Death Can’t Take a Joke (10 page)

She’d started the day full of optimism, convinced that even if the exercise failed to deliver the identity of her roof jumper, she’d at least be able to solve one mystery: how he got onto the roof without setting off the alarm in the first place. After drawing a blank with the last of the guards who’d been on duty that morning, she’d moved on to the night shift, pursuing her thesis that the guy might have gained access to the outside long before he jumped.

Two hours later, as the door closed on the last of them, she had to admit defeat. If any of the nine guys she interviewed – all of them solid, middle-aged types, and all but two of them ex-cops or ex-military – knew anything about the alarm being disabled at any stage then they were premier league liars. All she’d got out of three hours’ worth of interviews was a jumpy caffeine high and a shitstorm of paperwork to type up when she got back to the nick.

As she drove north, she cursed her obsession with following things through. If she’d left it to the local nick to handle the case she could have spent the day working the Jim Fulford murder, doing real detective work. Reaching the outskirts of Walthamstow, she spotted a sign for the William Morris Gallery and remembered she still hadn’t double-checked Janusz Kiszka’s alibi. Minutes later, she was driving into the half-moon shaped driveway, the gravel growling under her tyres.

The gallery was located in Morris’s old family home: a substantial Victorian mansion that put the scene of Kershaw’s upbringing – a Canning Town council flat – to shame. At reception, she showed her warrant card to a lady whom she instantly categorised as a member of Walthamstow’s recently arrived middle class, on account of her posh vowels and Boden-ish appliquéd top. Half an hour later, she was feeling a bit shamefaced at her narky assessment: Caroline couldn’t have been more helpful, introducing her to every member of staff who’d been on duty at the time of the murder. Along the way she’d proved herself a mine of information about the various paintings, fabric designs and stained-glass panels that made up the great man’s legacy. Kershaw made all the right noises, but she couldn’t really see why he was such a big deal. It all looked a bit … well, Laura Ashley, to her.

More to the point, after half an hour of questioning, the mugshot of Janusz Kiszka had drawn not a glimmer of recognition from any of the staff who’d been working there at the time of his claimed visit.

As she and Caroline descended the ornate staircase – a typical example of Arts and Crafts architecture, apparently – Kershaw wondered if she’d got it wrong. Whether, in fact, Kiszka
was
capable of premeditated murder, after all. Just because he’d turned out to be, more or less, one of the good guys the last time their paths had crossed, that didn’t mean he was innocent this time around. Good and evil, black and white, everything nice and neat – of course she was inclined to see things that way: she was a cop. But she remembered Streaky telling her once how that kind of thinking could be a detective’s worst enemy.

At the foot of the stairs, Kershaw thanked Caroline for her help. On the point of leaving, she decided she just had time to nip back to the gallery’s café for a sneaky cuppa: it would give her a chance to tidy her notes up.

She sat in the glass conservatory overlooking the Morris family’s huge landscaped garden, the bare branches of the trees stark against the pale winter sky, watching an old man in a waxed jacket raking dead leaves from the lawn. As she watched, he reached the footpath bordering the grass right beneath her, where he appeared to notice something on the ground. Bending down with some difficulty, he produced a plastic bag and started picking things up, the clockwork jerkiness of his movements betraying extreme irritation.

Kershaw bolted the rest of her tea, and dashing out through the garden door, flew down the steps.

‘Excuse me, sir.’ Up close, the gardener was an ancient guy with a brown, seamed face that suggested a lifetime working outdoors. ‘Can I ask if you were working here on Monday?’

‘Who’s asking?’ He stuck his chin out.

‘I’m DC Kershaw, Walthamstow Murder Squad.’ She wondered if she’d ever get over the thrill of saying that. ‘I’m trying to find out if anyone saw this man here on that day.’

The guy put both hands on his thighs to lever himself up and squinted at Kiszka’s mugshot. ‘I couldn’t tell you, I’m afraid my reading glasses are at home,’ he said.

Bollocks.

‘Because I saw you picking up cigarette butts, and this guy practically chain smokes cigars, so I thought …’ She tailed off, realising how daft it sounded.

‘You’d be surprised how many people there are who can’t go half an hour without sucking on a nicotine tit,’ said the old man. He was surprisingly well spoken, but she detected a bit of country burr running underneath. ‘They always stand here, by the staircase where they think they can’t be seen.’ He shot her a cunning look. ‘I catch quite a few of them though.’

‘Good for you,’ she said. ‘So, this man I’m talking about is a big guy, dark hair, and he wears a longish coat, kind of military looking.’

The old gardener stared up at the sky for several seconds.

‘Best pilots I ever saw!’ he said suddenly.

What the fuck? Was the guy having a mini-stroke or something?

He sketched an arabesque in the air with one wrinkled hand. ‘They’d already had practice fighting the Hun, you see.’

‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ said Kershaw. ‘But I haven’t got the foggiest what you’re talking about.’

‘Polish fighter pilots, in the Battle of Britain. Don’t they teach young people about the war these days?’

Her brain whirred and clicked. ‘You did see him! But … how did you know he was Polish?’

‘Because when I told him he couldn’t drop his cigar butt here, he said
Koorr-vah Mahsch.’
He rolled the Polish round his mouth like a fine whiskey. ‘Mother of a whore,’ he added helpfully.

‘Yeah, that sounds like him,’ said Kershaw suppressing a grin.

‘So I swore back at him in Polish.’ He chuckled. ‘To be fair, he was
very
apologetic, said he hadn’t meant to curse, it had just slipped out.’

‘What time do you finish?’ asked Kershaw.

The old man looked at his watch. ‘In about a quarter of an hour,’ he said. ‘Today’s my half day – why do you ask?’

‘Because I’d like to give you a lift home so you can look at this photo with your reading glasses on.’

‘No need for a lift,’ he said, pointing across the gardens to a row of terraced houses. ‘I only live over there.’

Half an hour later, Edward Cotter had positively identified Janusz Kiszka and agreed to sign a statement confirming that their little encounter had taken place at 5.40 p.m., just before the end of his shift. Since that was minutes after James Fulford had been stabbed, a good mile from the museum, Kershaw reckoned that Kiszka had just got himself a concrete alibi.

Over a cup of tea, Edward told her that as a boy he had lived in a village in Sussex next to Chailey airfield, where a Polish fighter squadron had been based during the war. Gripped by the thrilling spectacle of their dogfights with Messerschmitts overhead, Edward and his chums would hang around outside the chain-link fence surrounding the airfield, grabbing every opportunity to chat to their heroes. His most treasured possession, framed and hung above his mantelpiece, was a twenty zloty note signed by half a dozen pilots from the squadron.

Seeing the Polish currency depressed Kershaw, reminding her of the unfinished business down at Canary Wharf. But right now, getting back to the nick and updating the Sarge on the latest development on Kiszka’s alibi took priority.

Streaky was just finishing up a late lunch when she arrived in the office – a sausage roll by the look of the crumbs clinging to his chin and sprinkled over his beer gut. Kershaw delivered the news in as neutral a tone as possible: it was always a bit of a double-edged sword, eliminating a suspect.

‘Of course, even if he wasn’t actually at the scene, it’s still possible he was behind the murder,’ said Kershaw.

Streaky brushed the debris from his shirtfront into a cupped hand. ‘Use your noddle, Detective,’ he said. ‘If Kiszka arranged a hit on his chum, he would have made damn sure he was miles away when it was going off, preferably having a nice cup of tea with that priest of his – what was his name?
Pietruski
.’ After throwing the crumbs into his mouth, he dusted off his palms.

Kershaw marvelled at his powers of recall: it was years since Kiszka had been under investigation, but then the Sarge was famous for his ability to summon up the tiniest details from long-dead cases.

‘Anyway,’ he went on. ‘I just put down the phone to his brief. He was calling to tell me that Kiszka’s signed a document making over ownership of the gym and its assets to Marika Fulford, which rather puts the mockers on his supposed motive for the murder.’

‘I’d love to have a crack at interviewing the wife, Sarge,’ said Kershaw. ‘Now the dust has settled, she might have remembered something that could give us a lead?’

Streaky folded his arms across his belly and gazed enquiringly at Kershaw. ‘I’m confused, Detective. Haven’t you got an anonymous suicide to identify at one of London’s most famous high-rise landmarks?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about that Sarge. I spent the whole day interviewing the security team down there and I’m drawing a total blank …’

Raising a finger to silence her, Streaky screwed up his eyes. ‘Listen. Can you hear that?’

‘Sarge?’

‘I thought I heard the distant strains of a violin. Spare me the sob story, Kershaw. The quicker you deliver a name for your roof diving chum, the sooner you can start doing the job I employed you for.’

‘Right, Sarge.’

As Kershaw walked away, Streaky started whistling a tune. It took a couple of minutes before she realised what it was: the old Weather Girls song ‘It’s Raining Men’.

When she got back to her desk, Sophie Edgerton passed over a post-it note. ‘The pathologist who did the PM on your Canary Wharf suicide called. He said to call him back on his mobile.’

Kershaw tapped out Nathan King’s number with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. ‘Hi, Dr King? It’s DC Natalie Kershaw. Investigating officer on the Canary Wharf Tower fatality.’

As King gave Kershaw the lowdown, Sophie watched her colleague’s expression travel through a series of emotions: from neutral professionalism, through bewilderment, culminating in outright incredulity. Finally, she spoke.

‘You’re fucking kidding!’

Janusz stood in the living room of his mansion flat looking out over Highbury Fields – the grass still silvered here and there by last night’s frost – and savoured the smell of the
bigos
cooking in the kitchen. He didn’t usually eat much at lunchtime, but he had some good-looking
zywiecka
he was keen to try
and the sausage, pork rib, and sauerkraut stew would be good insulation against the unseasonably cold weather. Perhaps he also felt the need of comfort food to fortify him for the afternoon’s sombre task: visiting a stonemason to help Marika pick out a headstone for Jim.

It looked as though England was in for a series of proper winters, not as bitter as the ones he remembered from Poland, but enough to knock over the puny transport systems on a regular basis. Back home, childhood winters had meant blissful weeks of igloo building and skating on frozen rivers – he recalled his mate Osip losing the top of his ear to frostbite one year. His thoughts drifted to Bobek: it would be good to have him over to stay again soon. In a couple of years he’d be more interested in girls and motorbikes than in his boring old man.
Christmas
, he decided. He’d ask Marta if the boy could spend a few days of his school holiday in London.

His entry phone buzzed. It was Oskar.

‘I’ve been trying to reach you on your phone
and
email all morning, Janek,’ he complained before he’d even got through the door.

‘That fancy phone you made me buy ran out of juice again. And I haven’t turned the laptop on yet.’

Oskar tutted. ‘You need to stay connected,
kolego,
especially in your line of work.’ He sniffed the air. ‘
Bigos
?’

‘
Tak.
’

‘Good. I haven’t had lunch yet.’

‘What was so urgent, anyway?’

‘The Romanian!’ said Oskar, beaming. ‘He took the bait we laid for him!’ He did a little jig of triumph, short legs pumping.

‘The story you spun Marek about having a rich mate with money to invest?’

‘Yeah! I told him you’re a businessman who just inherited a pile of cash, and also dropped your fancy apartment in Highbury Fields into the conversation.’ Going over to the bay window, Oskar looked out, shaking his head. ‘You know, Janek, if you sold this place and moved further east, you could probably pocket half a million.’

It was a well-worn argument: Janusz had been lucky enough to buy the apartment for a bargain price from his landlord back in the eighties, and according to Oskar, any sane person would have cashed it in for a fat profit long ago.

‘Put another record on, Oskar. What about the Romanian?’

‘So Marek phoned me this morning and said the guy would like to invite you to a party he’s throwing tonight for his investors.’

‘You played it cool, like I told you?’ asked Janusz.

‘Of course!’ said Oskar with a casual shrug. ‘I said that you didn’t really like parties – unless you counted the gay orgies.’ He punched Janusz’s shoulder. ‘Only kidding! I told him you might be interested.’

‘Where is this party, then?’

‘If I give Marek the thumbs-up, someone will text you the details. So it might help if you worked out how to charge your phone, sisterfucker.’ Oskar threw himself down on the sofa and beamed up at Janusz, transparently pleased with himself. ‘I told you we’d make a good team. When will the
bigos
be ready?’

The unscheduled invite left Janusz with two problems. First, there was his promise to go and look at headstones with Marika. Second, he didn’t have the first idea what a ‘wealthy investor’ might wear to a drinks party.