and searched his face, before sleepwalking into his arms. Holding her to his chest so tightly that her hot tears soaked through to his skin in an instant, he sent a grim-faced nod of greeting over her shoulder to Basia, her sister, who looked on from the kitchen doorway.

Finally, Marika drew her head back and looked up at him. ‘Thank you, Janek, for going to him,’ she said, her voice thick with tears. ‘I will go to see him later, with Basia.’

The three of them sat around the kitchen table nursing un-drunk cups of tea, under the mournful gaze of Laika, who had not raced to greet Janusz today but instead lay silent in her basket, her long black-and-white nose resting on crossed paws.

‘Basia and I, we had gone out to our Pilates class,’ said Marika, ‘and when we came back, about nine o’clock, the police were waiting outside.’ Her voice was husky and almost toneless. ‘They’d … taken him away to the hospital by then, but they say he was already dead.’ Her eyes filled with tears again.

As Basia put an arm around her shoulder, murmuring words of comfort, Janusz realised that Marika was speaking in Polish, which he couldn’t remember her doing since she’d married Jim. Now grief had stripped away the last ten years, throwing her back on her mother tongue.

After a moment, she pulled herself upright and used both hands to sweep the tears from her cheeks – a determined gesture.

‘What did the cops say?’ he asked. ‘Did they question the neighbours straightaway? Right after the … after Jim was found?’

She nodded. ‘Jason who lives two doors down heard a shout when he was putting out the rubbish bags.’ She paused, took a steadying breath. ‘It was starting to get dark, but he saw two men running away, through the garden gate.’

‘Which way were they headed? Hoe Street? Or Lea Bridge Road?’ Janusz was relieved to find himself slipping into private investigator mode.

‘Hoe Street, I think he said.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘They both wore hoodies and balaclavas,’ she said, dropping into English for these unfamiliar words. ‘So all he could say was that one was tall – almost two metres – and slim, the other a little shorter.’

‘Black? White?’

She gave a hopeless shrug. ‘It was dark, and with the faces covered, he couldn’t tell.’

Janusz hesitated. He needed to know exactly how Jim had died but he couldn’t think of a sensitive way to frame the question. From Laika’s basket came a tentative whine of distress.

Marika’s swollen eyes met his and a look of understanding passed between them. ‘The police said …’ her voice had fallen to a croak. ‘They told me he had suffered several deep stab wounds … in his stomach. One severed an artery …’ She tried to go on but then gave up. ‘I’m sorry, Janek,’ she said. ‘Is it okay if I let Basia tell you the rest? I need to lie down.’ She stood unsteadily, her chair grating harshly on the stone floor tiles.

Janusz jumped to his feet and went to her, his shovel-like hands encircling her slender forearms. At his touch, Marika’s eyes filled with fresh tears.

‘You know that he was an only child,’ she said, grief roughening her voice. ‘But he always said he didn’t miss not having a brother – because he had you.’

She winced and Janusz realised that, without meaning to, he had tightened his grip on her arms.

‘You rest, Marika,’ he said, bending to lock his gaze on hers. ‘But there’s something I want you to know. Whatever it takes, I will find the skurwysyny who did this.’

They embraced then, three times on alternate cheeks in the Polish way. He stood watching her walk slowly down the hall, choosing her footing carefully, as though stepping through the debris of her shattered life. Laika rose to follow her, bushy tail down, claws tick-ticking on the wooden floor.

To avoid disturbing Marika – her bedroom lay right above the kitchen – Basia took Janusz into the front room and closed the door.

‘There’s no way he could have been saved,’ she said, eyebrows steepled in sorrow. ‘Marika doesn’t know this, but the police told me those dirty chuje – excuse my language – they practically gutted him. He lost sixty per cent of his blood lying there on the garden path.’

Janusz blinked a few times, trying to dispel an image of his big strong mate lying helpless on the ground, his life ebbing away across the black and white tiles.

‘They wouldn’t let Marika near the house,’ Basia went on. ‘We went to my flat and I only brought her back here once …’ her knuckles flew to her lips ‘… once everything was cleaned up.’ Seeing her stricken face, Janusz remembered something. All those years ago, it had been Basia whom Jim had dated first, if only for a few weeks, before he’d become smitten with her older sister. Janusz had ensured, naturalnie, that Jim got plenty of ribbing down the building site for getting lucky with both sisters, but as far as he could recall, there had been no hard feelings between any of the trio when Jim and Marika became an item.

‘On the phone, you said something about junkies?’

Basia tipped her head. ‘It was something one of the policemen said, that maybe it was a robbery, to get money for narkotyki.’

Janusz frowned. The house was over a mile from the notorious council estates west of Hoe Street, bordering neighbouring Tottenham, that were home to Walthamstow’s drug gangs. Would those scumbags really travel all the way up here to rob a random householder on the doorstep of his modest terraced house? Then he remembered Jim’s text delaying their meeting.

‘Do you know why he was running late for our pint at the Rochester?’

She nodded. ‘Marika asked him to fix a leaking tap in the downstairs cloakroom, so he came back from work early to do it before going out again.’

‘He didn’t say anything about someone coming to the house to see him, before he came to meet me? Maybe that new deputy manager of his?’

The gym was doing so well that Jim had expanded six months earlier, taking on a young local guy to help manage it, although the last time they’d met, Jim had hinted that the new staff member wasn’t proving a great success. I’m not really cut out for bossing people about, he’d confided to Janusz, his usually sunny face downcast.

‘No,’ said Basia. ‘When we left here to go to Pilates, we were all joking around, Jim saying he couldn’t wait to get rid of us so he could sit down and read the paper.’ She lifted a shoulder in the peculiarly expressive way Polish women had. ‘It was just a normal day.’

Janusz gazed out of the bay window that framed the tiny front garden and flower-strewn wall like a tableau. Through the half-closed slats of the blinds a young woman came into view, slowing to a halt in front of the wall. She stooped to lay something, and he saw her lips moving, as though in silent prayer. There was something about her that caught his attention. It wasn’t just that, even half-obscured, she was strikingly beautiful; it was the powerful impression that the sadness on her face and in the slope of her shoulders seemed more profound – more personal – than might be expected from a neighbour or casual acquaintance of the dead man.

‘Basia,’ he growled in an undertone. ‘Do you recognise that girl?’

Basia frowned out through the blinds, shook her head. Outside, the girl bent her head in a respectful gesture, crossed herself twice, and turned to leave.

Driven by some instinct he couldn’t explain, Janusz leapt up from the sofa and, telling Basia that he’d phone to check on Marika later, let himself out of the front door. The girl had nestled a new bouquet among the other offerings, but her expensive-looking hand-tied bunch of cream calla lilies and vivid blue hyacinths stood out from the surrounding cellophane-sheafed blooms. After checking that there was no accompanying note or card, he scanned up and down the street. Empty. Crossing to the other side of the road, he was rewarded by the sight of the girl’s slender figure a hundred metres away, walking towards the centre of Walthamstow.

Gradually, he closed the gap to around fifty metres. By a stroke of luck, a young guy carrying an architect’s portfolio case had emerged from a garden gate ahead of him so that if the girl happened to glance behind she’d be unlikely to spot Janusz. From the glimpses he got he could see that, even allowing for the vertiginous heels, she was tall for a woman, her graceful stride reminiscent of a catwalk model’s.

The girl passed the churchyard that marked the seventeenth-century heart of Walthamstow Village, where the breeze threw a handful of yellow leaves in her wake like confetti, but she didn’t take the tiny passageway that led down to the tube as Janusz had half expected, heading instead for Hoe Street. Once she was enveloped by its pavement throng he was able to get closer, taking in details such as the discreetly expensive look of the bag slung over the girl’s shoulder and the way her dark blonde hair shone like honey in the morning light.

Then a black Land Rover Discovery surged out of the stream of barely moving traffic with a throaty growl and came to a stop, two wheels up on the pavement, ahead of the girl. The driver, a youngish man with a number two crew cut, wearing a black leather jacket, jumped out and went over to her. When she shook her head and carried on, he walked alongside her, talking into her ear. A few seconds later, she tried to break away but he put a staying hand on her upper arm, a gesture at once intimate, yet controlling. She didn’t shake it off, instead slowing to a halt. From the angle of his head it was clear the guy was cajoling her.

Janusz could make out a densely inked tattoo on the back of the guy’s hand, which disappeared beneath the cuffs of his jacket, and emerged above the collar. A snake, he realised – its open jaws spread across his knuckles, the tip of its tail coiling up behind his ear. The girl’s head was bent now, submissive. After a moment or two, she gave an almost imperceptible shrug, and allowed herself to be ushered to the car.

She climbed into the back seat where Janusz glimpsed the outline of another passenger – a man – before the Land Rover slid back into the traffic. He cursed softly: with no black cabs cruising for fares this far east, he had no way of following them. But twenty seconds later, just beyond a Polish sklep where Janusz sometimes bought rye bread flour, the Land Rover threw a sudden left turn that made its tyres shriek.

Janusz doubled his stride towards the turnoff. When he reached the corner it was just as he remembered: the road was a dead-end, and the big black car had pulled up not twenty metres away, its engine murmuring. He stopped, and pulling out his mobile, pretended to be taking a call. Through the rear window of the car, seated next to the girl, he could see a wide-shouldered, bullet-headed man. Judging by his angrily working profile and her bowed head, she was getting a tirade of abuse. Even from this distance the man gave off the unmistakable aura of power and menace. When he appeared to fall silent for a moment, the girl turned and said something. A swift blur of movement and the girl’s head ricocheted off the side window. Janusz clenched his fists: the fucker had hit her! Only a conscious act of self-control stopped him sprinting to the car and dragging the skurwiel out to administer a lesson in the proper treatment of women. A half-second later, the kerbside door flew open and he pushed the girl out onto the pavement. The door slammed, the car performed a screeching U-turn, mounting the opposite pavement in the process, and sped off back to Hoe Street.

Janusz could restrain himself no longer: he jogged over to where the girl half-sat, half-sprawled on the kerb, her long legs folded beneath her like a fawn. She looked up at him, a dazed look in her greenish eyes, before accepting his arm and getting to her feet. Her movements were calm and dignified, but he noticed how badly her hands were shaking as she attempted to button her coat.

He retrieved one of her high-heeled shoes from the gutter and, once he was sure she was steady on her feet, stepped back. The last thing she needed right now was a man crowding her personal space.

‘Can I do anything?’ he asked. ‘I got the number plate – if you wanted to get the police involved, I mean?’

She touched the side of her head – the bastard had clearly hit her where the bruise wouldn’t show – and met his eyes with a look that mixed resignation with wary gratitude.

‘Thank you,’ she said finally, her dry half-smile telling him that the police weren’t really an option. ‘It is kind of you. But really, is not a problem.’ Her voice was attractively husky, with an Eastern European lilt – that much he was sure of – but not entirely Polish. If he had to lay money on it he’d say she hailed from further east, one of the countries bordering Russia, perhaps.

As she dusted the pavement grit from her palms his eyes lingered on her fine, long-boned fingers. Then he remembered why he had followed her in the first place: to find out her connection to Jim and why she would leave a bunch of expensive flowers in his memory. He was tempted for a moment to broach it with her there and then, but some instinct told him that a blunt enquiry would scare her off.

‘Allow me to give you my card, all the same,’ he said, proffering it with a little old-fashioned bow. It gave nothing away beyond his name and number and offered his only hope of future contact with the girl. ‘In case you change your mind – or should ever find yourself in need of assistance.’

She took the card, the wariness in her eyes giving way to a cautious warmth.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘A girl never knows when she might need a little assistance.’ And pocketing it, she turned, as graceful as a ballet dancer, and started to walk away.

‘May I know your name?’ Janusz asked to her departing back.

For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then, without breaking step, she threw a single word over her shoulder.

‘Varenka!’

Five

Natalie Kershaw woke with a jolt, her heart pounding, convinced she was falling from the top of the Canary Wharf tower. Then the dream was gone, as evanescent as the vapour made by breath in frosty air. Turning over, she threaded an arm across Ben’s warm stomach and dozed, unconsciously synchronising her breathing with his. Ten minutes later, they both surfaced, woken by the muffled roar of a descending plane.

‘Shouldn’t you be getting up, Nat?’ murmured Ben. ‘First day of school and all that?’

Kershaw dug him in the ribs. ‘Don’t start pulling rank on me, just cos we’re in the same nick now.’

‘Am I sensing insubordination, Detective Constable?’ said Ben, putting a hand on her hip and pulling her towards him. ‘I hope this doesn’t mean a return of your well-known issues with the chain of command.’

After a quick mental calculation of how long it would take her to get from Ben’s place to Walthamstow, she added ten minutes to allow for traffic, then reached up to return his lazy kiss.

She and Ben had been together for almost two years now. They’d met while working at Canning Town CID but shortly afterwards their then-sergeant DS ‘Streaky’ Bacon had moved to Walthamstow, and encouraged Ben to apply for a sergeant post there in Divisional CID. Now that Kershaw was joining Streaky’s team on Walthamstow Murder Squad, she and Ben would be working in the same nick again for the first time in ages, although not – luckily – in the same office.

The relationship had had its ups and downs, for sure, but despite her instinctive caution, Kershaw was pretty sure that Ben was a keeper. As a fellow detective, he knew the score, which meant that unlike her previous boyfriend, an estate agent, he never lost the plot if she had to stand him up for dinner or rolled in a bit pissed after drinking with the team. More to the point, he seemed to understand that for her, the Job wasn’t, well, just a job. Okay, so she had, privately, felt somewhat irked when Ben had reached sergeant rank before her, but then he hadn’t been hauled up in front of Professional Standards for ‘flagrant disregard of the rulebook’ like she had.

Ancient history, she told herself. Today’s a fresh start.

She arrived at the nick a comfortable twelve minutes before the start of her shift. It had been three months since she’d heard she’d got the job, but when she told the receptionist that she was there to start work on Murder Squad, she felt her stomach perform a loop-the-loop.

Climbing the stairs, it hit her that she’d be thirty next year, and only now was her life panning out the way she’d imagined when she left uni. Better late than never, girl, she heard her dad saying. Better late than never. He’d been dead for three years, but so long as she could hear his voice in her head from time to time, it felt like he was still alongside her, somehow. Her mum was a much hazier memory but then Kershaw had been barely nine when she’d died, leaving Dad to bring her up single-handed.

She’d just reached the door marked Murder Squad when her mobile went off: Ben.

‘I was about to tell you, before you went and distracted me this morning, that I got a call from the agents,’ he said. ‘We can move into the new flat end of next week.’

Christ, she thought. That was quick. Over the last few months, Ben had waged a quiet yet dogged campaign for them to move in together, and she’d finally caved in. A couple of weekends ago they’d found the perfect place, a cosy flat in Leytonstone with its own pocket-sized garden.

‘Nat?’

‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ she replied. ‘Should give me plenty of time to box stuff up.’ She hoped her voice didn’t betray the sudden tightening she felt in her chest. Wasn’t this what she wanted? Kershaw told herself. To settle down, share her life with Ben?

‘You sure you’re cool with this?’ he asked. ‘Moving in together, I mean. If it’s too soon for you …’

The note of uncertainty in his voice prompted a rush of guilt. She tried to nail what it was, exactly, that was giving her the heebie jeebies. The prospect of giving up her independence after living on her own for the last two years? Partly, yes, but that wasn’t the whole story. Was it because Ben was sometimes a bit, well, too nice? The thought had barely entered her head before she dismissed it, angry with herself.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ she reassured him. ‘I was just … surprised that we were getting in so quickly.’

After hanging up, she gave herself a stern chat. Too nice?! If you don’t want to end up lying dead and undiscovered in some grimy flat being eaten by your own cats, Natalie Kershaw, you’d better waken your ideas up.

She was pushing open the office door when there came a familiar voice in the corridor behind her.

‘Ah! DC Kershaw!’ It was her old boss Detective Sergeant Bacon. ‘I see you’ve acquired a new hairstyle.’

‘Yes …’ Suddenly self-conscious, her hand flew to her blonde hair, newly styled in an asymmetric cut, one side three inches shorter than the other.

Hitching up the trousers of his ancient suit, he squinted down at her hair.

‘If I was you, I’d go back and ask for a refund,’ he confided. ‘Whoever cut it must’ve been three sheets to the wind.’

‘Yeah, I’ll do that, Sarge,’ she grinned. He’d gained even more weight, and lost a bit more gingery hair from the top of his head, but he was still the same old Streaky.

‘Anyway. Your arrival couldn’t be more timely – we’ve got an old chum of yours in interview room 2.’ Opening a door labelled Remote Monitoring Room, he winked at her. ‘You can watch it all on the telly.’

After Streaky shut the door behind her, and Kershaw took in the hulking figure slouched in a chair on the video feed, she was properly gobsmacked.

What the fuck? The last time she’d laid eyes on Janusz Kiszka had been in Bart’s hospital, after he’d got himself on the wrong end of a vendetta with a Polish drug gang. Since Kershaw’s conduct in that case had earned her a disciplinary hearing, the sight of the big Pole’s craggy mug, today of all days, was about as welcome as a cockroach in the cornflakes.

Hearing Streaky finish reading him the official caution, she forced herself to concentrate.

‘According to the statement you gave my colleague yesterday,’ said Streaky. ‘You’re aware that your friend James Fulford was stabbed to death on his doorstep at around 5.30 p.m. on Monday?’

Fuck! Kiszka was being questioned about a murder?

‘Could you just refresh my memory as to your whereabouts at that time, Mr Kissa-ka?’

Kershaw grinned. Streaky knew perfectly well how to pronounce Kiszka’s surname: he was mangling it deliberately to wind him up.

‘The William Morris Gallery,’ said Kiszka.

‘Go to a lot of galleries, do you?’

He shrugged. ‘I showed the other cop the text Jim sent me. He said he was going to be late for our meeting, so I had time to kill.’

Streaky paused, letting the word dangle in the air.

‘The trouble is, Mr Kiss-aka, I had one of my most experienced officers take your photo down to this … furniture museum – and there wasn’t a single member of staff who remembers you.’

‘It’s the only photo I had to hand,’ he hefted one shoulder. ‘It isn’t a very good likeness.’

Streaky opened the file in front of him and leafed through some papers.

‘Of course, this isn’t the first time you’ve been in a police interview room,’ he went on, fixing his suspect with a deadpan stare. ‘You were questioned in the course of another murder investigation a couple years back: one that involved drugs, shooting, and three dead bodies if memory serves.’

‘I’m a private investigator – it’s an occupation that sometimes requires me to deal with unsavoury characters,’ said Kiszka, staring right back.

‘I’ll bet it does,’ said Streaky, his voice heavy with irony. ‘But you never really explained how someone who claims to make his living chasing bad debts and missing persons ends up in a Polish gangster’s drug factory.’

‘Does your file mention that if I hadn’t been there the body count would have been even higher?’ he growled.

Streaky dropped his gaze. Advantage Kiszka, thought Kershaw.

‘Remind me how it was that you and James Fulford became friendly?’

‘Like I told the other cop, we met on a building site back in the eighties.’

‘And in all that time since then, you say you’ve just been drinking buddies, good mates, right?’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he said, pulling a tin out from his pocket.

Kershaw wrinkled her nose, remembering the little stinky cigars he smoked.

‘No smoking in here I’m afraid, Mr Kiss-aka,’ said Streaky, pointing at a sign. ‘So, you’ve never had any involvement in this gym he runs in Walthamstow?’

Kiszka shook his head.

‘No business dealings of any kind with each other? No property deals, for instance?’

‘No, nothing like that.’

Kershaw noticed he’d started tap-tapping his index finger on the cigar tin. A sign of impatience? Or a guilty conscience?

Streaky inserted the tip of his little finger into his ear. After rooting around for a few seconds, he examined the results of his excavation with a thoughtful expression.

‘How old are you, Mr Kiss-aka? Fifty-something?’