by Anya Lipska
‘Tak. Fantastyczne name for a cop!’ Oskar chuckled. ‘He asked you to call him at the office.’
‘Dobrze,’ said Janusz. ‘I’ll see you about half seven then.’
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Oskar’s voice was plaintive.
‘What?’
‘Aren’t you going to tell me you love me?’
‘Fuck off, Oskar.’ But a smile tugged at one corner of Janusz’s mouth.
DS Bacon didn’t want to talk on the phone so Janusz agreed to drop by the nick on his way to Barking.
Now they sat across a table in the same interview room where the Sergeant had questioned him about Jim’s murder, what felt like 300 years ago.
DS Bacon caught his look. ‘Sorry we’re in here, but we’re having a visitation of IT types – they’re crawling all over the offices upstairs.’
Janusz took the paper cup of tea the Sergeant handed him. ‘How’s Natalia?’ he asked. It had been three days since the medics had declared her out of serious danger but he knew that, with such a deep wound, infection was a constant risk.
‘Yeah, she’s fine. Bending everyone’s ear about when she’s allowed to come back to work.’
Janusz raised an amused eyebrow. ‘She’s not going to be in any trouble, is she, for going to Romescu’s place on her own?’
Streaky shook his head. ‘In the ordinary run of things she’d probably be due some time on the naughty step, but in this case I’d say there are “extenuating circumstances”.’
‘Because it was only due to her initiative that you were able to identify a murderer?’ asked Janusz.
‘The Metropolitan Police reward initiative?! Wash your mouth out!’ Streaky chuckled. ‘No. Let’s just say that since the Stride debacle, the brass have been gagging for a “good news” story. And “Brave girl cop stabbed confronting murder suspect” has a better ring to it than “Brave girl cop disciplined on numbskull health and safety charge”.’
Janusz gave a grunt, remembering a recent story in the newspaper about a cop who’d dived into an icy pond to save a drowning child. In the England he’d arrived in twenty-five years ago they’d have given him a medal; these days the guy’s actions had earned him a reprimand for failing to conduct a proper risk assessment. The world had gone crazy.
‘Anyway.’ Streaky took a document from a file and pushed it across the table. ‘I wanted to let you know that your hunch was right.’
Janusz frowned at the unfamiliar words and letters. ‘Sorry, I don’t really read Ukrainian.’
‘It’s a report from the Kharkov police.’ He pointed out the date, 11th November 1998. ‘They’ve confirmed that the person you know as Varenka Kalina had a little sister, name of Anna. She was born with what they called a “chromosomal deficiency”.’
‘Downs Syndrome.’
Streaky nodded. ‘Varenka’s mother was a prostitute, as you said, and one day when Mummy was out cold on vodka, Anna was raped and beaten by one of the clients. She died in hospital a few weeks later. She was eight years old.’
‘God rest her soul,’ muttered Janusz.
‘The bastard got off with manslaughter, and his tariff is almost up. They’re letting him out in a couple of weeks.’
Janusz imagined Varenka’s reaction to the news of his impending release, how it must have brought the horror of her little sister’s murder come flooding back. ‘She couldn’t take revenge on him, so she executed another paedophile in his place.’
Streaky made a gesture indicating that he shared that conclusion.
Not for the first time, Janusz reflected on the long shadow cast by Stalin’s fifty-year domination of Eastern Europe, and the chaos that had convulsed the region when communism fell. It was no wonder, really, that such desperation, such suffering, had spawned some twisted and ruthless progeny.
Then he remembered something the Sergeant had said. ‘Why did you say the person I “know as Varenka Kalina”? Is it an alias?’
‘Well, it’s a name she’s entitled to use on her passport,’ said the Sergeant with a strange half-smile. ‘But it’s not the one she was christened with.’
Seeing Janusz’s complete incomprehension, he handed him another document from the file. ‘Birth certificate,’ he said, and indicated one of the boxes.
Janusz squinted down at it. The Ukrainian alphabet shared enough characters with the Russian Cyrillic he’d been forced to learn at school to allow him to read the surname Kalina. But although the Christian name started with the letter ‘V’, rendered in Cyrillic as ‘B’, it wasn’t Varenka. The name it spelled out was Valentyn.
Janusz stared at the Sergeant. ‘Varenka was born a boy?!’
He nodded, evidently enjoying himself. ‘Yep.’
Janusz realised his jaw was hanging open. ‘It must be a mistake – she was so beautiful and … ladylike.’ His mind whirred, flicking through a mental album of images of Varenka. Yes, she was tall for a woman, and her hands weren’t exactly dainty, but she was a million miles from the ‘truck driver in drag’ image that the phrase ‘sex change’ summoned up in his mind.
Streaky shrugged. ‘Apparently, as long as you take the right hormones in early puberty, you never develop facial hair, an Adam’s apple, or the rugged good looks you and I enjoy.’
‘But she had breasts …’ Janusz stopped, realising what a dumb comment that was in the era of implants you could literally buy off the shelf. As for the hormones, in post-Soviet Ukraine there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be obtained with hard currency.
In fact, the more he thought about it, the more it fell into place. Even without the height and her husky voice, there had always been something indefinably different about Varenka – the sense that she possessed some mystery no man could unravel.
‘Did she still have …?’ Janusz waved vaguely below the waist.
‘I was going to ask you that,’ deadpanned the Sergeant.
‘Kurwa mac!’ he protested, squirming in his chair. ‘I never laid a finger on her!’
‘I’ll believe you,’ grinned Streaky. ‘Anyway, our boy Romescu obviously had more exotic tastes than you. That place in Kharkov where she danced must have been a tranny club.’
Janusz chewed his thumb, remembering Varenka’s mysterious trip to the private hospital. Then the letters GRA and the name Churchill scrawled inside the pink matchbook from the bar where she’d worked jumped out at him.
‘Gender Re-Assignment,’ he said out loud.
‘Come again?’
‘I think she was still undergoing her sex change treatment at the Princess Louise Hospital – a private place in the West End – and I’ll bet you a tenner that the specialist there is called Churchill.’
Then the night at the opera came flooding back, the story of the water nymph Rusalka who underwent a traumatic metamorphosis so that she could join her human lover. When Varenka had spoken so feelingly that night about the difficulty of transforming oneself, he’d assumed she’d meant escaping a life of prostitution: now it was clear she’d meant something far more fundamental.
As the Sergeant scribbled a note in the file, Janusz went on: ‘That’s why she didn’t leave Romescu earlier. It wasn’t because she was scared of him; she was just waiting till he’d funded her transformation.’
‘What I don’t get,’ said Streaky, frowning, ‘is if he fell for her when she was a geezer, then why would he fancy her after …’ he made a sawing motion across his lap.
Both men avoided the other’s gaze, crossing their legs in unison.
‘How should I know?’ growled Janusz. ‘He was bisexual? He was in love with her, with or without a dick?’ He waved a hand. ‘Nothing surprises me about what people get up to these days.’
As they headed downstairs in the lift, Janusz was lost in his own thoughts. He was still struggling to absorb the alarming truth about Varenka, a girl he had flirted with and, with whom, given the right mood and moment, he might have taken things a lot further.
By the time the door of the po
lice station closed behind him, he had made one unshakeable resolution: Oskar must never know.
Forty-Six
Standing at the bar of the Rochester, Janusz asked for two bottles of Tyskie, the order he’d placed several hundred times over the years meeting Jim here, before correcting himself.
He carried the drinks over to the table by the window where Kershaw sat, looking out into the thickening dusk. It was almost a fortnight since she’d been stabbed and when he got her text suggesting they meet, he hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect.
‘Cheers,’ she said, taking the large glass of white wine he handed her. ‘I’m not really supposed to be drinking yet, but you know what? I’ve decided life’s too short.’
‘Na zdrowie,’ Janusz toasted her, and took a swig of beer. ‘What harm can a couple of glasses of wine do? Doctors are a bunch of old women.’
He saw a tremor of pain cross her face as she set her glass down on the table.
‘So, they say you will make a full recovery, right?’
‘Yeah. I got lucky,’ she grinned. ‘According to my surgeon, if you have to lose an organ then the spleen is the one to go for. Apparently it’s a bit of an optional extra – like alloy wheels or a sun roof.’
It was the sort of tongue-in-cheek bravado that Janusz had come across many times in the company of men – a bit of bluster intended not exactly to deny fear, but to cut it down to a manageable size.
After a pause she said: ‘I wanted to see you as soon as I got out, to thank you.’
‘Thank me?!’ Janusz raised his eyebrows. ‘For sending you to interrogate a cross-dressing psychopath?’
‘If you hadn’t called the nick when you did and insisted on talking to Streaky – to the Sergeant – they say I probably would have bled to death in that apartment.’
The note of bewilderment in her voice told Janusz she was still coming to terms with this momentous idea. He tried to recall when he’d first been confronted with the reality of his own mortality. Probably at the demo where Iza had died, slipping lifeless from his disbelieving fingers – so nineteen years old, a good deal younger than Natalia, but then he had lived in interesting times.
‘If I had only realised what was going on earlier,’ he said, ‘I would never have asked you to go and talk to her.’
‘Well, you didn’t exactly have all the facts, did you?’ she said, staring into her wine, seeing an image of Ben pocketing Stride’s glasses. ‘I hear the person you spoke to when you called the nick took quite a bit of convincing.’ Recalling Adam Ackroyd’s account of the call, she shook her head at him in mock reproach. ‘I’m told you used swearwords he never even knew existed.’
‘Ten years on English building sites,’ said Janusz modestly, before clearing his throat. ‘There’s something I wanted to tell you, too – about that guy who fell out of the Orzelair plane?’
‘Oh yes?’ said Kershaw.
He told her what he’d discovered during their trip to Poland – omitting certain unnecessary details like the handgun he’d dumped in the lavatory cistern at the police station – laying out Romescu’s smuggling operation, and what had really happened to Orzelair’s head of security.
Folding her arms, she skewered him with a stare. ‘You’re telling me that Anatol Voy-tek was investigating the goings-on at … P-shay-joke-off Airport?
‘Not bad,’ he nodded, acknowledging her attempt at the correct pronunciation. ‘Yeah, Prczeczokow.’
‘Whatever. And he got bopped on the head and stuffed in the wheel well by that big ugly mechanic?’
‘Mazurek. Yes, almost certainly.’
‘Because Wojtek was trying to close down Romescu’s arms- smuggling malarkey?’
He lifted one shoulder, bracing himself. She hadn’t raised her voice but he could tell from the set of her jaw that she wasn’t happy.
‘I knew you were keeping something from me in Poland!’
‘I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure of my facts …’
‘I was in charge of the fucking investigation, not you! It’s up to me to make those decisions.’
Janusz winced: even after all this time living in the UK it still pained him to hear a girl curse. ‘After my … discussion with Mazurek I knew Romescu would cover his tracks. You wouldn’t be able to prove anything.’
Kershaw made a noise of angry disbelief.
‘Okay … and it’s true that I wanted you here in London, looking for Jim’s killer. Not haring around Poland on a wild goose chase.’
Glaring at him, she drained the rest of her wine.
‘You have to understand something,’ he said. ‘When I was growing up, an informer’ – he uttered the word as though ejecting something disagreeable from his mouth – ‘was a traitor, pure and simple. No … decent person would dream of talking to the cops. I guess it’s a tough habit to shake.’
She fell silent for a moment, before nodding at his half-empty beer bottle: ‘Another one of those?’ and rose to go the bar, rebuffing his attempts to buy the round.
As she waited for the drinks, Kershaw brooded over the way that Kiszka had kept her in the dark, before it struck her that Ben, her supposed boyfriend, had done exactly the same. There were further uncomfortable parallels – both Ben and Kiszka had tried to alter the course of justice by covering up evidence of a suspicious death. There was one big fat glaring distinction, though. Kiszka wasn’t a police officer.
Back at the table, she set down the drinks and lowered herself carefully into her chair, her fragility an unwelcome glimpse of the old lady she would one day become.
‘Well, at least you told me in the end,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a chat with the detective we met in Poland. Now Romescu’s dead, maybe someone at the airport can be persuaded to spill the beans on Mazurek.’ She paused, picturing the body spreadeagled on the pavement in the shadow of Canary Wharf tower, the pool of blood beside his head like a crimson speech bubble. ‘There’s no way he could have got a big geezer like Wojtek into that plane without some help.’
Looking at Janusz over the rim of her wineglass, she cocked her head: ‘What made you change your mind about telling me, anyway?’
He stared past her blonde head out into the street. The sky was already dark and a mist had come down, spinning whorls of gauzy light around the streetlamps. ‘I realised that Wojtek’s wife, his family, they have a right to know what happened to him. You might not nail Mazurek, but at least they won’t have to wake up every day for the rest of their lives wondering how he ended up in the wheel well of that plane.’
‘You realise it will mean going back to Poland, to make a statement?’
He gave an assenting half-shrug, then grinned: ‘I’ll take you back to that restaurant in the old town if you like. The one where you ate all the potato cakes.’
‘Okay, as long as you don’t do a runner this time.’ She tried for a stern look but her smile muscles weren’t playing ball.
Their eyes met, and they both held the gaze for a long beat, acknowledging that the trip would be no hardship.
‘Natalia,’ his voice deepened, becoming serious. ‘You’ve been through a shattering experience. Don’t ask too much of yourself. And don’t expect your life to return to … how it was before. That’s all.’
‘Believe me, I don’t,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m thinking about joining SCO19.’ Seeing his uncomprehending look, she translated: ‘Firearms unit.’ She downed the rest of her wine. ‘Nothing evens the score with the bad guys like a Heckler & Koch.’
Eyeing her set little face, features blurred by alcohol, he wanted to say more, tempted to share his own hard-won knowledge that drink was, at best, a temporary respite from troubles, at worst, a new and bottomless well of misery. But he knew there was no point.
She picked up her coat, manoeuvring her arms into the sleeves as though moving underwater, deflecting his attempt to help her with a single shake of the head.
‘So what are you up to tonight? Hot date?’ he asked, joshing her.
&nb
sp; ‘Yeah, kind of.’
‘Blind date, maybe?’
‘You could call it that.’
It would be the first time Kershaw had seen Ben since getting out of hospital – back in the real world. Maybe the only chance of salvaging their relationship would be to find some way of starting from scratch. But she wasn’t holding out much hope.
Janusz watched through the window as she walked out of view, feeling suddenly and unaccountably despondent at the thought of not seeing her, at least until the Poland trip. What was it about the girl that got to him?
A phrase his Babcia used to say rang out in his head: she was ‘like a stone in his shoe’.
Epilogue
Around ten days later, Janusz was in the Polski sklep on Highbury Corner, stocking up on dill cucumbers and rye flour, when his phone rang.
Seeing ‘Number Unavailable’ on the screen he almost pressed ‘Ignore’ – he’d been suffering an onslaught of calls lately from Indian guys calling themselves ‘Josh’ and ‘Barry’, imploring him to switch energy providers. But something told him to take the call.
‘Hello, Janusz.’ A voice familiar in its honeyed huskiness, the grumble of traffic in the background.
Kurwa mac! He stood stock-still in the middle of the aisle.
‘I called because I wanted to say sorry, for all the trouble I caused you … and your friends.’
‘Trouble?!’ His voice incredulous at the scale of her understatement.
‘Yes. And I wanted you to know that I honestly liked you – still like you. It wasn’t just … business, you know?’
The hint of flirtatiousness in Varenka’s voice enraged him, but it occurred to him that if he could keep her talking, maybe the cops could use the signal to find out where she’d been calling from. No sooner had the thought occurred to him than there came a sound in the background, a distant squealing caused by some sort of metallic friction. A train? Nie. But something naggingly familiar.
‘How is the girl policeman?’ she asked.
‘She’ll live,’ he said. ‘But she’ll never be the same again.’