by Anya Lipska
‘No comment.’
Kershaw took over. ‘You know the lorry driver Duff shot in that raid? He’s got to have an operation next week, to have a colostomy bag fitted. It’s pretty common, apparently, when you’ve been paralysed.’
Steve’s shrug said Life’s a bitch.
Kershaw leaned towards him. ‘If we don’t put Duff away, do you really think he’ll let you just waltz back into your old life? After he kidnapped your wife?’
His eyes went from side to side, something in his expression shifting, as if inwardly, he conceded the point.
‘Listen, Steve. We know you did some kind of job for him – and whatever it was kicked off all the killings. We’re not looking to charge you with anything – we just want to stop anyone else dying.’ He was looking at her now, taking in what she was saying. ‘He’s decided you’re a loose end, Steve. And we all know how people like Duff deal with loose ends.’
‘If you play ball with us, we can protect you,’ said Streaky. ‘Give us quality information to connect Duff to the Felixstowe job, and I’m confident we can get you into witness protection. Give you a fresh start, somewhere far away from the Duffs.’
Eyes narrowed, Steve appeared to be thinking it over.
Finally he said, ‘Nah. I can look after myself.’ His attempt at a cocky leer was lame, thought Kershaw, like something he’d practised in the mirror.
‘What about Kasia’s safety?’
‘What about it?’ he said sulkily. ‘She’s leaving me for that Polak.’ He looked away but not before Kershaw caught a flicker of something in his expression.
Kasia was evidently Steve’s weak spot. Now she just had to work out how to lean on it.
Forty-Four
The next day, Janusz was on his way to visit Kasia when he glimpsed the compact outline of Natalie Kershaw – a blonde guided missile – beetling down the hospital corridor towards him. Seeing that she had yet to notice him, he was gripped by a sudden urge to duck into one of the wards. He knew he couldn’t avoid the inevitable grilling indefinitely, but in this place, preoccupied with Kasia’s recovery, he felt obnazony – raw – less able to fend off her questions.
‘Janusz!’
Too late. He raised a hand in reluctant acknowledgement: maybe it would be better to get it over with before visiting Kasia.
In the hospital canteen, Janusz asked her to find a table while he went to order the drinks, buying himself a bit of time to prepare for the interrogation. But when she took the cup of tea from him, the look in her grey-blue eyes seemed almost playful. It struck him that she looked much more relaxed – and healthier – than she had when he’d first asked for her help finding Kasia. That was what, just eight, nine days ago? It felt more like nine months.
He put his head on one side ‘You look good. Piekna. New boyfriend?’
‘Er, no-o,’ said Kershaw, feeling a blush creep up her cheeks. She had no clue what pee-ek-nah might mean but she knew a compliment when she heard it. ‘Maybe I’m just living a blameless life.’ There was some truth in that, she realised: as well as cutting down on the booze, she’d even been back to the climbing wall – something she hadn’t done in years. ‘Anyway, never mind me – how’s Kasia doing?’
He smiled into his tea. ‘The medics say she’s on the mend.’ According to the nurse he’d spoken to, Kasia was conscious, if still drowsy, and coping well with the withdrawal from the Rohypnol.
‘I’d like to have a chat with her today,’ said Kershaw, ‘see what she can remember while it’s still fresh.’
‘You can try – but the docs say she has almost no memory of who took her, if that’s what you were hoping for.’ He picked up on her troubled look. ‘You said on the phone you’ve got DNA evidence, though? To prove that Kasia was in Duff’s hideout?’
She half shrugged. ‘We got a match off the water bottle, but the CPS say it might not be enough. Duff’s brief is bound to argue that simply putting his client and Kasia in the same location doesn’t prove beyond doubt that he kidnapped her.’
They sat in silence for a moment. ‘You must know that we don’t buy your handover story for a nanosecond,’ she told him.
‘What story?’
‘The mystery call from the mysterious Mr X offering to deliver Kasia at the fish market – and asking for nothing in return.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s how it happened, darling.’
He always called her ‘darling’, Kershaw noticed, when he had something to hide.
‘What about this call alerting us to where Steve Fisher was holed up?’
He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
‘It came from a call box in East London – a five-minute walk from Whitechapel Hospital, funnily enough.’
‘It’s a small world.’
Kershaw folded her arms. ‘Just in theory, why do you think the person who gave us that tip-off made such a big deal of him having a firearm? Especially since he didn’t have one.’
‘Hypothetically?’
‘Yes.’
He frowned. ‘I suppose the mention of a gun would ensure the cops got there fast.’
‘My conclusion exactly – but why the urgency?’
To stop Steve Fisher getting assassinated by a Russian psychol, thought Janusz.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said.
After much soul-searching, Janusz had decided that tipping off the cops about Steve’s whereabouts before the Russian could reach him was the only course of action that would allow him to preserve a sense of human decency. More selfishly, it meant that he’d be able to look Kasia in the eye without having to hide a terrible secret – a secret that would have cast a shadow over their future life together. Double-crossing the Russian had been a risk, of course, but the guy did already know the cops were looking for Steve; and anyway, the idea that Janusz might tip off the police in order to protect his love rival would be a concept he’d find impossible to compute.
Kershaw scanned Janusz’s face but found his expression about as readable as a granite cliff-face. It was clear from the timing of the tip-off, just after Kasia’s release, that the two events were linked – but she couldn’t for the life of her work out how.
‘Come on, Janusz. Kasia’s safe now. Can’t you tell me a bit more about what’s been going on?’
The plaintive note in her voice tugged at Janusz’s conscience – she had risked her job to help him, after all, when he’d had nowhere else to turn.
‘Look, Natalia. I’d love to,’ he told her. ‘But you need to take my word for it when I say that there are some people you’ll never be able to reach.’ Fingering the scab on his upper lip, he visualised the Russian, no doubt happily ensconced back home with his Siberian Forest Cat by now, enjoying the proceeds of his London mission.
She chewed at the side of a fingernail. ‘What about the mysterious job that Steve did for Joey Duff? The one that led to his friends getting murdered?’
‘What about it?’
‘We can’t find anything that fits the bill – there are no reports of armed robberies just before Steve went missing. Have you got any idea what it might have been?’
‘How would that help?’
She lowered her voice. ‘Joey Duff doesn’t know it yet, but he’s our prime suspect for shooting that lorry driver in Felixstowe. Anything that gives us an insight into his activities might help us put him away.’ Leaning across the table, she fixed him with an intent look. ‘Don’t you want to see that bastard behind bars, after what he did to Kasia?’
Janusz had pulled out his cigar tin, and was turning it over and over in his fist. He had to admit that the idea of seeing the skurwysyn Duff punished for what he’d done to Kasia was a compelling prospect. ‘Okay,’ he said, finally. ‘Off the record. Although I doubt it’ll be much use.’
He laid it out for her as he saw it. How Joey Duff had returned from Australia to take control of the family firm – only to find Russian gangsters parking their tanks on the Duff family’s lawn, mus
cling in on its criminal interests around Stratford. ‘The way I see it, Joey Duff got word that the Russians were using a local flat as their stash house,’ said Janusz. ‘I think he decided enough was enough, and came up with a plan to turn the place over – to send the Russians a message that they weren’t welcome.’
‘Foreigners go home.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘A perennially popular sentiment.’
‘Okay, I’m with you so far. But why would Duff hire a couple of low-level fences like Steve and Jared to do the job?’
Janusz pulled a sardonic grin. ‘Because Russian gangsters have a certain reputation, and Joey Duff wasn’t sure how they might respond.’
‘So rather than risk using his usual crew, with its links to him, he sends in Steve and Jared like, like … human minesweepers.’
‘Yeah. He’s hoping that the Russians will get the message and choose a less troublesome area.’ Janusz lifted massive shoulders. ‘But if the worst comes to the worst, Steve and Jared are dispensable.’
‘So the stash – money, drugs, whatever – wasn’t the main objective. This was about Joey Duff marking his territory.’
‘A tactic which badly backfires. The Russians respond by sending an enforcer to find out who’s behind the raid. He finds Jared and Bill and tortures them – but Jared pegs it before he talks, Bill doesn’t know anything – and Steve’s already done a runner.’
Kershaw’s expression cleared as she pieced it together. ‘Duff is frantic that Steve might put him in the frame with the Russians? So he abducts Kasia in a desperate attempt to reach him.’
‘Yeah. Steve is the last thread linking Duff to the job and he wants it snapped – fast. But Steve’s dumped his mobile and disappeared off the face of the earth.’
Kershaw nodded to herself. ‘Do you have any clue what kind of racket the Russians were muscling in on? Prostitution? Drugs?’
Janusz frowned, recalling the carrier bag Steve had stolen from the flat above the launderette, the envelopes of cash with the scribbled first names and mysterious initials. Pulling out his mobile, he opened the memo he’d made, before handing it over to her. ‘Do these initials mean anything to you?’
Kershaw read aloud: ‘LB, M, ML, BH, CL … I dunno. What context was this in?’ – he gave her what her dad would have called an old-fashioned look – ‘Well, LB is the abbreviation for a pound. Could ML be milli-litre, CL centi-litre? But BH doesn’t sound like any measurement I can think of.’
Janusz was no more than mildly curious as to the nature of the racket – he knew it was irrelevant to the bigger picture. The thing that had turned a simple stash raid into something more murderous and far-reaching was the bullet-shaped data stick – or rather, its contents.
She handed him back his phone. ‘If you’re right, then these Russians of yours went to a shedload of trouble trying to find out who robbed them.’ She bit her lip, frustrated. ‘Whatever Steve stole from them, it must have been really valuable – but we didn’t find anything when we searched his caravan.’
Time to change the subject. ‘I nearly forgot,’ he said, consulting his phone again. ‘You might want to get DVLA to check out this registration number. U-A-5 I-L-Y.’ He spelled out the number plate for the custard-yellow Porsche, which was no doubt still gathering dust in the car park under the flat in Stratford. ‘I’m pretty sure the owner will turn out to be the unidentified dead guy your colleagues found in Victoria Park.’ Had Vasily Vetrov not worked for some very nasty gangsters, his personalised number plate might have struck Janusz as almost poignant – an object lesson in human vanity rendered pointless by death.
‘You mean the guy who was blowtorched and shot in the back of the neck?’ Her eyes widened as she recalled something Nathan had said. ‘He had Russian dental work!’
Janusz was enjoying the look on the girl detektyw’s face.
‘So where does he fit in?’ she asked.
‘He was the Russians’ accountant – he lived in the flat that got rolled. There’s a lady in a Polish grocery shop nearby who can confirm his ID.’
‘So he was the guy looking after the stash for the Russian crims?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And he paid the price for losing it.’
Not exactly, thought Janusz. But what he said was: ‘That’s certainly how it looks, isn’t it?’ After knocking back the last of his tea – now stone-cold – he tapped his cigar tin on the table. ‘Listen, Natalia. I’m afraid I must go. I want to grab a smoke before I see Kasia.’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Then she stared at him.
‘What?’
‘Show me those initials again.’
He handed her the phone.
A moment later she raised her head to shoot him a triumphant grin.
‘It’s not BH. It’s B and H.’
‘Sorry?’
‘B and H – Benson & Hedges. My Auntie Carol used to send me down the shop to buy them for her. Look,’ she turned the phone’s screen round so he could read it. ‘LB – that’s gotta be Lambert & Butler. M …’
‘Marlboro.’
‘Yeah, of course. So ML must be Marlboro Lights. And CL – Camel Lights. The Russians were selling smuggled cigarettes.’
She was right, Janusz realised. Sky-high UK duty had made tobacco London’s number one contraband item. He himself had bought Kasia cartons of Silk Cut in Asian corner shops and Polski skleps where he was known and trusted – even, a couple of times, from shady guys cruising the car park at Asda in Leyton.
‘Brawo, Natalia,’ said Janusz, clapping his hands softly in a round of solo applause.
‘Incredible.’ She shook her head. ‘Three people dead because of a turf war over who gets to sell cheap fags to East Enders.’
‘It’s big business,’ shrugged Janusz, getting to his feet, but Kershaw wasn’t finished with him.
‘Hang on a sec. We’re hoping Steve might help us to nail Joey Duff for the Felixstowe job, shooting that lorry driver. Any idea how we might get him to talk?’
He looked down at her, a single line of worry stitched between her brows, and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Natalia.’
‘The Sarge is talking to the Home Office about giving him a new identity in exchange for turning witness. Do you think he might go for that?’
Janusz recalled Steve’s twisted code of honour, the pride he took in having declined to turn grass when he’d been caught selling the stolen iPads. Then he tried to imagine him starting over, on his own, out of his East End comfort zone. Steve might have contemplated escaping to a new life in Spain, running a beach bar, but that plan had included Kasia, who possessed the necessary skills to make it work – skills that he lacked.
‘No chance.’
‘Could you talk to him?’
He let out a woof of laughter that turned heads at nearby tables. ‘You’re kidding! What makes you think he’d listen to the bastard who’s setting up house with his wife?’
Forty-Five
Entering the ward, Janusz saw Kasia sitting up in bed, a sight which made him pause to cross himself and send up a prayer of thanks, something he’d done countless times since she’d been returned to him.
‘Czesc, Janek.’
Although her words came in a rusty whisper, he couldn’t help but grin – wan complexion and red-rimmed eyes aside, this was the first time that he’d seen her looking anything like her old self again. After he perched himself on the edge of the bedside armchair, an awkward silence fell, but that was hardly surprising given the presence of a nurse who was adding something to Kasia’s drip. ‘I’ll be out of your way in a moment, sweetheart,’ she told him with a wink.
Once the nurse had gone, he took a good look at her, as if committing her face to memory all over again. He noticed a tiny scar he’d never seen before at her hairline, too old to be the result of her recent trauma, but then she didn’t usually wear her hair scraped back this way.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, at a loss for what else to say.
‘Fant
astycznie,’ she said, pulling that lop-sided smile of hers – the first thing he’d noticed about her at their initial encounter, three years earlier.
‘You’ll be fine once you get out of this place,’ he said, taking her little hand into his big mitt.
‘Maybe.’ Defocusing, her gaze drifted over his shoulder.
‘You’re freezing!’ He chafed her hand between his, feeling the bones beneath the skin, the result of her enforced crash diet. ‘When we get you home I’m going to make you a big pile of kopytka with wild mushroom sauce’ – the tiny potato dumplings were her favourite comfort food – ‘and Oskar’s been helping me with getting the bathroom tiled and painted, so everything will be ready for you.’
‘You are a good man, Janek. The best man I ever knew.’
He was alarmed to see tears fill her eyes. ‘Kasiulka, don’t! I know you’ve had a terrible time, but … it’s over now.’ He dropped his eyes to the hospital-blue coverlet, grasping for the right words: he’d always been hopeless at this kind of conversation. ‘The rest … well, it’s true what they say, you know. Time will heal it.’
Janusz stared, appalled and helpless, as Kasia’s tears overflowed, two tracks running down her lovely face.
‘Shhh,’ he told her. ‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have talked about you coming home when you’re still not properly recovered.’ He couldn’t recall ever having seen Kasia in less than full control of herself. Of course, one heard about people suffering PTSD after terrible experiences, but he’d never have said she was the type.
‘Did … something happen to you that you haven’t told anyone about?’ he asked, struck by a sudden intimation of what might be causing her such distress. ‘You do know you could tell me, don’t you?’
A silent but definite shake of the head.
Going to sit beside her on the bed, he put an arm around her narrow shoulders and pulling her closer, brushed away the tears dripping from her jawline. She leaned fiercely into him, pressing her wet cheek against his bristled one, but his efforts to console her only seemed to make things worse. He let her cry, then, making the kind of soothing noises he remembered making to Bobek when the boy had woken howling from some nightmare.