Death Can’t Take a Joke (32 page)

Yes!
Kershaw felt the hairs prickle upright on her forearms.

‘Okay, that’s good,’ she said, keeping her tone neutral. ‘Was an address mentioned? Did it sound like he was ordering a contract killing?’

‘Yes. I know that he sometimes killed people. Or better to say, paid other men to kill them for him.’

‘Which other people did he have killed?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know the names, he kept them from me.’

Kershaw noted that she was speaking of Romescu in the past tense. A good sign, she thought, suggesting that Varenka had well and truly moved on from any misplaced loyalty to – or more likely fear of – her ‘boyfriend’.

‘Did you hear him say anything later, about the killer making a mistake? Did he mention Jim Fulford’s name at all?’

Varenka took a deep breath, gave a little shake of her head. ‘I don’t want to say any more. I don’t feel safe, not until you have him locked up.’

Time to back off a bit.

To lighten the mood, Kershaw nodded at the ring on Varenka’s little finger. ‘My mum gave me a ring just like that when I was little – does it have sentimental value?’

‘Yes.’ Just for a moment, the look Kershaw caught in those greeny-gold eyes was no longer sorrowful, but as cool and unreadable as the eyes of a puma. ‘I keep it because of a promise I made to someone, a long time ago.’

At the Rochester, Janusz was halfway through his second pint of beer. After some deliberation, he’d decided against calling on Marika, telling her the latest on Jim’s murder, at least until the cops had confirmed the mistaken identity theory. The girl detective, Natalia, had promised to call him as soon as she had anything solid. If anyone could get the truth out of Varenka, she could.

He recalled his clandestine visit to Romescu’s apartment, having to hide in the closet, and his discovery of Varenka’s ‘escape kit’ – the school pencil case with the keepsakes and the roll of dollars. He wondered whether she’d ever tried to get away from Romescu, only to discover perhaps, that her boyfriend had her followed round the clock. Or perhaps, as she had hinted at the opera, she believed she could never truly escape, that it was impossible for a working girl to transform herself and leave that kind of life behind. It can hardly have been the life she had dreamt of as a child, the little girl by the rock pool with the china doll eyes.

He was reaching out for his pint. And then it hit him.

‘I totally understand how anxious you must feel, with him still at liberty,’ Kershaw was telling Varenka. ‘We’ll intercept him at the airport tomorrow and bring him in. Right now, though, I think we should find you somewhere safe to stay.’

‘It is okay, there is a friend I can stay with tonight. I’ll call her now.’

Picking up her phone, Varenka got up from the breakfast bar.

Kershaw sensed a shift in her mood since she had agreed to testify against Romescu. There was a new decisiveness in her body language and something else – a hint of suppressed excitement. Perhaps it was simply relief now that she’d made the decision to talk.

Then Kershaw’s phone rang, making her jump. Was it the guy on reception, warning her that someone was on his way up?

She whipped it out of her pocket. Relieved to see it was only Janusz Kiszka, she pressed ‘
Ignore
’.

Janusz had no idea whether the connection he had made was pure coincidence – or something real and deadly serious. Either way, he wasn’t taking any chances. And when Natalia failed to answer her phone it sent him into a lather of fear. It had been he who had sent her to Romescu’s flat, and the idea that he might have sent her into danger … he couldn’t bear to think of it.

‘I need a cab to Canary Wharf straightaway,’ he told the guy behind the bar. ‘Tell them there’s fifty quid in it if they’re here in less than five.’

He raced outside to wait for it and pulled his phone out again. She hadn’t phoned back or replied to his text. He paced up and down the pavement raking a hand through his hair. Then stopped in his tracks, realizing that he had to do something he wouldn’t have imagined possible until this moment.

Thirty seconds later a flat, official-sounding voice answered his phone call and he heard himself saying: ‘Put me through to Sergeant Bacon – it’s an emergency.’

In Millharbour, a single beam of sunlight had escaped the bank of purple cloud, flooding the living room of the apartment with a lurid light. Varenka paced the shiny floor, talking into her phone, occasionally glancing across at Kershaw.

Kershaw was finding it hard to think above the murmuring Polish, underscored by the ‘tap tap’ of high heels across the mirrored wood. But she was aware of an uneasy feeling stirring in her gut. She’d expected Varenka to demand more reassurances about being granted residency before agreeing to turn witness against Romescu. Her gaze fell on the girl’s shoes. Ivory-coloured suede, the flash of red soles.
Louboutins.
Probably cost more than she earned in a week.

Suddenly, hail raked the windows like a burst of automatic gunfire, jangling her nerves.
Was she missing something here?

‘Could I use your loo?’ She needed to be somewhere quiet for a minute, to think things over.

‘Of course,’ said Varenka. ‘I will show you where it is.’

She clattered up the staircase, each stair a slab of shiny honey-coloured wood that appeared to float in mid air, Kershaw following. On the upper level, a gloomy corridor lined with artworks led to two doorways at the far end. As they got closer, Kershaw could see that one of the doors stood slightly ajar. Varenka pulled it to, before opening the bathroom door. Then shooting Kershaw a smile, she clack-clacked back down the corridor.

Locking the bathroom door behind her, Kershaw could feel her pulse thrumming in her throat. She stared at her reflection in the mirror over the sink, the discreet purr of the extractor fan the only sound in the windowless room.

She couldn’t put her finger on it, but
something
just didn’t feel right.

Opening the bathroom door as quietly as she could, Kershaw paused on the threshold. She could hear Varenka on the phone downstairs, the musical glissading of the Polish sounding oddly like Welsh at this distance. She covered the three or four metres to the door Varenka had closed on tiptoe – even in flats it was difficult to cross the polished hardwood without making a sound.

As her hand closed around the door handle, she hesitated, imagining what Streaky might have to say about her embarking on an unauthorised search without having the faintest idea of what she expected to find. She suspected he might use the phrase ‘
women’s intuition’
– and most definitely
not
in a positive way.

Heart bumping alarmingly against her chest wall, she turned the door handle, grimacing at the faint grating of the mechanism, and pushed the door open just far enough to slip inside. She left the door a couple of centimetres ajar so that she would hear if Varenka set foot on the staircase.

She scanned the room quickly. In her heightened state, her brain seemed to capture images like the shutter on an old-school camera.
Click.
To the left, set into a wall of wood, a safe – its door hanging open.
Click.
Ahead, on the bed, a half-packed suitcase. Two neatly folded men’s shirts visible on top.
Click.
A door set into the wall next to the bed – probably to an en-suite bathroom. And waist high on the door’s shiny white surface, the clear outline of a bloody palm print.

The important thing was to keep calm.

She had a searing memory of a safety briefing at the nick only that week – instructing detectives to carry their Airwaves radios at all times. And a pin-sharp picture of hers, sitting in the desk drawer. Creeping out of the room, she closed the door carefully behind her and paused to listen. All was silent down below. She headed down the corridor at a normal pace, as though innocently returning from the bathroom.

She’d almost reached the top of the staircase when Varenka stepped out from an alcove that Kershaw hadn’t noticed on her way up.

Her hand flew to her chest. ‘You scared me!’ she said.

As Kershaw had predicted when she first laid eyes on her, Varenka did indeed stand nearly six feet tall even without her high heels. Her eyes were the colour of wet seaweed and they looked as cold and empty as those of a long-dead creature at the bottom of an underground sea.

As Varenka’s arm shot out in a blur, Kershaw ducked into a crouch, step one of a self-defence move drummed into her during training.

The next thing she knew, she was lying on the deck, feeling badly winded. She studied the polished floor next to her cheek, wondering if it was walnut. Her nan used to have a walnut dressing table the exact same colour that she’d been very proud of. She felt her eyelids starting to drift shut. The last thing she saw, forming a silvery ‘V’ against the wood half a metre away, were the open blades of a pair of dressmaking scissors.

By the time Janusz arrived at Millharbour, it was nearly dark, the clouded sky turned the colour of ink, an icy rain sheeting across the dock.

The minicab was still moving when he jumped out, flinging some notes on the seat, and ran at full tilt onto the dockside. He could see that the entrance to Romescu’s apartment block had been cordoned off with police tape, with a uniformed cop standing guard at the revolving door.
Praise be to Mary, Mother of God,
he said
in a fervent whisper, crossing himself
.
But the wave of relief evaporated when he realised that the tape, the cop, were confirmation that a crime had taken place.

‘Listen,’ he panted, as he reached the cop. ‘I need to go up, I was the one who called it in.’

Taking in Janusz’s dishevelled appearance with a single dry glance, the cop redirected his gaze past him, towards the dock. ‘I’m afraid no one’s allowed in at the moment, sir, not even the residents.’

‘Call Sergeant Bacon, tell him Kiszka is here.’

‘Sergeant
who
?’

Kurwa!
Of course: the quickest way to get back-up to the apartment would have been to mobilise the local cops. This guy’s folded arms and impassive expression told Janusz that he was wasting his time. So he shrugged, backed off a few metres and pulled out his phone, as though to make a call. Out of the corner of his eye, he was taking in the block’s other door, next to the revolving one, the one he’d used on his last visit, when he’d been impersonating an aircon engineer. Would it still be open now?

The second the cop’s attention drifted elsewhere, Janusz ducked under the tape and pushed at the door. It swung inward.
Brawo
! Ignoring the shout of outrage at his back, he sprinted for the lift, praying there would be one waiting. There was. Through its closing doors he caught a glimpse of the cop’s angry face as he crashed through the lobby.
Too slow, my friend.

On the eleventh floor, he’d almost reached Romescu’s apartment when another cop bowled round the corner and shoulder-charged him, shoving him up against the wall. Then, over the cop’s burly shoulder, a welcome sight: the ginger-haired Sergeant Bacon, his gut busting out of a shabby brown suit.

Streaky’s face wore a thunderous expression. He came right up close, his nose almost touching Janusz’s. ‘Are you behind this fucking fiasco, Kiszka?’

‘Natalia – is she okay?’

‘Well, that depends,’ said Streaky, his voice tense with sarcastic fury.

‘On what?’

‘On whether you can be okay after having a pair of six-inch scissors stuck in your gut.’

Mother of God!
Janusz slumped back against the wall.

‘Did you put her up to this? Charging in here, on her own, like the Lone fucking Ranger?’

‘On her own?’ He tried to blink away an image of the girl detective on the deck, bleeding and helpless …
just like Jim.
What an
imbecyl
he had been, not to realise earlier the situation she’d be walking into.
When they’d parted, he’d been too caught up in his own emotions, grappling with the discovery that Jim’s murder had been something as banal as an address cock-up.

Straightening up, he met Streaky’s ice-pick stare. ‘It was me who told her that the girl was in danger, earlier today,’ he said
.
‘What happened … it’s my responsibility.’

Streaky eyed his face, his expression relenting a little. ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ he said. ‘In my experience, DC Kershaw does whatever the fuck she likes.’

‘Is she …?’ Janusz couldn’t complete the question.

‘She’s in hospital, having surgery right now. I’ll let you know as soon as I know.’ Streaky hitched up his trousers. ‘Meanwhile, you can make yourself useful.’

Sunk in a miserable daze, Janusz followed him down the corridor. After donning white paper boilersuits and shoe covers they entered the apartment, which was abuzz with activity. In the kitchen they passed a girl in a protective suit dusting the surface of the breakfast bar, and at the top of the stairs a man in the same get-up was taking photographs of a dark and sticky-looking pool of blood.

Janusz shot Streaky a questioning look. Wordlessly, his expression
telegraphed back: Yes, the blood is Kershaw’s
.

In the master bedroom, the concealed door to the walk-in wardrobe stood ajar. Streaky nodded him in first. ‘Watch where you put your feet.’

Inside the long narrow room, the first thing to hit him was the citrusy perfume that Varenka wore, followed by a stronger, ferrous undernote. At the far end, under the clothes rail, lay its source: Barbu Romescu, sprawled face down in a blood-soaked heap of his own suits. His face was in profile, the left eye open wide, his expression one of almost comic puzzlement. The cause of his demise was clear: in the side of his neck, a jagged, gaping wound so savage that Janusz could make out the curve of a cervical vertebra.

‘For the record, can you confirm this is Barbu Romescu?’ asked Streaky, at his shoulder.

‘Yes, it’s him.’ Janusz stared at the scar on the side of Romescu’s face, the legacy of his daring escape from Communist Romania. In death, it looked paler, less prominent.