Where the Devil Can’t Go
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‘Yes, father,’ Janusz bowed his head a fraction. The exchange didn’t alter much with the years. It was a pain, yes, to be lectured, but like the church’s smell – incense, spent candlewicks and ancient dust – it was strangely comforting, too.
‘I know you and Marta have been estranged for many years,’ Father Pietruski continued, his voice lower, but still firm. ‘Nonetheless, you must try again – for the sake of the boy, at least. Build some bridges with her, hmm?’
Janusz moved his head in a gesture that he hoped might pass for assent. The priest waited for something less ambiguous – in vain.
‘Say three Hail Mary’s and the act of contrition,’ he said, blessing Janusz with his right hand, ‘And I’ll meet you at The Eagle in half an hour.’
Janusz stood and stooped to leave the box, the step loosing off a gunshot crack. The ladies outside rustled with excitement, like birds disturbed at their roost.
‘Dzien dobry, paniom,’ he bowed, recognising many of the faces. They chirped greetings back, but one, sitting in the middle of the pew, grasped his arm as he tried to pass.
There was no escape. Pani Rulewska’s upright posture and the deference of the other women marked her out as their leader, even though she was in her late fifties, a good couple of decades their junior. He paused, bowing his head a fraction.
She wore a dark red skirt suit of some rich, soft material, which even he could see was beautifully tailored. He recalled that she owned a designer clothes factory in the East End, and never let anyone forget that a gown created by her Polish seamstresses had once graced the shoulders of Princess Diana.
‘Now, panie Kiszka, I hope that we can count on your support in the forthcoming patriotic event?’ she demanded in her rather grating voice.
Patriotic event? He felt a flutter of panic, as though he was eight years old again, and unable to remember the next line of his catechism.
‘The election?’ she prompted. ‘The older people, of course, can be relied on, but the youngsters, the ones here, they are another matter. They are away from home and family, they are led astray by straszne English habits. Drinking, sex, drugs …’ Pani Rulewska shook her head. ‘This is no longer the England we once loved.’
The other women bobbed their heads, murmuring assent. He nodded, too, and not entirely out of politeness: the England he’d found a quarter of a century ago might have been duller and greyer, but hadn’t it also been gentler, and more civilised? Or am I just getting old and cantankerous? he wondered.
‘You are known, and respected – mostly …’ she qualified. ‘You can reach the young ones, tell them how the new president will rebuild the country and give them all jobs back home where they belong.’
Despite Janusz’s instinctive distrust of politicians, the Renaissance Party candidate did seem to offer Poland a way out of the predicament it found itself in after twenty years of democracy. Sure, the economy had bounced back after decades of Communist mismanagement, but there still weren’t enough well-paid jobs to prevent the exodus of a million or more young people overseas, most of them to the UK. The country’s graceful Hapsburgian squares were fast disappearing beneath a deluge of fast- food chains and gangs of stag-partying Brits, and unless Poland’s exiled generation could be lured back home soon, he feared for his country’s identity.
Janusz liked the Partia Renasans’ big idea, a massive regeneration programme to create jobs and attract the exiles home – and the way it reunited the alliance of the church, unions and intelligentsia, which in the eighties had defeated the Communist regime under the Solidarity banner. The Party had already won the Sejm and the Senate, and now its leader, Edward Zamorski – a respected veteran of Solidarnosc, a man who’d endured repeated incarceration and beatings during the fight for democracy – looked set to become president.
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 busyness, 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 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, Okocim, 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 chose 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?’ asked Father Pietruski, 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 quotation marks were 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 Janusz had turned up at St Stanislaus, he was clearly a soul in torment, and although Father Pietruski 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 honorowego – to keep you out of trouble – and 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 mass. 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 so, but the girl’s mother back home hasn’t heard from her 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 Pietruski 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 might only come up to his armpit, but 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 – harder to recognise 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 brokenbaby 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 plain-clothes 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’d 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 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.
He was 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,’ he told her. ‘Just this side of the Thames Barrier. 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 round 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.’
Kershaw scribbled on her pad. ‘The sixteenth dead body you’ve found this year?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. And we’re not even four months in yet.’
The smell emanating from the body filled the tent now. A not-unpleasant riverine tang, but with a darker undernote that reminded Kershaw of mushrooms left in the fridge too long. She felt deflated, disappointed not to find something more … concrete. But then she thought: don’t be daft, Nat, did you really think you’d pitch up and spot something to solve the case, Prime Suspect style?
‘There’s no way she’d be naked, is there, if it was just suicide?’ she asked, suddenly anxious that the girl might turn out to be just another random jumper. ‘I mean her clothes, they couldn’t have come off by themselves, in the water?’
He turned his mouth down at the corners. ‘I’ve never heard of a current removing a bra and pants.’ They avoided each other’s eyes. ‘No, I’d say she was definitely naked when she went in,’ he went on. ‘And this time of year, I shouldn’t think she was skinny dipping.’
He bent to reach into a bag at his feet. ‘I’d better get on with the samples while she’s fresh,’ he said, and started to line up plastic vials on a nearby trestle table.
Left alone with the body, Kershaw noticed that the girl’s shoulder-length hair was drying at the ends, turning it a bright coppery gold. It was a shade her dad used to call Titian, she remembered, out of nowhere.
Her gaze fell on the girl’s left hand. It lay as the cop had left it, palm-up on the stainless steel, fingers slightly crooked, suggesting helplessness – or entreaty. A gust of wind whipped the tarpaulin flap open with a crack, making her jump.
‘I almost forgot,’ said the cop, returning to Kershaw’s side. ‘There is one bit of good news.’ Cupping his gloved hand under the girl’s hip, he tilted her body.
Near the base of the spine, just above the swell of the girl’s buttock, Kershaw could see what looked like a stain beneath the waterlogged whiteness of the skin. Bending closer, she realised it was a tattoo – an indigo heart, amateurish-looking, enclosing two names, obviously foreign: Pawel and Ela.
‘Gives you a head start on ID-ing her,’ the cop said, setting the body back down with surprising gentleness.
Three
The rectangle of plastic snapped open as the last coin clinked through the slot, and Janusz stooped to his peephole. Beyond it, in the centre of a dimly lit windowless room, a slender naked girl writhed around a floor-to-ceiling pole under a shower of multicoloured lights.
Every trace of her body hair had been shaved or plucked away, making her nakedness absolute, apart from a single stud in her navel. The girl’s movements, timed to the grinding rock music, had a natural grace, but her made-up face was expressionless and her gaze focused on some distant point. Her long fingernails struck the only incongruous note – painted not the usual scarlet, but jet-black.
Janusz watched just long enough to make sure it was Kasia, then straightened and checked his watch, frowning, and tried to block out the alkaline reek of old semen in his cubicle. The music came to an end, only to be followed by another, smoochier number. Cursing softly, he glanced up at the ceiling and reached into his pocket.
He could still hear the smoke alarm wailing as he leant against the club’s rear wall enjoying his smoke – his fourth, or maybe fifth, cigar of the day. The last punter, a paunchy guy in his forties wearing a chalk-stripe suit, stumbled out of the fire exit, head bent as he finished fastening his fly. Noticing the big man in the old-fashioned trench coat, he straightened, and pulling out a pack of cigarettes, asked for a light.
Janusz sparked his lighter, although the guy had to bend forward to reach the flame. Then, blowing out a stream of smoke, the punter planted his feet apart and jabbed his chin over his shoulder. ‘Did you see the bird in there?’ he asked, with a man-to-man chuckle. ‘I’ll bet that’s a road well travelled.’
Janusz’s face remained impassive, so the guy didn’t notice his right hand clench reflexively into a fist, nor realise how close he was skating to a broken jaw.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Janusz, taking an unhurried draw on his cigar. ‘I just work here sometimes.’
The guy gave him an assessing look, trying to work out the accent – posh-sounding, but some foreign in there, too. ‘Yeah? You a bouncer then?’
Janusz shook his head.
‘Work behind the bar?’
Another shake. Then Janusz looked the guy in the face properly for the first time.
‘Look, it’s supposed to be hush-hush,’ he said, ‘but what the hell, today’s my last day in the job.’ He ground his cigar stub out on the wall and discarded it, then leaned closer. ‘I rig the hidden cameras in the peepshow booths,’ he said in a conspiratorial murmur.
The guy stared at him: ‘Cameras? I’ve never seen a camera in there.’
Janusz shrugged. ‘That’s because I’m pretty good at my job.’
The guy’s face was going red now. ‘So you’re telling me … they film the blokes watching the shows?’
Janusz dipped his head sideways in regretful assent.
‘Why the fu …?’ the guy’s voice held a mixture of anger and foreboding.
‘It’s a live feed to the internet,’ said Janusz. ‘Apparently, a lot of people will pay good money to watch guys … you know …’, and with an economical gesture he demonstrated the activity he was too polite to put into words.
Now, the guy’s mouth was opening and shutting like a Christmas carp, and Janusz wondered if he was going to have a stroke or something.