Death Can’t Take a Joke (35 page)

Authors: Anya Lipska

BOOK: Death Can’t Take a Joke

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After a pause she said: ‘I wanted to see you as soon as I got out, to thank you.’

‘Thank me?!’ Janusz raised his eyebrows. ‘For sending you to interrogate a cross-dressing psychopath?’

‘If you hadn’t called the nick when you did and insisted on talking to Streaky – to the Sergeant – they say I probably would have bled to death in that apartment.’

The note of bewilderment in her voice told Janusz she was still coming to terms with this momentous idea. He tried to recall when he’d first been confronted with the reality of his own mortality. Probably at the demo where Iza had died, slipping lifeless from his disbelieving fingers – so nineteen years old, a good deal younger than Natalia, but then he had lived in interesting times.

‘If I had only realised what was going on earlier,’ he said, ‘I would never have asked you to go and talk to her.’

‘Well, you didn’t exactly have all the facts, did you?’ she said, staring into her wine, seeing an image of Ben pocketing Stride’s glasses. ‘I hear the person you spoke to when you called the nick took quite a bit of convincing.’ Recalling Adam Ackroyd’s account of the call, she shook her head at him in mock reproach. ‘I’m told you used swearwords he never even knew existed.’

‘Ten years on English building sites,’ said Janusz modestly, before clearing his throat. ‘There’s something I wanted to tell you, too – about that guy who fell out of the Orzelair plane?’

‘Oh yes?’ said Kershaw.

He told her what he’d discovered during their trip to Poland – omitting certain unnecessary details like the handgun he’d dumped in the lavatory cistern at the police station – laying out Romescu’s smuggling operation, and what had really happened to Orzelair’s head of security.

Folding her arms, she skewered him with a stare. ‘You’re telling me that Anatol
Voy-tek
was investigating the goings-on at …
P-shay-joke-off
Airport?

‘Not bad,’ he nodded, acknowledging her attempt at the correct pronunciation. ‘Yeah, Prczeczokow.’

‘Whatever. And he got bopped on the head and stuffed in the wheel well by that big ugly mechanic?’

‘Mazurek. Yes, almost certainly.’

‘Because Wojtek was trying to close down Romescu’s arms- smuggling malarkey?’

He lifted one shoulder, bracing himself. She hadn’t raised her voice but he could tell from the set of her jaw that she wasn’t happy.

‘I knew you were keeping something from me in Poland!’

‘I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure of my facts …’

‘I was in charge of the fucking investigation, not you! It’s up to me to make those decisions.’

Janusz winced: even after all this time living in the UK it still pained him to hear a girl curse. ‘After my … discussion with Mazurek I knew Romescu would cover his tracks. You wouldn’t be able to prove anything.’

Kershaw made a noise of angry disbelief.

‘Okay … and it’s true that I wanted you here in London, looking for Jim’s killer. Not haring around Poland on a wild goose chase.’

Glaring at him, she drained the rest of her wine.

‘You have to understand something,’ he said. ‘When I was growing up, an informer’ – he uttered the word as though ejecting something disagreeable from his mouth – ‘was a traitor, pure and simple. No …
decent
person would dream of talking to the cops. I guess it’s a tough habit to shake.’

She fell silent for a moment, before nodding at his half-empty beer bottle: ‘Another one of those?’ and rose to go the bar, rebuffing his attempts to buy the round.

As she waited for the drinks, Kershaw brooded over the way that Kiszka had kept her in the dark, before it struck her that Ben, her supposed boyfriend, had done exactly the same. There were further uncomfortable parallels – both Ben and Kiszka had tried to alter the course of justice by covering up evidence of a suspicious death. There was one big fat glaring distinction, though. Kiszka wasn’t a police officer.

Back at the table, she set down the drinks and lowered herself carefully into her chair, her fragility an unwelcome glimpse of the old lady she would one day become.

‘Well, at least you told me in the end,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a chat with the detective we met in Poland. Now Romescu’s dead, maybe someone at the airport can be persuaded to spill the beans on Mazurek.’ She paused, picturing the body spreadeagled on the pavement in the shadow of Canary Wharf tower, the pool of blood beside his head like a crimson speech bubble. ‘There’s no way he could have got a big geezer like Wojtek into that plane without some help.’

Looking at Janusz over the rim of her wineglass, she cocked her head: ‘What made you change your mind about telling me, anyway?’

He stared past her blonde head out into the street. The sky was already dark and a mist had come down, spinning whorls of gauzy light around the streetlamps. ‘I realised that Wojtek’s wife, his family, they have a right to know what happened to him. You might not nail Mazurek, but at least they won’t have to wake up every day for the rest of their lives wondering how he ended up in the wheel well of that plane.’

‘You realise it will mean going back to Poland, to make a statement?’

He gave an assenting half-shrug, then grinned: ‘I’ll take you back to that restaurant in the old town if you like. The one where you ate all the potato cakes.’

‘Okay, as long as you don’t do a runner this time.’ She tried for a stern look but her smile muscles weren’t playing ball.

Their eyes met, and they both held the gaze for a long beat, acknowledging that the trip would be no hardship.

‘Natalia,’ his voice deepened, becoming serious. ‘You’ve been through a shattering experience. Don’t ask too much of yourself. And don’t expect your life to return to … how it was before. That’s all.’

‘Believe me, I don’t,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m thinking about joining SCO19.’ Seeing his uncomprehending look, she translated: ‘Firearms unit.’ She downed the rest of her wine. ‘Nothing evens the score with the bad guys like a Heckler & Koch.’

Eyeing her set little face, features blurred by alcohol, he wanted to say more, tempted to share his own hard-won knowledge that drink was, at best, a temporary respite from troubles, at worst, a new and bottomless well of misery. But he knew there was no point.

She picked up her coat, manoeuvring her arms into the sleeves as though moving underwater, deflecting his attempt to help her with a single shake of the head.

‘So what are you up to tonight? Hot date?’ he asked, joshing her.

‘Yeah, kind of.’

‘Blind date, maybe?’

‘You could call it that.’

It would be the first time Kershaw had seen Ben since getting out of hospital – back in the real world. Maybe the only chance of salvaging their relationship would be to find some way of starting from scratch. But she wasn’t holding out much hope.

Janusz watched through the window as she walked out of view, feeling suddenly and unaccountably despondent at the thought of not seeing her, at least until the Poland trip. What was it about the girl that got to him?

A phrase his
Babcia
used to say rang out in his head: she was
‘like a stone in his shoe’
.

Epilogue

Around ten days later, Janusz was in the
Polski sklep
on Highbury Corner, stocking up on dill cucumbers and rye flour, when his phone rang.

Seeing ‘
Number Unavailable’
on the screen he almost pressed ‘
Ignore’
– he’d been suffering an onslaught of calls lately from Indian guys calling themselves ‘Josh’ and ‘Barry’, imploring him to switch energy providers. But something told him to take the call.

‘Hello, Janusz.’ A voice familiar in its honeyed huskiness, the grumble of traffic in the background.

Kurwa mac
!
He stood stock-still in the middle of the aisle.

‘I called because I wanted to say sorry, for all the trouble I caused you … and your friends.’

‘
Trouble?!
’ His voice incredulous at the scale of her understatement.

‘Yes. And I wanted you to know that I honestly liked you –
still
like you. It wasn’t just … business, you know?’

The hint of flirtatiousness in Varenka’s voice enraged him, but it occurred to him that if he could keep her talking, maybe the cops could use the signal to find out where she’d been calling from. No sooner had the thought occurred to him than there came a sound in the background, a distant squealing caused by some sort of metallic friction. A train?
Nie.
But something naggingly familiar.

‘How is the girl policeman?’ she asked.

‘She’ll live,’ he said. ‘But she’ll never be the same again.’

Varenka sighed. ‘Believe me, that was the last thing I wanted to happen. But she was snooping around … and I had to leave.’

‘And now you and your new boyfriend are having a nice time spending Romescu’s money.’

A pause.

‘I am single again, actually,’ she said. He could almost see her drily amused expression across the ether.

So the tattooed driver had been dumped – or disposed of – having performed his function as her getaway driver.

‘It’s quite a skill you have, your ability to use people,’ he said, finding himself unable to say her name. ‘You get Romescu to bring you over from Ukraine, then, once he’s paid your hospital bills, outlived his usefulness, you murder him and move on.’

‘All my life, people – or should I say – men, have used
me,’
she said, bitterness curdling her voice. ‘From when I was twelve years old. Can you even imagine what that is like? Your mama probably bought you a bunny rabbit for your twelfth birthday. Mine demonstrated how to use a condom on a client.’

‘Lots of people have terrible childhoods. They don’t all turn into knife-wielding maniacs,’ growled Janusz.

‘What would you know about it? With your nice middle-class upbringing, your university education, your wife and son. People like me? We do whatever we have to do to survive.’

The words
‘wife and son’
jumped out at Janusz. How did she know about Marta and Bobek? Just as Romescu had … Was it Varenka
who’d done the digging to discover their address?

He heard the high-pitched noise in the background again, and this time it clicked: it was the sound of
a tram
, metal wheels squealing as it rounded a bend in the track. He felt like someone had tipped a glass of ice water down his back.
Was she in Poland? In
Lublin
?
Mother of God!
Don’t let this
psychol
be anywhere near Marta and the boy!

‘I didn’t protect the one who needed my protection the most.’ She spoke precisely, meaningfully. ‘I have to spend the rest of my life paying for that.’

Was she taunting him, saying he should be in Poland to protect Bobek?

‘Does everyone else have to pay for your failure, whether they’re innocent or guilty?’ he asked, desperation roughening his voice.

She breathed a heartfelt sigh of the sort an actress might learn at the Hollywood school of heartfelt sighs.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said suddenly. Her voice had quickened, as though with suppressed excitement. ‘I’ve just seen the person I’m meeting.’

‘Who’s that then?’ asked Janusz, dreading her reply.

‘An old friend who’s getting out of prison today.’

Realising where she was, he felt the tension flood out of his body.

‘Goodbye, Janusz,’ she said. ‘I have a feeling you don’t know it, but you are the luckiest man alive.’

As he hung up he realised that about that, at least, she was right.

Also by Anya Lipska

Where the Devil Can’t Go (A Kiszka & Kershaw Mystery)

The Friday Project

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This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd 2014

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Anya Lipska asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007524402

Version: [2014-02-25]

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