Where the Devil Can't Go (20 page)

At the crowd’s back stood the famous Gdansk Post Office, its windows boarded up. Still the visored police pushed them back. Above the screams and curses and the clattering of horses’ hooves, the sound he would never forget – the obscene thump thump of lead-filled rubber truncheons striking human flesh.

He sucked in a breath, remembering the sensation of being crushed: the weight of humanity like a massive door closing inexorably on his chest.

He’d still got Iza’s hand in a tight grip but he couldn’t always see her, she was so tiny and so far beneath him in that crush. He felt a wave of relief when he caught sight of her. Her face, jammed sideways against a man’s chest, was papery-white, set, every ounce of will bent on getting air into her compacted lungs.

“I shouted to her ‘I’ll get you out!’” he told Kasia. “But really, I wasn’t too sure about getting either of us out by then.”

His stomach had been jumping with fear. Taller than anyone else in the heaving mob, he had at least been able to turn his head, and realised they were only a couple of metres from a wide ledge, shoulder-height, behind them on the Post Office facade. A scream rang out as another surge of the human tide felled two, three people. Their heads disappeared beneath the surface, which closed above them in an instant. He tightened his grip on Iza’s gloved hand and flexing the big muscles in his legs started to carve a path through the wall of flesh toward the ledge. He trod on something soft, felt bone snap beneath his boots. As he forced his way on, a girl in a red wool hat sank beneath his elbow without a sound.

With a last heave he managed to drag Iza to the ledge, and used it to brace himself against the press. With no breath left for words of reassurance, he sent her a look that said he would get them up there but first he’d have to let go of her hand for a moment. Panting, he levered himself up and drew his legs up behind him. Grasping a window bar to brace himself with one hand he reached down with the other and gripped Iza’s hand. Between the freckles her face had a bluish tinge now like skimmed milk, but she rested her gaze on him and smiled, and his heart opened.

He started to pull her upwards, like a stubborn cork from a bottle. Her shoulders emerged above the wedged morass of people, but then the crowd surged again. He saw something go out of her face at that and felt her grip on his hand loosen. He made a desperate grab for her wrists. But as he did so, her section of crowd lurched sideways, then started to topple. Half a dozen went down as one, dragging her from his grasp.

Some of his mates found him, later, amid the wreckage of the demo, as paramedics tended to the injured and checked bodies for signs of life.

He was slumped against the wall under the ledge, among torn banners, hats, shoes – shell-shocked and mute, but uninjured, and still clutching one of Iza’s gloves.

He found the lemon tea still in his curled fist, tepid now, and Kasia’s shocked gaze locked on his face.

“They all thought it strange that I never asked what happened to her,” he shrugged, “as if I needed to.”

“And Marta?” asked Kasia after a moment.

“She was Iza’s best friend. We clung together to survive, I suppose. The wedding was six weeks later. Madness.”

Just then, Kasia’s boss, Ray returned.

“What’s all this then, a Polish tea party?” he said, in his flat London accent, seemingly oblivious to the sombre moment he was interrupting. He grinned in that unpleasant way he had, as though enjoying a private joke at someone else’s expense. “You keeping my staff from their duties, Janek?”

Janusz hated the over-familiar way Ray used the diminutive of his name, but he could hardly pull him up on it – not because he was a good customer for the booze, but because he was Kasia’s boss. The truth was, Janusz didn’t like Ray. He told himself it was because he couldn’t respect any man who lived off women, but now and again it occurred to him that maybe his dislike was rooted in the fact that it was Ray who had talked Kasia into showing strange men her
pizda
for money.

Kasia rose from her bar stool with dignity and spoke to Ray in English: “I already finish stock take, call the Rentokil for get rid of the mice, and throw out one drunk,” she said. “Tell me other things you like me to do, and I do it.” With that she clip-clopped in her high heels out the back, Janusz gazing after her in admiration.

Grinning, Ray took Kasia’s stool at the bar, slinging his leather jacket over the seatback. “Did you two have a falling-out?” he said, nodding at Janusz’s injured face. “I’ve always thought that one would have a good right hook on her.” Janusz shot him a look, but deciding he was just taking the piss, let it ride.

“I had a crash in a cab,” he said, in a voice that discouraged further enquiry, and drained the dregs of his cold tea.

Ray started cleaning his fingernails with a business card. “By the way,” he said. “You wouldn’t know anything about some bloke hanging around, scaring off the punters, would you?”

Janusz raised his eyebrows with polite interest. “No, why?” he asked, meeting Ray’s penetrating gaze.

“I had some bloke’s lawyer on the phone yesterday. Turns out some idiot has been going round telling people that we film them in the booths – y’know, bashing the bishop,” he chuckled, “and put it on fucking YouTube or YouWank or something.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off Janusz, who started laughing, too.

“You’re kidding!” said Janusz, shaking his head. “London is full of crazy people.”

Ray seemed to accept Janusz’s performance. “Yeah, well, business is already shit without losing any more punters,” he said. “Especially since I hear I might be losing Kasia.” He raised a questioning eyebrow at Janusz, who frowned.

“I thought you’d know all about it,” he said. “I heard her on the phone yesterday to that girlfriend of hers in Poland – you know, the one with the funny name...”

“Basia?” offered Janusz: the diminutive of Barbara always amused Londoners.

“Yeah,
Basher
,” said Ray, shaking his head at the hilariousness of foreign names. “So I’m down in the cellar putting a new barrel on – you can hear everything down there – and from what I can make out, they’re chattering away about setting up a
nail bar
. In Warsaw, believe it or not.”

Janusz denied any knowledge of the plan, but as the news sank in he felt a horrible sense of inevitability. He recalled Kasia enthusing, a few weeks back, about Basia’s
fantastik
business plan to set up some beauty clinic in the capital. Several big multinationals, banks and so on, had relocated there, and it seemed the business district was awash with well-off women.

Kasia had never hinted that she might be part of the venture, but he knew that
chuj
Steve had been trying to persuade her that they should leave London and start afresh in Poland, where it was cheaper to set up a business. Typical of Steve that the business in question would be one in which his wife did all the graft.

Having dropped his bombshell, Ray disappeared into the office to do some paperwork and Janusz called out a goodbye to Kasia. She came out and they kissed farewell in the Polish way. “I’m going to be away for a few days on business,” Janusz told her, examining the toe of one boot. “Maybe I will see you when I come back?”

She hesitated, then inclined her head and smiled that crooked half-smile of hers. “Of course. We are friends, no?” she said, which only deepened his gloom. He must have looked depressed, because she leaned close to him. “Listen, Janek, maybe you will tell me it is none of my business, but... Iza’s death, I think maybe you still need to forgive yourself for what happened,” she paused and gazed into his eyes. “Maybe she just didn’t have the will to live.”

Great, he thought, she was off to Poland with her worthless husband, but at least he got some free psychoanalysis as a parting gift.

He pounded the pavement, head down, his whole body aching and his head befuddled by the day’s revelations. As for the last hour, he had no clue what made him spill his guts to Kasia about Iza, the demo, all that ancient history. Maybe to make her see that staying with Steve was a criminal waste of her life.

In his heart of hearts, though, he knew she was
uparty –
stubborn. No, more than stubborn, she was obdurate. There was nothing in Polish to match the stony finality of the English word.

FOURTEEN

Since the Waveney Thameside Hotel’s CCTV cameras had clearly been rigged by a total cretin, Kershaw was going to have to rely on the observational powers of the desk clerk who had been on duty the night of Justyna Kozlowska’s death.

His name was Alex Hurley, a young, smartish guy, living in a new, smartish studio flat on the outskirts of Stratford – and Kershaw took a dislike to him from the word go, though to tell the truth she was in a pretty foul mood after spending half an hour locked in the one-way system eating diesel fumes.

The place was the size of a postage stamp – hardly enough room to swing a hotel desk clerk, she thought – but it was stacked full of shiny appliances and ‘look at me’ gadgets. As he made coffee, using a proper Italian stainless steel machine, she said over the hiss of steam: “Nice place you’ve got: the Waveney pays its desk staff well, then?”

“Actually, I’m a management trainee, so I pull down a pretty good package,” he said with patently false modesty. “Andrew Treneman, the manager, reckons I’ll be running my own hotel in a few years.” Typical corporate ladder climber, she thought, smiling encouragement at him. As he topped their coffee with foamed milk, she let her eyes drift to a pile of paperwork on the polished stone kitchen worktop. The headings of one, two, three different credit card statements were visible.
Not
that
good a package then, Boy Wonder
, she thought.

As they drank their coffees on his cow-sized leather sofa, he was all helpful smiles and body language, examining the copy of the credit card slip used to pay for the room with a studious frown. But in answer to all her questions about the man in the hat – “Would you describe him as tall?” “Well-dressed? Slim or well-built?” “Did he have an East European accent?” – he just shook his head.

“I’m really sorry, officer, I just don’t remember him at all,” he said, opening up his hands in that ‘nothing to hide’ gesture that always made her suspicious. Even when she got out the CCTV footage she’d had transferred onto DVD and played him the section that showed the guy checking in – and Alex, clear as day, chatting and grinning away on the other side of the desk – he
still
shook his head and gurned blankly.

“What about these two?” she tried, rewinding the DVD to the American couple. On his huge TV screen their backsides looked like twin baby hippos wrapped in tartan.

He grinned the superior grin of the young and toned, making her dislike him even more, and said, in a comedy American accent: “
Mr and Mrs Waldenheim the Third, from
Plastic, Colorado
!” Then, realising his feat of memory had just pissed off Kershaw even more, he shrugged and said, “Unusual names - easier to remember, I suppose.”

Kershaw pressed fast forward till she reached the girl in the shoulderless dress, the sex worker groping her male companion so enthusiastically she was practically giving him an intimate body search. “Remember this pair?”

Alex creased his forehead in concentration, then shook his head. “Um, no not really.”

“How many of your guests at the Waveney are there to have sex with prostitutes would you say?” she asked. “Just a rough estimate.”

Apparently unfazed by the question, he showed her his palms again.

“The hotel has a very strict policy preventing sex workers touting for business in the public areas, but if a couple arrive and check in together, there’s really no way of knowing if it’s a...professional arrangement.”

He looked well pleased at this little sample of hotel-management-speak bollocks, but it did nothing to allay Kershaw’s suspicions. She had a hunch that, alongside the usual rich tourists and business-wallahs, the hotel was doing a roaring trade among working girls and their clients. A suspicious death on the premises was one thing, but if it turned out Justyna was a sex worker who got murdered on the job then it could put a nasty dent in the hotel’s upmarket reputation. Maybe Alex really did have early onset dementia, or maybe the word had gone out to the hotel’s staff: keep
schtum
in the hope the cops get bored and go away.

When she got back to the office, Kershaw had to run to catch the phone ringing on her desk.

“You sound a little out of breath, Detective Constable,” came a plummy voice. “Chasing down ne’er-do-wells, I hope?”

“Oh, hi Dr Waterhouse. Anything for me on Justyna Kozlowska?”

The PM had taken place that morning, about the same time she’d been grilling Janusz Kiszka. She held her breath, on tenterhooks for his response, but Waterhouse was in playful mood.

“May I congratulate you on your Polish pronunciation, Detective. At this rate, we’ll have
paramethoxyamphetamine
tripping off your tongue in no time!”

She forced herself to join in Waterhouse’s peals of laughter, venting her feelings by pulling a crazed serial killer face down the phone.

“Did you find those... dots on her kidneys?” asked Kershaw.

“
Petechiae
? Yes, I did. And since I know how keen you are to get the results, I had a little word with the toxicologist,” he said. And strictly
off
the record, his initial tests
do
suggest the presence of PMA in the young lady’s bloodstream.”

“What about any signs that she’d been tied up, like I said in the email?”

“Nothing conclusive, I’m afraid, Detective. And there were no vaginal tears, bruising or abrasions to suggest she was anything other than a
willing
partner in the encounter.”

Yeah, thought Kershaw – with the shed load of drugs and booze Kozlowski had on board, consent became a somewhat fluid concept. Waterhouse hadn’t found any semen on the body either, so the man in the hat must have used a condom. But the Doc saved his best bit of news till last.