A Devil Under the Skin

The guy frowned up at the screen. ‘Wenger’s lot. So long as they keep their heads this time.’ He examined the big Pole with frank but friendly curiosity. ‘What about you?’

‘I think you’re right,’ Janusz said. ‘2-0 to Arsenal.’

‘You Polish, I’m guessing?’

Janusz tipped his head in assent.

The man lodged one buttock on the nearest bar stool, taking the weight off. He had a pouchy, lugubrious face, which a badly trimmed moustache did nothing to cheer up. ‘My first job was crewing on the container ships – we went all over the Baltic. Whereabouts in Poland you from?’

‘Gdansk.’

‘You’re having a laugh?!’ he chuckled. ‘If I sailed into Gdynia once I must have done it a hundred times!’

The guy introduced himself as Bill Boyce and soon the two of them were swapping stories about some of the Baltic seaboard’s least salubrious nightspots, memories that evidently recalled happier times for the older man.

‘What line of work are you in now?’ asked Janusz.

‘Chippie,’ he said. ‘Not that I get a lot of work these days. Last job I had was a month ago, fitting a front door for an old girl I know.’ He grinned, baring a set of disturbingly white dentures. ‘I blame your lot, pricing us honest English tradesmen out of business.’

Janusz made a rueful face: there was some truth in Bill’s point. Twenty, thirty years ago, when he’d worked on building sites, Poles were a rarity and he was welcomed as an exotic breed – but the arrival of so many of his countrymen over the last decade had inevitably depressed wage levels and stirred resentment. But he wasn’t here to discuss the downside of globalisation and the free movement of labour.

He nodded over at Bill’s table. ‘Your friends, they don’t seem very interested in the footie?’

Bill stared at the floor, his face crumpling even more. ‘We had a bit of bad news this morning.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. We just heard that one of our muckers upped and died.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Janusz left a respectful pause. ‘Elderly gent, was he?’

‘No. Forty-three.’

Janusz made the kind of shocked noises that were appropriate to the death of someone so young, albeit a stranger.

Bill shook his head. ‘Yeah. He was bit of a scallywag, was Jared, but a good mate. I’ve known him twenty-odd years – we met on a building site down by Royal Docks.’

‘What happened?’

Bill hesitated, but the compulsion to talk won out. ‘It was a freak accident, happened yesterday they think. He was found in his flat, electrocuted.’

‘Christ!’

‘Yeah. They say he drilled into a live cable, putting up a shelf or something.’ Perplexity creased his face – either at Jared’s stupidity, or perhaps at the cosmic lottery of sudden, unexpected death.

‘Jared …’ mused Janusz, before taking a slug of beer. ‘That’s an unusual name. What’s his surname?’

‘Bateman.’

‘Yeah, I think my mate Steve might have mentioned him once or twice.’ A total fabrication, of course, but worth a punt.

‘Steve Fisher, you mean? Yeah, him and Jared were as thick as thieves.’ Bill’s look suggested that in their case, the expression might be more than just a turn of phrase.

Before Janusz had a chance to probe further, the landlady reappeared looking harassed. ‘Sorry, Bill love, but I just couldn’t get that barrel on. You’ll have to have something else, I’m afraid.’

‘You must be out of practice, Kath,’ said Bill with a grin. ‘Make it four pints of Foster’s then.’

He turned back to Janusz. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of Steve, as it happens, ever since we heard about Jared. But he isn’t answering his phone. You wouldn’t be seeing him soon, I suppose?’

‘Yeah, I might be, later on,’ Janusz lied. ‘Shall I get him to call you?’

As they exchanged phone numbers, one of Bill’s friends came over to help him carry the drinks. Although he was shorter than Janusz, his muscled neck and broad shoulders gave him the look of a bull mastiff – and one that might bite at the smallest provocation. The guy, who Janusz gathered was called Simeon, smiled readily enough but his eyes sized Janusz up as though he were a second-hand car with no service history. He had a high-pitched voice, which sounded incongruous coming out of that stocky frame.

Deciding not to expose himself to further scrutiny, Janusz made a show of checking his watch and drank up. As he headed for the door, the sticky carpet sucked at the soles of his feet as though reluctant to let him go.

That night, Janusz stayed up cooking till the early hours. He made some barszcz, followed by a batch of pork meatballs stuffed with mushrooms, and a loaf of half-rye bread, not because he felt like eating, but because cooking always cleared his head, helping him to puzzle out conundrums. And because focusing on the facts of the case was the only way of keeping at bay the images that lurked at the periphery of his vision, images of what might be happening to Kasia, right that minute.

By 2 a.m., he had enough food for a week but no bolt-of-lightning revelations about where Steve might have taken Kasia. It would have to be somewhere remote, where she couldn’t escape or raise the alarm – but Steve was a Londoner, bred and buttered, hardly the type to have access to some rural bolthole. As for the death-by-DIY of Steve’s electrician mate, Jared: Janusz had turned it over in his mind, but could discern no plausible connection to the couple’s disappearance. No. The law of Occam’s Razor told him the simplest solution was the most likely: Steve had lured Kasia away somewhere, and after she refused to go along with his idea of moving to Spain, starting afresh, was holding her there against her will.

The question was, where? And was she in imminent danger? Janusz sent up a fervent prayer: that Kasia would say – and do – whatever she needed to in order to keep Steve sweet, until he could track her down.

Slumping onto the sofa with a bottle of beer he barely noticed the cat, Copetka, jumping onto his lap. What seemed like moments later he woke with a sudden shudder, blinking open his eyes to find himself lying at full stretch, sunlight streaming through the open curtains. The cat, which now lay on his chest, yawned companionably in his face and started to purr.

Janusz realised that while he slept, he’d reached a decision.

‘Copetka?’ he growled into the cat’s face. ‘You’ve never heard me say it before. But I think I’m going to have to call the police.’

Eight

‘I’m putting you on sick leave from today.’

‘But, Sarge!’

‘No arguments. I don’t want to see your face anywhere in the unit for the next two weeks.’

Kershaw stared at the floor. She’d known she was in for a bollocking, of course, but even being on non-operational duties was preferable to this … exile. What the fuck was she going to do with herself for two weeks? Drink, probably, replied a sarcastic voice in her head.

‘Natalie. Is that understood?’

She gave a mulish nod. She’d never heard the Sarge sound so angry before: Toby Greenacre was legendary for his cool throughout the unit.

His expression softened. ‘Listen, Natalie. Just count your blessings that the guy didn’t want to make something of it, or you’d be up before Divisional Standards.’

Kershaw had to concede that it probably hadn’t been a good idea to stay on drinking in the pub on her own last night. It had been sweet of Matt to take her out for a post-work jar, when he’d seen how down she was after a ten-hour shift spent cleaning guns, checking equipment, updating the armoury’s records. But later, after Matt had gone home to his fiancee in Chingford, and she’d put away a couple more glasses of red wine, she’d started to get properly pissed off at the thought of how many more months of this purgatory she’d have to endure. She’d done nothing wrong and yet it felt as if she was sitting in the waiting room of her own life.

So, when some drunken lowlife started mouthing off at the girl behind the bar while Kershaw stood behind him waiting to order, it had been a monumentally bad accident of timing.

‘The guy was bang out of order,’ she told the Sarge, sticking her chin out. ‘He called her a “useless fucking slag” – because she forgot to put ice in his JD and coke. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen!’

She had tapped the guy on the shoulder, and politely told him to apologise. He threw a look backwards, clocked a five-foot-two-inch blonde girl, and laughed. Looking back, she thought it might have turned out differently if he’d sworn at her. It was the way he’d dismissed her in a glance – that was what had really pulled her trigger. Bang. Before she even knew what she was doing, she had his arm yanked up tight between his shoulder blades – all that upper body strength training paying off – and was reading him his rights.

‘I don’t think I need to remind you about the rules governing the behaviour of an off-duty officer, Natalie,’ the Sarge was saying. ‘Especially since you were visibly the worse for drink, according to the officer who got dragged in to sort things out.’

Kershaw knew she should just keep schtum but there was no stopping herself. ‘Are we supposed just to ignore it then, Sarge, when someone behaves like that?’

He fixed her with his calm brown eyes. ‘Do you think your intervention made the situation better or worse for the barmaid?’

She pictured the girl’s weary face throughout the hour-long drama that had played out in the street outside, as the local cops questioned all three of them. A drama that had ended with ‘no complaint’ by the girl and without so much as a ticking-off for the loudmouth. ‘I’m not going to caution him,’ she recalled the older uniform confiding to her, not unkindly. ‘If we do, he’ll only make trouble for you.’

‘And how do you think it would have played in the Standard,’ the Sarge went on, ‘if it had come out that the officer involved in the Kyle Furnell shooting got herself into a pub scrap?’

Christ. She had to admit that scenario had never even occurred to her.

The Sarge regarded her in silence for a long moment, the look on his face suggesting he was waiting for an apology. She just stared at the floor. Finally, he stood up behind his desk, indicating the interview was over, and walked her to the door.

‘Speaking of the Furnell business – now the inquest is over, I hope you’re cracking on with your psych assessment?’

‘I’ve had the first session, Sarge.’ No point mentioning she hadn’t got round to booking another one yet.

‘I suggest you use the time off to go every day. The quicker you get the sign-off, Natalie, the quicker we can have you back on ops, where you belong. Okay?’

As Kershaw descended the stairs, she decided that the worst thing about the bollocking had been the expression in the Sarge’s eyes at the end. A few years ago, Sergeant Toby Greenacre had been in charge of a nasty hostage situation: a standoff that had ended with him slotting a man who was holding a shotgun to the head of his pregnant wife. The look he’d given her said that he’d been there – that he knew what it was like to be under the microscope for so long, waiting for normal life to restart.

She’d turned her mobile off for the bollocking. Switching it back on, she saw she’d missed a call. There was a text, too. It said simply: ‘Call me. Janusz Kiszka.’

Nine

Kershaw was the first to arrive in the Rochester, the Walthamstow gastropub where she’d arranged to meet Kiszka. Standing at the bar, it struck her that although it was only eighteen months since they’d last met here, a couple of weeks after the stabbing, it seemed like a memory from a distant era. Back then, she’d yet to trade her detective’s badge for an MP5, and was still debating whether she and Ben, her then-boyfriend, might still have a future together.

She pictured again the look in Ben’s Bournville-dark eyes, when she’d finally told him it was over. Had she done the right thing? It was a question to which her mind returned periodically, only to deliver the never-changing answer. Probably. Staying with Ben just hadn’t been an option, not after the way he’d let her down. She took a slug of her wine. Now what have I got to look forward to? She was thirty years old, boyfriend-less, and with her new career in firearms on hold before it had even properly got started.

Then she saw the rangy, unmistakable outline of Janusz Kiszka looming through the etched glass of the pub doors, and felt her spirits rise.

After insisting on buying her another glass of wine – which she made no more than a token effort to decline – he sat down opposite her, his big frame comically too large for the pub chair.

‘How are you?’ From the look he sent her under his brows the enquiry was more than just the routine social formula.

‘Oh, I’m fine. Fully recovered.’

‘So you got into the firearms unit, just as you wanted to?’

‘Yep.’

‘Congratulations.’ Despite looking a bit on the thin side, she was still an attractive little thing, Janusz decided – the kind of girl you’d definitely look twice at in the street. ‘I read about the crazy guy who got himself shot,’ he said frowning into his beer. ‘That was you, right?’

She nodded, her expression betraying no pride, but no regret either, before knocking back half a glass of wine. Janusz recalled that she’d been drinking for England the last time they met and, judging by the red veins clustered at the corners of her eyes and the bruised look beneath them, she still was. It stirred in him memories of dark times, long ago in Poland, when he’d sought the comforting blankness that only strong drink could bring.

‘You did the right thing,’ he growled. ‘Did it get you into trouble?’

‘Not in theory,’ she said. ‘But I’m still NAC … sorry, not authorised to carry. And I’ve got to confess my deepest, darkest feelings to a shrink before they’ll give me my gun back.’

The thought of her being subjected to the perambulations and circumlocutions of a trick cyclist made Janusz grin. ‘I bet that’s fun.’ She returned the smile, reminding him how much prettier she looked without the perpetual frown stitched between her brows.

‘Anyway. You wanted to see me about something?’ she asked. ‘Or was it just a social call?’

Janusz hesitated. Growing up under a totalitarian regime had instilled in him a profound distrust of authority of any kind – especially the police. In the Poland where he’d grown up you didn’t turn to the milicja to sort out your problems: you looked to family, to the community, or to your own devices. Even now, decades later, the idea of asking a cop for help still made him feel queasy.

‘My girlfriend … Kasia. She was meant to be moving in with me this week – but she’s gone missing.’ He stared at the table. ‘I think her husband may have abducted her.’

‘Because she told him she was leaving?’ asked Kershaw. He opened those big shovel-like hands in assent. ‘Have you considered that she might just have had second thoughts? People do – especially at the last minute.’

He met her gaze. ‘Not without a word to me. And she hasn’t turned up at work either.’

‘Maybe she’s pulled a sickie.’

Janusz bridled. ‘She runs her own business,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I checked their flat – there’s no sign of either of them.’

‘Right.’ Kershaw hesitated, trying to find a diplomatic way of telling him that ninety-nine per cent of missing persons cases turned out to be people disappearing of their own free will. Then there was the other one per cent. ‘Tell me a bit more about her – and this husband of hers.’

Janusz related how back home in Poland, Kasia had worked two jobs to help fund her studies at Lodz Film School, arriving in nineties London with a hundred pounds and a single goal: to get into the film industry. Instead, while working in a Polish bakery in Ealing, she’d met Steve – someone in whom she thought she saw an enterprising spirit to match her own. Three months later they were married.

‘And her directing ambitions?’

‘Soon went out of the window.’ He shrugged. ‘She discovered that Steve’s talk was just that. Talk. His business schemes were fantasy. He did the odd cash-in-hand job on building sites but she ended up being the main breadwinner, working in bars, mostly.’ Out of respect for Kasia, he didn’t mention her brief stint as a pole dancer in a Soho club – telling himself it could hardly have any relevance to her disappearance.

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure, as my nan used to say,’ said Kershaw. ‘So why did she stick with him all this time?’

‘The Church,’ he said, with a wry grimace.

Kershaw rotated her glass on the table, thinking. ‘So she’s a devout Catholic, who puts up with him for what, twenty years, because she doesn’t believe in divorce.’ She frowned up at him. ‘Why the sudden change of heart?’

As the girl’s unblinking gaze skewered Janusz he was reminded of the time she’d interrogated him about a murder, the first time they’d met. He shifted about in the narrow chair. Why had Kasia changed her mind about leaving Steve? The milestone of her recent fortieth birthday suddenly struck him as an inadequate motive for such a momentous volte-face.

To change the subject, he told her about the one-way tickets to Alicante Steve had booked, and his conviction that the couple were still in the UK.

Kershaw chewed at a nail. ‘So you think he strung her a line about a birthday dinner or something to get her somewhere quiet, then sprung the idea of this trip on her?’

‘Yeah. He’s a fantasist. He probably thought he could change her mind with some story about starting a new life in Spain.’

She nodded, that made sense. ‘What kind of guy is he? If your theory’s right, do you think she could be in danger?’

He paused, wondering how much to tell her. ‘He has hit her, a couple of times. I had to have a word with him once.’

She raised an eyebrow, imagining the one-sided nature of that discussion.

Janusz narrowed his eyes, recalling the impression of Steve he’d got from that single face-to-face encounter. Skinny and unprepossessing to look at, yet full of himself, Steve had alternated between braggadocio and aggrieved self-pity. ‘I think he’s a lazy lowlife with a big mouth, but I never thought he’d have it in him … to really hurt her. Not till now, anyway.’

‘Once a wife beater, always a wife beater, in my experience,’ she said, regretting her glib words when she saw his jaw clench in a spasm of distress.

She felt torn. The likeliest explanation was probably the most obvious one – that Kasia had got cold feet about going to live with Kiszka. His caveman looks, the edge of danger about him would no doubt be attractive to some girls, but as life partner material? On the other hand, she couldn’t help feeling intrigued by the story – especially since she knew what a big deal it must have been for Kiszka to ask for help from a cop.

‘Why are you asking me to get involved? Why not just report her missing?’

He lifted one shoulder. ‘Because the police would just assume I was a jilted boyfriend. Even if they did believe me, they’re hardly going to invest serious resources in finding yet another missing person, are they?’

‘Fair point.’

‘So … will you help?’ He drained the rest of his pint, avoiding her eyes.

Kershaw suddenly realised that her pulse was beating a little faster than when she’d first walked in the pub. It seemed that the mystery of Kiszka’s missing girlfriend had got under her skin. She’d need to tread carefully, of course: the last thing she needed was to get herself in any more trouble at work.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ she told him.

Janusz bared his teeth in a grin. ‘Another one of those?’ he asked, pointing at her empty wine glass.

After he’d gone to the bar, having waved away her attempt to buy a round, Kershaw realised that there was another reason she’d agreed to help, the return of a feeling she’d almost forgotten. There was something about being around Janusz Kiszka that somehow made her feel more alive.

Ten

At Walthamstow Central tube station, heading home to Highbury, Janusz found himself in the midst of a deepening crush on the southbound Victoria line platform, the muffled drone of the announcer overhead saying something about signal problems. Luckily, Walthamstow was the line’s northernmost terminus, so when a train finally did arrive it emptied completely, allowing him to bag a seat. The journey was slow, punctuated by long stops in tunnels, and the fresh influx of rush-hour humanity that squeezed itself onto the packed train at Tottenham Hale triggered a very English symphony of muted tuts.

Right under Janusz’s nose, a guy in his twenties wearing a too-tight suit all but body-blocked an older woman carrying shopping bags to capture a just-vacated seat opposite. Seeking eye contact to establish whether the lady might take offence – an advisable step in London, he had long ago discovered – Janusz wordlessly offered her his seat, and when she smiled her thanks, stood to make way for her. Taking hold of the overhead passenger rail with both hands, he proceeded to direct an unblinking stare down on the discourteous kutas in the suit, who grew increasingly fidgety during the long wait in the next tunnel, before unaccountably deciding to get off at the next stop. Claustrophobic, probably, thought Janusz with an inward grin.

Minutes later, as the train lurched to a halt yet again, Janusz idly scanned the faces of the passengers either side of him, each immured within their own private citadel. A head-scarfed Asian girl, eyes elongated with kohl, playing a game on her phone, a man intently reading an article on London house prices in the Standard, and a white girl with dreadlocks, tinny music spilling out of her headphones. He let his eyes drift back to the man reading the paper. He remembered noticing the same guy amid the crush on the packed platform at Walthamstow. And he’d been reading the same page of the paper then.

No one was that slow a reader. Janusz squinted at the tube map just above his eye level, relying on his peripheral vision to build a picture of the guy. Reddened, pockmarked skin, like someone who’d spent too many years in the sun – or in extreme cold. Forty-five, or thereabouts, around Janusz’s age. Close-cropped hair, balding at the temples. Expensive-looking bomber jacket.

Maybe he was just being paranoid, but Janusz had long ago learned a valuable lesson: in his line of work, a little paranoia could seriously boost your life expectancy. So when the train reached Highbury, he made sure he was first up the short flight of stairs from the platform and into the exit tunnel. Rounding a sharp bend which meant he couldn’t be seen from behind, he broke into a jog, and didn’t slow down when he reached the escalator, climbing it two steps at a time, the metal treads flashing beneath his boots. Highbury was one of the network’s deepest stations and by the time he neared the top, his breathing was sawing like an old tree in a high wind. He slapped his Oyster card on the reader – praying it would work first time – and the gates parted to release him.

Outside, twilight was descending, and Janusz ducked into the pub next to the station where he sometimes had a homecoming beer, positioning himself by a window with a view of the station exit. Twenty or thirty seconds later, he spotted bomber jacket cutting a path through the seething tide of homeward-bound passengers, scoping his surroundings with an alert yet casual gaze. For a heart-stopping moment his eyes lingered on the pub, before he disappeared from view towards the main road.

The guy’s body language appeared unhurried. But his watchful air, the purposefulness of that measured stride – all said professional tail. Suspecting that his new-found friend might double back at any moment to check out the pub, Janusz headed out back towards the lavatories. Down a corridor and past the door marked Gents he found what he was looking for: an emergency exit he occasionally used to nip out for a cigar. It gave onto a quiet backstreet that bore west towards Liverpool Road, the opposite direction to his apartment.