Death Can’t Take a Joke (15 page)

Hearing the kindness in his tone, Kershaw felt a flare of disappointment. It said more clearly than anger would have done that he wasn’t going to play ball.

Janusz stood to clear away their empty cups and saucers, feeling pain shoot through his thigh muscles – a reminder of last night’s chase, and of his ebbing levels of fitness. He’d recently read a depressing fact: that after the age of thirty-five, the typical man loses a pound of muscle every year.

‘How did this guy die, anyway?’ he asked, carrying the dirty crockery over to the sink.

‘He fell out of the wheel well of an aeroplane coming in to land at City Airport.’

Janusz was glad he had his back to the girl because it meant she couldn’t see his expression but he couldn’t stop the stack of china from rattling in his hands. He was seeing again the article he’d found on the internet, the picture of the young Romescu giving the thumbs-up from his hospital bed.

‘A stowaway?’ he asked, in as casual a tone as he could manage.

She shrugged. ‘It looks that way, although God knows why, when Poland’s in the EU.’

‘Whereabouts in Poland did the plane fly in from?’

‘Prez-ez-kof?’ she tried, making an apologetic face. ‘Near the border with Ukraine?’

‘
Pshe-choh-kuff
,’ he said, correcting her mangled pronunciation. Przeczokow was a smallish provincial city on the border with Ukraine. And he had a hunch that its IAATA-designated abbreviation, the one inscribed on your luggage tag if you were flying there, would be ‘PCK’ – just like the tag on Romescu’s suitcase.

He lit another cigar. ‘Orzelair flight?’ he asked, blowing out a lazy plume of smoke.

Kershaw checked her notebook. ‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘I think I flew there once, years ago.’

Rather than speculate why Kiszka suddenly seemed interested, Kershaw focused on nailing the deal. ‘You’d get paid the full police interpreter rate, plus all your expenses, of course.’

‘Who would I have to interview?’

‘Local cops, airport staff … I dunno, maybe the local paper if it has one.’

‘And I can go where I like – in my free time?’

‘Of course.’

‘I have to be back before Thursday, for Jim’s funeral.’

‘No problem, we’ll only be there one night.’

Janusz ran a hand the size of a small shovel along his jaw. Since the fracas with Romescu’s thug beneath the Thames, he’d been wondering how best to progress his investigation into Jim’s murder. His priority was still to find out how his friend and the Romanian might be connected, but now his cover had been blown it was clear that any further direct contact with Romescu was out of the question. And although he sensed that Varenka might prove a useful conduit, he wanted a better handle on her boyfriend’s activities before suggesting they meet. A quick trip to check out the Orzelair set-up at Przeczokow could deliver valuable intelligence on Romescu, with an added bonus – the cops would be picking up the tab.

He decided it was what the Americans called a no-brainer.

‘Alright,’ he sighed. ‘When do we leave?’

Two days later, Janusz Kiszka and DC Natalie Kershaw were buckling up for the 10 a.m. Orzelair flight from City Airport to Przeczokow. An eccentric-looking couple, the big Pole in his ancient trench coat and the short blonde girl wearing the dark trouser suit and the serious expression, drew some curious glances from their fellow passengers.

Janusz was too preoccupied to notice. He’d been expecting to see Kasia the night before, on a rare evening off from the nail bar, but at the last minute she told him that she’d forgotten a promise to go out to dinner with her husband Steve. He’d lost his temper and slammed the phone down on her. Once he got back from Poland, he told himself, he was going to have it out with her once and for all. It didn’t help his mood that he was expected to cram his big frame into an airline seat apparently designed for children and Japanese people. Still, at least the flight wasn’t full, which meant that they had a row of three to themselves, him by the window and the girl taking the aisle seat.

When the drinks trolley came round he asked the stewardess for a beer. To his irritation she hesitated, looking over at the girl detective as though to ask her permission.

‘What was that about?’ he growled once he’d got his drink and the trolley had moved on.

‘No idea,’ said Kershaw, but a moment later it dawned on her. ‘They’ve clocked that I’m a cop.’ She tried to keep from grinning. ‘And they think you’re … my prisoner.’

‘Oh, that’s great,’ he said. ‘You’ll probably need to come with me when I want to use the bathroom.’

Wearing a thunderous frown, he pulled a rolled-up wad of paperwork out of his coat and started reading.

Kershaw noticed that he twisted himself around towards her, his back set against the window. Maybe it was simply because the seat back was too narrow for his shoulders – but it also had the effect of preventing her from seeing the documents clutched in those big mitts.

She sipped her orange juice, her mind returning to the meeting in Kiszka’s flat, and found herself unable to shake the uncomfortable feeling that his change of heart about the Poland trip had been suspiciously sudden. Maybe she was being paranoid: the Job did tend to make you question everyone’s motives. She grinned to herself, remembering something her dad used to say.
Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Janusz meanwhile, was immersing himself in a feature from
The Economist
on Zaleski Corporation – the industrial conglomerate that owned Orzelair –
which he’d printed out just before leaving for the airport. Zaleski had been set up by a guy called Sebastian Fischer in 1990, after Poland’s first democratic elections, and was lately being hailed one of Eastern Europe’s great post-Soviet success stories.

The piece compared Poland to its former master, Russia, where the fall of communism had been followed by a rummage sale of state assets by the corrupt political class to their cronies in business: a rigged auction that had spawned hundreds of billionaires while leaving swathes of former Soviet citizens destitute.

By contrast, the article noted, Poland had been swift to reinstate the structures essential to civil society while taking a relatively cautious approach to the free market. Into this scenario had come Fischer, a young lawyer with a talent for predicting which Soviet-era businesses would flourish in the new Poland and for identifying emerging opportunities such as a soaring demand for cut-price flights.

A photograph showed a tall slim man in his forties who looked a little like a clean-shaven Steve Jobs. He wore evening dress and was dancing with a middle-aged woman in a lime-coloured gown. German Chancellor Angela Merkel. According to the picture caption, the event was some German-Polish trade beano. Reading on, Janusz discovered that in May that year Fischer had swung a highly lucrative deal, a joint venture between Orzelair and Lufthansa that gave the German carrier access to its extensive network of routes to emerging east European economies.

Janusz paused to drain the remains of his tiny can of beer, trying to puzzle it out.
Six months ago, Orzelair and parent company Zaleski Corp make a giant leap into the premier league of European businesses. Meanwhile, Romescu – the man who practically built the airline from scratch – exits stage left
. He recalled the sick look on his face when Janusz mentioned Zaleski shares. The article confirmed his hunch. The company’s shares were 100 per cent owned by Fischer, his wife and other members of his family, so it appeared that Romescu had departed without so much as a gold-plated clock.

He crushed his empty beer can in one fist with a crunch that drew a wary look from two of the cabin staff standing by the galley kitchen. He attempted a placatory grin but the hasty way they looked away suggested the girl’s guess was right: they thought he was a convict being escorted home!

Rolling up the sheaf of articles, he returned them to his coat pocket. They’d given him plenty of food for thought. Being director of an airline could certainly come in handy if Romescu were trafficking girls from non-EU countries to the West, assuming he’d found some way around border controls. Had Fischer got wind of his associate’s criminal sideline and summarily kicked him out? But before he could pursue this train of thought, the girl detective piped up.

‘So, Janusz, when did you come over to the UK?’

‘1986.’

‘Did you come over here to work?’

‘Yes.’

‘You had some kind of science degree, didn’t you? Were you hoping to get a job in a lab or something?’

‘I didn’t finish my studies.’

‘Really? How come?’

She clearly wasn’t going to be put off.
Great
, he thought,
two hours being grilled by a cop.

‘Back then I thought it was more important to go out on the streets and fight the system.’ He pulled a humourless grin. ‘Then my girlfriend got killed because I took her to a demo. I turned into a drunk and married her best friend, which was a total disaster. So I ran away to England like a coward.’

He turned to look out of the window. But if he’d assumed he’d shut her up, he was wrong.

‘Christ!’ she exclaimed. ‘This was when the Communists were in charge, right?’

He nodded wearily.

‘I remember my dad telling me he used to watch it on the news every night, striking workers demonstrating at the gates of some shipyard?’

Her tough little face softened when she mentioned her father, Janusz noticed, making her look a whole lot prettier. ‘The Vladimir Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk,’ he said. ‘My hometown.’

‘He was in the Communist Party, my dad.’ Seeing Kiszka’s aghast look she was swift to add: ‘He worked on the docks in the sixties – loads of dockworkers were communists back then, apparently. But when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, he said that was it – he burnt his party card.’

Janusz just grunted. He’d heard it all before and it always made him feel the same way. Why did these armchair commies wait for Soviet tanks to crush the Prague Spring? Had they failed to notice the invasion of Hungary in ‘56? Not to mention Stalin’s purges, or the well-publicised horrors of the Gulags?

‘It must be nice for you,’ she went on, ‘now there are so many more Poles in London?’

‘Not really. Back in the eighties I at least had rarity value. English people wanted to talk to me about Kieslowski and Polanski.’ He puffed air through his lips – a dismissive sound. ‘Now they just want to know if I do loft extensions.’

Christ on a bike!
thought Kershaw.
What a grouchy bastard.

Janusz stretched and yawned. ‘So what’s the story on this guy we’re trying to identify, the one who fell out of the plane?’

‘I wish I knew,’ she said. ‘Maybe he got over the Polish border, from Ukraine or Belarus?’ She congratulated herself on doing her Google Maps homework the previous night. ‘Then bribed someone at the airport to get on a plane to the UK?’

‘Did he look like an economic migrant?’

‘Not really, no.’ Kershaw frowned. ‘He was wearing a suit and a pretty expensive overcoat.’

Janusz wondered how many of the stowaways changed their minds when the temperature in the wheel well plunged and the air grew thin. If you started banging on the fuselage, would anyone even hear you above the noise of the engines?

‘How old was he?’

‘Forties, early fifties?’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps he was a mental health case. You know, the type who thinks the TV is sending him messages? Maybe he thought the CIA was after him.’

‘Or
Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa
.’

‘Umm, you’ll have to run that past me again.’

‘The SB – the secret police from communist days. That would be the more likely delusion, for a Pole.’ He pulled a savage grin. ‘As far as we were concerned, the CIA were the good guys.’

She’d never thought about it before, but now it struck her how different the world might look, depending on the time and place you viewed it from.

When the aircraft began its descent, Janusz decided to visit the loo. Watching him walk up the aisle, Kershaw grinned to see one of the cabin attendants scuttle into the galley at his approach, drawing the dividing curtain behind her. As soon as Kershaw saw him turn the handle of the cubicle, she leaned across, dipping into his coat pocket. Retrieving the roll of paperwork he’d buried himself in earlier and with half an eye on the loo door, she leafed through the printouts …
Stuff about Orzelair, and the group who owned it … an article about wheel-well stowaways.

Seeing the cubicle door open, she slipped the papers back into his pocket, a thoughtful look on her face. Either Janusz Kiszka had decided to become the world’s most conscientious police translator, or he had an undisclosed interest of his own in Orzelair and the man who had fallen from one of its planes.

Twenty minutes later, they were clattering down the aeroplane steps, their breath solidifying in the bitterly cold air.

‘Was that entirely necessary?’ she asked, catching up with him on the apron.

‘What?’ he asked, all innocence.

‘What you did to that cabin attendant.’

As he’d walked towards the plane entrance, Kershaw following behind him, Janusz had kept both hands together down in front of him as though wearing handcuffs under his coat sleeves. When he reached the cabin attendant doing the goodbyes at the door he’d pulled an axe murderer grin, then jerked his wrists apart.

‘You totally freaked the poor girl out!’ said Kershaw.

Despite her frown, a dimple in the girl detective’s right cheek betrayed the effort she was making to keep a straight face. His gaze lingered on her for a long moment: he had to admit that, for a cop, she was remarkably easy on the eye.

Seeing her shift her overnight bag awkwardly from one hand to the other, Janusz insisted on taking it from her.

‘Thanks,’ she said, digging in her pocket for her gloves. ‘But here’s the deal. Could you try to remember that while you’re here, you’re representing the Metropolitan Police?’

He grunted in what she hoped was agreement, albeit grudging.