Death Can’t Take a Joke (34 page)

Squeezing her hand, he supplied the poem’s closing line:
‘As far as you’ve come, can’t be undone.’

‘Your boyfriend’s here, dear, if you feel up to a visitor.’

Opening one eye, Kershaw saw Lovely Irish Nurse, as she’d dubbed her, the one who’d stroked her head when she’d been in such an agitated state after coming round from the operation.
Had that been yesterday? No, the day before.
In here, time had become an irrelevance. The thing that consumed and governed every waking thought, the only force you respected – and dreaded – was
pain
. At first, it had come in great racking waves so fierce that she’d wanted to throw herself out of bed, desperate to knock herself unconscious. She could still feel it, like a hot spiked band around her abdomen, but the white-hot screech of it had muted to a background drone.

Boyfriend?
Kershaw thought for a moment, before realising she must mean Ben.

‘Yeah, okay.’

With the nurse’s help she levered herself up onto her pillows, wincing as she felt the stitches pull, but noticing that the manoeuvre was noticeably easier than when she’d attempted it the first time.

Ben’s Bournville-dark eyes above his absurdly large bouquet were still gorgeous, although the skin around them was crosshatched with anxiety.

‘Hello, Nat,’ he said, perching on the edge of the visitor’s armchair.

‘Hi,’ she managed a smile. ‘They’re pretty.’

The nurse lifted the flowers from his hands. ‘Let me put them in a vase.’

They made small talk for a bit about the gossip at the nick, the number of cards and flowers she had, her Auntie Carol’s visit, before falling silent.

‘You gave me a terrible scare there, Nat.’

‘Yeah, sorry about that. It wasn’t intentional.’

‘No, ‘course not. But when they told me you might not make it, just before you went into surgery …’ He stared up at the ceiling, blinking, and blew out a controlled but ragged breath. ‘I … I couldn’t imagine what my future would be without you. I literally couldn’t see it.’

‘Ben …’

‘Hear me out. It’s made me realise how much you mean to me, Nat. And I figured something else out. After what happened, me staying in the Job, it would just make the situation even more difficult for you. So I’ve decided, I’m packing it in.’

Her head jerked up. ‘What? You can’t do that. You just made Sergeant!’

‘I don’t deserve it. I let everyone down – and not just you.’

Their eyes met.
Streaky.
Without whom Ben would never have been promoted, and who had risked career suicide to cover for him and put right his monumental screw-up.

‘In all honesty, Nat? I don’t think I have it in my blood like you do. It’s a job to me,’ he shrugged. ‘I can find another job. I can’t get – I don’t
want
to get – another girlfriend.’

Kershaw felt a wave of tiredness break over her. ‘It’s a lot to take on board …’

‘I know, and I don’t want you fretting about anything right now. You need to concentrate on getting better. We’ll talk about it when you come out, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

After Ben left, Kershaw felt herself drifting back to sleep, a vivid image playing on her retina: the scrap of back garden at the new flat, the lawn dappled with sunshine, and Ben leaning over a smoking barbecue, busy with the tongs. Her last conscious thought before sleep engulfed her: was it just a morphine-fuelled fantasy or a plausible picture of her future?

‘What time are you coming home, Janek?’

‘I told you this morning, Oskar. I’ve got to go and see that guy in Barking, the one whose factory keeps getting burgled.’

Even though he was no longer in any danger, Oskar had taken up Janusz’s offer to stay at his Highbury apartment, saying that after sharing a maisonette with four other blokes for the last year he could do with a holiday. But Janusz was finding the experience far from restful.

‘Well, what do you expect me to eat for my dinner?’ Oskar sighed down the phone. ‘You know, while you sit on your
dupe
having meetings and drinking latte, some of us have been up since 7 a.m. doing man’s work.’

‘There’s some
pierogi
in the fridge,’ said Janusz.

‘I had them for breakfast,’ said Oskar. ‘And if you ask my opinion? You put in a tiny bit too much pepper.’

‘I didn’t ask your opinion,’ growled Janusz, shifting the phone to his other ear. ‘And remember what I said about cleaning your work tools in the sink …’

‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ said Oskar, ignoring his comment. ‘Sergeant Backgammon called on the landline …’

‘You mean Sergeant Bacon?’

‘
Tak
.
Fantastyczne
name for a cop!’ Oskar chuckled. ‘He asked you to call him at the office.’

‘
Dobrze,
’ said Janusz. ‘I’ll see you about half seven then.’

‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Oskar’s voice was plaintive.

‘What?’

‘Aren’t you going to tell me you love me?’

‘Fuck off, Oskar.’ But a smile tugged at one corner of Janusz’s mouth.

DS Bacon didn’t want to talk on the phone so Janusz agreed to drop by the nick on his way to Barking.

Now they sat across a table in the same interview room where the Sergeant had questioned him about Jim’s murder, what felt like 300 years ago.

DS Bacon caught his look. ‘Sorry we’re in here, but we’re having a visitation of IT types – they’re crawling all over the offices upstairs.’

Janusz took the paper cup of tea the Sergeant handed him. ‘How’s Natalia?’ he asked. It had been three days since the medics had declared her out of serious danger but he knew that, with such a deep wound, infection was a constant risk.

‘Yeah, she’s fine. Bending everyone’s ear about when she’s allowed to come back to work.’

Janusz raised an amused eyebrow. ‘She’s not going to be in any trouble, is she, for going to Romescu’s place on her own?’

Streaky shook his head. ‘In the ordinary run of things she’d probably be due some time on the naughty step, but in this case I’d say there are “extenuating circumstances”.’

‘Because it was only due to her initiative that you were able to identify a murderer?’ asked Janusz.

‘The Metropolitan Police
reward initiative
?! Wash your mouth out!’ Streaky chuckled. ‘No. Let’s just say that since the Stride debacle, the brass have been gagging for a “good news” story. And “
Brave girl cop stabbed confronting murder suspect”
has a better ring to it than “
Brave girl cop disciplined on numbskull health and safety charge
”.’

Janusz gave a grunt, remembering a recent story in the newspaper about a cop who’d dived into an icy pond to save a drowning child. In the England he’d arrived in twenty-five years ago they’d have given him a medal; these days the guy’s actions had earned him a reprimand for failing to conduct a proper risk assessment. The world had gone crazy.

‘Anyway.’ Streaky took a document from a file and pushed it across the table. ‘I wanted to let you know that your hunch was right.’

Janusz frowned at the unfamiliar words and letters. ‘Sorry, I don’t really read Ukrainian.’

‘It’s a report from the Kharkov police.’ He pointed out the date, 11th November 1998. ‘They’ve confirmed that the person you know as Varenka Kalina had a little sister, name of Anna. She was born with what they called a “chromosomal deficiency”.’

‘Downs Syndrome.’

Streaky nodded. ‘Varenka’s mother was a prostitute, as you said, and one day when Mummy was out cold on vodka, Anna was raped and beaten by one of the clients. She died in hospital a few weeks later. She was eight years old.’

‘
God rest her soul
,’ muttered Janusz.

‘The bastard got off with manslaughter, and his tariff is almost up. They’re letting him out in a couple of weeks.’

Janusz imagined Varenka’s reaction to the news of his impending release, how it must have brought the horror of her little sister’s murder come flooding back. ‘She couldn’t take revenge on
him
, so she executed another paedophile in his place.’

Streaky made a gesture indicating that he shared that conclusion.

Not for the first time, Janusz reflected on the long shadow cast by Stalin’s fifty-year domination of Eastern Europe, and the chaos that had convulsed the region when communism fell. It was no wonder, really, that such desperation, such suffering, had spawned some twisted and ruthless progeny.

Then he remembered something the Sergeant had said. ‘Why did you say the person
I
“know as Varenka Kalina”
? Is it an alias?’

‘Well, it’s a name she’s entitled to use on her passport,’ said the Sergeant with a strange half-smile. ‘But it’s not the one she was christened with.’

Seeing Janusz’s complete incomprehension, he handed him another document from the file. ‘Birth certificate,’ he said, and indicated one of the boxes.

Janusz squinted down at it. The Ukrainian alphabet shared enough characters with the Russian Cyrillic he’d been forced to learn at school to allow him to read the surname
Kalina
. But although the Christian name started with the letter ‘V’, rendered in Cyrillic as ‘B’, it wasn’t
Varenka
. The name it spelled out was
Valentyn.

Janusz stared at the Sergeant. ‘Varenka was born a
boy
?!’

He nodded, evidently enjoying himself. ‘Yep.’

Janusz realised his jaw was hanging open. ‘It must be a mistake – she was so beautiful and … ladylike.’ His mind whirred, flicking through a mental album of images of Varenka. Yes, she was tall for a woman, and her hands weren’t exactly dainty, but she was a million miles from the ‘truck driver in drag’ image that the phrase ‘sex change’ summoned up in his mind.

Streaky shrugged. ‘Apparently, as long as you take the right hormones in early puberty, you never develop facial hair, an Adam’s apple, or the rugged good looks you and I enjoy.’

‘But she had breasts …’ Janusz stopped, realising what a dumb comment that was in the era of implants you could literally buy off the shelf. As for the hormones, in post-Soviet Ukraine there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be obtained with hard currency.

In fact, the more he thought about it, the more it fell into place. Even without the height and her husky voice, there had always been something indefinably
different
about Varenka – the sense that she possessed some mystery no man could unravel.

‘Did she still have …?’ Janusz waved vaguely below the waist.

‘I was going to ask you that,’ deadpanned the Sergeant.

‘
Kurwa mac
!’ he protested, squirming in his chair. ‘I never laid a finger on her!’

‘I’ll believe you,’ grinned Streaky. ‘Anyway, our boy Romescu obviously had more exotic tastes than you. That place in Kharkov where she danced must have been a tranny club.’

Janusz chewed his thumb, remembering Varenka’s mysterious trip to the private hospital. Then the letters
GRA
and the name
Churchill
scrawled inside the pink matchbook from the bar where she’d worked jumped out at him.

‘
Gender Re-Assignment
,’ he said out loud.

‘Come again?’

‘I think she was still undergoing her sex change treatment at the Princess Louise Hospital – a private place in the West End – and I’ll bet you a tenner that the specialist there is called Churchill.’

Then the night at the opera came flooding back, the story of the water nymph Rusalka who underwent a traumatic metamorphosis so that she could join her human lover. When Varenka had spoken so feelingly that night about the difficulty of transforming oneself, he’d assumed she’d meant escaping a life of prostitution: now it was clear she’d meant something far more fundamental.

As the Sergeant scribbled a note in the file, Janusz went on: ‘That’s why she didn’t leave Romescu earlier. It wasn’t because she was scared of him; she was just waiting till he’d funded her transformation.’

‘What I don’t get,’ said Streaky, frowning, ‘is if he fell for her when she was a geezer, then why would he fancy her after …’ he made a sawing motion across his lap.

Both men avoided the other’s gaze, crossing their legs in unison.

‘How should I know?’ growled Janusz. ‘He was bisexual? He was in love with her, with or without a dick?’ He waved a hand. ‘Nothing surprises me about what people get up to these days.’

As they headed downstairs in the lift, Janusz was lost in his own thoughts. He was still struggling to absorb the alarming truth about Varenka, a girl he had flirted with and, with whom, given the right mood and moment, he might have taken things a lot further.

By the time the door of the police station closed behind him, he had made one unshakeable resolution:
Oskar must never know.

Standing at the bar of the Rochester, Janusz asked for two bottles of Tyskie, the order he’d placed several hundred times over the years meeting Jim here, before correcting himself.

He carried the drinks over to the table by the window where Kershaw sat, looking out into the thickening dusk. It was almost a fortnight since she’d been stabbed and when he got her text suggesting they meet, he hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect.

‘Cheers,’ she said, taking the large glass of white wine he handed her. ‘I’m not really supposed to be drinking yet, but you know what? I’ve decided life’s too short.’

‘
Na zdrowie
,’ Janusz toasted her, and took a swig of beer. ‘What harm can a couple of glasses of wine do? Doctors are a bunch of old women.’

He saw a tremor of pain cross her face as she set her glass down on the table.

‘So, they say you will make a full recovery, right?’

‘Yeah. I got lucky,’ she grinned. ‘According to my surgeon, if you have to lose an organ then the spleen is the one to go for. Apparently it’s a bit of an optional extra – like alloy wheels or a sun roof.’

It was the sort of tongue-in-cheek bravado that Janusz had come across many times in the company of men – a bit of bluster intended not exactly to deny fear, but to cut it down to a manageable size.