Where the Devil Can't Go (24 page)

Kershaw sat on the bed. The only sound was the intermittent buzz of a fly bashing against the window. Either she was being paranoid or the room was impersonal to the point of creepiness. No sign of the journal Timothy had mentioned, no contraceptives, none of the
clutter
of modern life – let alone any illegal drugs.

Who are you, Elzbieta?

Her gaze wandered to the wall facing the foot of the bed and she jumped, hand flying to her mouth. Lit by the sullen glow of the low energy bulb was a lurid medieval picture of Jesus, parting his robes with a coy gesture to reveal a heart, bleeding and entwined with thorns. She pushed away a sudden, vivid memory of Elzbieta’s post mortem, her chest cracked open like an animal carcass.

Until now, she’d always imagined her floater dying in a hotel, like Justyna. But now the total absence of any personal effects in her room was making the hair stand up on her arms. Someone had cleared this place to remove anything incriminating, she could feel it in her bones. And the river couldn’t be more than a five, ten minute drive away.

Three strides took her to the curtained window. A pull cord opened the heavy curtains with a deep swoosh and light surged into the room. For a split second the in-rush of daylight whited everything out. Kershaw blinked four or five times – and not just because of the glare. Elzbieta Wronska’s room wasn’t a short drive from the Thames: it was as close to the river as you could get without actually having to do backstroke.

Feeling a cold excitement, and with her heartbeat going
boo-boof boo-boof
in her ear, she opened the balcony door, taking care not to smudge any prints, and stepped out onto the tiny overhang. As a lone gull keened overhead, Kershaw hefted an imaginary body from her shoulder onto the rail, then pitched it into the dark water ten metres below.

SIXTEEN

The waters of the North Sea roiled and foamed along the ferry’s side, the light from a platinum moon tumbling on the choppy black swell. Janusz flicked his spent cigar into the waves and buttoned his trench coat against the wind. Where the fuck was Oskar? He’d gone to the bar over half an hour ago to buy a Coke, just so they’d have some plastic glasses for the beers awaiting them back in the van. He wondered if he’d got into any bother. Earlier, they’d noticed knots of hard-eyed Englishmen on board, presumably on their way to the Brondby vs Liverpool game in Copenhagen. They looked like they’d be in the market for a ruck at some point, but surely not before they’d put away another seven or eight pints.

Just then, the door from the bar to the deck area opened, releasing a blast of raucous noise from the bar, and Oskar’s barrel-shaped outline appeared in the lit doorway. He held the door open with one foot and then, moving carefully so as not to drop the armfuls of stuff he was carrying, he made his way, chinking, over to where Janusz stood at the rail. He had a Liverpool scarf wound round his throat and he was humming a song, though it wasn’t till he got closer, that Janusz recognised it as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.

“Oskar, what the hell have you been up to?” said Janusz as he rescued a bottle of premium vodka from under his mate’s right arm and a giant Toblerone wedged beneath his chin. “I thought you were just getting some glasses?”

Oskar raised an eyebrow and tried to look mysterious: “Maybe you aren’t the only smartass around here.” As Janusz gave a dismissive snort, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and drew out a wad of notes with a flourish.

“
Five hundred quid
jackpot!” he crowed, waving the notes under his mate’s nose and doing a little jig of triumph. “You should have seen it, Janek! I had three bars and then I got a lucky nudge. There were so many tokens the barman had to get the purser down to change it all into cash!”

Janusz picked up one end of the red and white scarf. “And this? I thought you supported West Ham.”

Oskar gave a sheepish shrug. “One of the Scousers gave it to me after I bought the lads a round.”

“Yeah? I bet that put a hole in your winnings,” growled Janusz.

“Ah what the fuck, it was free money!” Oskar hopped from foot to foot. “Anyway this wind is blowing my balls off. Let’s go and celebrate.”

An hour later, the two mates were sitting cross-legged in the back of the van on folded bubble wrap, drinking from plastic cups: Oskar on the premium vodka and Janusz the bottled Budwar. Opening a Tupperware box, Janusz started laying out the snacks that he’d prepared the night before on top of Olek’s coffin. He and Oskar had debated whether using it as their dinner table would be disrespectful, but they soon agreed that Olek wouldn’t mind – it was all good Polish food after all.

“Anyway, the Egyptians used to put food and drink inside the tombs of their kings,” said Oskar, adopting a knowledgeable air. “To give them something to eat and drink when they got to heaven. I saw a programme about it on Discovery Channel.”

Janusz arranged slices of
wiejska
and gherkins on a slice of buttered light rye, then paused to watch Oskar take his first bite of the homemade minced veal
kotlety
stuffed with goats’ cheese and herbs. Janusz had found it hard to sleep at the flat after what had happened the previous night, so he’d stayed up cooking with all the lights blazing, before falling asleep on the sofa just before dawn.

“This is good shit,” mumbled Oskar, although Janusz noticed that before finishing his mouthful of
kotlety
, he absent-mindedly threw in a triangle of Toblerone. He cast his eyes skyward: Oskar was an appreciative audience for his food but he’d never make the judging panel of
Masterchef
.

After they’d finished the food and swept the debris off the top of Olek’s coffin, the serious drinking started.

“Do you ever wonder what the fuck we’re doing with our lives?” asked Oskar suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, working away from home, living among strangers, maybe even
dying
among strangers,” nodding to the coffin, he crossed himself, “All that shit.” He stretched out for the vodka bottle, bringing a chorus of pops from the bubble wrap beneath him. “When we were kids doing military service I thought if I could get a flat, get married, and find a job paying enough to live on, I’d be happy. At least under the Kommies everyone had jobs. What would we earn back home now? Peanuts.”

“Bullshit,” said Janusz. “I’m sick of all this
‘The Kommies looked after people, gave everyone a job’
. You know most of the jobs back then didn’t pay shit – unless you were one of those Party bastards pulling in the backhanders.” He pulled on his cigar. “Anyway, you were always the one dreaming up crazy money-making ideas.”

Oskar sighed in agreement, then grinned: “Remember that time we smuggled the Levi’s from Jugoslavia to Moscow?”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Janusz, with a rueful grin. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into it. We were lucky not to end up in some fucking gulag living on cabbage soup and watching frostbite turn our dicks black.”

They’d been fresh out of the military, sharing a room in a grotty Warsaw hostel. Even then, Oskar had been quick to spot ways to make cash. Communism had killed all normal commerce: the only stuff in the shops was the crap from ‘fraternal countries’ that nobody wanted. But since Poles could travel more or less freely there was a thriving trade in smuggled goods. Janusz had taken a lot of persuading, but Oskar finally wore him down: after all, apart from the promise of riches, getting one over on the
Kommies
was practically a national duty.

“And you made me promise on a fucking bible that if you went with me, I had to find you a copy of that song you were crazy about,” Oskar’s brow furrowed: “You know, the one by that poofter with the high voice.”

Bohemian Rhapsody
. From the thrilling moment when Janusz had first heard it played on a mate’s transistor radio on Radio Luxembourg when he’d been what – fifteen, sixteen? – getting his hands on a copy had become an obsession.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“You remember taking the night train to Belgrade, though,” said Oskar, waggling his eyebrows mockingly.

The pair had travelled with every
zloty
they and their mates could scrape together, and the address of a backstreet dealer scribbled on a scrap of paper.

Oskar knocked back another shot of vodka and his face split in a grin. “Every time you heard the
milicja
coming down the corridor to check passports you’d go ‘Look casual! Look casual!’” said Oskar, mimicking a squeaky voice. “And you kept threatening to swallow the piece of paper...” he started to crack up, “to...to... stop it falling into enemy hands!” He bellowed with laughter, slapping his thigh, tears brimming in his eyes.

All Janusz could remember was the cold fear of what it would do to his mother if he was caught: something that hadn’t occurred to him till the moment he’d met the steady stare of the official checking his passport. Thankfully, they got away with it, selling two dozen pairs of Levis to eager punters in Moscow for three times what they’d paid the dealer. Oskar had duly produced a shiny copy of Bohemian Rhapsody, bought from the
Pewex
dollar shop – but Janusz vowed never to put himself at risk again. Then, within three months, he had won a place to do physics at Jagiellonski, got involved in the protests, and all such resolutions flew out of the window.

“Anyway,
kolego
,” said Oskar, clearing his throat. “I was thinking, when you’ve finished playing detective, why don’t you go down to Warsaw, spend a few hours with Bobek?”

Janusz picked at the label of his beer bottle. The idea had occurred to him, too. In his imagination, he’d even got as far as the yellow door of the apartment, but the thought of Marta opening it, and her disapproving expression at the sight of his bruised face had been enough to dissuade him. No matter what he said, she’d be convinced he was back on the booze and had got himself into a fight.

“I’m here to work, not to play happy families,” said Janusz. His tone was level but Oskar detected a warning note.

He hesitated, then decided to have one last go. “It’s only a couple of hours on the train from Gdansk.”

“Don’t start nagging me, Oskar, you’re not my fucking wife,” Janusz growled.

Oskar decided not to press the issue. Janusz could be touchy on the subject of his family, which, according to Gosia, was because he felt guilty about being an absent father. Women’s heads were nine-tenths full of garbage, but any reasonable man had to admit they were usually right about shit like that.

An hour or so later, after a string of formal toasts to Olek, they were bedded down for the night under a couple of rugs, and Janusz was drawing a sigh of relief at the sound of snoring from his mate. Just before they turned in, he’d had to spend several minutes talking him out of his plan for a final valedictory gesture: prising open Olek’s coffin to give him a packet of crisps for the afterlife.

SEVENTEEN

“What do you mean, he’s gone to Poland?”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth Kershaw realised it was a silly question: the nerdy guy in the retro glasses could hardly have been clearer. His neighbour, Janusz Kiszka, had left the country yesterday, hours after she’d questioned him about Justyna Kozlowska.

“Another Polish guy, in a white van, came and picked him up,” said the neighbour, “at about five in the morning.” He raised his eyebrows to show what he thought of that.

“How d’you know the other man was Polish?”

“Because after Janusz got in the van there was a lot of shouting,” said the guy with a scowl, waving at his window. “I could hear everything.”

“Did it sound like a falling-out?”

He nodded. “Janusz was having a go at the other guy, I think.”

“Did he say when he was coming back?” she asked, aware of a note of panic entering her voice. If Kiszka had done a bunk, Streaky would kick her arse all over the office for scaring him off and he’d be right: she’d gone too far and too fast with him.

The neighbour looked worried now. “I certainly hope so – the night before he left he asked me to feed his cat for a few days.”

Phew
. He hadn’t left for good then. Another thought occurred to Kershaw – if he
was
part of some drugs ring, maybe he’d gone to Poland to pick up PMA from one of those illegal factories the report talked about.

“I have quite a bad allergy to animal hair, actually,” the guy was saying.

He didn’t strike Kershaw as the old-fashioned neighbourly type, but then she couldn’t quite see Kiszka as a cat lover either.

“You and Mr Kiszka must be good friends.”

“No, no,” the bottom half of his face twisted into a grin, but behind the trendy glasses, his eyes looked nervous. “Not at all. I just...he said it was an emergency.”

Yeah
. She imagined Janusz Kiszka would be a hard man to say no to.

The savaging Streaky gave her when she got back to the office was as bad as she’d anticipated and then some, but at least Browning and Bonnick were on lates, so Ben Crowther was the only other person to overhear the roasting. The worst thing about Kiszka’s disappearance was that Streaky now seemed to have a downer on every other bit of progress she’d made on the two dead Polish girls.

“Tell me if I’m missing something,” he asked, all innocence. “But on the Waveney Thameside case, you’ve got some CCTV footage of one suspect that’s about as useful as a chocolate fireguard, right?”

“Yes, Sarge,” she muttered.

“And, you’ve put the wind up a second suspect so bad that he’s legged it to Poland?”

“Sarge, I...”

“Now some stude who saw a picture of a misper on the website has conveniently handed you a name for the dead female in Wapping mortuary. And your latest devastating insight,” he shook his head, “if I’m not actually
dreaming
this, is that since this Ela Wronska’s room had a
river view
, she can’t have jumped in of her own accord, she must have been pushed!” Streaky jumped out of his chair. His face was so close to hers she could trace the tube map of broken blood vessels in his cheeks. “Just remind me – am I training you to be a detective, or a fucking clairvoyant?!”