Death Can’t Take a Joke (26 page)

‘Just what the fuck did you think you were doing, Ben?’

‘I … I don’t know. It just happened. I’m sorry.’

She couldn’t detect any real regret in his voice.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said. ‘What you did, it puts my career on the line – not just yours!’

‘What do you mean? You weren’t involved.’

‘We were moving in together! After that, everything that
you
do has consequences for
both of us
. Especially given the job that we do.’

‘You surely don’t care about … what happened to that guy?’ said Ben. ‘You thought the same as me – good riddance.’

‘I care about
the law!
’

‘
The law
screwed up when it let him off!’

This wasn’t going as Kershaw had planned. She tried for a reasonable tone. ‘Look, what’s happened has happened. What’s important now is that you do the right thing.’

‘Which is?’

‘Go to your DI, tell him what happened, say you forgot to hand the … item in, whatever …’

‘No way!’

‘Ben! You have to.’

A longer pause. She could picture his stubborn expression on the other end.

‘You’re not going to hand them in, are you?’

‘No. What would it achieve?’

Kershaw ignored the question. It was like they were speaking different languages.

‘I can’t brush this under the carpet, Ben. This is really serious. I need to talk to someone, get some advice.’ She let it sink in. ‘I’m going to talk to Streaky. Unless
you
want to?’

‘No. You do whatever you think you have to.’

His voice was cold and the call ended without any glimmer of reconciliation.

Without allowing herself to pause and think about what she was about to do, she pulled up Streaky’s number and pressed dial.

For perhaps the first time ever, he actually answered his mobile.

‘Sarge, it’s Kershaw. Look, I’m not working today but I really need to see you.’

‘I’ve been expecting this,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘The day when you realised you could no longer repress your feelings for a devilishly attractive senior detective of mature years.’

He agreed to meet her in Leytonstone, at a pub where they would be highly unlikely to run into anyone from the nick. While he was up at the bar ordering drinks, she got a sudden bout of cold feet.
What the fuck was she doing?
If she grassed up Ben, wouldn’t Streaky be duty bound to report him? Was she really ready to take responsibility for ending Ben’s career?

She drank half her glass of red wine in a single draught. Streaky sipped his pint, waiting for her to speak.

‘Thanks for seeing me, Sarge. I didn’t know what else to do. You’re the only person I can talk to.’ Her words came out in a gabble.

‘Calm down, woman,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘There’s nothing so bad it can’t be sorted out.’

‘I’m not so sure about that.’

As she told the story, Streaky’s face remained im- passive, the only visible reaction a fractional raising of his gingery eyebrows at her mention of the blood on Stride’s glasses.

‘I realise that you might have to report this,’ she said, her face tense with misery. ‘And the last thing in the world I want to do is drop Ben in it, but the only alternative I could see was for me to resign – leave the Job. And I’m not sure I could bear to do that.’

Putting it into words crystallised what she felt for the first time. She had no idea whether she and Ben had a future, but she knew one thing sure as Christmas: she couldn’t cover up for him, pretend nothing had happened, and continue to work as someone whose entire purpose was to uphold the law. That kind of hypocrisy would turn her stomach.

Streaky brushed some crumbs from the table. ‘So you think our friend Stride was offed by vigilantes?’

She nodded.

‘The post-mortem is on Tuesday, if memory serves. If you’re right, then the pathologist should find some evidence of a struggle – bruising, contusions, whatever.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not a Home Office PM, is it? He might easily put it down to Stride blundering into trees in the dark, especially since we presented it as a Cat 2 death.’

‘Fair point,’ said Streaky, wiping foam from his upper lip. ‘A bog-standard PM won’t necessarily pick up on the little clues.’

She scanned his face, trying to work out what he was thinking. ‘It’s not like I’m shedding any tears for Stride, Sarge, but if we let murdering scumbags start to dish out justice, then we might as well close the nick, issue everyone with an Uzi, and fuck off home. Don’t you think?’

‘Eloquently put,’ he said. ‘Do you have the article with you?’

Filing the jiffy bag inside his jacket, Streaky dug out his mobile and a packet of fags, before stepping out into the street. After he’d gone, Kershaw started feeling panicky again, desperate to know what was going on. What was he doing? Destroying the evidence? Phoning Divisional Standards? It struck her that he might be sending someone to arrest Ben
right now
.

Well, what did you expect
, she asked herself,
for Streaky to wave a magic wand and make everything alright?

Five minutes later, he came back in, sat down, and opened a packet of crisps, as though nothing had happened. She didn’t know what to think: was the jiffy bag still there in his inside pocket, or had he got rid of it?

‘What’s going to happen to Ben, Sarge?’

‘You let me worry about that.’

‘But what am I supposed to do?’

‘You stay away from loverboy – and don’t discuss this with
anybody,
especially over a mobile phone.’

He sluiced the last of his pint down his throat and, setting the empty glass back on the table, sent her a meaningful look. She looked back at him, uncomprehending.

‘Look lively, detective: it’s your round.’

As Kershaw drove back to Canning Town, she savaged her nails, her mind whirring with questions. Streaky had played his cards very close to his chest. Was he just being circumspect, given the seriousness of what she’d told him? Or was there something else going on? He had pretty trenchant views on the death penalty, after all. Where would it leave her if he simply pretended none of this had happened? With just two options, she realised, both of them seriously unattractive: keep
schtum,
or take the matter higher, which would mean dropping Ben
and
Streaky in it.

Then she remembered something Streaky himself had said after a Hackney cop reported a colleague who liked beating up suspects in the back of the van.

You know what happens to whistleblowers in the end, don’t you?
he’d said.
They end up having their whistles inserted where the sun don’t shine.

Janusz pocketed the SIM card from his mobile phone and slotted in the new one he’d just bought from an Asian newsagent on Lea Bridge Road.

Jim’s murder was more than two weeks old and he still felt like he was getting nowhere. Finding out that Romescu’s Discovery had been parked at Hollow Ponds the night some paedophile hanged himself only confused matters – after racking his brains for a possible connection, Janusz had more or less dismissed it as a weird coincidence. The woodland was the closest thing the area had to a wilderness, and its proximity to the drugs, gangs and other assorted villainy of the East End inevitably made it a magnet for those whose business was best conducted in private.

Snapping shut the cover of his phone he dialled Varenka’s number, ready to hang up if somebody else answered. Without anything else to go on, it was time to take a risk and apply some gentle pressure, see if she would confide in him, reveal something that might provide the missing link between Romescu and Jim. She hadn’t answered Janusz’s text after their evening at the opera, and it occurred to him that her boyfriend might be monitoring her calls – hence the precaution of a new SIM card, to ensure he’d show up as an unknown number.

‘Varenka speaking.’

‘Can you talk? If not, just say it’s the wrong number.’

A pause and then she said, ‘It’s okay, please wait a moment.’ He heard her steps as she took the phone somewhere … quieter? Safer?

‘I need to see you,’ he said. If she thought his urgency was romantically motivated, so be it; with one friend dead and another in hospital, disappointing a pretty girl came pretty low on his list on concerns.

She hesitated for a beat. ‘I could say I need to go shopping? But I will probably have company.’

An hour later, Janusz was riding an escalator into the glassy maw of Stratford Westfield, a recently built temple to the god of shopping that, given his intense dislike of crowds, he’d so far managed to avoid. It occurred to him that Varenka wasn’t the only one who needed to keep a low profile: the nail bar where Kasia worked was only five minutes away, and although he suspected that their relationship was entering its terminal stages, the prospect of her spotting him with another woman was nonetheless an unattractive one.

He found Varenka leafing through a book in the gardening section of Foyles – a rendezvous she’d probably chosen because the store lay in one of the quieter reaches of the mall, and its cookery and gardening section was tucked away at the rear, safe from the gaze of passers-by.

She was dressed more casually than he’d seen her so far, in flat pumps, a pair of artfully ripped jeans and a soft black jumper under her red coat. Her face looked younger and more vulnerable than it had under the evening makeup she’d worn for Romescu’s soiree and the opera.

Janusz took up position where he’d get advance warning of anyone coming into their section of the store and picked up a book on bread making.

‘Do you have company?’ he asked.

‘Yes. But he decided to wait in the car park, playing games on his phone.’

The tattooed driver.

She shot Janusz an amused look. ‘Even if he decides to come after me, it would never occur to him to look in a bookshop.’

Nodding down at the book in her hands, he raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you a keen gardener?’

She looked at the page, open at a picture of a wildflower meadow, and her expression grew wistful. ‘I’ve never had a garden,’ she said. ‘But when I was tiny I remember staying with my
babcia
and
dziadek
– they had a smallholding, up near the Bialystok Forest? I spent hours in that garden, picking flowers I wasn’t supposed to, pottering about with a mini watering can. A couple of times, they even took us to the seaside.’

He smiled at the echo of childish excitement in her voice, recalling the photograph of little Varenka and her brother beside the rock pool, the look of uncomplicated happiness on her face. Most people, as they grew up, experienced many kinds of happiness, he reflected, but the pure, unconscious joy of a small child? That could never be recaptured.

‘Wouldn’t your mama and tata let you stay there, with your grandparents?’

‘I never knew my father. And my mother … she said she couldn’t bear to be parted from me.’ She looked at the floor. ‘The truth was she liked having me around to fetch and carry for her, run to buy
wodka
after she got money from one of the truck drivers.’

Confirmation that her home was one in which the family business was prostitution.

Closing the book, she stroked its cover once, before replacing it on the shelf. ‘One winter, when the power was cut off, she wanted to put my schoolbooks in the stove – this was after we lost the apartment and were living in a shack by the truck stop. When I tried to stop her, she gave me a beating that broke two ribs.’

Janusz couldn’t detect a trace of self-pity in her expression, only the clear-eyed realism of the survivor. Recalling her outburst when he’d admitted abandoning his studies to join Poland’s anti-communist protests, he felt a hot wave of shame. Given the realities of her life at the same age, it was no wonder she’d been angry.

‘So how did you get out of … Ukraine?’ He only just avoided naming her home town, which he knew only from her hidden driving licence, at the apartment.

‘I was working as a dancer in a club in Kharkov. Barbu was in the city on business and he came in one night with a group of men. After that, he came back on his own every night for the rest of his trip.’ She shook her head, a half smile on her face. ‘The same show five nights in a row!’

‘And it was he who took you out of there, out of Kharkov?’

‘Yes. And my life changed –’ she clicked her fingers ‘– like that.’

Janusz fell silent, pondering his next move, aware that bad-mouthing Romescu was a strategy that could backfire.

‘You must feel you owe him a great debt.’

She lifted one shoulder. ‘Of course.’

‘But life with him … I’m guessing it’s not what you hoped for?’

‘I used to tell myself he wasn’t a bad man. But now, when innocent people get hurt …’ Her voice trailed off and she shot a look over her shoulder towards the store entrance.

He wanted to ask her outright if she meant Jim, if that was why she’d come to be leaving flowers for his dead friend, but to do so would mean revealing his hand.
Patience
, he told himself.

‘What kind of things?’

She scanned his face and for a wild moment he thought she was going to tell him. Then she gave a tiny shake of the head.

‘Listen, Varenka,’ he took her hand. ‘I will help you to leave him, if that’s what you want.’

As he said the words, Janusz felt a total heel – the scenario playing out here was as old as the Bible. A young woman without resources or family, utterly reliant on a violent man, desperate to leave, whose only hope was to find a new protector. Many would condemn her for that – but they were people who couldn’t comprehend how limited are the options of the powerless.

She looked down at their linked hands. ‘You are very kind. But what can I do? If I leave him then I must go back to Ukraine. I don’t think I could bear that.’

He ran a hand across his jaw – racking his brains for how he might help her to find her feet. Living as an illegal, beneath the radar of the authorities, was easy when you had a rich boyfriend, but if you had to find work and a place to stay with limited resources and lacking an NI number, life became far more precarious. It was one reason why girls who’d been trafficked found it so hard to escape their pimps, however abusive.