Death Can’t Take a Joke (25 page)

The answer pinged into her brain.
Because the glasses weren’t close enough to the scene for Stride to have dropped them while he was hanging himself.
Ben had found them some distance away, and realised they presented a totally different scenario. That Stride had been taken to Hollow Ponds against his will, and anticipating his fate, had put up a desperate fight: a struggle in which he’d lost his glasses, possibly accounting for the blood on the lens.

A scenario that turned Anthony Stride’s death from the suicide of a repentant paedophile to a cold-blooded murder.

Kershaw imagined the scene. It would take two people, one to scale the tree and throw down the noose to the one keeping hold of Stride, who was probably gagged, his hands tied.

Then what?
The noose goes over his head. He’s hauled up by the rope, the one on the ground holding him aloft while the rope is tied off to the branch. He starts to strangle. She remembered the scratch marks under Stride’s jaw around the noose, how she’d assumed he must have changed his mind. In fact, he’d have started scrabbling at the rope the second the killers freed his hands. They must have stood there, watching. You’d have to wait, just in case. She imagined two executioners, sombre-faced in the gloom. Got a flash of Ben’s face, lips thinned to a savage line.
No!

She shook her head violently to rid herself of the image. Okay, she reasoned to herself, so Ben had covered up Stride’s killing – probably to protect Hannah Ryan and her family from a headline-hitting murder case, and maybe because he thought the guy had got his just desserts. But Ben, a cold-blooded murderer?
No fucking way.

It was little consolation. The fact remained that the man she loved had covered up a murder, breaking every promise he had signed up to when he became a police officer. What was worse, he had broken the bond of trust between them, even telling her the barefaced lie that the missing glasses had been found at Stride’s place. And by hiding them in their flat he had risked not just his career – but hers, too
.
This wasn’t ignoring some bureaucratic directive or fudging a technicality: stealing evidence and obstructing an investigation was breaking the law.

Replacing the glasses in the jiffy bag, she wandered into the front room. Standing there, arms wrapped around herself, her mind fumbled for some way of her and Ben getting through this. Her gaze snagged on the roses, the card on the mantelpiece: they struck her now like artefacts of some long lost, innocent age. She felt hot tears track down her face.

She couldn’t stay here, she decided, couldn’t face seeing Ben. She’d write him a letter, then she’d go home – back to Canning Town.

Seeing Oskar’s hospital bed shrouded by curtains gave Janusz a bit of a scare, but when he pulled them aside he found his mate propped up on his pillows, playing cards with an old man wearing a faded tartan dressing gown.

‘Close the curtain!’ hissed Oskar.

‘Why?’ asked Janusz, twitching it across behind him.

‘The nurses say we aren’t allowed to play for money. I tell you, Janek, it’s like living under communism in here.’ This with a mournful shake of his head. ‘Give me a break, Harry!’ he groaned as the old man laid down three aces. ‘You’re slaying me today!’

After Harry had pocketed his pile of coins and shuffled off, Janusz peered into Oskar’s face. The bruises were ripening into a banana yellow and one eye was still swollen shut, but he was relieved to see the spark back in his mate’s other eye.

‘How are you feeling,
kolego
?’

‘Fine, fine.’ Oskar waved a pudgy hand. ‘I’ve told the doctors I need to get out of here soon – I’ve got a job to price up in Redbridge.’ He leaned towards Janusz and waggled his eyebrows. ‘Did you bring the Zubrowka?’

With a quick look over his shoulder, Janusz slipped him a small hip flask.

Oskar shook it disparagingly. ‘That wouldn’t keep a
babcia
warm on her way to church!’

‘I’m not going to be held responsible for getting you drunk, Oskar.’

‘Bison grass is
medicinal,
Janek – it builds your strength up.’ He took a swig. ‘I thought you were supposed to know about science and shit.’

Janusz grinned. ‘Since you’re obviously feeling better, maybe you can tell me now exactly what happened?’

‘It’s all a bit of a blur, to tell you the truth.’

‘What I can’t work out is, how did Romescu’s
gangsterzy
track you down? Do you think it was that shopkeeper – Marek?’

Oskar half-shrugged, half-shook his head, took another nip of
wodka
.

Janusz narrowed his eyes. He’d seen that look before. He was suddenly reminded of an incident back in that shit-hole of an army camp where they did their national service. He’d caught Oskar skinning some rat-like carcass in the boot room and, after lengthy questioning, discovered that he’d been secretly trapping squirrels and trading them for cigarettes with the quartermaster. The squirrels had been served to visiting Party members and top brass in the officers’ mess under the description ‘woodland rabbit’, allowing the quartermaster to sell some of the pork and chicken usually reserved for the high-ups on the black market. As a patriot, he’d of course ensured that the rest reached the protein-starved conscripts. Janusz remembered pointing out quite forcefully to Oskar that if his little scam were uncovered, he’d probably be accused of assisting a CIA-backed plot to poison loyal comrades, and get thrown in prison – or shot.

Now he said: ‘Don’t treat me like a
dupek
, Oskar. What is it that you’re not telling me?’

‘Nothing!’

‘Oskar!’

‘Calm down, Janek, you’ll have a stroke if you’re not careful.’ He chuckled. ‘Still, at least you’d be in the right place for it.’

Janusz gave him a hard stare.

‘
Dobrze
! Okay! So I did a bit of freelance detective work into the Romanian guy.’

Janusz took a swig of
Zubrowka. He had a feeling he was going to need it. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I went and parked opposite that Turkish café in Walthamstow, Friday afternoon. I remembered Marek saying that was one of the days he goes there.’

‘And did he turn up?’

Oskar levered himself up on his pillows, grimacing as the weight shifted onto his plastered arm. ‘No, but he sent his driver – the one with all the tattoos? He had a rucksack with him.’

Cash collection – or delivery
, thought Janusz. ‘Did the rucksack look any different between when he went in and when he came out?’

Oskar screwed his eyes half shut. ‘It looked bulkier when he came out.’

Collection.

‘So you followed him?’

‘
Tak
, in the van.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘And I made sure I was super
dyskretny
.’

Janusz pictured Oskar’s beaten-up van with the squealing fan belt ‘discreetly’ tailing Romescu’s Discovery around the East End.

‘Then what?’

‘When we got to the A406, he suddenly took off, and I lost him.’

‘Until he turned up at your flat later on.’

Oskar turned an astonished gaze on him. ‘How did you know?!’

‘He took your licence plate,
kolego,
’ growled Janusz, ‘and used it to get your address.’

Later that night, Oskar had answered the doorbell to find a man wearing a balaclava on the doorstep.

‘He coshed me over the head.
Whack!
After that, I don’t remember a thing, not till I woke up in here and saw your ugly mug leering down at me.’

‘Nothing about what happened up at Hollow Ponds, the woods?’ Janusz felt his jaw clench. ‘You told me they … hurt you, to find out why I’m investigating Romescu.’

‘Did I say that?’ Oskar looked blank. ‘It’s all gone now.
Pfouff!
’

‘What did you tell the cops?’

‘That I got mugged taking a walk in the woods,’ said Oskar. ‘They didn’t seem all that interested. They probably thought I was some Eastern European gangster.’ He looked quite pleased with this idea.

‘A lonely old
pedzio
looking for a blowjob, more like,’ said Janusz, grinning.

‘Well, you’d know more about that than me,’ said Oskar.

The curtain rattled aside to reveal a nurse with a businesslike air.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ said Oskar, reverting to English. ‘No Susie today?’

‘Susie has taken a holiday,’ said the nurse, checking the overhead monitor. ‘I am Jadwiga.’

‘You’re Polish?’ asked Oskar, his eyes following her brisk movements.

She nodded. ‘I’m afraid visiting time is over,’ she told Janusz.

‘Okay,
prosze pani
,’ he said, getting to his feet. Then he remembered something. ‘Oskar. Back home, do you remember seeing brown metal boxes with yellow lettering on them?’

The answer his mate gave him made him feel like a total
idiota
.
Of course.

As Janusz had bid Oskar goodbye the nurse had started sniffing suspiciously at the air – bison grass being a highly aromatic herb. By the time he’d reached the doors of the ward he could hear his mate’s voice raised in plaintive protest.

‘You can’t confiscate that – it’s private property!’

Waiting for a bus to take him back to Walthamstow tube, Janusz turned on his mobile and found a text message waiting for him. Paul Jarrett, the guy at the Hollow Ponds café, wanted to talk to him.
Nothing urgent
, it said.

Less than ten minutes later, the boating lake came into view. The place was heaving: it might only be eight or nine degrees out, but it was a Sunday, the sky was a milky blue and people were clearly making the most of what could be the last bit of decent weather before winter closed its icy fist. At the café, Jarrett was serving a queue of people, but when he spotted Janusz he nodded and held up two fingers.
Two minutes.

A few minutes later, a teenage girl appeared behind the counter, and Jarrett came over to Janusz’s table carrying two mugs of tea.

‘Brrrr! Brass monkeys, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘Still, this probably feels like the Caribbean compared to where you come from.’

Janusz grinned in rueful agreement: he’d given up explaining that at least in Poland the summer brought many months of reliably warm and sunny weather, something which he found himself missing the longer he lived on this rain-lashed island buffeted by Atlantic weather systems.

‘Thanks for the tea.’ He lit a cigar, inhaled. ‘So, did you hear something, about the night my mate got mugged?’

‘Nah, it’s not that,’ said Jarrett. ‘I’m probably just wasting your time. But I recall you said something about a black 4X4?’

Janusz nodded, smothering a grimace at the alien taste of milk in his tea.

‘Yeah well, it’s probably nothing, like I say, but one of the rangers was in for a cuppa the other day, and he was saying they’re going to replace some of the logs around the car park.’ He gestured towards the gravelled rectangle, with its rough cordon of tree trunks, clearly laid long ago to prevent vehicles parking in the scrub and woodland beyond. ‘He says he was driving back from the pub the other night when he just happens to glance in here. He sees a motor with its lights off, creeping out of the wood there, through that gap. Before he can do anything, the car pulls onto the road and tears off in the opposite direction.’

‘And he reckons it was a Discovery, right?’

Jarrett nodded. ‘Yeah. Which is why I thought you might be interested.’

‘But this wasn’t Friday night, when my mate got beaten up?’

‘’Fraid not.’ Then Jarrett struck his forehead with the flat of his hand in frustration. ‘I can’t remember now if he said it was Tuesday or Wednesday. Mind you, it’d be easy enough to find out.’

‘You could call him?’

‘Nah, sorry, I haven’t got his number – but he said it was the night before that guy was found?’ He lowered his voice. ‘You know, the dirty fucking nonce who hanged himself in the woods?’

Frowning, Janusz shook his head.

‘Are you serious? It was all over the papers. Stride his name was – interfered with a little handicapped girl a while back and got off scot-free.’ Jarrett looked over at the cabin. The rush of customers had subsided and the young girl leaned on the counter, chatting on her mobile phone. He shook his head. ‘If anybody laid a finger on my Deena, I’d …’ The muscles worked in his jaw. ‘And I’m not a violent man.’

Five minutes later, Janusz took a stroll over to the gap Jarrett had indicated in the car park’s perimeter. Finding a set of tyre tracks through the undergrowth, he followed the trail ten metres or so into the scrub. The tracks ended behind a tangle of elder and bramble bush extensive enough to keep even a sizeable car out of sight of the road.

Back in her old flat, Kershaw endured the worst night of her life since her dad had died, the thoughts churning in her head like washing on an endless rinse cycle.

To end up doing what he’d done, to cross the line so dramatically, Ben had clearly become
obsessed
with Anthony Stride during the time he’d spent with the Ryan family. How had she missed the signs? Could she have done more to pull him back from the brink, maybe even prevented it from happening? More importantly,
what the fuck
was she going to do now? Finally, towards dawn, she slept fitfully for an hour or so.

She awoke filled with a powerful sense of resolve: she had to do
something
to try to fix this unholy mess.

There were five missed calls and a bunch of texts waiting on her phone: all from Ben. The note she’d left him at the flat had made it clear she knew everything and that she’d taken the glasses ‘for safekeeping’: she couldn’t risk him panicking, making things worse by getting rid of them.

After taking a hot shower, she primed herself with a strong coffee and called him back.

‘Natalie, thank God! I’ve been going out of my mind!’

At the sound of his voice, she fought down a clamour of emotions. ‘It’s not been a great time for me, either.’

They fell silent, both aware that they were speaking over an open phone line.