Where the Devil Can't Go (3 page)

Which was all well and good, but knocking on people’s doors wearing a party T-shirt wasn’t really up Janusz’s street. So after murmuring a few vague words of support, hedged with protestations of masculine busy-ness, he gave the old dears his most gallant bow, and made a quick exit, feeling their eyes on his back all the way up the side aisle.

At the last alcove, he paused under the gentle gaze of a blue-gowned plaster Mary, lit by a shimmering forest of red perspex tea lights, and, asking forgiveness for his white lie, crossed himself.

With an hour or more to go before the evening rush, the only sound in The Eagle and Child opposite Islington Green was the clink of glasses being washed and stacked.

Janusz ordered a bottle of Tyskie for himself and a bisongrass
wodka
for the priest. When he’d first arrived in London, over two decades ago, these drinks were exotic, practically unheard-of outside the Polish community, but the mass influx of young Poles that followed EU membership changed all that. It still made him chuckle to hear English voices struggling to order
Wyborowa, Ocokim,
Zubrowka.

He took the drinks out to the ‘beer garden’, a stretch of grey decking pocked with cigarette burns, ringed by a few wind-battered clumps of pampas grass. He took a table under a gas heater: it was a bitter day, but a drink without a smoke, well, wasn’t a drink.

“More sins of the flesh?” said Father Piotr Pietruzki, clapping Janusz on the shoulder just as he was lighting his cigar. The old man’s manner was friendly, mischievous even, now he was off duty.

“To your health,” said the priest, taking a warming sip of
wodka
. “So how is... ‘business’?” – the sardonic apostrophes audible.

“Not so good. A few cash flow problems – till I collect from a couple of bastards who owe me.”

The priest locked eyes with Janusz over the lip of his glass.

“Using no more than my persuasive skills, Father.” A conciliatory grin creased his slab-like face.

“To think you were once the top student in your year. And not just at any university: at Jagiellonski!” mused the priest, for perhaps the hundredth time.

Janusz permitted himself a brief glance skywards.

“
Such
a fine brain, you had – Professor Zygurski told me,” said the priest, shaking his head. “Of course, theology would have been more fitting than science, but, still, what a waste of God-given talent.”

“It wasn’t a time for writing essays,” shot back Janusz. “How could I sit on my backside in a cosy lecture theatre talking about Schrodinger’s Cat while people were getting beaten to pulp in the streets?” Pushing his free hand through his hair he added in a brooding undertone, “Although maybe I should just have carried on fucking about with Bunsen burners.”

The priest pulled at his earlobe, decided to let the profanity go.

The early Eighties had been a disruptive and dangerous era for everyone, he reflected – especially the young. The protests organised by Solidarity adhered largely to the principle of peaceful protest but were met, inevitably, by the batons and bullets of the Communist regime. In more normal times, Janusz might have gone on to match, or even outshine, the achievements of his father, a highly-regarded professor of physics at Gdansk University, but soon after General Jaruzelski declared martial law, the boy had abandoned his studies to join the thrilling battle for democracy on the streets.

Then, just as suddenly, he had left for England – abandoning the young wife he’d married just weeks before. When he turned up at St Stanislaus’ he was clearly a soul in torment, and although Father Pietruzki had never discovered the root of the trouble, one thing was certain – whatever happened back then cast a shadow over him still.

He studied the big man with the troubled eyes opposite him. This child of God would never be a particularly observant Catholic, perhaps, but the priest was sure of one thing: he was possessed of a Christian soul, and when the new government was elected – by God’s Grace – it was to be hoped that men such as he would return home to rebuild the country.

He leaned across and tapped Janusz on the back of the hand.

“I may have a small job for you,” he said. “Something
honorowy
– to keep you out of trouble, and to use that brain of yours. A matter that
Pani
Tosik brought to me in confession.”

Janusz raised an eyebrow.

“And expressly
permitted
me to take beyond the sacred confines of the confessional. One of the girls, a waitress in the restaurant has gone missing.”

“With the takings?”

“No, no, a God-fearing girl,” said the priest. “She always attended
Masa
. She’d only been here a few weeks, waiting tables, plus a little modelling work,” ...Janusz raised an eyebrow and grinned through his cloud of smoke.

“Yes, a very beautiful young woman, but a good girl and a hard worker. She disappeared two weeks ago without a word, and Pani Tosik is worried out of her skin. She doesn’t want to call the police,
naturalnie
.”

Janusz inclined his head in understanding. Maybe Poles were insubordinate by nature, or maybe it was a reaction to forty years of brutal foreign rule – either way, they didn’t roll out the welcome mat for the cops.

“So? She’s found a boyfriend who’s getting rich doing loft conversions,” he said, flicking a fat inch of ash off his cigar.

“Maybe, but the girl’s mother back home hasn’t heard from the girl and Pani Tosik feels terribly guilty. She wants her tracked down,” he met Janusz’s eyes, “And she’ll pay good money.” Janusz couldn’t help smiling at the old man’s transparent look of guile as he delivered his trump card.

Finding a missing person was hard work and involved lots of schlepping round on the Tube, which he loathed – but it was common knowledge that Pani Tosik was loaded, and he could certainly do with the cash.

Father Pietruzki drained the last of his drink and stood to go to the bar.

“Anyway, I suggested you - God forgive me.”

TWO

The sky over the Thames was a milky, benevolent blue, but a freezing wind raked Detective Constable Natalie Kershaw’s face as the fast-response Targa tore over the steely water. As the speedboat swept under Tower Bridge, engine noise booming off the iron stanchions, the uniformed helmsman sneaked a sideways look at her profile, the blonde hair scraped back in a businesslike ponytail. He wondered if he dared ask her out. Probably not – she looked like a ball breaker, typical CID female.

Kershaw was miles away, thinking about her Dad, scanning the southern bank for the Bermondsey wharf where he had hauled coke as a warehouseman in the Sixties – his first job. He’d pointed it out to her from a tour boat – an outing they’d taken a couple of years ago, just before he’d died. She finally clocked his warehouse – hard to recognize now its hundred-year old patina of coal smoke had been sandblasted off. Fancy new balconies, too, at the upper windows: all the signs of the warehouse’s new life as swanky apartments for City bankers –
Yeah, a right bunch of bankers
, she heard him say. He’d be pleased as Punch to see her now, a detective out on her first suspicious death.

When her DS had dropped it on her that morning she’d been a bit hacked off – she already had to go up west for a court case, and this job meant her racing straight back to Wapping. Anyway, surely a floater pulled out of the Thames was a job for a uniform? But telling the Sarge that, however diplomatically, had been a Bad Move, she realised, almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Worse, she was on early turn this week, so this had all gone off at 0730 hours, and DS Bacon, known to his constables, inevitably, as Streaky, was
not
a morning person. He had torn a big fat strip off her in front of two of the guys.

“Let’s get one thing straight, Kershaw – you’ll do whatever fucking job I throw at you and say thank you, Sarge, can I get you a cup of tea, Sarge. If I hear any more of your cheeky backchat I’ll have you back on Romford Rd wearing a lid faster than you can say diversity awareness.’

Streaky was in his fifties, old school CID to his fag-stained fingertips, and Kershaw suspected that in his book, female detectives were good for one thing: interviewing witnesses in rape, domestic violence, and broken baby cases.

Of course she could complain to the Guv, DI Bellwether. Streaky’s Neanderthal management style – the swearing, the borderline sexism, his old school insistence on addressing DCs by their surnames – it was all a total no-no these days, but she’d rather keep her mouth shut and get on with it. You needed a thick skin to be in the job. If she got stick now and again for being a young, blonde female – and therefore brainless – she could give as good as she got. Anyway, everyone copped it for something. Being fat, thin, Northern, ginger, having a funny name, having a boring name, talking posh, talking Cockney, anything. At her first nick, one poor bastard had made the mistake of letting on that he did Karate, and the next day his desk disappeared under a deluge of Chinese takeaway menus and house bricks. She couldn’t even remember his real name, because after that everybody – even the girls on switchboard – called him Chop Suey.

Giving – and taking – good banter was about bonding, fitting in, being part of a unit. If you couldn’t take friendly abuse from fellow cops you were finished, game over. One thing she was sure of: Natalie Kershaw wasn’t going to end up one of those sad cases moaning about sexism at an employment tribunal. If she hadn’t made Sergeant by the time she turned thirty, in three years’ time, she’d pack it in and do something else.

Anyway, once she’d had a proper look at the job Streaky had thrown her, she thought maybe it wasn’t so lame after all. The floater had come up naked, and you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that suicides don’t generally get their kit off before chucking themselves in the river. So maybe it was a good call to send a detective to have a look before the pathologist started slicing and dicing – Streaky might be a dinosaur in a bad suit, but occasionally he showed signs of being a good cop.

The Targa overtook a tourist boat – the occupants craning to check out the cop at the helm and his attractive plainclothes passenger – and within seconds, they were pulling up at a long blue jetty on the north shore in front of Wapping Police Station. Kershaw gave the uniform a smile, but ignored his outstretched hand to step down from the bobbing boat unaided. She headed for the nick, a Victorian building with more curlicues and columns than a footballer’s wedding cake, but after a few steps his shout made her turn. Grinning, he pointed across the jetty to an oblong tent of blue tarpaulin, then, revving the Targa’s engine unnecessarily he sped off.

He was cute, she thought. Why don’t guys like that ever ask me out?

She pulled the tarpaulin flap open and ducked inside. Just at that moment two river cops were unloading the contents of a black body bag into a shallow stainless steel bath, about twice the size of the one in her flat. The darkly slicked head of a girl, followed by her naked body, slithered out of the bag in an obscene parody of birth.

“Fuck,” muttered Kershaw, caught unawares. It wasn’t her first stiff – as a probationer she’d been sent on a call to a tower block in Poplar after some neighbours reported a foul liquid seeping through their ceiling. In the upstairs flat she found the remains of an old guy, who’d been dead in his armchair for two weeks in front of a two-bar fire. He’d looked like a giant half-melted candle.

But she had to admit this one was a shocker. The girl’s skin was purplish and mottled, the breasts and stomach bore gaping slashes, and here and there were raw patches the size of a man’s hand, as though someone had taken a blowtorch to the body. The face was fairly intact, except for the eyes, which were now just two blackened empty pits.

One of the PCs left, and the other gave her the rundown.

A middle-aged, lifelong-plod type: a bit world-weary, but straight as a die, which was a relief, because she hadn’t anticipated the sheer embarrassment factor of looking over a naked female with a guy old enough to be her Dad.

“A runner spotted her on the foreshore at low tide, just this side of the Thames Barrier,” he said. “We get quite a few floaters washed up on the sandbank there.”

Kershaw pulled out a notepad and pencil. “She didn’t necessarily go in the water there, though?”

He shook his head. “Could have drifted anything from fifty yards to ten miles downstream – all we can say is she went in somewhere on the tidal section. They can travel a mile a day, or more,” giving her more than he needed to, info she could file away for future use.

“What about the eyes,” she said, nodding toward the empty pits. “I’m guessing ...rats? Birds?”

“Eels, probably”, he said. “Greedy buggers. The type people eat jellied. Personally, I prefer a prawn cocktail...”

They shared a grin over the eyeless head.

“And the injuries?” asked Kershaw. “Any chance they could be pre-mortem?”

He bent to examine the deepest wound, through which the pale glimmer of the girl’s ribcage could be seen, and twisted his mouth sceptically: “Hard to say. Boats and barges can do a lot of damage, and she’s probably been in over a week. When it’s cold they stay under longer – the stomach gases take more time to build up.”

Moving up to the head, Kershaw bent to study the girl’s face, trying to ignore the yellowish foam bubbling out of her nostrils. The skin was puffy from prolonged immersion, which made it hard to tell what she might have looked like in life, but from her slim figure Kershaw guessed she was in her mid to late twenties – making them round about the same age. She was seized by a sudden need to know the girl’s identity.

“Will we get prints off her?” she asked the PC.

With a latex-gloved hand, he turned the girl’s left wrist palm-upwards to reveal the underside of her fingers, which were bloated and wrinkled, the skin starting to peel.

“‘Washerwoman’s hands’,” he said, with a shake of the head. “You’ll get bugger all off them. We’ll take DNA samples, though – maybe you can get your budget manager to approve a test. The reference is DB16.”