by Anya Lipska
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.
“I did find a single pubic hair – which I’m delighted to say appears to have an intact follicle attached. If your DS signs off the request I’ll have it sent it for DNA profiling.”
After she hung up, Kershaw punched the air. Streaky would surely approve DNA-testing the hair: if hat man had previous, he’d be on the national database. At the very least she’d have cast-iron forensic evidence to put the bastard at the scene – when she found him.
She ploughed through the twenty-three emails waiting in her inbox, hitting delete on most of them – another community policing initiative from the Justice Department, a clampdown on overtime, a warning for the person leaving tea bags in the sink (‘you know who you are’), a leaving do in the Drunken Monkey that evening – someone from Traffic she didn’t know – and several mails aimed at the long-suffering uniforms. One reminded them of the regulation sock colour, ie black or navy, to be worn on duty, the correct shade of sock presumably being a critical factor when poor plod had to insert himself between some drunken lowlife and the girlfriend he was using as a punch bag outside the kebab shop in Leyton High Road on a Friday night.
That left only one mail worth reading. DI Bellwether had come good on his promise to dig out the PMA info he’d mentioned, and had attached an EU-commissioned report called “Europe: Global Centre of Synthetic Drug Production”. It was 250 pages long, and she was just thinking she was glad to have the office to herself for half an hour so she could have a proper read of it when Streaky and Tom Browning came in, talking about some announcement by Scotland Yard, or as Streaky preferred to call it, “The Dream Factory”.
“It’s what we used to call LOB, in the bad old days before detectives learned to watch their Ps and Qs,” said Streaky, resting one considerable buttock on the edge of Kershaw’s desk. “Load of old bollocks,” he added, seemingly for her benefit, although she’d heard the phrase a hundred times before, usually from him.
“What’s that then Sarge?” she asked as Browning, fired up his computer opposite her. He looked as smug as ever, but he’d had to stick a bit of bog roll on his chin to staunch a shaving cut, she noticed.
“They’ve announced they’re taking rape cases off CID
now, handing it over to ‘specialist units’” said Streaky, picking at a piece of crusted food on his tie. “Apparently, nasty old-school detectives don’t take rape seriously, which is why the conviction rate is a piss-poor six per cent, according to the boss-wallahs and their feminist pals in the univer-shitties.”
She managed an interested smile.
“What’s your view, Browning?” asked Streaky, craning round.
“Waste of resources, Sarge,” said Browning, leaning back in his chair. “Rape convictions are always going to be hard to get because, well, it’s one person’s word against another, isn’t it.” He gave a man of the world shrug.
“Do you agree, DC Kershaw?” asked Streaky.
“Up to a point, Sarge,” she said. “But it’s also because some jury members think if a girl goes off on her own with a bloke then she’s asking for it.”
To her surprise, Streaky nodded. “I think you’ll find DC Kershaw brings a useful perspective to the issue,” he said to Browning. “Unlike you, she’s probably had to deal with many a nasty little nonce trying to get into her knickers.”
Streaky stood up and stretched, giving Kershaw a scary glimpse of coppery belly hairs through his gaping shirt buttons.
“Call me old-fashioned,” he said. “But in my book, there’s only one way to put more of ‘em behind bars – don’t give the toe rags a jury trial.” And with that searing judicial insight, Streaky ambled off to his desk.
Browning, who had been giving Kershaw the evils since Streaky sided with her, now flashed an insincere smile across their desks. “What’s happening with that floater you’re on, the Polish girl?” he asked.
“Sarge has her down as a suicide, jumped in the river when she was off her head,” said Kershaw, trying to get back into the PMA report.
“Sounds about right,” said Browning, checking his text messages. “Tattoos, drugs, East European: it all says sex worker, doesn’t it? Probably trafficked.” Kershaw gave Browning a sweet smile: “Do you ever read that bit at the front of the paper called the news section? Poland’s been in the EU for, like, years. She probably flew in on Ryanair.”
He just grinned. “Whatever. If I was you I’d try and bosh that job, you’ve got no chance of ID-ing her.”
What made his smug assurance so exasperating was that he was probably right. If Ela, like Justyna, was a sex worker, and a foreign one at that, identifying her would be a total nightmare. Kershaw’s gaze fell on the image of Ela that Missing Persons Bureau had created from the post-mortem photographs. Like digital undertakers, they had erased injuries; photo shopped eyes back into her empty sockets, and restored her Titian hair to frame her face. At least it gave her something half-decent to put on the system, but what if no one had reported her missing? A working girl could slip beneath the murky waters of her life without leaving a ripple.
Suddenly angry, Kershaw leaned across the desk and nodded at the shaving cut on Browning’s chin.
“You want to be careful with that,” she said, concern in her voice. “All the arse-kissing you do, it could go septic.”
Juvenile, yes, but it wiped the smirk off his face.
She pressed print on her PC and while the machine chugged out the PMA report, made herself a really strong mug of Tetley’s. Then grabbing the still-warm printout and her coat, she headed for the door – and ran straight into Ben Crowther, spilling tea onto his shoes.
“Sorry, Ben – my fault,” she said, digging out a tissue from her coat pocket.
He just laughed, and taking the tissue, crouched to wipe his shoes clean.
“Where are you racing off to?” he asked, looking up at her with an expression of amused tolerance.
“Oh, just trying to find some peace and quiet to read this,” waving the report, Kershaw rolled her eyes in the direction of Browning’s desk.
Ben just pulled his slow grin, “Have you been letting Tom wind you up again?” he asked, getting to his feet.
“Yeah, probably,” she said. “He does know how to press my buttons.” She cringed at the double entendre, but Ben didn’t seem to notice.
“Listen,” he said, looking over her shoulder. “Do you fancy a drink after work on Saturday?”
Aye, aye, she thought – is Ben Crowther asking me out on a date?!
“I’m meeting some guys from Uni, up in town,” he went on. “I think you might like them.”
Right – not a date, then. It was just as well really, she thought. She’d slept with a fellow cop in Romford Rd once, and it had gone round the nick like wildfire. It was much too soon to be dating, anyway – Mark was barely out of the door.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Sounds good.”
She took the lift to the top floor and after checking there was no-one around, pushed open a heavy door labelled “Fire Exit Only” – wedging a bit of folded cardboard underneath so she could get back in. She’d discovered the nick’s flat roof a few weeks earlier and made it her own private spot, somewhere to have a think or read in peace.
She lit a cig and spread out the copy of Metro she’d brought to sit on. On a mild, sunny day like today, the view over London was like something out of a movie: the glittering curve of the river and the great squished ‘O’ of the London Eye in the distance.
After thirty minutes of speed-reading, a technique that had got her through every exam she’d ever sat, she reckoned she was an expert, if only of the armchair variety, on PMA. It seemed that the world supply of synthetic drugs, aka Ecstasy and the like, used to come from – where else – the Netherlands, but in the last ten years, under pressure from the Yanks, Dutch police had clamped down, closing dozens of drug factories. Of course, that did nothing to reduce the demand for E, it just meant the drug gangs packed up their chemistry sets, and re-opened in countries where the authorities had fewer resources: Estonia, Lithuania – and Poland, which with the longest border in Europe was a smuggler’s wet dream.
But the villains had another problem: right across Europe there were tough new controls on the starter chemicals needed to make the E – and that was where PMA came in. Although its effects were similar to E, its basic constituent was a harmless compound called anethole – cheap, widely used in the perfume and food industries, and impossible to regulate.
She shifted position, the newspaper rustling beneath her, trying to ease the creeping numbness in her bum. The equation for the drug gangs was brutally simple: why buy expensive illegal chemicals on the black market to make E, when you could use dirt-cheap anethole and pass off tabs of PMA as the real thing? And if people took too many tabs because it took longer to come on than E – well, that was their problem. It was just like the fake handbag business, Kershaw reflected, except a Gucci bag from Korea didn’t leave your organs cooked medium rare.
She lit another cigarette – the third of the five a day she allowed herself, and re-ran what she knew about Justyna Kozlowska’s death. The man in the hat caught on CCTV was clearly the prime suspect, but she still felt sure Janusz Kiszka was involved – why else would Justyna hide his card in her mouth? Maybe he was part of a drugs ring, manufacturing PMA and smuggling into the UK? But why was Justyna, and maybe Ela, too, killed?
An idea pinged into her head. Could the girls have been caught in the middle of some drug gang stand-off? She recalled Kiszka balling his fists at the mention of Pawel, the mystery man whose name was tattooed on Ela’s buttock. If there was a vendetta raging between the two men, then maybe, just maybe, the man in the hat was the mysterious Pawel, and he had lured Kiszka’s girlfriend to the hotel to murder her.
A gust of wind rattled the pages of the report, making Kershaw shiver. Something occurred to her. Maybe it wasn’t Justyna but her killer who put Kiszka’s card in her mouth – to incriminate his enemy, or to taunt him.
After leaving Kasia’s club, Janusz went straight to an Internet café that he sometimes used in St Anne’s Court, a tiny Georgian passageway off Wardour Street. Kris, the Bulgarian who ran the place, took one look at his face and disap
peared out the back. He returned a few minutes later with a lemon tea, setting it down beside Janusz’s workstation with a graceful nod that said it was on the house.
Janusz was surprised to find that Nowak rated a Wikipedia mention on a page dedicated to Polish industrialists; there was even a shot of him, taken maybe ten years earlier, balding and energetic looking in shirt-sleeves, before he’d shaved off his remaining hair. The biog said he was born in 1945, the same year his father had been taken away to a Soviet prison camp along with the hundreds of thousands of Poles designated enemies of Socialism in Stalin’s post-war purge. His father’s crime: he had fought alongside Britain and American forces during the invasion of France. Five years later, he had died, supposedly of TB. The write-up noted Nowak’s sixteen years as a Solidarnosc official in the Vladimir Lenin Steel Works in Nowa Huta, and mentioned his second career in the construction business, setting up Nowak Budowa, two years after the Kommie regime fell in 1989. He hadn’t done badly out of it, selling up for two million zloty, just under half a million sterling, in 2003.
But it was Nowak’s later activities that earned him the Wikipedia entry. The guy’s ‘bit of charity work’ was clearly a full-time job – he was the founder or patron of half a dozen charities, mostly connected with social housing and urban regeneration. There was a Nowak quote from Gazeta Wyborcza, March 2007: “The older generation can exhort the young to come back to Poland and help the country’s revival, but these are empty words unless we guarantee them well paid jobs and decent places to live.”
Edward Zamorski – naturally enough – got a more detailed biog and a gallery of photographs spanning his thirty years in politics. Here was a black and white shot from the Eighties that captured the young Zamorski, moustachioed and wearing a workman’s jacket, in the front line of some demo or other, right arm raised to fend off a wedge of helmeted ZOMO. Beside him a young, stocky priest, semi-crouched beneath the blur of a white rubber truncheon on a trajectory aimed at his head.