Death Can’t Take a Joke (13 page)

But Janusz could tell from the engine’s undimmed roar that his pursuer wasn’t slowing down. Then he realised why: the guy was so close and the tunnel so narrow that Janusz’s coat flying out like a pair of wings prevented him from seeing the obstacle ahead.

Unable to risk slowing his own pace, all Janusz could do was to try to match his stride rate to the looming barrier. At the last moment he jinked to the right and made a grab for the second barrier. Then he was in the air, flying over it. The impact when his feet hit the ground the other side brought his jaws together so violently he heard the crack of a molar. Almost immediately came the screech of brakes and an explosive bang, metal on metal, rang out in the tunnel like a bomb blast, followed by the keening shriek a motorcycle makes when it’s locked on full throttle but its back wheel spins uselessly in the air.

Panting heavily, Janusz looked back down the tunnel. The impact had bent the bike in two, and left the mangled remains of its front wheel wrapped around the first barrier. Leather jacket had been catapulted over the second and lay spread-eagled on the concrete floor, one arm outstretched. Janusz could make out the tattooed head of the snake across his motionless knuckles: it looked as though it might be about to slither down his arm and escape the carnage.

The guy’s left leg jerked once, like a broken marionette. The sight took Janusz right back to his university days, dissecting dead frogs: their limbs used to twitch like that when you applied electric current.

At the tunnel end, he entered the lift. Leaning heavily against the wall, he pulled out his mobile, tempted to text Romescu, to inform him that one of his employees had met with a workplace accident. Then the stern gaze of Father Pietruski swam before him.
Alright, alright,
he murmured. Once he reached street level he’d call 999 so someone could come and scrape the guy off the concrete.

The morning after receiving the surprise phone call from Dr King, the pathologist who’d done the PM on the Canary Wharf body, Kershaw found herself sitting in the marble-lined lobby of Court Two at the Old Bailey. Nathan King was appearing as an expert witness in a big murder case, so her best chance of a face-to-face chat would be to hang around and grab him between appearances.

‘DC Kershaw?’ a voice said.

She got to her feet, wondering, not the first time, what it was about her that seemed to say ‘cop’ so unmistakably. Dr King looked younger than he’d sounded on the phone, early thirties at most, with longish curly hair. Attractive, if a bit shambolic-looking.

‘They might call me back in at any moment,’ he said, pulling a file out of a rucksack as he sat down beside her, ‘so forgive me if I race through this.’ He flicked through his post-mortem report. ‘Here we go,’ he said, shuffling closer on the wooden bench to give her a better view. ‘This is what I was telling you about on the phone.’

Kershaw squinted at the black and white photograph – the image it captured looked like a jellyfish mottled with leopard skin spots – before turning an uncomprehending gaze on him.

He tapped the discs with his forefinger. ‘These are gastric lesions. They’re called Wischnewski spots.’ He beamed at her. ‘I’ve seen them in a lecture theatre but I never expected to see such a good set of them in the flesh.’ He shook his head, marvelling at his good fortune.

Kershaw gazed at him, wondering what made anyone choose a career which involved plunging your hands into the entrails of dead strangers every day of your working life. The thought was swiftly followed by another: what must it be like
having sex
with someone you knew spent their days doing that?

She pushed the idea away. ‘Right. And tell me again exactly what that means?’

‘They’re a strong indicator that our man was suffering from advanced hypothermia at the time of his death.’

‘Which you get when you’re exposed to extreme cold.’

‘Yup.’

‘So he might have been up on the roof for several hours, or maybe even spent the whole night there,’ said Kershaw, pleased to find some concrete evidence for her thesis.

The doc turned down the corners of his mouth – he didn’t buy the idea. ‘The advanced hypothermia this suggests,’ he said, tapping the photo, ‘would almost certainly have rendered him semi-conscious at best.’

Kershaw felt her pulse flutter. ‘So he wouldn’t have been
able
to climb over the parapet – not on his own anyway?’

‘That’s right. And there’s something else interesting.’ He leafed through the file and angled it towards her, revealing a shot of the man’s right hand, lying palm upward. ‘See this?’ He traced a darkened band of skin across the middle of his palm.

‘It looks like … a burn.’

‘Or a
freezer
burn.’

‘You think somebody might have kept him in a freezer? And then
thrown
him over the parapet?’ Kershaw could barely keep the excitement out of her voice.

‘No.’

Her shoulders went down. ‘So … What are you saying exactly?’

‘There’s no doubt in my mind that he died of severe head injuries sustained in the fall.’

‘So can I ask why were you so keen to drag me into town when I could’ve been down at Canary Wharf finding out how he got onto the roof?’ A bewigged barrister who was sitting nearby with his client shot Kershaw a disapproving look and she realised that she must have raised her voice. She softened her tone. ‘Sorry, Dr King, but you did say on the phone that you thought it might
not
be suicide after all?’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I don’t think he fell from the roof.’

‘But you just said …’

‘That he was killed by a fall.’ He waited until he had her full attention. ‘A fall from an aircraft.’

Kershaw rocked back so far that she banged her head on the wooden bench back. ‘Fuck!’ she exclaimed – earning herself another dirty look and a headshake from the bloke in the silly wig. ‘But if he fell out of a plane, surely he’d be much more badly messed up than if he fell off a tall building?’

King shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. He had all the injuries I’d associate with a fall from height, including a shattered skull. But if he fell as the plane was coming in to land, then the height might not have made a significant difference.’

Kershaw tried to recall whether she’d heard the whine of a descending jet overhead just before the guy fell. She couldn’t remember anything,
but she knew that the human brain filtered out unimportant background info, sending it straight to ‘trash’.

The doc was flipping to the back of his report. ‘Canary Wharf tower is around 800 feet; a plane on its final approach into City airport might fly as low as 1500 feet.’

‘What, and you’re saying another 700 feet would be neither here nor there as regards the state of the body?’ Kershaw’s tone was politely incredulous.

‘That’s right,’ said the doc. ‘I’ve seen similar injuries in a window cleaner who fell twenty-five feet. Other people have survived falling ten storeys.’

Kershaw heard again the
whump
the guy had made when he landed on the limo.

‘He did hit the roof of a car first …’

‘Yes. That would have made a big difference in helping to break his fall.’

‘Although that probably isn’t much consolation to him,’ said Kershaw, biting her lip.

‘Not in the final analysis, no,’ said King, allowing himself a small grin.

She traced the outline of the discoloured band of skin across the dead man’s palm. ‘And this?’

‘Ice burn, I’m guessing, possibly caused when he tried to hang onto some strut or other inside the wheel well, before he lost consciousness.’

Kershaw was only just beginning to digest this bombshell when the voice of an usher echoed around the lobby: ‘Dr Nathan King to Court Two … Dr King to Court Two.’

Getting to his feet, King reached for the file that lay on the bench next to Kershaw. ‘Got to go, I’m afraid,’ he said, shooting her an apologetic grin.

Instinctively, she grabbed one end of the file. ‘So, he must have been in some unheated part of a plane,’ she said, thinking aloud, ‘and became hypothermic when it reached high altitude.’

‘If the hypothesis is correct, yes,’ said King, giving the file a polite tug. ‘Look, I’m afraid I …’

‘But if he was in the baggage hold, how did he fall out?’ she persisted.

The usher repeated his call, louder this time. Abandoning good manners, King wrenched the file from Kershaw’s grip. ‘I really have to go!’ The last thing he said as he hurried away was: ‘Do what I did – run a Google search on aeroplane stowaways.’

Taking the doc’s advice, Kershaw had, by the end of the day, become an expert on the subject from the comfort of her office swivel chair. She was taken aback to discover that every year a handful of people, most of them from the world’s poorest countries, crawled into the wheel wells of jet planes in a desperate search for a better life elsewhere. Some of them met their end almost immediately, getting mashed when the pilot retracted the landing gear. Others died from extended exposure to temperatures as low as minus sixty-five degrees Celsius combined with high altitude oxygen starvation. The handful who somehow survived the ordeal then risked plummeting to their death when the plane’s undercarriage was lowered during its final descent, by which time they were usually semi-conscious at best – which was almost certainly what had happened to the Canary Wharf guy.

It was all fascinating stuff but it was hardly the kind of thing she’d joined Murder Squad for. Yawning, she looked up from her screen and let her gaze drift around the office. Her fellow DCs Sophie and Adam were on the phone talking to Jim Fulford’s possible contacts: they looked motivated, purposeful.
That’s what I should be doing,
she thought. When Sophie had finished her call, Kershaw leaned across the desk.

‘Soph, have you got any idea where Streaky is?’

Sophie tapped her watch and raised a quizzical eyebrow. It was nearly six.

Kershaw grinned. ‘Silly question?’

‘Yep. He went to the Moon half an hour ago.’

So Streaky had already left for his daily visit to the Eagle and Child. Dubbed ‘the Moon’ due to its total lack of atmosphere, it had won his custom by virtue of a single impressive attribute: the beer was cheaper per fluid ounce than the mineral water.

Kershaw thought about leaving it to the morning to update him, then changed her mind. No, best to bosh this dead stowaway job right now so she could dive straight into the Fulford case first thing.

She found Streaky on a stool at the bar, a tabloid newspaper in one freckled hand, the other curled around a half-drunk pint of lager.

‘Well, fuck me sideways! If it isn’t Ms Marple,’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought you only patronised gastropubs these days. You do know they don’t serve sun-dried tomato flavour crisps in this place?’

‘I’ll have to make do with cheese and onion then, Sarge,’ she said, levering herself up onto an empty barstool. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

He bugged his eyes at her. ‘A woman buying a round? I’ve seen everything now.’ He drained the remains of his pint in two throat-distending gulps and smacked the glass down. ‘Mine’s a pint of wifebeater.’

Catching the barman’s attention, Kershaw ordered a Stella and a glass of Chilean Chenin for herself.

Folding up his paper, Streaky stabbed a finger at the front-page photo – an unremarkable-looking man in his fifties out shopping, beside the headline ‘
Monster of Worcester gets Day Release’
. ‘You weren’t even born when this comedian came to trial. He killed three little kids he was babysitting, then kebabbed them on some iron railings.’

‘Christ on a bike! Was he deranged?’

‘Nope, he just
“lost his temper”
when the baby wouldn’t stop crying. This was back in the seventies – it was only about ten years after they abolished hanging.’ Streaky’s face became pensive. ‘I remember having a right old ding-dong with my dad about the case. Brimming with youthful idealism, I was, telling him no matter how terrible the crime, nothing could justify judicial murder.’

‘Really?’ She tried to picture a youthful, freckled-faced Streaky, arguing earnestly for a child murderer’s right to life – and failed.

He took a draught of his fresh pint and smacked his lips. ‘I was talking a load of old bollocks, of course. Now, if they locked the bastards up and threw away the key, I could just about live with it, but how often does that happen? Those sandal-wearing dope smokers on the Parole Board always end up giving sick fuckers like him “another chance”.’

Kershaw made all the right noises. Although part of her agreed with him, she was wondering how many innocent people would have got strung up during all those miscarriage of justice cases in the seventies.

She moved the conversation onto the Canary Wharf ‘suicide’, explaining the pathologist’s theory that the mystery Pole fell to his death not from the tower, but from an aeroplane.

‘It never ceases to amaze me – the lengths people will go to reach this sceptred isle,’ said Streaky. Tearing open a packet of crisps he set it on the bar, inviting her to share them with a munificent gesture. ‘Whereabouts do you reckon he got into the wheel well?’

‘The only flight into City that fits with the time he fell comes out of some place in south-east Poland,’ she said. ‘Tiny little airport, out in the sticks, from what I could find out online.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘Anyway, I wanted to ask you what’s the drill now,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to call Canary Wharf nick or would you rather do it?’

‘What’s it got to do with them?’ asked Streaky.

‘Well … since he’s definitely a Polish national, we’ve got no hope of identifying him, so surely it’s down to them to bat it across to the Polish police?’

Streaky conveyed a stack of crisps to his mouth and crunched on them for a while. ‘You say that two fellas dropped out of planes coming into Heathrow this year …’ he said musingly. ‘Flights from Europe, were they?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Africa, Angola … and somewhere else. Why do you ask?’

‘Any of these wheel-well desperadoes ever fly in from
EU countries
?’ he asked with an icy smile.