A Devil Under the Skin

He laid out the bare bones of what he was doing for Haven – avoiding any confidential details – while making it plain that most of his work as a private investigator was carried out not for corporations but on behalf of fellow Poles.

The opening bars of a Chopin polka sounded from Stefan’s pocket. Setting down his sandwich, he pulled out an iPhone – Janusz was amused to see it was the latest model – and using a stylus device, tapped in his passcode.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, squinting at the screen, ‘I’m playing chess with someone in Kiev and the bastard has just threatened my queen.’

While Stefan decided his next move, Janusz took the opportunity to check his own phone. He wanted to find out what time Kasia would be arriving at the flat with her stuff that evening, but the two texts he’d sent since they parted on Saturday had so far gone unanswered.

Still nothing. There was, however, a missed call from Barbara, her partner in the nail bar.

‘Janek,’ she said, her voice strung as tight as piano wire. ‘Please call me the minute you get this. It’s urgent.’

Five

Kershaw swiped her card at the entrance of the SCO19 office, trying to ignore the sour churning in her gut – which wasn’t entirely down to the bottle of Shiraz followed by Metaxa chasers she’d put away the previous night while watching some forgettable DVD box-set.

Throughout the long months of the internal inquiry, then the inquest, she’d convinced herself that once she’d been exonerated – and she’d never seriously considered the alternative – she’d be out on shouts within a few weeks. Yesterday’s session with the shrink had upended a bucket of cold water over that idea. She cursed her own naivety: she should have known they’d make her jump through hoops before she got back her firearms authorisation – if only for the benefit of the media.

‘Here she is,’ said a friendly voice. It was Matt, her fellow crewmate in the ARV on the day that Kyle Furnell had got shot. He set a mug of tea down on her desk. ‘Saw you parking up, so I made you a brew.’

‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Matt,’ she said, raising a quizzical eyebrow. ‘You’re not working up to a proposal of marriage, are you?’

He pretended to consider the idea, before shaking his head. ‘Nah. No offence, Nat, but I’ve set my heart on having kids who’ll grow up bigger than hobbits.’

With the routine hostilities out of the way, Matt sat down at his desk, opposite hers. ‘You all right?’ he asked – concern softening his features. She pulled a half shrug, half nod. ‘You did get my message, after the inquest?’

‘Yeah, thanks for that, Matt. Sorry I didn’t reply. I decided to have a quiet weekend, you know, after all the hoo-hah last week.’ She’d almost taken Matt up on his suggestion of a few jars down the local to celebrate the result, but after seeing the news report with Kyle Furnell’s mum, she just hadn’t felt like it.

He nodded. ‘I can imagine. I just wanted you to know that everyone here was made up for you, after the coroner gave you the all-clear?’

‘Ah, bless them,’ she said. A year ago, after the shooting, when she’d got back to the unit, all the guys had made a point of coming over to tell her they’d have done exactly the same thing in her situation. Well, nearly all the guys. ‘What about Lee Carver?’ she asked, eyebrows raised. They both knew there would be a few in SCO19 who’d be revelling in her recent troubles, older guys who still had a visceral reaction to the idea of a woman carrying – aka armed. Lee Carver, a firearms training instructor in his fifties, was one of them.

‘Well, maybe not him.’ Matt sank his head into his shoulders and deepened his voice to an inarticulate growl. ‘The only thing I want to see a female carrying is my dinner – on a fucking tray.’

They both laughed – but Kershaw’s heart wasn’t really in it.

During her first week of firearms training, Carver had more or less blanked her – pointedly avoiding eye contact and only addressing her when it was absolutely necessary. Then, out on the range one day, just as she was lining up on a target, he’d dropped to a crouch alongside her. ‘Help me out would you, Kershaw?’ he murmured close by her ear, all friendly curiosity.

‘Yes, Skipper?’ Men like Carver loved being called Skipper.

‘You are a woman, right?’ He let his eyes flick down to her breasts, once – as if they puzzled him.

‘Yes, Skipper.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ She could still see his hot blue eyes, inches from her face, and smell the gusts of his notoriously rank breath. ‘So what exactly are you doing here – on my fucking range?’

Pretty much everyone on the course – all of them guys her age or a few years older – thought Carver was a knuckle-dragging gobshite. And if Kershaw had reported his outburst, he’d have been chin-deep in shit. But that wasn’t her way: never had been, in all the four and a half years she’d been in the Job. No. Her response was to memorise the instruction manual and use every second of the target practice on offer, as well as doubling the hours she spent in the gym. Marksmanship was only half the story: you had to be superfit, too, especially when it came to the fiendish ‘run and shoot’ exercise. Sprint for 100 metres, adopt shoot position shouted by instructor, one shot at target. Miss and you fail. Exceed 45 seconds and you fail.

After five or six weeks, Kershaw was hitting body mass on the bad-guy-shaped target, 46, sometimes 48, times out of a possible 50.

By the last day, of the sixteen who’d started, only Kershaw and seven others had gone the distance and qualified – and she’d risen to become the second best shooter of her intake. Later, when everyone was down the local celebrating, she’d picked her moment to collar Lee Carver at the bar. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, Skipper,’ she said, smiling up at him, ‘I probably would have packed it in after the first week.’ He stared down at her, confusion and three pints of Stella narrowing his eyes. ‘So … I got you a thank-you pressie,’ she said, handing him a Boots bag. Left him staring at a bottle of Listerine.

The thought of Lee Carver and his kind getting off on her current predicament did have one positive, though: it iron-plated her resolve to get her firearms authorisation back and prove them all wrong.

Taking a gulp of tea, Kershaw started to go through her email inbox, but found her thoughts drifting back to the day she’d qualified, almost a year ago. At the moment the chief instructor had handed her the little red book that was her authorisation to carry, she’d fizzed like a freshly popped bottle of champagne. But on the heels of the elation came a deep sadness. She’d convinced herself, wrongly as it turned out, that such a big life landmark would bring the return of something she had lost.

Because the worst legacy of getting stabbed hadn’t been the loss of her spleen, but the disappearance of something she valued far more: her dad’s voice. After he’d died of cancer nearly five years ago, she would still hear him popping into her head with one of his sayings or daft gags – his East End drawl, always on the brink of a chuckle, sounding as clear and real as if he was standing next to her. He usually appeared just when she most needed a word of consolation or encouragement – or even, now and again, a telling-off.

But ever since the stabbing – even at the moment she’d won her spurs as a firearms officer – silence. Just when she’d needed him most, his voice had disappeared. Like Scotch mist.

‘Nat? Are you all right?’

Looking up to find Matt’s worried eyes on her, she realised she must have said the phrase – one of her dad’s – out loud.

‘Sorry. Must be going bonkers.’

‘Good job you’re seeing a shrink, then.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘How’s that working out for you by the way?’

‘Like having a root canal and a bikini wax at the same time.’

The phone on her desk trilled. After a brief exchange she hung up, blowing out an exasperated breath.

‘What’s up?’ asked Matt.

‘Guess what I’m gonna be doing the rest of the day?’

Matt shrugged.

‘Cleaning weapons in the armoury. Five years as a cop, two as a detective, all that grief getting my ticket to carry? And now I’ve literally been demoted to oily rag.’

Six

The nail bar business that Kasia co-owned with Barbara stood in one of the farthest reaches of Stratford’s old shopping centre. Built in the early seventies, when poured concrete was the building material of choice for the trend-conscious architect, the mall squatted sulkily in the midst of Stratford’s one-way system, ugly sister to the glittering new towers of Westfield Stratford City across the way.

In fact, Janusz had always preferred the older, shabbier development over the flashy new pretender. For starters, it still housed an old-fashioned market on weekdays that – alongside the familiar ranks of anaemic Dutch tomatoes and golden delicious – now also boasted a Lithuanian stall selling passable kielbasa and decent pickles.

As he pushed open the door of Elegant Nailz, he was hit by a vaporous wave of solvent that made his eyes water. The place was more of a glorified kiosk than a proper shop, the original premises having been split down the middle to create two shop fronts, the other housing a shoe repairers run by a family from Hong Kong. There was barely enough room for three nail tables, but Kasia and Barbara did a brisk enough trade in acrylic and gel extensions to keep them busy past 7 p.m. most evenings.

Barbara was working on the nails of a pretty black girl with long straightened hair. Turning on the tabletop fan, she left her client drying her talons under the air stream and came over to the minuscule reception desk, to embrace him.

‘I kept getting your voicemail,’ he said. ‘So I came straight over. What’s up?’

‘Have you heard anything from Kasia?’ Her anxious eyes scanned his face.

‘Nie. Not for a couple of days.’ Seeing Barbara’s pretty features crumple at his response, Janusz felt a physical sense of dread – as if someone just blasted his gut full of quick-setting cement.

‘I haven’t seen her since Saturday,’ Barbara went on. ‘When she didn’t turn up this morning I wasn’t too worried – Monday mornings are always quiet so she often works from home on the website, or following up email queries. You know me, I am a katastrofa with computers. But she missed three appointments this afternoon and her phone is going straight to voicemail – Kasia’s never done that before.’

After disgorging this rush of information, Barbara glanced over her shoulder and managed a smile at the black girl, still playing an invisible piano beneath the fan dryer. The girl returned the smile – she could see there was some drama unfolding between nail-lady and the big guy in the old-school army-style coat but since they were speaking Polish there was very little point in trying to earwig on their conversation.

Seeing how jittery Barbara was, Janusz took her hands in his and spoke quietly, reassuringly. ‘Dobrze. So she came in on Saturday afternoon, right?’ – as he said it, he saw again Kasia trotting across Highbury Fields, her hair glinting in the sunshine.

‘Tak. Around 4 p.m., in time for the late appointments. She left at seven.’

‘And you’ve had no contact since then?’ He kept his voice low and his eyes locked on hers.

‘Zero.’

‘And … Steve?’

‘I can’t raise him either.’ Barbara’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘It’s as if they both dropped off the face of the earth.’

‘I am sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.’ Janusz dredged up a comforting grin. ‘Maybe she’s sick and Steve was meant to call you to let you know. You know what he’s like.’

She looked doubtful.

‘Look, I’m going to head over to the flat,’ he said. ‘Just to make sure everything’s okay.’

‘Dobrze,’ she sighed, twisting a bangle on her wrist. ‘I hope it’s the right thing to do.’ She met his gaze, before looking away, embarrassed. ‘You might run into Steve.’ As Kasia’s closest friend, Barbara knew all about their three-year affair, and – no doubt – the fact she was finally leaving Steve.

Barbara took a breath and for a moment seemed on the brink of saying more, but instead gave a tiny shake of her head. ‘Just be careful.’

He patted her hand. ‘Don’t you worry, Barbara, I can handle Steve.’

Twenty minutes later, he was approaching the Victorian terrace within sight of the Olympic stadium where Kasia and Steve lived, wondering what he’d say if he did encounter her husband. Their paths had crossed once before, after Kasia had turned up to meet Janusz sporting a black eye that make-up couldn’t quite conceal. After Janusz had coaxed out of her what had happened, he’d paid Steve a surprise visit, pretending to be Kasia’s cousin over from Poland, and given the chuj a taste of what it felt like to be on the wrong end of a fist. It seemed the encounter had achieved the intended effect – according to Kasia, he’d never raised his hand to her again.

It suddenly occurred to him that Kasia’s impending departure might have changed that. Was Kasia lying in a darkened room, ashamed to go out, wearing the souvenirs of her husband’s ungovernable rage? As that image rose before him, Janusz knocked on the front door of their maisonette louder than was really necessary. Far from being worried about bumping into Steve, he was starting to look forward to it.

When, after a second knock, it was clear that there was nobody home, Janusz pulled out the bump key he always carried with him. Twenty seconds of jiggling later and he was inside.

‘Kasia?’ he tried. ‘Steve?’ Nothing.

It was strange to be back here. The woodwork had been painted in one of those dreary heritage colours that Kasia liked – and she’d probably done the graft, too, no doubt while Steve was down the pub talking up his latest moneymaking scheme.

The place was as clean as a teardrop – even the skirting boards betrayed not a speck of dust – and the citrus smell of cleaning product sang in the air. The only sound was the discreet burble of the fridge freezer in the kitchen, where he found nothing out of place but for a single upended coffee cup in a rack on the draining board. He checked the fridge, which held a cling-filmed plateful of pierogi, a pint of fresh milk missing an inch, and a chiller drawer full of plastic wrapped vegetables, with use-by dates a couple of days hence.

So far, his professionalism had allowed Janusz to case the joint as if this were just another investigation, but he was finding it hard to fight down a yawing sensation in the pit of his stomach. Where was Kasia? And Steve? What the fuck was going on?

He realised he’d been putting off checking the bedroom till last. Grow up, he growled to himself as he opened the door.

Still, seeing the double bed, it was hard not to visualise Kasia lying there beside her husband. Janusz shut his eyes, trying to retrieve something she had said to him one night, early on in their relationship. How had she put it? Something like ‘the physical side of the marriage died a long time ago’.

The bedside tables bore no sign of any of the paraphernalia of illness – no water glass, no box of tissues. He tried the drawers of one, finding nothing more exciting than a Bible in Polish, a pair of women’s sunglasses he recognised as Kasia’s and a few female bits and bobs. Then he tried Steve’s side. Some survival book by an ex-SAS man, a few old lottery scratch cards (all losers – just like the fucker who bought them, he thought savagely) and a tatty photo of Kasia and Steve holding ice-cream cones, which looked like it had been taken ages ago, on holiday somewhere.

They were both smiling, and Kasia’s hair was blonde, as it had been when he’d first met her. Seeing the sprinkle of youthful freckles across her nose he felt a tugging sensation in his chest. Folding the picture carefully so that Steve disappeared, he pocketed it, before starting to leaf through the SAS survival guide, a look of scorn growing on his face. A look that dissolved at what he found, tucked towards the back of the book.

It was a printout of a booking confirmation made out to Steven Fisher, for two seats on flight AM47 from Luton to Alicante. The second passenger name: Kasia Fisher. Janusz checked the departure details. The flight had left at 11.30 that morning.

Oskar paused in the act of conveying a forkload of gulasz to his mouth. ‘It’s simple science, Janek. As long as you eat according to your blood group, the excess weight will just fall off naturally!’

The two friends were having a late lunch in their favourite café, the Polska Kuchnia in Maryland, and Oskar was keen to proselytise about his latest fad diet.

‘You see. This is protein.’ Oskar gestured towards his plate with a professorial air. ‘So being blood type B, I can eat as much of it as I like.’ There was a moment’s silence while he dispatched the forkful, following it down with a swallow of beer that made his throat bulge.

‘Because of your blood group.’

‘Dobrze. Type B dates from the time when man was nomadic, so I can eat most things and still lose weight.’ He spoke with the modesty of a man disinclined to boast of his good fortune.

‘Right. And this is all based on your ancestors having a varied diet – because they travelled around a lot.’

If Oskar detected any sarcasm, he ignored it. ‘That’s right. I just have to avoid hydrocarbons.’

‘Carbohydrates.’

‘Tak, like I said.’

Watching Oskar take a glug of beer, Janusz toyed with the idea of explaining nutrition to him, or indeed the fundamentals of evolution, but he knew he’d only be doing it to put off the moment when he’d have to broach the Kasia situation. Pushing aside the meal he had barely touched, he told him the news.

‘Kurwa mac, Janek!’ Oskar wiped his mouth with a balled napkin. ‘You should have said before!’

Janusz felt his chest tighten at the distress on his mate’s chubby face. He might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but since Janusz’s mother and father died, many years ago, Oskar was the closest thing to family he had.

‘I know how it looks,’ said Janusz. ‘But I don’t believe for one minute she’s gone off to Spain with Steve.’

‘But what about the flights?’

‘I don’t think she went on any flight. Her favourite sunglasses were still in the flat. Anyway, she’s not the type who’d leave a fridgeful of food to rot.’

Oskar popped another can of Tyskie, his face furrowed, and topped up their glasses, avoiding Janusz’s eyes. ‘You don’t think … Is it not possible …’

‘That she had second thoughts about moving in with me?’ Janusz growled. ‘No. I mean, of course it’s possible. But I know there’s no way she’d go without telling me – she’s not a coward. And she wouldn’t leave Barbara hanging like that, either.’

‘So what do you think happened, Janek?’

Janusz stared at the ceiling, trying to visualise for the hundredth time what might have happened between Saturday afternoon, when Kasia had left his apartment, and now.

‘I think he’s taken her somewhere.’ Voicing this unwelcome thought, he recalled how preoccupied she’d seemed recently. Had she been frightened – despite all her denials – about what Steve might be driven to do as her departure became a reality?

‘You mean taken against her will?’ asked Oskar, eyes wide.

‘Tak. I think he tricked her into going somewhere out of town with him. I don’t know – told her he’d booked something to celebrate his birthday? Maybe he hoped that from there, he could persuade her to go to Spain with him.’

‘And when she refused, he wouldn’t let her go?’

Janusz gave a grim nod. ‘If he’s hurt her in any way …’ Realising that his hands were clenched into fists he made a conscious effort to unball them.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to find her. Find both of them.’

Oskar nodded. ‘If anyone can do it, kolego, you can.’

Janusz didn’t tell Oskar the thing that had been troubling him the most since his visit to the flat that afternoon. The tickets to Alicante Steve had booked for himself and Kasia had been one-way. Whatever the worthless skurwysyn had been planning, it hadn’t involved either of them coming back.

Seven

The Pineapple, which Janusz knew to be Steve Fisher’s local, was a rain-stained one-storey building of eighties vintage marooned in the midst of a Stratford council estate. Its car park stood empty but for an old torn sofa, contents bulging like entrails, but by the time Janusz pushed open the door at around 6 p.m., the place was already pretty busy, most eyes trained on the huge TV screen which showed three pundits warming up for the Arsenal v. West Ham match. It was the kind of pub where people came to spend their benefit or pension cheque on cheap lager and enjoy a bit of free heating and Sky Sports.

Janusz tried to ignore the smell of stale beer and old vomit, the unpleasant sensation of the carpet adhering to the underside of his boots. He clocked the flag of St George hanging above the bar with a wary eye – in his experience it sometimes signalled a less than warm welcome for someone sporting a foreign accent, which might hinder his intelligence gathering.

So it was a relief when the woman behind the bar – the landlady, judging by her proprietorial demeanour – greeted him in a brisk but not unfriendly manner. After ordering a drink, Janusz pulled up a bar stool and asked, ‘Steve Fisher been in today?’ – sending her a grin that suggested he and Steve went way back.

Uncapping his bottle of beer, she shook her head. ‘Nah. Haven’t seen him since Saturday. You meant to be meeting him?’

Janusz’s gaze flickered over her face but he decided she was just making small talk. In her early sixties, she was surprisingly well groomed for such a rat-shit boozer, he thought – her hair looked professionally coloured and her preternaturally even tan said spray-job or sunbed rather than recent holiday.

‘No. I just popped in on the off-chance.’

After she’d given him his change, he turned to scope the pub over the rim of his glass. A knot of lads – plasterers judging by the state of their boots – laughed quietly over their drinks in one corner. Polish, he decided, as much from their self-effacing manner as the half-discerned rhythms of their speech. His gaze slid over a noisier cluster of youngsters wearing Arsenal shirts, and the usual scatter of old guys drinking solo, before coming to rest on a group who sat separately in a raised area by the back wall. Six or seven white men in their forties and fifties, they made a morose huddle, paying no attention to the TV screen and barely talking, despite a forest of empties on their table.

They looked like the sort of working-class men Janusz had worked alongside on building sites back in the eighties and nineties, the kind who’d left the inner city in droves long ago for suburbs like Enfield or Romford – an exodus often disparagingly described as ‘white flight’. The ones left behind were largely the unskilled rump, a forgotten minority, routinely despised – in his experience, often unfairly – for their presumed xenophobic attitudes.

Fixing his gaze on the football coverage, Janusz settled down to wait. Ten minutes later, his strategy bore fruit when one of the men came up to the bar.

‘Five pints of Stella with whisky chasers, Kath, love.’ He was a big guy in his fifties with a despondent air, wearing a suit jacket that had fitted him, once, before he’d started the really serious work on his beer gut.

‘Singles or doubles?’

He popped his cheeks, blew out a breath. ‘Go on then, make ’em doubles.’

The Stella foamed up while the landlady was pulling the first pint and, as she disappeared to put a new barrel on, Janusz seized the chance to strike up a conversation. ‘Who do you fancy for tonight then?’ he asked, nodding at the screen.