by Anya Lipska
Janusz picked up a handful of notes. ‘So this is definitely all you took from the flat?’ Catching Steve’s eyes cut to the left, Janusz lost it, backhanding him across the face.
Steve raised both hands. ‘Okay, okay!’ Reaching behind him, he started to feel along the hem of the curtain, looking for something. ‘It’s no big thing. Just a souvenir really.’ Something chrome-shiny winked as it fell from his hand, rattling onto the tabletop between them.
A bullet. But oversized, Janusz realised – even for the largest calibre gun. Picking it up, he found that the top twisted off to reveal a data stick.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘It was in the bag with the rest of the stash.’
‘What’s on it?’
He shrugged. ‘No idea. I haven’t got a computer here.’
Janusz rolled the bullet in his hand. ‘This guy you robbed? What do you know about him?’
Steve shrugged. ‘Fuck all. I don’t even know his name. Just some guy who kept a lot of cash at home.’
‘And the girl – you said she was foreign. What kind of foreign?’
‘Search me,’ he shrugged.
‘Think, for fuck’s sake!’
‘One of your lot, maybe? Wait – Jared asked her name, trying to keep her calm.’ He screwed his face up. ‘Lara. That was it.’
Lara. The short form of Larissa, which would make her most likely Russian or Ukrainian. Janusz started to return the cash to the carrier bag, stacking it neatly.
‘Take the money,’ said Steve. ‘Maybe it’ll help you get Kasia back.’
Janusz grunted. Picking a free sheet newspaper off the floor, he folded it into the top of the bag to hide the contents. ‘You stay here. You contact no one. Whoever killed Jared and Bill – they’ll still be looking for you. If I need you, I’ll call the old lady in the office.’
Steve shifted in his seat, his expression becoming mournful. ‘I’d give anything to turn the clock back, you know – to make Kasia safe again.’
‘Well, let me know how you get on with that,’ said Janusz, getting to his feet.
‘I know you probably won’t believe me – but Kasia and me, we were all right for a long time,’ Steve was apparently in confiding mood now that Janusz was leaving. ‘Up till the moment we lost the baby.’ Their eyes met, and this time it was Janusz who looked away first. ‘You didn’t know about that, then?’ Steve sounded defiant but it was plain from the way he spoke, mouth twisted to one side, that he felt the loss still. ‘Yeah, we had a little girl, stillborn. Almost full term, she was – eight years ago this year. After that, Kasia just couldn’t fall pregnant again.’
Until now, thought Janusz. Until now.
Twenty-Nine
First thing the following morning, Janusz got a call from the girl detektyw saying she had some information that might interest him, but refused to say more till they met in person. Now he sat waiting for her in a greasy spoon in Walthamstow, sipping a lemon tea.
In a bid to still his impatient speculation as to what she’d discovered, Janusz went over what Steve had told him for about the hundredth time, attempting to fit it alongside what he already knew. He was reminded of an Impressionist painting he’d seen in a gallery one time. Standing up close to the canvas, all you could make out were the formless daubs and dashes of paint; it was only when you stood back that the countless individual brushstrokes resolved themselves into a picture – bathers and sightseers around a sunlit lake. Right now, Janusz felt as though he were standing way too close – that the bigger picture was still eluding him.
Steve and Jared’s raid on the flat above the launderette was at the heart of this business, of that much he was sure. And the envelopes full of cash were clearly the proceeds of some kind of racket. Of course, gangsters raiding each other’s stash was nothing new, but he was struggling to understand why Joey Duff would hire a pair of jokers like Steve and Jared to do the job – and ask for nothing in return?
Through the window, he saw the slender little figure of Natalia coming into view, beetling along the pavement under an umbrella. She paused in the doorway to give it a shake before joining him.
‘Sorry I’m late. It’s caning it down out there.’
‘So I see.’
He eyed her with an amused glance: her fair hair looked damp and messy, her cheeks pink. He was suddenly reminded of the trip they’d taken to Poland, where he’d acted as her interpreter, and especially the night when, in the heat of a blistering row, he’d come perilously close to kissing her. He and Kasia had been going through a rough patch at the time so it was fortunate that Natalia had been more or less engaged to some other cop: people’s entire futures turned on such split-second decisions, he mused.
‘I’ve been doing some digging on your Duffs,’ she told him with a triumphant grin, after taking a gulp of the Diet Coke he’d bought her.
‘Tell me.’ Janusz’s voice was urgent, the daydream forgotten in his desperation for anything that might take him a step closer to finding Kasia.
‘It turns out that Frankie Duff was a bit of a legend in the sixties and seventies. The Duff Family was the biggest criminal gang east of Hackney. They had a string of pubs and clubs, but that was all just a front for the real business – which was mainly drugs and prostitution. Anyway, in the nineties, the family firm decided to diversify – and guess what their new venture was?’
‘Armed robbery.’
‘Got it in one.’ She shot him a quizzical look.
‘Educated guess,’ he shrugged.
‘Okay. Anyway, in 1999, SOCU got some intel and Flying Squad ambushed a gang in the middle of a raid on a warehouse. The leader was Frankie’s son, Joseph – more commonly known as Joey – Duff.’
‘He went down, I take it?’
‘Yep. Twelve-year sentence. After he’d been inside a year, his dad died of a stroke and he got let out to attend. It was one of those East End gangland funerals.’
Janusz recalled seeing one such affair on TV news a few years back – the horse-drawn carriages, the ageing bottle-blonde ‘celebrity’ mourners, and lavish wreaths spelling out ‘D-A-D’. He’d been appalled and fascinated by the crowds it drew: back in Poland, only religious figures or heroes of the Solidarity movement got funerals like that.
‘I assume he’s been out for a while now?’
‘Yep. He got early release after six years, and as soon as his probation was finished, he buggered off to Australia.’
‘What happened to the family firm?’
‘With Frankie Duff dead and the son gone, that was the end of them. Or that was the story that was put about, anyway.’ She took a leisurely sip of her Coke, her eyes on his, mischievous.
‘Come on, Natalia.’
She felt herself blush: simultaneously pleased yet embarrassed by him using the Polish version of her name. ‘All right. Passport records show that Joey Duff flew back into Heathrow on the 16th of January last year. Three months later, an armed gang held up a lorry – the one I told you about at Felixstowe? And we think the same gang pulled two other similar jobs.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Janusz. ‘Are you telling me that your lot didn’t know Joey Duff was back in the UK? Didn’t anybody put two and two together?’
‘It’s like my old Sarge always says: the public have a touching faith in our powers.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘Fact is, after his probation order ended, Duff became pretty much like you and me. Unless he announces he’s joined Al-Qaeda or something, he can come and go through passport control ten times a year, and we’d be none the wiser.’
Janusz ran his finger around an old mug ring on the tabletop. ‘But now you know he’s back, I suppose you’ll be wanting to speak to him about these lorry robberies.’ He kept his tone casual, but in truth, the thought of the cops chasing after Joey Duff and putting Kasia in worse danger filled him with dread.
‘There’s not much point till we get some evidence,’ said Kershaw. ‘Even if we knew where he was.’ She’d suggested
the exact same thing to Streaky, after he’d told her the Duff family history, only to earn herself one of his dismissive snorts. Never confuse coincidence and evidence, he’d told her.
Janusz looked out of the fogged and rain-streaked window at people scurrying by, hunched under umbrellas. ‘Have you got a photo of him?’
She tapped the screen of her phone and handed it to him. ‘His arrest mug shot.’
Back in the nineties, Joey Duff still had the mullet, but gelled into spikes on top, a style which Janusz remembered being popular among footballers and celebrity chefs at the time. But there was no mistaking the stony gaze, that twisted nose: the mug shot put it beyond doubt that Joey Duff and the hard-faced guy from the Forest Sanctuary Hotel were one and the same. Janusz heard again his strange, bastardised accent – Cockney intermingled with a twang picked up from somewhere or other … Australia, as it turned out.
‘Well?’ Her blue-grey gaze on Janusz’s face was unblinking.
‘Ugly bastard, isn’t he?’
‘Do you recognise him?’
‘No,’ he lied, handing back the phone. ‘What’s the story with the mother?’
‘After her husband died, Katherine Duff sold the scrap business she’d inherited from her father and retired. She bought herself a big pile in the country and a golf club in Epping, which she had converted into the Forest Sanctuary Hotel. It’s all above board – on the face of it, anyway. The business is in the name of Sebastian Duff, the younger son.’
Recalling his tanning booth encounter with Duff Junior, Janusz felt a twinge of conscience. ‘Yeah. I came across him at the hotel,’ he said. ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think he’s involved in the dirty side of the business. There’s certainly no love lost between him and his brother.’
‘Interesting,’ she said, filing away the information. Then she saw a smile spreading across his face, lifting his habitual scowl. ‘What is it?’
Janusz was recalling his stay at the hotel, and the moment when Oskar had told him the name of the owner. He’d called her Katarzyna – the Polish version of the English name Katherine, as Natalia had just confirmed.
‘You said that the Duffs used to own pubs and clubs, right?’
‘Yeah …’
Narrowing his eyes, Janusz pictured the woman who’d been serving behind the bar of the Pineapple the first time he went there. The woman who Bill had called ‘Kath’. He remembered she’d struck him as surprisingly well turned out for the landlady of such a cruddy pub, with her expensive clothes, jewellery, and winter tan – she and her younger son apparently shared a weakness for sun beds. And now he thought about it, hadn’t her ears pricked up when he’d asked after Steve Fisher?
‘I think if you check, you’ll find that Katherine Duff still owns the Pineapple.’
‘No shit!’
‘Bill said something about her being out of practice changing a beer barrel,’ he said, thinking aloud.
The girl’s face snapped shut quicker than a sprung trap. ‘You met Bill Boyce?!’
‘Uh, yes. Ages ago.’ Janusz cursed himself. ‘Didn’t I say?’
‘No. You didn’t. In fact, you gave me the definite impression that you’d never set foot in the Pineapple.’
She suddenly sounded like milicja. Opening his big hands on the table, Janusz sent her his most innocent look. ‘I go to a lot of pubs, darling, I can’t be expected to remember them all. Anyway, the conversation we had, it was just bar chit-chat.’
‘You know he’s been murdered, right?’ she asked, her gaze skewering him.
‘Yes, so I heard,’ he said, making a split-second decision that she’d never believe a claim of ignorance. ‘Looks like being friends with Steve Fisher can seriously damage your health.’
‘You’re right there,’ she said.
Seeing her drop her gaze, Janusz drew an inward sigh of relief – he’d got away with it.
Kershaw drained her glass. She didn’t buy his story for a minute – but what was the point in picking a fight?
‘Anyway, where does it get us?’ she went on. ‘If you’re right, I mean, and Katherine Duff really does own Steve’s local?’
‘She’s a retired millionaire – her idea of a busy day is probably getting her nails done and her legs waxed. Why would she put herself behind the bar of a pub unless she was desperate for something?’
‘Like what?’
He ran a considering hand along his jaw. ‘To eavesdrop on the gossip. Find out if anyone knows where Steve has got to.’
‘Which would suggest she’s up to her ears in her son’s dirty business.’
Janusz shrugged, non-committal. He was aware of walking a tightrope: handing Natalia just enough to earn reciprocal intelligence about Joey Duff, but not so much that it risked the situation slipping out of his control.
‘I’ll text the Sarge,’ said Kershaw, reaching for her phone. ‘See if we can find out who owns the Pineapple.’
As she tapped out a text, Janusz’s brain was racing. It felt to him as if parts of the picture were finally starting to coalesce, shapes emerging from the formless mass. From the clamour of his thoughts a sudden conviction emerged: whatever his motives when he ordered the raid on the flat above the launderette, Joey Duff had bitten off more than he could chew.
One thing was as clear as the sun: the idea that all this angst and bloodshed could stem from the theft of a paltry fifteen grand was implausible, if not laughable. His thoughts turned to the bullet-shaped data stick sitting in his coat pocket. The minute he’d got back from Southend he’d tried opening the thing on his laptop, but it was password-locked. Had Steve lied to him? Had the data stick been the real target of the robbery all along? Something else occurred to him. The break-in at the nail bar had happened right after Steve went missing. Was it an attempt by Duff to recover the stick, thinking Steve might have hidden it there?
Janusz turned the bullet shape over in his pocket, toying with the idea of handing it over to Natalia – the cops had whole departments dedicated to unlocking data – before dismissing the idea. He couldn’t bring himself to hand over his only clue, his single hope of bringing Kasia home unhurt. If only his degree had been in computing rather than physics.
Suddenly, he leapt to his feet, jogging the table and startling Kershaw, who caught her empty Coke glass as it threatened to topple. ‘What the f …?’
‘Sorry, darling. I just remembered, there’s someone I have to see.’
Before she could protest or press him further, he was gone, leaving the bell above the door jangling in his wake.
Thirty
‘I brought my laptop,’ Stefan told Janusz, as the younger man set down two pints of Tyskie. Stefan had suggested the George, a sprawling Victorian gin palace opposite Wanstead tube for their rendezvous, due to the privacy offered by its ornate high-sided booths. ‘Do you have the article?’ The old boy evidently relished the cloak and dagger nature of their rendezvous: his voice was tense with suppressed excitement, blackbird eyes hooded yet alert.
Stefan had been unable – or unwilling – to say over the phone whether he’d be able to access the contents of the locked data stick, and Janusz had been loath to return to St Francis’s, where he would only be reminded of the unfinished business of Wojtek Raczynski’s fraudulently inflated annuity. He still felt duty bound to report the matter to Haven Insurance at some point, but told himself that asking Stefan for advice on a separate matter didn’t, strictly speaking, breach the terms of his contract. Anyway, in the strange state of limbo that he’d inhabited since Kasia had gone missing, he’d learned not to look too far ahead. One step at a time: that was the only way of coping with the sickening sensation of vertigo that engulfed him whenever he thought about where she was, or what might be happening to her.
After firing up his laptop, Stefan inserted the data stick. ‘Any clues at all to the password? Such as the owner’s name, birth date, so forth?’
‘Not really. Only that it might be in Russian.’ Janusz eyed the laptop –
a large and expensive-looking black number.
‘It’s my single extravagance,’ said Stefan, with that unnerving knack he seemed to have of reading unspoken thoughts. He tapped the keyboard. ‘I just downloaded the latest “brute force” software. And luckily for you, it accepts a Cyrillic character set.’
‘So, are you saying it can crack a password, just like that?’ Janusz tried not to sound sceptical.
‘Well, that depends entirely on the complexity, of course. If it’s eight or nine characters and a simple words and numbers combination, then probably, yes. It runs a billion guesses … per second.’ Stefan chuckled at the look on Janusz’s face.
Recalling that his own favoured password was Kasia’s name and birthday, Janusz wondered guiltily how long it would take to crack. ‘What if it’s more complex?’
‘Then I might need some help from one of my young wunderkinds. Some of them have access to some serious hardware.’
Janusz squinted at the screen, which was filled with scrolling lines of flickering text. ‘Is there any password that isn’t breakable?’
‘Probably not,’ Stefan chuckled at Janusz’s shocked look. ‘But rest assured, there are very few people with the requisite skills and a computer large enough to do the job.’
Having arranged to talk again when Stefan had any news, Janusz left him to it. At the door to the street, he threw a backward glance at the booth where the old man sat. Hunched over the laptop, his face illuminated by the screen, he looked like a medieval alchemist in an old master painting, transmuting base metal into gold.
Before leaving the caravan park the previous night, Janusz had extracted from Steve the address of the flat that he and his mate Jared had robbed. Half an hour after leaving Stefan, he had located the Bubbles Launderette on the outskirts of Stratford. The place stood in a straggle of dismal-looking shops – an Asian newsagent, a Polski sklep and a Paddy Power, alongside a couple of empty units that had been boarded up long ago. He found the flat’s front door down a side turning, but after ringing and knocking he got no answer. Flipping open the letterbox, he peered through – and saw a pile of junk mail overflowing the mat.