Death Can’t Take a Joke (24 page)

Varenka turned to him. ‘You came,’ she said.

Janusz sat beside her, taking in at a glance the long lithe body, the silvery-green shift that finished just above her honey-coloured knees – a ribbon of the same material woven through her hair, which she wore in a loose chignon.

Ale laska
!
He’d almost forgotten what an extraordinary-looking girl she was. If he ended up having to take her to bed in order to get to the bottom of Jim’s murder, well, he’d suffered worse hardships.

They’d barely exchanged ‘hellos’ before a shushing sound swept the packed auditorium and, after a few last-minute coughs and snuffles, the orchestra struck up the dramatic opening chords of Dvorak’s
Rusalka.

Janusz knew the opera, which told the story of a doomed love affair between a prince and the beautiful water nymph of the title, having seen it in Warsaw as a young man, but when the curtain rose he was mystified. Rusalka had been relocated from her usual setting of lakeside forest glade to a
kitsch
modern-day bedsit, and she and her sister nymphs had become under-dressed girls lounging on red plastic sofas. He squinted at the stage in confusion before the awful truth dawned on him: this was an
art-house
production.

To his relief, Janusz discovered that by closing his eyes he could still lose himself in the transporting beauty of the music. Ten minutes later, hearing the opening bars of the ‘Song to the Moon’, Rusalka’s poignant plea to be transformed into a human so that she could join her lover, he opened his eyes and glanced sideways at Varenka’s profile. She was leaning forward in her seat, lips slightly parted, gaze riveted on the spotlit figure of the soprano, looking for all the world as if her own future depended on the water nymph’s wish being granted.

When the curtain fell for the interval, he turned to her. ‘Shall we get a drink?’

Crushed into a corner of the busy bar they stood toe to toe in enforced proximity.

‘
Na zdrowie
,’ he said, raising his glass of champagne.

‘
Na zdrowie
,’ she murmured, taking a decorous sip of her drink.

‘What do you make of it?’

‘It is
przepiekna
,’ she said, eyes wide.

‘Exquisite? Really?’ he raised an eyebrow. ‘Even the pantomime cat?’ The agent of Rusalka’s metamorphosis from water nymph to woman was a giant black cat that had clawed off her fishy tail before raping her, prompting uncomfortable titters from the audience.

‘Well, perhaps that was an experiment too far,’ she allowed, a faint blush climbing into her cheeks.

‘Where was the supernatural element, the spirit world of nymphs and sprites? How can a garish …
bedsit
replace that?’

‘Bedsit?’ She looked at him under her brows. ‘You surely know it is a brothel?’

It was his turn to feel foolish. ‘
Kurwa
! So the director turned the wood nymphs into whores?!’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘I think sex worker is a nicer word, no?’

Janusz gave a little bow. ‘You are right, it’s a discourteous expression.’ He sometimes forgot where and when this poised, intelligent girl had been raised and that she had no doubt been selling her body to men all her adult life. ‘But I still don’t see the point of changing the setting.’

‘I think the director is using the sex business as a modern real-life parallel, to frame Rusalka’s dilemma.’ Varenka peered at the bubbles in her champagne. ‘She can leave the world of the wood nymph, just as she can leave the world of prostitution, but in reality, she can leave neither. When she becomes human she loses the power of speech, which means she will never truly be accepted.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s the same for a sex worker. Whatever she does to transform herself, to the world she will always be a girl who sold her body for money.’

It was a brutal yet honest summation of the life of a prostitute, thought Janusz. There probably wasn’t a culture in the world that didn’t view the stain of whoredom as indelible, and a girl from a Catholic background – even a liberated one – would have had that way of thinking seared into her soul from infancy.

‘So where does the Prince fit in? Does she love him, or does he just offer a way out of her predicament?’ asked Janusz.

‘I think a girl can truly love the person who rescues her from a terrible place, but perhaps she discovers later that she has exchanged one prison for another.’

On the face of it, they were still discussing the opera, but Janusz could tell from the sadness around Varenka’s eyes and the feeling in her voice that the scenario she described was, to her, a daily reality.

‘Escape is not impossible, you know,’ he said, bending his head to seek her gaze. ‘In this country there are ways for girls in that kind of trouble to seek refuge.’

Varenka let her eyes rest on his, and he held his breath, sensing that she was on the verge of accepting his implicit offer of help. But just then the bell signalling the end of the interval rang, shattering the moment.

Depositing her glass on a nearby ledge, she smiled up at him. ‘We will have to wait and see what happens to Rusalka in the end, no?’

She hadn’t exactly spoken openly about her situation but neither had she taken fright at the turn the conversation had taken. Janusz decided he’d ask her to go for a drink afterwards. With more time to talk, and some alcohol inside her, she might be persuaded to unburden herself.

Back in their box watching the second half, Janusz found himself more sympathetic to the director’s vision: portraying Rusalka as a sexual plaything unable to escape her destiny did bring a fresh poignancy to her plight. When the Prince, inevitably, abandoned his mute lover for being insufficiently human, Rusalka stabbed herself to death.

The stage lights dimmed for a scene change. Janusz knew that the remorseful Prince had still to seek out his lover’s undead spirit but, much as he wanted to see the disloyal
chuj
get his comeuppance, he had other plans. Carefully pushing back his chair, he got to his feet. When Varenka shot him a quizzical look he made an apologetic face and opened his hand, spreading thumb and fingers.
Five minutes.

Making his way down the wide red staircase back to ground level, he found the emergency exit he’d clocked on the way in. Pressing down the push bar he slipped out, inserting his cigar tin at the foot of the door to stop it closing. Outside in the cold night air he found himself in a narrow alleyway leading to a side street off of Covent Garden Piazza. He worked his way around the edge of the square, keeping himself concealed behind groups of evening promenaders.

Barely two minutes later, he found what he was looking for. Silhouetted against the spotlit stucco façade of the opera house, the outline of a familiar figure: Romescu’s driver. It was too dark to make out his snake tattoo, even if it hadn’t been encased in the gleaming white plaster cast that emerged from the sleeve of his jacket, covering his knuckles – a souvenir, Janusz guessed, of his ‘accident’ in the Greenwich foot tunnel. He leaned against an ornate lamp post, smoke curling idly from his cigarette, keeping a casual but practised eye on the Opera House entrance. So Varenka’s precautions hadn’t been the result of an overactive imagination: Romescu
was
keeping tabs on her.

Nosz, Kurwa
!
Janusz had been banking on taking her somewhere after the performance, to continue the work of gaining her trust – but the presence of snake-boy exploded that idea. They couldn’t leave the Opera House together now. Could he persuade her to slip out through the fire exit? After a few moments’ thought, he dismissed the idea as too risky. If she were to be seen with another man – let alone an enemy of Romescu … Janusz still held himself culpable for the death of his girlfriend Iza nearly thirty years ago, and he wasn’t about to risk another girl’s life, not even for the sake of dear old Jim.

Turning a reluctant back on the lights of the Opera House, he headed north for Holborn tube, punching out a text message as he walked.
A thousand apologies
,
but I had to leave,
it said.
I can’t explain now, but I will be in touch soon – I promise.

‘Is all this lot just for dinner, or are we stocking an aquarium?’

After seeing the list of fish and crustaceans Ben needed for his famous spaghetti marinara, Kershaw ditched her plan to pop into Tesco Express and drove up to the Waitrose at South Woodford, where the local yummy mummies did their shopping. She knew it wouldn’t be cheap but was still shocked to discover at the checkout that she’d spent almost twenty quid on a single meal – not including the cava. Wasn’t living together supposed to
save
money?

Relax
,
she told herself.
It’s not every day you move in with the guy you aim to spend the rest of your life with.

The crisp new resident’s parking permit in her windscreen meant she could park practically in front of their new place, in the tree-lined Bushwood area of Leytonstone – which was just as well, given the bulging black bags and boxes pressed up against the windows of her Ford Ka. Turning her shiny new key in the front door lock brought a surge of excitement, but inside the corniced hallway she stopped short. An image of her dad, in paint-spattered blue overalls, flashed into her mind, as clear as if he was standing beside her. She was remembering her first flat, where he had helped her to cover up the headache-inducing lime green wallpaper – a task that had taken five coats of magnolia emulsion. He’d died less than a year later. Throat cancer.
That’ll teach me for smoking sixty a day when I was young and foolish,
he’d croaked, dry and mischievous right to the end.

Then the image of him was gone, the bittersweet emotions it had resurrected giving way to a panicky feeling that she might never sense him alongside her like this ever again. She took a steadying breath.
Come on, Nat,
she murmured.
This won’t get the baby bathed.
He couldn’t really be gone, she reassured herself, not so long as the daft things he used to say lived on.

In the front room she could see the trouble Ben had taken to make the place welcoming. As well as setting up the TV and set-top box –
funny that –
he’d scattered his old leather sofa with cushions and rolled out the rug with the a bright blue abstract swirl that they’d picked up on their first trip to IKEA together. On the fireplace mantelpiece was a bunch of yellow hothouse roses beside an envelope with ‘Natalie’ written on it in Ben’s looping handwriting. Inside was a splotchy painting of a picturesque house covered with bougainvillea, sunshine dappling its stone walls. She smiled at the message inside: ‘Looking forward to our new life together – love, Ben.’

The kitchen was more of a work in progress. A quick check of the cupboards unearthed the saucepans they’d need to make dinner, but she couldn’t find a single cooking implement, nor any cutlery or glasses to lay the table.

She returned to the bedroom where she’d seen a stack of yet-to-be-unpacked boxes on Ben’s side of the bed. The trouble was, the idea of marking up boxes to make it easy to retrieve things hadn’t occurred to Ben –
bless him
. With a good-natured sigh, she started to check the boxes’ contents. DVDs and sci-fi novels in one … cycling gear, a camera and workout kit in another … but no sign of any kitchenware. As she stopped to pick up a book she’d dropped, she spotted a black bag shoved under the bed. It looked like it was full of clothes, but remembering how she’d used her jumpers as packing material to protect breakables, she reached under to drag it out. Inside she found nothing but balled-up T-shirts and jeans. Then, as she started shoving it all back inside, her fingers touched something unexpected. It was a small jiffy bag, sealed with grey duct tape.
What was that doing there?
Guessing that Ben had probably scooped it up accidentally with a pile of clothes, she set it on his bedside table.

Moving to the window, she stood for a moment with her arms folded, gazing out at the garden. It looked wintry and denuded, the only patch of green a shabby-looking conifer in a pot on the tiny terrace. She imagined the two of them out there in the summer, drinking cold wine, the smell of lamb sizzling on the barbecue. But she couldn’t suppress the feeling welling up in her chest: the sensation she sometimes got at a crime scene when something didn’t quite fit. It was a bit like listening to an orchestra in which one instrument was being played in the wrong key.

Her gaze was dragged inexorably back to the bedside table, to the jiffy bag – which sat there, seeming to mock her with its sheer ordinariness. She stood, irresolute, biting her thumbnail.
What was a relationship without trust?
she chided herself. But other questions, unbidden, bubbled to the surface of her mind.
What was inside? Why wasn’t it in the boxes with his other things?

It was no good. Two steps and the package was in her hand. Something irregular and frail inside. It felt like … She could feel the patter of her pulse, hear the blood whooshing in her ears. She tore the duct tape off. Pulled out the contents. A pair of glasses, in a clear plastic evidence bag. She dropped it on the bed like it was on fire. Looked at the ceiling for one, two, three seconds. Looked back at what lay on the bed. There was no deleting the image or undoing what she had found. Narrow, retro-style frames – Anthony Stride’s glasses – the ones she remembered staring out of the news reports on the Hannah Ryan case.

She only just made it to the kitchen sink. After throwing up her afternoon coffee, she rested her head on the cool stainless steel for what seemed like an age. Then she took a big drink of cold water from the tap and returned to the bedroom. Forcing herself into professional mode, she picked up the evidence bag by one corner and peered at the contents. The lenses of the glasses were dusty and there was a fragment of dead leaf caught in one of the hinges. On the surface of the right lens was a smear of what looked like dried blood.

Kershaw sat back on the bed. There was only one possible conclusion: Ben had come across Stride’s glasses up at Hollow Ponds but had failed to turn them in as evidence. If he’d simply forgotten to sign them in, they’d be in a drawer at work, not at home, hidden at the bottom of a bag of clothes. There could be no justification or explanation for taking evidence out of the nick.
Why would he hide his discovery?
Racking her brains she dredged up her brief but thorough search of the clearing where Stride hanged himself: she was stone cold certain there were no glasses in the immediate vicinity of the body. So where had Ben found them? And more to the point,
why the fuck
would he cover up his find?