Death Can’t Take a Joke (9 page)

Reaching inside his overalls, he pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to the skinny guy on reception, who, in a couple of years’ time, might be old enough to start shaving.

‘Tower Management. Leaking air-conditioning unit in apartment 117,’ he said. How had he ever managed to do his job in the days before the internet, he wondered. Back then, even discovering the name of the management company would have taken hours of phone bashing, and as for photoshopping its logo into a fictional work docket? The idea would have been the stuff of science fiction.

‘I’m really sorry.’ The guy handed the document back to him with an uncertain shrug.

Don’t tell me they’ve changed companies or something
, thought Janusz.

‘The concierge is off sick,’ he went on. ‘I’m just a temp from the agency, filling in.’

Alleluja!

Scowling, Janusz looked at his watch. ‘Well, I’ve got four more jobs after this one so I haven’t got time to muck around
.’

‘I’ll see if the residents are at home.’ The kid punched out a number on the phone.

With every passing second that the phone went unanswered, Janusz allowed himself to relax a little. He made a production of shifting his half-empty toolbox from one hand to the other, as though it weighed a ton.

Finally, the kid hung up. ‘They’re not in,’ he admitted, gazing up at Janusz like a baby rabbit encountering a bear.

‘Look, here’s the drill,’ sighed Janusz. ‘You take me up to 117 and let me in, I do the job, you sign the docket afterwards to say it’s done.’

The kid was already shaking his head. ‘I can’t. The agency told me I mustn’t leave reception under any circumstances.’

Janusz checked his watch again and raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to explain that to the people in 117.’ He started to walk away. ‘Tell them to phone the office to rebook an engineer.’

He hadn’t even reached the door when the kid called him back. ‘What about if I give you the master key and you go up on your own?’

Janusz felt a pang of guilt at the kid’s anxious expression. ‘I don’t know … I’d like to help you out, but strictly speaking, it’s against company regulations.’

‘Who would know, if neither of us says anything?’

Janusz took a moment to examine the toe of his workboot. ‘Go on then,’ he said, finally. ‘But keep it to yourself, or we can both kiss goodbye to our jobs.’

Barbu Romescu’s apartment was located on the 11th floor and his front door, like all the rest, was fitted with a state-of-the-art electronic lock. Janusz slipped the master card into the slot. A green light winked at him. As he pushed the door open, he grinned to himself. The first rule of security: humans were always the weakest link.

When he saw the apartment’s open plan living area, Janusz gave a low whistle. Whatever the nature of Romescu’s mysterious ‘business interests’, they apparently paid very handsome returns. Light coming through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows flooded the enormous room, bouncing off the highly polished wooden floor, some sort of golden-coloured hardwood. To his right stood a gleaming, minimalist kitchen. He looked it over with an ex-builder’s eye, noting the way in which the designer, not satisfied with hiding every appliance from view, had even eliminated door handles from the black acrylic units.

Testing how they worked – the merest touch on the surface caused it to swing open silently – Janusz chanced upon the fridge. He surveyed its contents with an expression of mystified disgust. Having worked alongside Romanians on building sites he knew they could put away pork, dumplings and a good feed of beer with as much gusto as any God-fearing Pole, yet all Romescu had in his fridge was vegan yoghurt, a tray of alfalfa sprouts, a carton of egg white and some goji juice.

Padding around the living area, Janusz had to admit that it wasn’t half bad for a dodgy Romanian ‘businessman’. The furniture looked expensive yet elegant, and the artworks on the walls were the kind you might find in an upmarket yoga studio. The largest, at around three metres across, was a rather good hyperrealist painting of a butterfly in flight, sunlight making its pale blue wings translucent.

A staircase with wooden treads that seemed to hang in mid-air took Janusz to an upper level, where a corridor lined with more works of art led to the master bedroom, which was almost as big as the living area. He raised an eyebrow at the twin beds before checking out the en-suite bathroom. To one side of the sink stood an electric razor and a black bottle of aftershave; to the other, half a dozen bottles of the lotions and potions that women set such store by. Did they belong to Varenka? And whether they belonged to her, or some other girl, where did she keep her clothes? Back in the bedroom, Janusz turned his attention to the room’s longest wall, which looked to be panelled in a satin-smooth dark wood. But when he touched one of the panels, close by a seam, it opened smoothly, no doubt operated by the same hidden mechanism used in the kitchen. Inside he found a solid-looking safe with an old-style rotary dial – Romescu clearly preferred the certainty of old technology to the electronic versions on sale. Janusz rapped it with his knuckles: from the dull sound the steel made he calculated it to be at least eight mil thick. He knew of only two things that could break that open – a cutting torch, or a half-centimetre of Semtex.

Moving to a floor-to-ceiling panel at the end of the wall, he found it swung open at his touch to reveal some sort of darkened room.

Open Sesame!
he muttered, stepping into the gloom. A light sprung to life, revealing a dressing room: stood to his left, a long rail in a recess packed with outfits, many shrouded in dry cleaner’s plastic; to his right, a wall full of small, purpose-built drawers, each holding a pair of shoes. He flipped through the clothes on the rail: at one end, expensive looking suits and jackets – Romescu appeared to favour Hugo Boss, whoever he was – and at the other, a whole bunch of ladies’ outfits. They were high-end but understated – the kind of thing Varenka had been wearing when he first saw her. At the room’s far end stood a worktable with a fancy-looking sewing machine. He found it amusing, touching even, that a girl with such expensive clothes should prefer to do her own alterations.

Under the worktable stood a compact suitcase, its dimensions designed to meet the hold baggage restrictions that budget airlines enforced with Stalinist zeal. Janusz pulled it out and unzipped it. Empty. Turning it over he found the remains of one of those green and white sticky labels used to tell baggage handlers the destination airport. It bore the letters PCK, which struck him as vaguely familiar. As he replaced the suitcase under the worktable, he heard something – and froze. The soft clunk of the apartment’s front door closing.

Kurwa mac
!
Was it Romescu, home early from his Walthamstow meeting? He had no illusions about how the Romanian would treat an intruder – whatever macrobiotic fucking diet he was on. There was no time to close the door, even if he could work out how to operate the mechanism from the inside. Moving as swiftly and smoothly as his bulky frame would allow, he slipped between a long black coat and a floor-length red dress, praying that they were long enough to hide his feet and legs. There was barely enough room for him at the rear of the recess: even with his back pressed right against the wall he could feel the sinister kiss of the laundry plastic against his face.

Keeping his breathing quiet and shallow, Janusz closed his eyes and focused every circuit of his brain on interpreting any sound coming from the living area. Relieved not to hear voices, he made out only a faint ‘tap tap’ sound.
High heels!
The sound of a lone woman crossing a wooden floor. But even as he surfed the wave of relief, the tapping grew closer, before disappearing altogether.
She must have reached the carpet of the bedroom
. Then, from only metres away, he heard her murmur something, a note of perplexity in her voice: she’d seen the open door to the dressing room. An unbearable pause, followed by a tiny current of air across his sweat-slicked forehead as she came in. He couldn’t see anything, but he could smell her scent, a fresh lemony fragrance that summoned a memory of Varenka’s drily humorous gaze.

He heard her tut softly to herself and then the sound of drawers opening and closing. The laundry plastic had adhered itself to his upper lip, filling him with an almost unbearable urge to pull it away. After what seemed like an age, he sensed her leaving the dressing room. He held his breath. The tap-tap of her heels signalled her reaching the living room, the sound receding, and then came the discreet clunk of the front door closing. He tore the hateful plastic from his face and took a couple of giant gulps of air. Parting the hanging clothes he saw a pair of shoes on the floor, the heel of one snapped in half. She’d obviously had a mishap and come back to change her shoes.

Turning sideways, he tried to slide out between the hanging clothes, but the red dress slithered free of its hanger and cascaded to the floor. He crouched, gathering up the slippery fabric in one fist, and was just getting to his feet when his gaze snagged on something. The wardrobe recess was lined with low-profile skirting board. Nothing unusual about that, except that close to the corner, a section maybe twenty centimetres long appeared to have been inserted as an afterthought. It was the kind of thing you might see in a cowboy conversion, but not in an upscale Docklands apartment.

Pulling out his penknife, he slipped the blade into one end of the suspicious section. It came out with ease. Behind it, set snugly in a space that had been roughly hacked out of the plaster, was a shallow, rectangular tin box. Elated at his find, Janusz took it into the bedroom, and sat on the bed to examine it properly. It was a child’s pencil case, decorated with sugary illustrations of pink horses with flowing white manes and huge eyelashes, the kind of thing that little girls liked – until they moved on to boy bands. Inside, he found a few papers tied with a red velvet ribbon, a bundle of cash – ten bank-fresh hundred-dollar bills – and a child-sized ring, two intertwined hearts on a cheap-looking band of chrome, no doubt a childhood memento.

Untying the ribbon, he found a Ukrainian driving licence in the name of Varenka Kalina. He knew enough Ukrainian to glean that she had lived in Kharkov, the country’s second largest city, and from her surname it was clear she belonged to the country’s Polish-Catholic minority. From her date of birth she must be twenty-six now, but the Varenka captured in the photo was much younger and far less polished, wearing inexpertly applied eyeshadow and spidery fake lashes, her face framed with bottle-blonde hair. The licence recorded her occupation, no doubt euphemistically, as ‘exotic dancer’.

Janusz remembered reading that Kharkov had been an important command centre for the Soviet military, which meant that its inhabitants had suffered worse than most in the dramatic economic meltdown that followed the collapse of communism. Normal society evaporated: there were frequent power cuts, the streets were piled head-high with rubbish, and thousands ended up destitute and homeless,
wodka
providing the only reliable currency – and the only way to dull the hunger and misery.

This was the world that Varenka had grown up in, Janusz realised, and if she came from a family without money or connections, prostitution would have been her only career option. He gazed at her photo: she’d been barely seventeen when it was taken and the world-weary expression she was aiming for couldn’t quite conceal the spark of youthful hope in her eyes.

Another photograph, creased and faded by time, suggested happier days. The camera had captured two children as they peered into a rock pool, a broad white Baltic beach in the background. The older child, a sweet-faced boy aged eight or nine was using a stick to point something out to a fair-haired toddler with eyes like a china doll. The little girl had one chubby hand on her brother’s forearm to steady herself, and a look of uncomplicated wonder on her face: an expression that Janusz could remember seeing on his son Bobek’s face at the same age. The bond between the two children was as clear as the sun. So if the little girl was Varenka, as seemed likely, then where was her brother – and why had he not looked after his little sister, found some way to save her from becoming a whore?

The last item was a mystery: a bright pink book of matches bearing the name ‘
бар
метелик
’.
‘
бар’
meant bar – and Varenka had clearly kept the matchbook for what was scrawled on the inside cover: ‘
GRA – Mr Churchill, London W1’
. He puzzled over it for a few seconds but could make no sense either of the acronym, or the name and hopelessly inadequate address. Why had she preserved this bar room scribble?

He started putting Varenka’s stuff back in the tin, taking care to leave it the way he’d found it. The hidden driving licence, the thousand dollars and childhood snap – they felt like an escape pack, or a survival kit: the basics Varenka might need should she decide to leave Romescu. That wouldn’t be as easy as it sounded. Not only did she live under the threat of violence, but since Ukraine wasn’t in the EU, she was almost certainly here illegally. Janusz’s suspicions were beginning to take shape: was Romescu involved in trafficking girls from the former Soviet Union? Was this the business he and his Turkish chum met to discuss? It certainly sounded feasible, but one big unanswered question remained: what in God’s name could connect Jim to such a
straszny
business?

Checking his watch, Janusz decided he should probably make tracks – the last thing he needed was for the jittery kid on reception to lose his bottle and call the agency to report the engineer in room 117. At the door he paused, and heading back to the kitchen area, opened the fridge door and used his phone to photograph its contents. Without documentary evidence, Oskar would never believe him.

While Janusz was rooting around in Romescu’s apartment, just a couple of hundred yards away, in the Canary Wharf Tower, DC Kershaw was still interviewing what felt like a never-ending list of security guards.