Death Can’t Take a Joke (14 page)

Kershaw shook her head. ‘No, Sarge, but I don’t see …’

‘It just seems a bit of an
unusual
way to travel, given that Poles can come and go to the UK as they please.’ Pausing to form the crisp packet deftly into a funnel shape, Streaky upended it into his mouth. ‘I mean, I know Ryanair treat their passengers like cunts, but still, even they haven’t started charging extra for oxygen yet.’

Kershaw shrugged. She didn’t like the way this was going. ‘Maybe he got over the border from …’ Here her geography failed her. ‘A non-EU country?’

He gave a judicious nod. ‘Yes, that’s certainly a possibility. In fact, I’d make it your main avenue of enquiry.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes,
detective
. You.’ A warning flush began to spread up Streaky’s cheeks. ‘As you ought to know from the wildly expensive training you received, when a foreign national dies on UK soil it’s up to
us
to conduct the enquiry. And if that requires the investigating officer to travel to Poland, or to chuffing
Timbuktu
, then that’s what will happen. The only good news is it’s all coming out of Docklands’ budget and not mine!’

Kershaw felt her own face grow hot. ‘But Sarge, I’m meant to be working on murder cases, not chasing round Europe identifying people who fall out of aeroplanes!’

‘Maybe you should have thought about that before you volunteered to lighten the load of a nick that doesn’t pay your fucking wages!’

‘But it could take weeks!’

‘So I suggest you get on the blower and find yourself a Polish interpreter pronto. Then you’ll need to fill in a bunch of forms to send to the Polish police.’

Kershaw put her head in her hands. What had possessed her to be such a Girl Scout about this case? No one would have blinked an eye if she’d left the job to Canary Wharf nick.

‘Another white wine?’ asked Streaky, apparently unmoved by her misery.

‘Yeah. Make it a large one.’

‘So you really think the Romanian sent the tattooed guy after you to
kill you
?!’

‘I said so, didn’t I?’ hissed Janusz. ‘And keep your voice down.’

Oskar leant closer, his knife and fork clutched upright in chubby fists. ‘Just imagine,
kolego
,’ he said in a solemn whisper. ‘Your Mama,
God rest her soul
, gives birth to you in Gdansk, and you might have breathed your dying breath in the
Greenwich foot tunnel
.’ He crossed himself, then his expression brightened. ‘All the same, I’d give 500 zloty to have been there – just to see you hurdling that barrier like Red Rum.’ Chuckling, he impaled a couple of
pierogi
on his fork.

The two friends were having lunch in the
Polska Kuchnia
, a Polish café in Stratford that had sprung up a few years back to serve the legions of Poles working on the construction of the Olympics site and the redevelopment of the surrounding area.

The end of the building boom had brought a shift in the café’s clientele, from burly workmen in stained overalls and steel-capped boots to well-groomed office- and shop-workers from nearby Westfield shopping centre. For a few anxious weeks, Janusz and Oskar had feared that the arrival of this new, predominantly female clientele might result in an unwelcome refinement of the café’s menu. Luckily the threat of salad had never materialised and the chef still favoured traditional Polish favourites like
kielbasa
,
pierogi,
and his speciality, pork stew served on a fried potato pancake the size of a saucepan lid.

‘What I don’t get with this Romescu guy,’ whispered Oskar, glancing around him like someone given the word ‘
conspiratorial
’ in a game of charades, ‘is one minute you’re some rich
dupek
he wants to milk for cash, then the next minute, he wants you dead.’

It was a conundrum that Janusz had given a good deal of thought since last night’s little
dramat
in the tunnel. ‘Now I think back, I reckon he must have been keeping an eye on me and Varenka the whole time he was giving that speech,’ he said. Although Romescu had given no hint of it, there was probably very little that evaded that shark-like gaze.

‘What, so he ordered you to be killed because you were muscling in on his girlfriend?’

Janusz took his time to answer, savouring a mouthful of
gulash
. Certainly, Romescu had made it clear in the little meeting he’d staged that Varenka was more than just another ‘employee’. But Janusz had concluded that, however jealous he might be, the Romanian was unlikely to order a risky and impulsive killing over a girl – especially right at the moment he was expending so much money and effort on creating a respectable front.

‘No, I think he knows I’m onto him,’ he said. ‘I was an
idiota
, stirring things up that day in the Turkish café. The Turk probably gave Romescu my description, told him I was a friend of Jim’s.’ He topped up their glasses with beer. ‘Somewhere along the line last night he realised who I was. The last thing he needs right now is someone sniffing round trying to nail him for a murder.’

Oskar tore a piece of rye bread in two. ‘So how do you think him and Jim came across each other? Maybe Jim invested in this Triangle business?’ His eyes lit up. ‘I could try to find out, from Marek.’

Janusz pushed his plate away. ‘No, I already asked Marika to check his credit card and bank statements. She says there are no outgoings she didn’t already know about.’ He remembered with a pang how she hadn’t even asked why he wanted her to look. Her quiet trust in him was deeply touching, but it only added to the heavy feeling in his gut: the compulsion to deliver justice, for her and for Jim.

He pulled out the sheaf of articles he’d printed the previous night, the fruit of hours spent scouring the net for info on Romescu’s history. Most of them came from the business pages of newspapers and charted Orzelair’s rise from tiny provincial airline to Eastern Europe’s biggest budget carrier.

‘I’ve been doing some digging on Orzelair, to find out whether he really was such a big shot there as he claims.’

‘So, was he bullshitting?’ asked Oskar, before taking a deep gulp of his Tyskie.

‘Quite the reverse,’ said Janusz. ‘They couldn’t have set it up without him. When the Soviet Union started crumbling, Romescu went round the eastern bloc countries picking up second-hand Tupelovs. His experience as an engineer at Tarom – the Romanian state airline – meant he knew his planes. And how the system worked.’

Oskar rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

‘Exactly. So he sourced their first fleet of planes for peanuts. But that’s not the most interesting thing I found out.’

Janusz retrieved the extraordinary story he’d stumbled across on about page fifteen of the search results. The aviation magazine in which it had originally appeared had long since closed down but, luckily for him, some aeroplane-addled anorak had taken the trouble to upload its contents to his blog. The piece was dated November 1996.

‘Between 1947 and ’96, twelve people stowed away in the wheel wells of aeroplanes,’ said Janusz. ‘Nowadays they’re usually after a job in the West, but back then most of them were political refugees of some kind or other.’

‘Nutters,’ said Oskar.

‘The odds aren’t quite as bad as you’d think,’ said Janusz. ‘Six of them survived, including this one, in ‘89.’ Turning to the second page of the article he showed Oskar a photograph. The blurred black and white shot showed a skinny young man propped up in a hospital bed, with one side of his head wrapped in a bandage. He wasn’t smiling, but his right arm was extended stiffly towards the camera and he was giving the thumbs-up sign.

Oskar shook his head in disbelief. ‘
“
God looks after fools and children”, eh?’

‘God had nothing to do with it – this guy did his planning. He wore thermals from head to foot and picked a day when the weather was bad, which meant the plane flew at a lower altitude – 25,000 feet instead of 35,000 or more.’ He paused. ‘But then this guy wasn’t your average Joe Stowaway.’

Setting the article aside, Janusz picked up his glass.

Oskar stared at his mate. ‘Well, are you gonna tell me, prickteaser?!’

He took a drink of beer. ‘He was an aircraft engineer – with Tarom.’

‘
Nosz, Kurwa!’
Oskar struck the table with the flats of his hands.

Janusz nodded, then handed him the article.

‘
Escape from Ceausescu’s Romania:’
read Oskar
from the caption beneath the picture. ‘
27-year-old aircraft engineer Barbu Romescu survived a two-hour flight from Bucharest to Warsaw hidden in the wheel well of a
Tupolev Tu-154
. On arrival, he was granted asylum by Poland’s new democratically elected government
.’ He gave a low whistle. ‘I tell you something, Janek. The guy might be a dirty murdering pimp, but you gotta admit he’s got a fucking huge pair of
jaja
on him!’

Janusz grunted. ‘Listen, Oskar
.
You need to keep all of this strictly to yourself, you understand? And I don’t want you talking to Marek for a while – this guy is fucking dangerous.’

They were paying the bill when a red light started flashing on his mobile: it was a text message from the girl
detektyw.
It said she needed to see him ‘urgently’ to discuss some ‘important information’. He cursed softly – he’d almost forgotten the absurd notion that he was still a suspect in Jim’s murder. He started to punch out a message telling her to talk to his solicitor, before changing his mind. Having just paid the guy £700, he had no desire to inflate the bill further.

As Kershaw pressed the buzzer marked ‘Kiszka’ at the entrance to his swish mansion house apartment block, she remembered that the last time she’d been here, a couple of years back, she’d come perilously close to arresting him for a murder he didn’t commit. There was a neat symmetry to the fact that this time she was here to tell him he was officially off the hook for the murder of Jim Fulford.

She should have known better than to expect gratitude from the big Pole, she reflected, not ten minutes later. Kiszka simply looked at her across his scarred, orange pine kitchen table, his craggy features unreadable. He was smoking one of his foul-smelling little cigars and although he’d had the good manners to open a window, the space had still filled with a throat-tickling blue haze. Ben had finally persuaded Kershaw to give up smoking around a year ago but now the fumes were triggering her old nicotine craving.

Fidgeting in her chair, she picked at the skin around a nail. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ She was half tempted to point out that he’d still be a suspect if she hadn’t gone the extra mile to check his alibi.

‘I wouldn’t have been accused in the first place if your lot had done their job properly,’ he said, sideswiping that line of argument. ‘But maybe they were in too much of a hurry to charge someone – anyone – with Jim’s murder.’

‘Well, we’d have eliminated you a lot quicker if you’d told us you spoke to that gardener while you were at the museum.’

Janusz had to admit the girl had a point: the fact was he’d completely forgotten the little interchange over a dropped cigar butt. The sort of forgetfulness he would once have associated with advanced decrepitude was becoming a familiar occurrence.

He picked a flake of tobacco from his lip. ‘How are you getting on with finding the real murderer?’

‘We’re pursuing all possible avenues of enquiry,’ she said.

He remembered this tendency she had to lapse into officialese, a sinister echo of the doublespeak routinely employed by the enforcers of Poland’s communist regime – when they weren’t wielding the rubber truncheons, that is. Now it occurred to him that perhaps she did it when she was unsure of herself. Had the investigation hit a brick wall?

‘If you can think of any of Jim’s contacts we might have missed,’ she went on, confirming his hunch, ‘even if there’s no obvious reason why they might want to harm him, it could make all the difference.’

He felt a pang of guilt. Should he tell her what he knew? About Varenka leaving flowers and his suspicion that her scar-faced boyfriend was behind the murder?
No.
He had not a jot of evidence against Romescu, and if the cops called his girlfriend in for questioning, it would only put him on his guard, while destroying all Janusz’s efforts to gain her confidence. Better to pursue the investigation in his own fashion, at least for now.

‘Nothing that comes immediately to mind,’ he said.

But the way his gaze slid away from her made Kershaw’s antennae twitch. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d held out on her. Even more reason to get him to agree to her plan: it might give her the opportunity to suss out if he was hiding something significant.

‘I’m as keen as you are to find the perpetrators,’ she said. ‘In fact, I wanted to ask you a favour – something that might help speed things along.’

‘I’m confused,’ he said. ‘You put me in a cell and accuse me of murder, and now you’re asking for a favour?’ His deep voice rang with incredulous outrage.

Kershaw refrained from pointing out she hadn’t even started work on the squad when Streaky had him pulled in. ‘I have to go to Poland for a couple of days to try to identify someone who died here in London, and I need an interpreter.’

‘And you expect me to expend valuable time finding an interpreter for you.’

She chanced a grin. ‘Actually, no. I’m asking
you
to be my interpreter.’

Janusz stared at her, then chuckled: he had to admire the girl’s nerve. ‘And how exactly would dragging me off to Poland help you solve Jim’s murder?’

‘I’m off the case until I get this ID job out of the way. And finding a translator through the official channels could take weeks.’

‘I can imagine,’ he shrugged. ‘But you can’t be the only detective working on it.’

‘No, of course not. But … I think I’m the only one who’ll go the extra mile.’

The girl cocked her chin in that determined way she had which made her look like a pugnacious squirrel.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I can’t just drop everything and head off to Poland. But if you give me a few days I can probably find you someone.’