Death Can’t Take a Joke

by Anya Lipska

  ‘I went and parked opposite that Turkish café in Walthamstow, Friday afternoon. I remembered Marek saying that was one of the days he goes there.’

  ‘And did he turn up?’

  Oskar levered himself up on his pillows, grimacing as the weight shifted onto his plastered arm. ‘No, but he sent his driver – the one with all the tattoos? He had a rucksack with him.’

  Cash collection – or delivery, thought Janusz. ‘Did the rucksack look any different between when he went in and when he came out?’

  Oskar screwed his eyes half shut. ‘It looked bulkier when he came out.’

  Collection.

  ‘So you followed him?’

  ‘Tak, in the van.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘And I made sure I was super dyskretny.’

  Janusz pictured Oskar’s beaten-up van with the squealing fan belt ‘discreetly’ tailing Romescu’s Discovery around the East End.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘When we got to the A406, he suddenly took off, and I lost him.’

  ‘Until he turned up at your flat later on.’

  Oskar turned an astonished gaze on him. ‘How did you know?!’

  ‘He took your licence plate, kolego,’ growled Janusz, ‘and used it to get your address.’

  Later that night, Oskar had answered the doorbell to find a man wearing a balaclava on the doorstep.

  ‘He coshed me over the head. Whack! After that, I don’t remember a thing, not till I woke up in here and saw your ugly mug leering down at me.’

  ‘Nothing about what happened up at Hollow Ponds, the woods?’ Janusz felt his jaw clench. ‘You told me they … hurt you, to find out why I’m investigating Romescu.’

  ‘Did I say that?’ Oskar looked blank. ‘It’s all gone now. Pfouff!’

  ‘What did you tell the cops?’

  ‘That I got mugged taking a walk in the woods,’ said Oskar. ‘They didn’t seem all that interested. They probably thought I was some Eastern European gangster.’ He looked quite pleased with this idea.

  ‘A lonely old pedzio looking for a blowjob, more like,’ said Janusz, grinning.

  ‘Well, you’d know more about that than me,’ said Oskar.

  The curtain rattled aside to reveal a nurse with a businesslike air.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ said Oskar, reverting to English. ‘No Susie today?’

  ‘Susie has taken a holiday,’ said the nurse, checking the overhead monitor. ‘I am Jadwiga.’

  ‘You’re Polish?’ asked Oskar, his eyes following her brisk movements.

  She nodded. ‘I’m afraid visiting time is over,’ she told Janusz.

  ‘Okay, prosze pani,’ he said, getting to his feet. Then he remembered something. ‘Oskar. Back home, do you remember seeing brown metal boxes with yellow lettering on them?’

  The answer his mate gave him made him feel like a total idiota. Of course.

  As Janusz had bid Oskar goodbye the nurse had started sniffing suspiciously at the air – bison grass being a highly aromatic herb. By the time he’d reached the doors of the ward he could hear his mate’s voice raised in plaintive protest.

  ‘You can’t confiscate that – it’s private property!’

  Waiting for a bus to take him back to Walthamstow tube, Janusz turned on his mobile and found a text message waiting for him. Paul Jarrett, the guy at the Hollow Ponds café, wanted to talk to him. Nothing urgent, it said.

  Less than ten minutes later, the boating lake came into view. The place was heaving: it might only be eight or nine degrees out, but it was a Sunday, the sky was a milky blue and people were clearly making the most of what could be the last bit of decent weather before winter closed its icy fist. At the café, Jarrett was serving a queue of people, but when he spotted Janusz he nodded and held up two fingers. Two minutes.

  A few minutes later, a teenage girl appeared behind the counter, and Jarrett came over to Janusz’s table carrying two mugs of tea.

  ‘Brrrr! Brass monkeys, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘Still, this probably feels like the Caribbean compared to where you come from.’

  Janusz grinned in rueful agreement: he’d given up explaining that at least in Poland the summer brought many months of reliably warm and sunny weather, something which he found himself missing the longer he lived on this rain-lashed island buffeted by Atlantic weather systems.

  ‘Thanks for the tea.’ He lit a cigar, inhaled. ‘So, did you hear something, about the night my mate got mugged?’

  ‘Nah, it’s not that,’ said Jarrett. ‘I’m probably just wasting your time. But I recall you said something about a black 4X4?’

  Janusz nodded, smothering a grimace at the alien taste of milk in his tea.

  ‘Yeah well, it’s probably nothing, like I say, but one of the rangers was in for a cuppa the other day, and he was saying they’re going to replace some of the logs around the car park.’ He gestured towards the gravelled rectangle, with its rough cordon of tree trunks, clearly laid long ago to prevent vehicles parking in the scrub and woodland beyond. ‘He says he was driving back from the pub the other night when he just happens to glance in here. He sees a motor with its lights off, creeping out of the wood there, through that gap. Before he can do anything, the car pulls onto the road and tears off in the opposite direction.’

  ‘And he reckons it was a Discovery, right?’

  Jarrett nodded. ‘Yeah. Which is why I thought you might be interested.’

  ‘But this wasn’t Friday night, when my mate got beaten up?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’ Then Jarrett struck his forehead with the flat of his hand in frustration. ‘I can’t remember now if he said it was Tuesday or Wednesday. Mind you, it’d be easy enough to find out.’

  ‘You could call him?’

  ‘Nah, sorry, I haven’t got his number – but he said it was the night before that guy was found?’ He lowered his voice. ‘You know, the dirty fucking nonce who hanged himself in the woods?’

  Frowning, Janusz shook his head.

  ‘Are you serious? It was all over the papers. Stride his name was – interfered with a little handicapped girl a while back and got off scot-free.’ Jarrett looked over at the cabin. The rush of customers had subsided and the young girl leaned on the counter, chatting on her mobile phone. He shook his head. ‘If anybody laid a finger on my Deena, I’d …’ The muscles worked in his jaw. ‘And I’m not a violent man.’

  Five minutes later, Janusz took a stroll over to the gap Jarrett had indicated in the car park’s perimeter. Finding a set of tyre tracks through the undergrowth, he followed the trail ten metres or so into the scrub. The tracks ended behind a tangle of elder and bramble bush extensive enough to keep even a sizeable car out of sight of the road.

  Thirty-Three

  Back in her old flat, Kershaw endured the worst night of her life since her dad had died, the thoughts churning in her head like washing on an endless rinse cycle.

  To end up doing what he’d done, to cross the line so dramatically, Ben had clearly become obsessed with Anthony Stride during the time he’d spent with the Ryan family. How had she missed the signs? Could she have done more to pull him back from the brink, maybe even prevented it from happening? More importantly, what the fuck was she going to do now? Finally, towards dawn, she slept fitfully for an hour or so.

  She awoke filled with a powerful sense of resolve: she had to do something to try to fix this unholy mess.

  There were five missed calls and a bunch of texts waiting on her phone: all from Ben. The note she’d left him at the flat had made it clear she knew everything and that she’d taken the glasses ‘for safekeeping’: she couldn’t risk him panicking, making things worse by getting rid of them.

  After taking a hot shower, she primed herself with a strong coffee and called him back.

  ‘Natalie, thank God! I’ve been going out of my mind!’

  At the sound of his voice, she fought down a clamour of emotions. ‘It’s not been a great time for me, either.’

  They fel
l silent, both aware that they were speaking over an open phone line.

  ‘Just what the fuck did you think you were doing, Ben?’

  ‘I … I don’t know. It just happened. I’m sorry.’

  She couldn’t detect any real regret in his voice.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said. ‘What you did, it puts my career on the line – not just yours!’

  ‘What do you mean? You weren’t involved.’

  ‘We were moving in together! After that, everything that you do has consequences for both of us. Especially given the job that we do.’

  ‘You surely don’t care about … what happened to that guy?’ said Ben. ‘You thought the same as me – good riddance.’

  ‘I care about the law!’

  ‘The law screwed up when it let him off!’

  This wasn’t going as Kershaw had planned. She tried for a reasonable tone. ‘Look, what’s happened has happened. What’s important now is that you do the right thing.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Go to your DI, tell him what happened, say you forgot to hand the … item in, whatever …’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Ben! You have to.’

  A longer pause. She could picture his stubborn expression on the other end.

  ‘You’re not going to hand them in, are you?’

  ‘No. What would it achieve?’

  Kershaw ignored the question. It was like they were speaking different languages.

  ‘I can’t brush this under the carpet, Ben. This is really serious. I need to talk to someone, get some advice.’ She let it sink in. ‘I’m going to talk to Streaky. Unless you want to?’

  ‘No. You do whatever you think you have to.’

  His voice was cold and the call ended without any glimmer of reconciliation.

  Without allowing herself to pause and think about what she was about to do, she pulled up Streaky’s number and pressed dial.

  For perhaps the first time ever, he actually answered his mobile.

  ‘Sarge, it’s Kershaw. Look, I’m not working today but I really need to see you.’

  ‘I’ve been expecting this,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The day when you realised you could no longer repress your feelings for a devilishly attractive senior detective of mature years.’

  He agreed to meet her in Leytonstone, at a pub where they would be highly unlikely to run into anyone from the nick. While he was up at the bar ordering drinks, she got a sudden bout of cold feet. What the fuck was she doing? If she grassed up Ben, wouldn’t Streaky be duty bound to report him? Was she really ready to take responsibility for ending Ben’s career?

  She drank half her glass of red wine in a single draught. Streaky sipped his pint, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me, Sarge. I didn’t know what else to do. You’re the only person I can talk to.’ Her words came out in a gabble.

  ‘Calm down, woman,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘There’s nothing so bad it can’t be sorted out.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  As she told the story, Streaky’s face remained im- passive, the only visible reaction a fractional raising of his gingery eyebrows at her mention of the blood on Stride’s glasses.

  ‘I realise that you might have to report this,’ she said, her face tense with misery. ‘And the last thing in the world I want to do is drop Ben in it, but the only alternative I could see was for me to resign – leave the Job. And I’m not sure I could bear to do that.’

  Putting it into words crystallised what she felt for the first time. She had no idea whether she and Ben had a future, but she knew one thing sure as Christmas: she couldn’t cover up for him, pretend nothing had happened, and continue to work as someone whose entire purpose was to uphold the law. That kind of hypocrisy would turn her stomach.

  Streaky brushed some crumbs from the table. ‘So you think our friend Stride was offed by vigilantes?’

  She nodded.

  ‘The post-mortem is on Tuesday, if memory serves. If you’re right, then the pathologist should find some evidence of a struggle – bruising, contusions, whatever.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not a Home Office PM, is it? He might easily put it down to Stride blundering into trees in the dark, especially since we presented it as a Cat 2 death.’

  ‘Fair point,’ said Streaky, wiping foam from his upper lip. ‘A bog-standard PM won’t necessarily pick up on the little clues.’

  She scanned his face, trying to work out what he was thinking. ‘It’s not like I’m shedding any tears for Stride, Sarge, but if we let murdering scumbags start to dish out justice, then we might as well close the nick, issue everyone with an Uzi, and fuck off home. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Eloquently put,’ he said. ‘Do you have the article with you?’

  Filing the jiffy bag inside his jacket, Streaky dug out his mobile and a packet of fags, before stepping out into the street. After he’d gone, Kershaw started feeling panicky again, desperate to know what was going on. What was he doing? Destroying the evidence? Phoning Divisional Standards? It struck her that he might be sending someone to arrest Ben right now.

  Well, what did you expect, she asked herself, for Streaky to wave a magic wand and make everything alright?

  Five minutes later, he came back in, sat down, and opened a packet of crisps, as though nothing had happened. She didn’t know what to think: was the jiffy bag still there in his inside pocket, or had he got rid of it?

  ‘What’s going to happen to Ben, Sarge?’

  ‘You let me worry about that.’

  ‘But what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘You stay away from loverboy – and don’t discuss this with anybody, especially over a mobile phone.’

  He sluiced the last of his pint down his throat and, setting the empty glass back on the table, sent her a meaningful look. She looked back at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘Look lively, detective: it’s your round.’

  As Kershaw drove back to Canning Town, she savaged her nails, her mind whirring with questions. Streaky had played his cards very close to his chest. Was he just being circumspect, given the seriousness of what she’d told him? Or was there something else going on? He had pretty trenchant views on the death penalty, after all. Where would it leave her if he simply pretended none of this had happened? With just two options, she realised, both of them seriously unattractive: keep schtum, or take the matter higher, which would mean dropping Ben and Streaky in it.

  Then she remembered something Streaky himself had said after a Hackney cop reported a colleague who liked beating up suspects in the back of the van.

  You know what happens to whistleblowers in the end, don’t you? he’d said. They end up having their whistles inserted where the sun don’t shine.

  Thirty-Four

  Janusz pocketed the SIM card from his mobile phone and slotted in the new one he’d just bought from an Asian newsagent on Lea Bridge Road.

  Jim’s murder was more than two weeks old and he still felt like he was getting nowhere. Finding out that Romescu’s Discovery had been parked at Hollow Ponds the night some paedophile hanged himself only confused matters – after racking his brains for a possible connection, Janusz had more or less dismissed it as a weird coincidence. The woodland was the closest thing the area had to a wilderness, and its proximity to the drugs, gangs and other assorted villainy of the East End inevitably made it a magnet for those whose business was best conducted in private.

  Snapping shut the cover of his phone he dialled Varenka’s number, ready to hang up if somebody else answered. Without anything else to go on, it was time to take a risk and apply some gentle pressure, see if she would confide in him, reveal something that might provide the missing link between Romescu and Jim. She hadn’t answered Janusz’s text after their evening at the opera, and it occurred to him that her boyfriend might be monitoring her calls – hence the precaution of a new SIM card, to ensure he’d show
up as an unknown number.

  ‘Varenka speaking.’

  ‘Can you talk? If not, just say it’s the wrong number.’

  A pause and then she said, ‘It’s okay, please wait a moment.’ He heard her steps as she took the phone somewhere … quieter? Safer?

  ‘I need to see you,’ he said. If she thought his urgency was romantically motivated, so be it; with one friend dead and another in hospital, disappointing a pretty girl came pretty low on his list on concerns.

  She hesitated for a beat. ‘I could say I need to go shopping? But I will probably have company.’

  An hour later, Janusz was riding an escalator into the glassy maw of Stratford Westfield, a recently built temple to the god of shopping that, given his intense dislike of crowds, he’d so far managed to avoid. It occurred to him that Varenka wasn’t the only one who needed to keep a low profile: the nail bar where Kasia worked was only five minutes away, and although he suspected that their relationship was entering its terminal stages, the prospect of her spotting him with another woman was nonetheless an unattractive one.

  He found Varenka leafing through a book in the gardening section of Foyles – a rendezvous she’d probably chosen because the store lay in one of the quieter reaches of the mall, and its cookery and gardening section was tucked away at the rear, safe from the gaze of passers-by.

  She was dressed more casually than he’d seen her so far, in flat pumps, a pair of artfully ripped jeans and a soft black jumper under her red coat. Her face looked younger and more vulnerable than it had under the evening makeup she’d worn for Romescu’s soiree and the opera.

  Janusz took up position where he’d get advance warning of anyone coming into their section of the store and picked up a book on bread making.

  ‘Do you have company?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. But he decided to wait in the car park, playing games on his phone.’

  The tattooed driver.

  She shot Janusz an amused look. ‘Even if he decides to come after me, it would never occur to him to look in a bookshop.’

  Nodding down at the book in her hands, he raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you a keen gardener?’