Death Can’t Take a Joke

by Anya Lipska

  ‘Tak!’ Oskar shook his head admiringly. ‘Wearing that footie strip Marika made for him!’

  ‘England colours from the front, Polish colours from the back … because when he married Marika “he didn’t just marry a woman, he married a whole bastard country”.’

  Grinning, the two men shook their heads, smiles slow to fade.

  Before allowing himself a proper drink, Janusz did the rounds of Jim’s closer friends, the ones who’d been in touch with him recently, exchanging reminiscences and sharing condolences. He was also probing discreetly, trying to find out whether they’d noticed any change in Jim’s behaviour of late, and whether the names Romescu, Varenka, or Triangle rang any bells. He drew a total blank. When he touched on the motive behind the murder, they seemed depressingly willing to view it as a commonplace act of random violence – probably drug-related.

  ‘It’s why we left and went to Enfield,’ one old Cockney guy told him. ‘You’re not safe here anymore, not even on your own doorstep.’ The locals he spoke to had all, without exception, been on the sharp end of crime over the years – a mugging here, a couple of handbag thefts there, plus a clutch of burglaries and car break-ins. One lady had been car-jacked parking her car one night, someone else had a murder happen in the flat upstairs.

  Stepping outside for a smoke, he bumped into Wayne, the regular from the gym. They stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the tea lights still burning atop the garden wall.

  ‘You’re a PI, right?’ murmured Wayne. ‘So I’m guessing you’ll be looking for the lowlifes who killed Jim?’ Janusz nodded – Wayne was completely trustworthy. ‘Did you get anything out of that little punk Andre Terrell?’ he went on.

  ‘Why? Do you think he’s involved somehow?’ asked Janusz. From what he’d seen of Jim’s deputy manager, he’d have said the kid was all front – strictly an armchair gangster.

  ‘Nothing concrete.’ He screwed his mouth to one side. ‘But I think Jim regretted hiring him, you know?’ Wayne dropped his h’s like a Cockney but there was still a Caribbean sashay to his cadences.

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘Not in so many words – you know how the man was, he wouldn’t badmouth anyone. But it was obvious they didn’t get on. I seen that Terrell slam out of the office screaming and shouting more than one time.’

  ‘I suppose the cops have been by to interview him?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ They exchanged a dry look.

  Later, clearing away some dirty plates, Janusz found Basia, washing up alone in the kitchen. Grabbing a tea towel he started to dry up the mountain of crockery on the draining board. She barely acknowledged him, just crashed another plate onto the pile, spraying him with soapy water. She seemed … angry, almost. He recalled that she and Jim had been lovers, albeit some ten years ago, and although he was no expert in the female psyche, he could imagine that today couldn’t be easy for her, either. He was wondering what on earth he could say that might make her feel better, when Marika came in.

  ‘Janek, I think we should do the toasts now everyone has eaten?’

  The noise levels rose as numerous toasts to Jim were proposed in the Polish way, accompanied by industrial quantities of krupnik, after which Jim’s old Navy chums sang a few sea shanties, assisted by Oskar’s strident baritone. An hour later, it was all over, and Janusz was standing on the threshold, Marika by his side, the house empty and silent behind them.

  He enveloped her in a bear hug. ‘I haven’t given up on finding who did this,’ he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  ‘I know, I know.’ She patted his shoulder absently. ‘There was something I had to tell you … Tak. The police called to say they found Jim’s laptop.’

  ‘Really? Do you know where?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Janek, I don’t remember.’ She waved a helpless hand, lapsing back into the dazed, barely-seeing state of the recently bereaved.

  He walked down the front path, eyes front, refusing to look down at those treacherous tiles that had been the last thing Jim had seen.

  Oskar’s van pulled up at the kerb and he wound down the window. ‘Get in, Janek.’

  ‘Are you in a fit state to drive?’

  Oskar looked outraged. ‘Nosz, kurwa! I hardly drank anything! Anyway, I’ve had three really strong coffees.’

  Janusz didn’t have the strength to argue. ‘Drop me off by Walthamstow tube then, kolego.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ said Oskar, shaking his head. He waggled a bottle of Wyborowa. ‘We’ve got an appointment.’

  Which was how Janusz came to end the day scaling the two-metre-high railings of the City of London cemetery in the dark. As the taller of the two, he went first, covering the spikes with an old duvet Oskar used to protect garden ornaments, before using the van’s roof rack to boost himself up and over.

  The vast expanse of the cemetery, criss-crossed by pathways, receded into the silent darkness: Janusz hadn’t noticed during the burial ceremony how huge the place was.

  ‘How the fuck are we going to find him?’ he hissed.

  ‘What are you whispering for?’ chuckled Oskar. ‘You’re not going to wake anyone up!’ He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket with a nonchalant flourish. ‘I made a mapa after we buried him.’

  As they started off down the nearest path, a marble angel kneeling atop of a catafalque sent Janusz a reproachful look. It pitched him back thirty years, to those late-night visits to his grandfather’s grave on All Saints’ Eve. He remembered how tightly he had clung to Mama’s hand, eyes locked on the flame of his candle, knowing that if he should let his gaze flicker towards a candlelit grave, its inhabitant might suddenly sit up – grinning face crawling with worms, flesh hanging from the outstretched arms like seaweed. At least back then there had been the twinkling of a thousand candles and murmuring groups of people: here there was nothing but a silent dormitory of the dead.

  He shivered. ‘Are you sure about this? It’s not as if Jim was Polish.’

  ‘Tradition is tradition,’ said Oskar staunchly. ‘Anyway, he said it himself – being married to Marika made him an honorary Pole.’

  When they reached Jim’s grave, its freshly turned earth a darkened rectangle against the moonlit turf, they fell silent and crossed themselves. Janusz took the shot glass and held it out for Oskar to fill from the wodka bottle. He dropped to a crouch and carefully poured the contents onto the grave.

  ‘Na zdrowie, kolego,’ he murmured, hearing his voice break on the last word.

  They each took a swig from the bottle, Janusz suppressing a grimace: having spent half his youth blind drunk on the stuff, he could no longer stand the taste.

  A few minutes later they were clambering back over the railings, using the low branch of a tree for a leg-up. From behind him, Janusz heard Oskar say: ‘You dropped something!’

  It wasn’t till they were in the van, safely back on the main road, that Oskar handed Janusz what had fallen out of his coat pocket. A USB stick.

  He turned it over in his hands, frowning, unable to recall ever seeing it before, although the image it bore of an eagle with outstretched wings looked familiar. Then he remembered why.

  It was the Orzelair logo.

  Twenty-Five

  When Kershaw returned his call the following morning Janusz cut straight to the point. ‘I hear you found Jim Fulford’s laptop.’

  ‘You know I can’t confirm something like that to someone outside the family.’

  ‘It was Marika Fulford who told me,’ he growled. ‘I could get her to call you, but I’d really rather not disturb her the day after she buried her husband.’

  Kershaw sighed: she didn’t have much appetite for pointless protocol either. ‘Okay. Strictly off the record, we have recovered his laptop.’

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘Dawn raid on some toe-rag in Tottenham who trades stolen goods. I’m told his front room looked like the warehouse of PC World.’

  And I bet I know who sold it to him, thought Janusz suddenly,
seeing the flash of a fake diamond embedded in a tooth.

  ‘The Computer Crime Unit have had it for three days but they only just told us it was Jim’s,’ she went on. ‘All the files had been deleted, of course.’

  ‘But they were still there on the hard drive?’

  ‘Yep. They got them all back.’

  ‘If you’d let me have a look, I might be able to spot something.’ He kept his voice casual, as if he’d be doing her a favour.

  Kershaw hesitated. When she’d returned from Poland, Streaky had magnanimously allowed her back on the Fulford case, and had just assigned her and Sophie the task of wading through the recovered files. But without any suspect currently in the frame, or any idea what they were looking for, it looked like it would take until Christmas. As Jim’s best mate, Kiszka would undeniably have a better nose for anything out of the ordinary; on the other hand, after that stunt he’d pulled in Poland, going AWOL on her, she still felt disinclined to trust him.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  The rasp of a lighter came down the phone followed by an exhaled breath.

  ‘What if I told you I could identify your stowaway?’

  Kershaw felt her pulse rate jump. ‘Really,’ she drawled, deadpan.

  ‘Yes, really.’

  By the end of the day, the pair of them were installed in a conference room on the third floor at the nick, eyeing each other across a round table. After cloning the drive to secure the evidence, the computer crime boys had sent the laptop back for review and Streaky had approved Kershaw’s request to get Kiszka’s help in searching the files.

  The only sound in the chilly, windowless room was the pathetic whirr of a tiny fan heater. They must look like a couple of gunslingers in a spaghetti western preparing for a shootout, thought Kershaw, but instead of a gun she had the laptop, and he had a USB stick.

  A couple of seconds passed before Janusz pushed the nugget of plastic towards her, as though making the opening gambit in a game of chess.

  Kershaw plugged it into the computer.

  She stroked the trackpad, flipping through the PDF. ‘All I can see on here is some old annual report for Orzelair. I don’t see …’

  ‘Keep going. There’s a bunch of photos, near the back.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. “Orzelair’s new Berlin office … um … Meet the directors …”’

  She bent to peer at the screen. ‘Christ on a bike!’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ Eyes wide, she spun the laptop round and jabbed at a head and shoulders shot of a middle-aged man. ‘That’s the stowaway!’

  Janusz lifted one shoulder in assent.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘That’s not part of the deal, Natalia.’ He had no intention of telling her what he’d worked out – that Angelika must have slipped the stick into his coat pocket during that farewell embrace at the airport. When he’d shown her one of the composite photos of the dead stowaway during their tour of airport security the previous day, she’d shaken her head – but he’d caught a flicker of recognition in her eyes.

  ‘Anatol Woj-tek,’ read Kershaw from the caption, pronouncing the ‘W’ and ‘J’ in his surname in the English way.

  ‘It’s Voy-tek.’

  ‘Okay, whatever,’ she said, dragging her chair around the table so they could both comfortably view the screen. ‘But what does it say?’

  ‘It says “Pan Wojtek will be doing a charity skydive over London …”’

  She gave him a hard stare.

  ‘Okay, okay. It says “Anatol Wojtek is one of Orzelair’s longest serving employees, becoming head of security in 2009”. Then it goes on about “global challenges … threat of terrorism … new technology …” corporate hot air. That’s all.’

  ‘So how come that guy from Orzelair – Janicki? – didn’t recognise the company’s head of security?!’

  Janusz drew himself upright and adopted a stuffy, lawyerly tone: ‘I’m sure you will appreciate how difficult it would have been for Pan Janicki to match his memory of a living breathing colleague, whom he saw only rarely, with an artificially constructed post-mortem image of a cadaver …’

  ‘Why would he lie about it? Wouldn’t he care about the guy’s family?’

  ‘I guess having your head of security drop out of one of your planes over Canary Wharf could be a bit embarrassing? Especially now the company’s playing in the big boys’ league with their Lufthansa deal.’

  ‘But what the fuck was this Wojtek doing in the wheel well, anyway? He sure as hell wasn’t an economic migrant.’

  Kiszka felt a twinge of discomfort at hearing profanity from such pretty lips. ‘Maybe he was a crazy person.’ He fidgeted with his tin of cigars. Or maybe he was trying to get to the bottom of what Romescu and his gang were up to at Przeczokow Airport, and got killed for his trouble.

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ She scanned his face. ‘Anything at all? Do I need to remind you that you were an employee of the Met on our Poland trip? If you’re hiding anything you could be charged with obstructing a police investigation.’

  He gave her a long, level stare that said, clearer than any words, that they both knew she was talking a load of horseshit.

  Kershaw glared back at him. The fact that the ‘stowaway’ had turned out to be a senior employee only added to the general air of … whiffiness she’d smelt around the Orzelair set-up. This Wojtek character couldn’t have been murdered, could he? Even if he had, there was very little chance of her getting to the bottom of it all. And she had to admit that the prospect of spending the next God-knew-how-long flying back and forth to Poland to represent the London end of a murder investigation filled her with gloom.

  Janusz nodded at the laptop. ‘I’ve supplied my half of the bargain, now it’s your turn. I want to run a search of Jim’s files for a few names.’

  She waited, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

  ‘They wouldn’t be potential suspects that it slipped your mind to mention, would they?’ she enquired in a voice you could etch glass with.

  He was ready for that one. ‘No, they’re just names I overheard at Jim’s funeral that I didn’t recognise.’ He opened his hands. ‘I’m clutching at straws here.’

  That makes two of us, she thought. Twelve days into the investigation of Jim Fulford’s murder and the team was no closer to unearthing a feasible motive than it had been on day one, which was probably why Streaky had agreed to let Kiszka have supervised access to his dead friend’s computer files.

  ‘Barbu Romescu and Varenka Kalina,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to have to spell those for me.’

  Ten minutes later, having searched Jim’s documents, emails and even his internet search history, they’d drawn a total blank.

  Kershaw felt deflated: Kiszka really had just been clutching at straws. ‘Is there anything else we can look for?’ she asked.

  He rested his jaw in one of those giant mitts.

  ‘Have you run a search for Jim’s deputy manager, Andre Terrell?’ It was as well to leave no stone unturned: Terrell might know what connected his boss to Romescu.

  ‘Not personally, but I know one of my colleagues has already been through Jim’s email traffic.’

  One corner of his mouth twitched upwards. ‘Jim wasn’t a big fan of email. Try looking in documents.’

  Not surprisingly, Jim’s deputy was name-checked in hundreds of the recovered documents, most of which were routine stuff about payroll, health and safety training, insurance and the like. But twenty minutes into the search, Kershaw found something. A letter addressed to Andre Terrell from his boss.

  ‘Listen to this,’ she said. ‘“After issuing three formal warnings for misdemeanours ranging from persistent poor timekeeping to failure to upkeep membership records, I regret that I have no choice but to dismiss you from your position with one month’s notice.”’

  Janusz peered at the screen. ‘Look at the date.’
r />   ‘It’s the day before Jim’s murder.’ Kershaw’s voice was flat, matter-of-fact, but her face had grown pale with excitement. ‘Did Jim tell you that he was sacking this guy?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, nor even Marika, or she’d have mentioned it. The only other person who would need to know was the payroll lady, but she only came in once a month and he probably hadn’t got round to telling her.’

  Janusz recalled how shifty Terrell had been when he’d questioned him about the laptop: now it seemed his suspicion that the boy was behind its disappearance had been well grounded.

  ‘So Terrell gets the sack,’ said Kershaw, thinking out loud. ‘But when his boss gets killed, he sees a chance to keep his job.’

  ‘Right. And he steals the laptop because it’s the only record of his dismissal.’

  Kershaw turned a look on him that was unnerving in its intensity.

  ‘Or because it’s evidence of a motive for murder.’

  Twenty-Six

  It was just before six the following morning and the receptionist at Whipps Cross A&E was looking forward to clocking off when the automatic doors opened to admit a large, angry-looking man in a long coat. Even though her desk was behind a security screen, her eyes went to the panic button: the night shift brought all manner of lowlifes and psychos through the door.

  When the man gave her the name of someone who’d been admitted in the early hours she let herself relax a little. Foreign accent aside, he was nicely spoken, his manners a vast improvement on the average customer, even if his hands were bunched so tight on the counter that the knucklebones were visible through the skin.

  ‘I can’t find anyone of that name on the system,’ she said, peering at the screen.

  ‘Could you check again, please?’ asked Janusz, struggling to keep his voice calm. ‘It’s O-S-K-A-R – with a “k”.’

  Finally, the computer system gave up the information that Oskar had been brought in by ambulance just after midnight the previous night.