Where the Devil Can't Go

by Anya Lipska

  As the bus left the fields and scattered farms behind and the forest became unbroken on either side, he caught a glimpse of Prussian blue between tree trunks – the Lakes! – and felt a flutter of childish excitement.

  The bus disgorged its passengers in the midst of Gorodnik’s market day. The stalls nearest the bus station were indistinguishable from a London market, piled with mass-produced trainers, lurid sweets and cheap socks, except the stallholders were almond-eyed, their hair blue black – members of Poland’s Tartar population. But as Janusz neared the town square, he was reminded of market day outings with his grandmother. At one stall, a man was sealing a bargain to buy a protesting chicken, its scrawny-looking legs and wings tied with string. At another, a beady-eyed old Babcia in a bright print dress and gardener’s apron, sold wild garlic, potted chives and tomato plants, doubtless from her own allotment. As he lingered at her stall, she asked “Are you buying today, Panie?” It took him a moment to make out her broad Kashubian accent, but her no-nonsense tone was as clear as the sun, so he handed over some coins for a cone of radishes and walked on, munching them like sweets.

  Gorodnik’s cobbled market square stood in the shadow of an impressive brick-built Gothic church, a smaller version of St Mary’s in Gdansk, hung with a large banner advertising a forthcoming concert of works by Paderewski. Beyond the bustle of the market, the town became dusty and lifeless, and many of the shuttered shops looked as though they would never re-open. The Hotel Pomorski – which the Babcia told him was the only inn open outside the holiday season – turned out to be a bit of a dive, although admittedly a dirt-cheap one at sixty zloty, basically a working man’s restaurant with a handful of rooms and a shared bathroom. The taciturn landlady doled out a towel and told him breakfast was between seven and eight am. In the room, he paused only to drop his bag and pick up a map of the town from the chest of drawers, its peeling veneer striped with dozens of fag burns, before heading out.

  Away from the market square, the traditional architecture quickly gave way to the inevitable Soviet-built apartment blocks, Fifties vintage, many pitted with craters where the render had fallen off, giving them a leprous air. It took Janusz ten minutes to find the Woytek storage depot, a hundred-year-old timber warehouse on the outskirts of town, with a portakabin out front acting as an office – not the sort of place he’d trust with his family heirlooms. Behind a counter inside the portakabin sat a guy in a huge puffa jacket, reading the local paper. When he looked up Janusz saw he had a wall-eye.

  “Dzien Dobry, Panu,” he said, his good eye flickering over Janusz.

  Janusz returned the greeting with a smile, then quickly straightened his face. He’d already earned a few confused – and suspicious – looks in Gdansk, beaming unthinkingly at shopkeepers and passers-by. It was a habit he’d picked up in England, where a smile was the smallest and commonest coin of social currency.

  “My business partner and I store antique furniture here, from time to time,” he said. “In fact, he came out a few days ago on a trip to buy more, and we’re meant to be meeting up, but now,” he waggled his mobile, “I can’t get through to him on his phone.”

  “Maybe it got stolen,” said the guy, setting his newspaper aside.

  “Exactly,” said Janusz. “The trouble is, I’ve got no other way of contacting him.” He shrugged, trying to look helpless. “So I’m asking around, to see if anyone has another number for him, or an address – anything to help me find him.”

  The guy’s expression suggested no more than a polite interest in this fairy story. Janusz’s gaze fell on a calendar tacked to the wall behind him. Miss April was a buxom blonde, pretty beneath her carapace of make-up, but the amount of cleavage and fake-tanned thigh revealed by her cowgirl outfit struck him as touchingly modest by UK standards.

  “His name’s Pawel Adamski?” tried Janusz, returning his gaze to the guy.

  He shook his head, his left eye fixed disconcertingly on a point somewhere over Janusz’s shoulder. “Sorry – I’ve never heard of him,” he said. “I’m new, you see, and the boss is in Budapest this week.”

  “Perhaps you might have something on file that might help me find him?” Janusz shivered inside his coat – it couldn’t be more than ten degrees in here.

  The guy dipped his head sideways in apology. “Regretfully, Panie, we are not permitted to share customers’ confidential details,” he said, but his good eye held a speculative gleam that suggested he was nothing if not a reasonable man.

  A few minutes later, and fifty zloty poorer, Janusz emerged from the portakabin. Once around the corner, he pulled out the photocopy of Pawel Adamski’s sole invoice, anticipation making him breathe a little faster.

  Woytek Storage had received one container’s worth of goods, on February 1, which had been collected by a shipping company on February 16. The billing address matched the rented cottage in Willowbridge, but aside from Adamski’s name, there was no phone number, no credit card info, and no contact details of any kind in Poland.

  He struck the wall with the flat of his hand. Kurwa mac! Travelling a thousand miles to Gorodnik had always been a long shot, but he’d convinced himself the depot would produce another lead - something, no matter how small, to help him track down Adamski. He was on the point of screwing the piece of paper up in a rage, but managed to stop himself. Adamski must have some local connection to use the storage depot here. Why else would he choose a backwoods place like Gorodnik rather than one of the dozens of facilities in Gdansk? Folding the invoice away carefully, he lit a cigar and set off in the direction of town.

  It always cracked Kershaw up, the way people behaved when they thought they were alone. She was back at the Waveney Thameside Hotel, observing a guy who’d just entered the North lift on the CCTV feed. The minute the doors shut, leaving him as the sole occupant, he’d started scratching his balls, and now, looking comically furtive, he plunged his hand right down inside the waistband of his suit trousers and had a proper old juggle. Pocket billiards, her Dad would have called it.

  The camera, positioned to one side of the lift doors, captured the guy’s face as clear as day. If it had been working the night Justyna Kozlowska and hat man checked in, it would have provided a perfect shot of her suspect.

  Derek, the security guy, came into the office, carrying two brimming mugs of tea, “Let’s go into my cubbyhole, it’s warmer,” he said.

  She tore her gaze from the lift feed and followed him. “Don’t you have to keep an eye on the screens?”

  “No, darling, they’re only there in case of an incident,” he said, chuckling, “We’re not a Swiss bank, y’know!”

  After turning on an electric fan heater at her feet, Derek started reminiscing about his twenty-five years in the cops. “We didn’t have all these piles of paperwork you poor sods have to wade through nowadays,” he said, settling back into his armchair with a cuppa and a Garibaldi. “Or all this human rights bollocks – excuse my French.” He leaned forward confidentially, “And if a villain sometimes picked up a black eye in the cells, was that the end of the world? Our clear-up rate was a sight better than it is now.”

  Kershaw sipped her tea, nodding. “Yeah, it’s a nightmare these days,” she said. “You can’t imagine the grief my DI is giving me about that girl who died in room 1313. You and I know how much time police work takes, but all he cares about is targets and budgets.”

  “One of these cops who came straight out of college and into management is he?” asked Derek.

  “Got it in one,” she said with a rueful grimace. “Anyway, I thought I’d pop back and check a few things out, earn some brownie points.”

  “I’ll help in any way I can, sweetheart.”

  “You mentioned there was something wrong with the CCTV in the lifts at the time the girl was going up to the room?” she asked. “Do you remember how long it was down for?”

  “I can’t say I recall off-hand, sweetheart, but I’ll get you the logbook,” he said, hauling himself out of the armch
air.

  Security was clearly an afterthought at the Waveney, thought Kershaw as she opened the tatty A3 book with its hand-written entries. Inside were separate sections for the cameras and recording systems in the guest areas – check-in desk, foyer entrance, the north lift and south lift. In the section headed ‘North Lift Cam’ was an entry dated March 23, the day before hat man checked in, that read: “Cam out of order: Viztek called.” The next entry, dated three days later, read: “Cam repaired by Viztek”. She flipped through to the page for South Lift Cam, and found exactly the same entries and dates.

  Suddenly aware of the thump of her own heartbeat, she said: “Sorry, Derek, I’m a bit rubbish at technical stuff, but I’ve been thinking – each lift cam is obviously separate, with its own recorder, right? So how could they both go wrong at the same time?”

  Derek looked at both entries and scratched his grey-stubbled cheek, “Dunno – I can’t say I’m particularly up on technology myself.”

  “It wasn’t you who called this...Viztek in to check the cams?” she asked. Angling the book into the light, he squinted at it and shook his head: “No, I haven’t spoken to them for ages. It must have been Milo.”

  Derek went off to see if he could raise Milo, who worked the night shift, on the phone, and left Kershaw looking through the filing system for the CCTV tapes, a series of metal cabinets with deep drawers holding hundreds of tape cassettes, arranged in date order. The tapes from both lift cams were filed together in one drawer and, sure enough, there was a tape for March 22 but then nothing until March 27. Picking out a few for a closer look she noticed that they all bore the label ‘LIFT CAM’, with no indication which lift they came from.

  Just then, Derek came back, looking troubled. “I spoke to Milo – he says he remembers a note taped to the recorders a few days back saying the cams were up the spout, but he thought it was me who put it there.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “No, and neither of us took the note off and put in new tapes, either.”

  Derek seemed reluctant to look her in the eye during this exchange.

  “But surely it must have come up, when you and Milo handed over between shifts that morning?” She checked her notebook, “Milo starts at eight in the evening and clocks off when you start, at six am, right?”

  Derek’s mouth worked silently for a moment, then he burst out: “To tell you the truth, sweetheart, we don’t see each other most mornings,” finally meeting her gaze. “Milo has to leave at six to get his train, and my first bus doesn’t get me here till at least quarter past.” Kershaw left a pause – they both knew that he and Milo could be handed their P45s for leaving the Hotel without any security cover, even for ten minutes.

  “Could you do me a favour, Derek?” she asked. “Could you give Viztek a call for me, see what they’ve got to say?”

  As she suspected, the guys at Viztek had no record of any callout to the hotel in the last week – in fact, the last engineer visit had been to carry out the routine annual service, the previous November.

  Her hunch had been right: both lift cameras going wrong at the same time was just too big a coincidence. As she absorbed the significance of this discovery she could hear her breath coming fast and shallow. Somebody had got into security and waltzed off with the video tape – the very tape that must show Kozlowska and hat man going up in the lift. The thief had to take the tapes for both lifts, north and south, because the failure to label them meant there was no way to distinguish one from the other. Was it hat man, destroying the evidence? Don’t be thick, Nat. Even if he’d managed to get into security to steal the tapes, why would he cook up a cover story about broken cameras? The thief was clearly someone who needed to cover his tracks, in the frankly fucking unlikely event of Milo or Derek actually noticing that any tape cassettes had gone missing.

  Kershaw’s eye fell on Derek, who sat bolt upright, both hands gripping the armrests of his chair. “You were a cop, Derek,” said Kershaw, her grey eyes serious. “I don’t need to tell you what a big deal it is, those tapes going missing.”

  She felt a rush of pity at how terrified he looked: the job wouldn’t pay much more than minimum wage, but the poor bastard probably relied on it to supplement his pension. She ought to keep turning the screws on him to get maximum leverage, but instead she found herself saying: “Listen, I’ll do everything I can to keep you out of trouble, but you’ve got to help me find out who could have got in here and stolen those tapes.”

  His whole face lifted at the prospect of a reprieve.

  Kershaw stood and started walking back and forth – she always thought better on her feet. “So nobody else, not even the manager, has another key?”

  “No, I’ve always kept the spare locked in a drawer at home.”

  “Right. So if the office is never left unlocked – how does Milo get the key to you at the end of his shift, when he never sees you?”

  Derek admitted that, at the end of the night shift, Milo would lock up and put the key into a jiffy bag. On his way out, he’d slip it into the pigeonhole behind front desk where post for security was left, so that Derek could pick up when he got in later. Kershaw did a quick mental calculation. The arrangement left the key unattended for at least fifteen minutes – plenty of time for the thief to get into security, nick the tapes and alter the logbook, before returning it to the pigeonhole in time for Derek’s arrival.

  “And no-one else knew anything about this key handover business?”

  He shook his head. “Just me and Milo.”

  Kershaw paced around, chewing at her thumbnail, Derek’s anxious eyes following her. Then she took another Garibaldi, and offering the open packet to Derek, said “When you picked up the key from the pigeonhole that morning, was Alex Hurley still on front desk?”

  TWENTY

  Gorodnik nightlife was enough to make a man pine for the bright lights of Stratford, thought Janusz as he paced the town’s deserted streets with a growing sense of desperation.

  It was only seven pm, and he had already eaten a solid and almost completely tasteless dinner alone in the Pomorski’s dimly lit dining room, under the suspicious eye of the landlady. She’d served him a bowl of watery zurek, unmistakably out of a packet and minus the essential boiled egg, followed by a pierogi that seemed to be filled with nothing more than sauerkraut and too much black pepper. He said it was delicious, of course, but declared himself too full for dessert.

  The market square stood deserted, except for a gaggle of kids who were taking turns to rattle across the cobbles on a skateboard. Two cafes that had been busy earlier in the day were now tightly shuttered. Pulling his greatcoat tight against the chill wind coming off the lake, which according to his tourist map lay a kilometre to the east, he set out in search of a drink, cursing Adamski for bringing him to this provincial shit-hole.

  A half-hour later, he was taking a deep draft of Tyskie and thanking all the saints: if he hadn’t spotted the wink of light at the end of the narrow alley, he’d have walked straight past, and Pod Kotka turned out to be the only bar open in the evening. The place wasn’t half-bad, either – the worn tables and chairs and faded prints of Lakeland scenes on the walls suggested the place hadn’t been decorated since the fall of Communism, but the cigarettes of the dozen or so middle-aged punters created a comforting fug, and a tape of lively Gypsy music played in the background.

  The barman seemed the chatty type, so after standing him a drink, Janusz unfolded the storage depot invoice and spinning it round on the bar, tapped Adamski’s name. “I’m trying to get back in touch with this guy,” he said, lighting a cigar. “He’s someone I sometimes do a little business with in the UK.” The barman scanned the invoice, then let his eyes flicker over Janusz’s battered face with frank curiosity. Nothing interesting ever happened in here, unless you counted that time the buck rabbit Kaminski brought in on market day escaped from its sack and bit the lunch waitress. He handed the invoice back to him without a word.

  “I don’t s
uppose you recognise the name?” asked Janusz. “Or maybe you might have heard of somebody looking to buy antiques round here?”

  Wringing out a cloth, the barman started to wipe down the crazed formica surface of the bar. “Did this guy do a flit and leave you to pay the bills?” he asked.

  Janusz gave an embarrassed shrug, “Something like that, yeah.”

  He shot Janusz a look. “Sounds like Adamski, alright,” he said.

  Janusz involuntarily inhaled a mouthful of cigar smoke, sending him into a fit of violent coughing. As he wiped his eyes, the barman, lips pressed together to keep from laughing, poured him a glass of water. “Everybody knows Pawel Adamski. Until a few months ago he was always in here – when he wasn’t barred, that is,” he added, raising a meaningful eyebrow. “But that guy over there,” he gestured to a man with a greying thatch of moustache who sat upright and alone in a banquette, “Tadeusz Krajewski. He’s the one you should talk to.” As Janusz thanked him and stood up, the barman tapped him on the forearm. “He drinks Zubrowka.”

  Janusz took a drink over to Tadeusz, and introduced himself, somewhat warily, as a friend and sometime business associate of Adamski. He needn’t have worried – the older man’s face visibly brightened on hearing the name and he waved Janusz into the banquette opposite.

  “So you’re another one of those who’s gone off to London are you?” he asked in his soft country burr. Janusz spread his palms in apologetic assent. “You must have been over there a while – your Polish is shocking,” said Tadeusz with a smile. His eyes played over Janusz’s bruised face, but he made no comment, perhaps accepting violence as a routine feature of London life. “In my day, if you were born in Gorodnik, you died in Gorodnik,” he mused. “And we were all a lot happier for it, I can tell you.” Janusz nodded, hoping his expression didn’t betray what he thought of such a prospect.