Where the Devil Can't Go (11 page)

“The tox report backs it up though, Sarge,” said Kershaw, keeping her voice nice and low. He had once announced to the whole office that women’s voices were on the same frequency as the sound of nails scraped down a blackboard.
Scientific fact,
he said.

Streaky just grunted. “So you’ve got an OD with this stuff, wassitcalled…
PMT
…” – no fucking way was she taking
that
bait – “but even assuming you had a nice juicy lead to the lowlife who supplied the drugs, what’s your possible charge?”

Keeping her voice nice and steady, Kershaw said: “Well, Sarge, it could be manslaughter…”

Streaky whistled: “
Manslaughter.
We are thinking big, aren’t we?”

“Supplying a class-A drug to someone which ends up killing them is surely a pretty clear-cut case, Sarge.” As soon as the words left her mouth she realised how up herself they made her sound.

Streaky leaned back in his swivel chair and put his arms behind his head.

“Ah yes,” he said, “I remember my early days as a dewy-eyed young Detective Constable…”

Here we go, she thought.

“It was all so simple. Wielding the warrant card of truth and the truncheon of justice, I would catch all the nasty villains fair and square, put them in the dock, and Rumpole of the Bailey would make sure they went away for a nice long stretch. End of.”

She resisted the urge to remind him that actually, Rumpole had been on the dark side, aka defence counsel.

“Then I woke up,” he yawned, “and found myself back in CID.” He leaned forward and waved the PM report under her nose. “Even if you
did
find the dealer – which you won’t – and you
prove
he supplied the gear – which you can’t – I can assure you that our esteemed colleagues at CPS will trot out 101 cast-iron reasons why it is nigh-on impossible to get a manslaughter conviction in cases of OD. The main one being it’s ‘too difficult to establish a chain of fucking causality’, if memory serves.”

He scooted the report into his pending tray with a flourish.

“I’ll tell those long-haired tossers in Drug Squad about it. They might be interested if there are some killer Smarties doing the rounds. You carry on trying to trace the floater, just don’t spend all your time on it.”

“Yes, Sarge.” She hesitated, “But I still think that whoever gave the female the PMA – maybe her boyfriend, this guy Pawel – panicked and dumped her in the river after she OD-ed. I mean why else would she be starkers?”

She tensed up, half-expecting him to go ballistic at that; instead, he sighed, and picking up the report again with exaggerated patience, flicked through to the page he was looking for.

“The levels of PMA found in the blood may have caused hallucinations”
– he shot her a meaningful look – “…
the subject’s core temperature would have risen rapidly, causing extreme discomfort …PMA overdose victims often try to cool off by removing clothing…”
another look,
“wrapping themselves in wet towels and taking cold showers…”
he slapped the report shut, looked up at her, “Or maybe,
detective,
seeing as they are off their tits, by jumping in the fucking river!”

By now, Streaky’s chin had gone the colour of raw steak, a bad sign, so she decided not to push her luck. He picked another bit of paper out of his tray and shoved it at her.

“Here you go, Ms Marple, the perfect case for a detective with a special interest in pharmaceuticals – a suspected cannabis factory in Leyton. Enjoy!”

Three hours later, Kershaw was shivering in her car, outside the dope factory, with the engine running in a desperate bid to warm up, smoking a fag and trying to remember why she ever joined the cops.

Thank God that ponytailed, earring-wearing careers teacher from Poplar High School couldn’t see her now. When she’d announced, aged sixteen, that she wanted to be a detective, he’d barely been able to hide his disapproval. He clearly had no time for the police, but could hardly say so. Instead, he adopted a caring face, and gave her a lecture on how ‘challenging’ she’d find police culture as a woman. She’d responded: “But Sir, isn’t the only way to change sexist institutions from the inside?”

In truth, the police service hadn’t been her first career choice. As a kid, when her friends came to play, she’d inveigle them into staging imaginary court cases with the kitchen of the flat standing in for the Old Bailey. Turned on its side, the kitchen table made a convincing dock for the defendant, while the judge, wearing a red dressing gown and a tea towel for a wig, oversaw proceedings from the worktop. But the real star of the show was Natalie, who, striding about in her Nan’s best black velvet coat, conducted devastating cross-examinations and made impassioned speeches to the jury – aka Denzil, the family dog. As far as she could recall, she was always the prosecutor, never the defence. It wasn’t till she reached her teens that it dawned on her: the barristers in TV dramas always had names like Rupert or Jocasta, and talked like someone had wired their jaws together. The Met might be a man’s world, but at least coming from Canning Town didn’t stop you reaching the top.

The dope factory was in an ordinary terraced house in Markham Road, a quiet street, despite its closeness to Leyton’s scruffy and menacing main thoroughfare. Driving through, she had counted three lowlifes flaunting their gangsta dogs, vicious bundles of muscle, probable illegal breeds, trained to intimidate and attack. Obviously, she’d stopped to pull the owners over for a chat.
Yeah, right.

The report said that the young Chinese men who had rented number 49 for four or five months hadn’t aroused any suspicions among the neighbours. Kershaw suspected that in a nicer area, their comings and goings at all hours, never mind the blackout blinds and rivers of condensation running down the inside of the windows, might have got curtains twitching a lot sooner, but then round here, maybe you were grateful if the place next door wasn’t actually a full-on gangsta crack house. In the end, number 49 had only got busted by accident, when a fire broke out on the ground floor.

As she pulled up, the fire tender was just driving off, leaving the three-storey house still smoking, the glass in the ground-floor windows blackened, but otherwise intact. It looked like they’d caught the blaze early. Inside the stinking hallway, its elaborate cornice streaked with black, she picked her way around pools of sooty water, now regretting the decision to wear her favourite shoes. In the front room, once the cosy front parlour of some respectable Victorian family, she found a mini-rainforest of skunk plants, battered and sodden from the firemen’s hoses. Overhead, there hung festoons of wiring that had powered the industrial fluorescent strip lights; on the floor, a tangle of rubber tubing that presumably supplied the plants with water and the skunk-equivalent of Baby Bio.

“Hello, beautiful, come to see what real cops do for a change?”

Frowning, she turned round, to find a familiar face – Gary, an old buddy from her time at Romford Road nick a few years back.

“Gaz! How’s life on the frontline?”

Gary was a few years older than her – well into his thirties by now – and still a PC. He had been her minder when she had first gone on the beat as a probie, but they became proper mates after a memorable evening when they got called to a pub fight between football hoolies. West Ham had just thrashed old enemies Millwall at Upton Park, so it was the kind of ruck that could easily have become a riot. She and Gary could hardly nick them all: instead, they ID-ed the ringleaders and pulled them out, putting the lid on it without even getting their sticks out. Back at the station, Gary had told anyone who’d listen that Kershaw had thrown herself into the fray “just like a geezer”.

“All the other rooms like this?” she asked, after they’d done a bit of catching up.

“Yep. Third one this month,” said Gary, shaking his head. “You missed the best bit, though.”

Apparently, when he’d arrived on scene, he’d found a bunch of locals having an impromptu party outside the burning house.

“It was quite a sight – there was a boom box blaring, they were drinking beer, dancing around in the smoke, everyone getting off their face on the free
ganja
,” said Gary, shaking his head, grinning. “It was like Notting Hill fucking Carnival.”

Kershaw smiled but her eyes were uneasy. Gary was probably the least racist cop she’d ever met, but she hoped he watched himself in front of the Guvnors. That sort of chat could get you into big trouble these days.

“Down to us to do the clear-up, I suppose?” she asked.

“Got it in one, Detective,” he grinned.

Kershaw spent the next few hours cursing the Sarge for dumping this nightmare job in her lap. The cheeky slags who ran the factory had powered it for free, running a cable from the lamppost beside their garden wall, so she had to call out the Electricity Board to disconnect the power and make the place safe. She took half a dozen statements from the neighbours (total waste of time, of course, but she’d still have type them up) – and the worst job was still to come. Kershaw, Gary, and one probie would have to bag and label every single one of the 1000-plus plants and load them onto a lorry for the evidence store.

And it was all a load of old bollocks, anyway. It was only ever the ‘gardeners’ at the bottom of the dope pyramid, who got nicked – never the big fish.

As she sat in the car finishing her fag Gary came over and, leaning down to the open driver’s door, handed her a clear plastic parcel – a Met-issue protective suit and gloves. “Showtime,” he said, grinning.

“Sadist,” she muttered. Dropping her fag in the gutter, she ground it under her heel. Then the radio squawked into life.

“Go ahead, Charlie 1,” she said pressing the talk button.

“At the request of DS Bacon, please attend the Waveney Thameside Hotel, Wapping,” said the operator. “Report of a Sus X11. He will join you at the scene.”

Sus X11 was control room code for a suspicious death.
Game on
, thought Kershaw.

NINE

The engine of the Transit van shrieked as Oskar thrust it into second without any perceptible reduction in speed, and accelerated around a sharp bend. Janusz felt his right leg shoot out to slam on an imaginary brake – a movement that didn’t escape Oskar, of course: “It’s like driving a
babcia
to church!” he chuckled. They screeched to a halt at a red light, and Oskar reached behind him, producing a six-pack of
Tyskie
, and popped the ring-pull on one with a hiss. “Have a beer, mate, maybe it will help you grow a bigger pair of
jaja
!”

“Mother of God, Oskar! We can’t turn up smelling of beer – I want the girl to
trust
us.”

Waving away the objection, Oskar took a heroic swallow.

“A man is not a cactus, he has to drink. Anyway,” he added, pulling a tube from his overall pocket with a flourish, “I bought a packet of minty sweets.” He tapped his forehead, “Always thinking one step ahead, Janek, always one step ahead.”

The two mates were in one of Oskar’s rust-buckets, heading northeast on the A12, bound for Adamski and Weronika’s address deep in the Essex countryside. Janusz had never heard of Willowbridge, hadn’t even realised how far out of town it was till he’d looked at a map.

He tried to suppress the niggle of guilt he was feeling for not calling Pani Tosik with the news. The old girl had been emphatic that all she wanted was for him to find out Weronika’s address so that she could forward her poor, frantic Mama’s letter. But the more he learned about this lowlife Pawel Adamski, the more he felt some responsibility for the girl. OK, he couldn’t force her to come back, but he could give her some fatherly advice, and maybe she really was having second thoughts by now.

So he had talked Oskar – who was on night shifts – into giving him a lift, partly to avoid a marathon journey by train and taxi, but also because he might need reinforcements. Adamski was bound to cut up rough if Weronika did agree to come back to London, and women loved Oskar. He could put the girl at ease, get her into the van while Janusz had a chat with Adamski.

There was the blast of a horn from the car behind them – the lights had changed. They lurched forward, Oskar steering with his left hand so he could use the right to make flamboyant gestures of abuse in the rear-view mirror. Janusz rolled his eyes. At this rate, they’d be lucky to reach Willowbridge without getting shot by some Essex gangster.

“
After one hundred metres, turn left
,” said a woman’s voice from the box on the dashboard.

“No fucking way should we be going left!” complained Oskar. “This satnav is dogshit! I’ll kill that gypsy who sold it me.”

“Maybe you just don’t like a woman telling you what to do,” said Janusz, grinning. He’d begun the day in melancholic mood, returning over and over again to the row with Kasia, wondering if the affair really was finished. He kept visualising her: the aquiline nose and half-smile, that air of beguiling inscrutability. But ten minutes in Oskar’s company had pushed her out of his thoughts, made him feel alive again. Who knew what women wanted – you could waste a lifetime trying to work it out.

“Anyway,” said Oskar. “You said you had a photo of this chick we’re looking for?” He waggled his bushy eyebrows like a pantomime villain.

Janusz dug out the shot of Weronika in her fur coat that Pani Tosik had given him.

“
Ale laska
!” Oskar exclaimed, “I’d like to rattle her bones.”

Five minutes later, they tore past a sign that said they were entering Willowbridge, and Janusz managed to persuade Oskar to slow down. The place had a thatched pub, a duck pond, and half-timbered cottages clustered round a green. OK, the pub did have a huge awning advertising Sky football, but that aside, it was the kind of English village he recognised from black and white movies shown in Poland when he was young. Janusz was half-expecting to find a grotty block of flats tucked around a corner, but instead, Adamski’s address turned out to be a substantial cottage with a pretty garden bordered by a yew hedge and an oak porch silvered grey by the centuries. As they pulled up a discreet distance away, Oskar whistled, rubbing his fingers together. “Your boy is loaded, huh?”