Where the Devil Can't Go (43 page)

Hauling himself himself upright, he leaned over the balcony to scan the cappuccino-coloured waters of Leamouth, pitted with rain, and saw a pale head bob up, a little way downstream, maybe fifty metres from where the river entered the Thames and hit serious current. He could see that the entire riverside façade of the warehouse was clad with a network of scaffolding which came right up to the balcony, and for a moment, he considered using it to shimmy down, before dismissing the idea. No, there was only one way to get into the water quickly enough.

120 seconds.
As a jet out of City airport roared overhead he clambered onto the railing and perching on the edge, calculated the drop – twenty-odd metres. Then, pinching his nose firmly, he propelled himself forward. His final thought:
This is the last time I take a job from a priest.

He was surprised how quickly he hit the surface, and by the violence of the impact, which was like running into a bus doing 50kph. Then there was the way the icy water thrust itself shockingly into every orifice. For a horrible moment it felt as though he would keep plummeting down forever, but then suddenly he was shooting back up, buoyed by the three or four litres of air he’d stored in his lungs. As he broke the surface, he spun himself round toward the Thames, looking for Weronika, but couldn’t see anything through the chop of murky water. He struggled out of his trench coat, levered off his shoes, registered that the impact with the water had damaged his ankle joints, and struck out, doing a rough and ready crawl.
60 seconds.

Halfway to the spot where he reckoned he’d last seen her, he glanced back up at the balcony, and met a sight that made him waste breath on a stream of curses – Radomil was getting up from the deck. Still slow and shaky, but how long would that last? He doubled up his stroke, feeling his chest complain at the effort, and then, as a khaki wavelet broke before him, he saw the back of a water-darkened blonde head bob lazily above the water. She wasn’t moving. Perhaps she’d had insufficient air in her lungs. Or maybe she’d been knocked out by the impact.
Let her be alive.

Another glance back to the balcony. Radomil was on his feet now, back at the rail, weaving a bit, but with the gun back in his hand – he looked like a spider in the middle of the web of scaffolding. Why in God’s name hadn’t he finished the fucker off when he’d had the chance! He couldn’t remember the range and accuracy of a CZ 75 but he was pretty sure that hitting a human-size target at fifty metres would be child’s play.

As he got closer to Weronika, an eddy turned her round towards him: her face was white as skimmed milk, but the eyes were half-open, lips moving. Then he saw her head start to droop forward and the eyes to close. He had a sudden powerful flashback:
Iza at the demo, her white face, losing the will to live, leaving him.
A wave enveloped Weronika’s face and she sank beneath the surface with a sickening finality.
Mother of God, no.
Fixing his gaze on the spot, he kicked out wildly, ignoring the knifing pains in his ankles. Seeing no sign of her, he sucked in a breath and dived down, using his right arm to pull himself underwater, and sweeping his left around in a semi-circle in the hope of making contact. He opened one eye experimentally – the visibility was nil.

He came up, praying she’d surfaced nearby, and trod water for a couple of seconds.
Zero.
Down again, scoping out in circles from where she’d disappeared, going with the pull of the current. His hand hit slimy reed, it must be shallower than he thought. Not reed,
idiota
– hair! He grabbed for it again, caught a handful, and used his right hand to pull for the surface, the load coming surprisingly easily.

He drew a huge gulp of air, and turned the girl toward him. Her eyes were shut, her expression peaceful. Her mouth was rounded, childlike –
like Iza’s.

He slapped her face – a little water dribbled from her mouth, but otherwise it was like striking a wax sculpture.
No, not again, please God
. Then someone hurled a pebble into the water not two metres away. The mosquito whine that trailed it, made him whip around to look up at the warehouse – where he found Radomil, both elbows leant on the balcony to steady his aim, gun pointed straight at them. Even concussed, he’d find his range soon enough. Casting desperately around, Janusz found the channel lined by vertical brick walls, wet, black, and tall as a double-decker bus –
no way out.
Then, twenty metres away, he spotted an old iron buoy, just before Leamouth entered the Thames. He struck out for it one-handed.

“Hold on Nika, hold on Nika,” he said under his breath as they inched toward the buoy. As he reached it, he was greeted by a strident
clang!
The
psychol
was getting his eye in. He started to haul Nika’s dead weight around the side, to get out of the line of fire, and then, glancing up, he saw a mystifying vision. Radomil was bending to gaze along the barrel of his gun for another shot, but he was no longer alone on the balcony – a dwarf in a hooded black cape had materialized beside him. As Janusz stared, the figure raised a silvery rectangle high into the air, and smashed it over Radomil’s head. The fucker folded like a broken deck chair.

Janusz grabbed a heavy nylon rope trailing from the buoy’s side and looped it around his body to keep himself afloat. Turning Nika’s body around, he set her back against him, and cupping her chin to keep her face clear of the river, used his arms like bellows to force the water out of her lungs.
Squeeze, squeeze.
He couldn’t see her face, couldn’t feel any sign of life.
Squeeze, squeeze.
Keeping up the rhythm, he craned his head around so he could see her profile, and watched a tiny dribble leave her lips, before the flow stopped altogether. She remained as still and beautiful as a statue on a grave.
No, Mother of God, no.
He turned her round and pinching her nostrils, locked his mouth onto hers, and blew gently, remembering a health and safety course back when he and Oskar built motorway bridges.
One elephant, two elephant, three elephant.
Pause.
One elephant, two elephant, three elephant.
Pause.
Nothing.
He locked his mouth on hers again, but with a dragging, draining sense of hopelessness. Suddenly a jet of coppery-tasting water shot into his mouth, followed by a plosive cough. He turned her to face him, holding her head clear of the water as the fit of coughing convulsed her body and, finally, saw her eyes open, blue shot with grey, the colour of pebbles on a Baltic beach, and meet his for a moment. Then they closed again.

“Kiszka!” For a moment, he thought the voice shouting his name was in his head, but then it came again. “Kiszka!” He inched back around the buoy and looked up at the balcony. Now that the dwarf had taken off its hood, he could see it had the blonde head of the girl
detektyw.
He felt no curiosity, only relief to see that she was talking into a radio.

THIRTY

It took eleven minutes for the River Police Targa to speed Janusz, and the semi-conscious Weronika, upstream to London Bridge, where paramedics from Guy’s Hospital, a stone’s throw from the riverside, were standing by.

They wheeled her through A&E into a recovery room, and as nurses hooked her up to monitors and stuck an electronic temperature probe in her armpit, a doctor beckoned to Janusz, who was hovering just outside the open door. He hobbled over on the crutches they’d given him, ungainly as a pantomime horse.

“The police say they think she OD-ed on an ecstasy variant?” the doctor asked, squinting up at the monitor on the wall to which the temperature probe was attached.

“Yes, it’s called PMA,” said Janusz.

The doctor leaned over and ripped off the thermal blanket she’d been wrapped in. “Drug-induced hyperthermia,” he told one of the nurses, followed by a stream of incomprehensible medical jargon in which ‘ice water baths’ and ‘aggressive hydration’ were the only words Janusz understood.

“Her temperature’s almost 40 degrees,” he told Janusz, scanning his face to see if he knew what that meant.

He did.

“All we can do is get her temperature down and maintain blood pressure. If we can head off renal failure, she’s got a good chance.”

Janusz leaned against the wall. The thought of her dying, now, was more than he could bear.

“I tell you something,” said the doc, trying to cheer him up. “If she hadn’t been immersed in that freezing water, I doubt we could do anything for her.”

After hanging around in A&E for another hour, a second medic told Janusz that the impact with the water had broken his right ankle and sprained the left. With one leg strapped up and the other encased in plaster to the knee, he took the lift up to the ITU to see how Weronika was doing. At the door, a nurse looked him up and down and, taking pity on the big man with the anxious eyes, agreed to let him sit by her bed for a while.

Weronika was sedated and unconscious, but he decided he could discern a reassuring trace of colour in those sculpted cheeks, and her fingernails had lost the bruised colour they’d had when the river cops had pulled her out of his arms and into the boat. The funny thing was, now he could look at her properly for the first time, he couldn’t for the life of him work out why she had ever reminded him of Iza. Weronika had the sharply planed, other-worldly beauty of a model, nothing like Iza’s rounded, soft prettiness.

As he emerged from ITU, Janusz turned his mobile back on and found he’d got a text from DC Natalie Kershaw. She was in the hospital and wanted to see him. They met in the hospital’s staff canteen, on the eleventh floor. As he made his way toward where she sat, next to the window, still struggling with the crutches, she looked up and they shared a rueful grin.

He lowered himself into the seat she pulled out for him. “We make quite a pair,” he said, nodding at the flesh-coloured strapping that reached from her wrist to her elbow. “Did that bastard hurt you?” He recalled her whacking Radomil over the head with what he realised now must have been one of the flight cases.

“No, no – he didn’t come round till after back-up arrived,” she said, setting her coffee cup back in its saucer awkwardly with her left hand. “I tore a tendon, climbing the scaffolding.”

He visualised the high sides of the warehouse, the web of slippery steel. The girl really was a
psychol.

Studying Janusz’s outfit – garishly-patterned jumper and cord trousers, presumably out of the hospital’s emergency clothing store, Kershaw reflected that the man she had once thought so dangerous now looked about as fearsome as a favourite uncle.

She pushed a cup of coffee towards him, black and insanely strong, just as he liked it, and fixed him with a look. “So,” she said. “Before we ask you in for an official interview, any chance of you telling me what the hell has been going on?”

Beyond the window the sun had come out, transforming the ribbon of river below into liquid jade. Janusz took a gulp of coffee, but he still couldn’t wash away the metallic tang of river water. “You’ve got the CCTV and forensics to prove that this... Radomil guy murdered Justyna, right?” he said, flexing his fingers so the joints popped.

“Yes,” she allowed. “But I’ve got no idea
why
he killed her.” She’d used the passport he’d been carrying to get the Polish police to fax over a lengthy rap sheet. Radomil Janowiak was a career gangster in the synthetic drug trade, who had also narrowly escaped conviction for the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl in Warsaw the previous year, after the girl unaccountably changed her story.

He fiddled with the spoon in his saucer. “And I’m guessing you found another of his victims, in that warehouse?”

“Pawel Adamski? What was left of him, yes.” She blinked, trying to clear the image. “On the floor of the men’s toilets.” Adamski’s passport had been lying in a pool of half-congealed blood under a urinal.

“He’ll have Radomil’s DNA all over him,” said Janusz. The guy wasn’t the kind to delegate the violence – he enjoyed it too much.

He fell silent. Pawel’s death would come as a devastating blow to Weronika, if she survived the PMA overdose. He remembered the story Pawel had mentioned, about the children who woke the dragon. If only the dumb
burak
had stopped blackmailing Zamorski when he fell for his daughter, maybe the two of them might have escaped, started a new life somewhere.

“As for the religious girl, Elzbieta, you’ve got nothing to prove he murdered her, but I can’t help you with that,” he shot her a look from under raised eyebrows.

She shrugged. It was obvious where he was going with this.

He stretched his plastered leg out, wincing. “The way I see it, darling,” he said, “you’ve got the guy nailed for two murders and an illegal drug factory. Sure, I’ll make a statement about how he tried to kill Weronika, too. But I can’t see what else you need from me.”

Kershaw shifted in her seat. “What was Adamski’s role in all this? And the girl’s?”

Ever since the police boat plucked him out of the water, Janusz had been wondering whether to tell the girl about Konstanty Nowak and Zamorski. But what solid evidence did he have against either of them, when all was said and done? Ela and Pawel, the only two people who could testify to Zamorski’s crimes, were both dead. And the SB document that could prove the entire conspiracy was in the hands of Nowak, who would dangle it over the head of his creature, the president, for the rest of his political life.

“What does it matter?” he shrugged. “You’ve got your murderer.”

“Maybe, but I think that bastard Janowiak was acting on orders,” she stuck out her chin. “And I think you know who was giving them.”

He met her gaze. “And we both know that you never catch the big fish,” he said, throwing a weary hand up in the air. “This is the way the world works.”

She bit her thumbnail. “If Radomil should decide to talk, to give up his boss, would you help me then?”

He was about to tell her that wasn’t going to happen, the guy wasn’t the type to spill his guts, but then he scanned her intent little face, mouth set in a determined line.