Death Can’t Take a Joke (27 page)

‘Would you allow me to lend you some money, so you can find somewhere to stay?’

Slipping her hand out of his, she lifted her chin. ‘Thank you, but I have enough money. If I leave –
when
I leave – I will not accept money from a man ever again.’

Her phone chirped. After a brief conversation in Ukrainian, she hung up.

‘He’s saying we have to go,’ she bit her lip. ‘Would you follow me back to the car? Just in case he saw me talking to you?’

‘Of course. But listen, I understand you don’t want money, but I am going to work out a way for you to leave, I promise.’

‘I believe you,’ she said simply.

Hanging back a good thirty metres – Varenka’s red coat making it easy to keep her in view as she passed through the idling throng – Janusz replayed their encounter. She had seemed less assured, more anxious than he’d seen her before. Was it his fault? Had Romescu somehow found out she’d been in touch with him? Whatever the reason, he had to think of a way of getting her to safety – and not just for her sake. Once she’d escaped Romescu’s control, he was convinced she’d feel able to confide why Jim had been killed.

At the multi-storey car park, he took the service stairs up to the third floor where she’d said the Discovery was parked, and walked parallel with her, keeping two aisles, four rows of parked cars between them. Coming to a halt behind a wide concrete pillar, he saw snake-boy
,
still wearing his plaster cast, emerge from the driver’s side and go round the car to open the rear passenger door for her. His body language was anything but chivalrous, however, signalling instead his dominance and a lazy contempt. He slammed the door on her with unnecessary force, the sound bouncing off the concrete ceiling like a bomb going off.

Kershaw was struggling to navigate the catastrophic shitstorm that had engulfed her life since she’d stumbled on Stride’s glasses. Her normal impulse in a crisis would be to go out on the piss with one of her mates, have a good cry on a friendly shoulder, but what was the point? She couldn’t reveal what Ben had done, explain why they hadn’t moved in together as planned. She’d taken two days off work, arranged in order to give herself time to get settled in the new place; instead, she’d spent the time watching old movies and getting slaughtered on red wine, alone. The second night she’d ended up scrabbling drunkenly through the boxes she’d labelled for the move in search of a half-finished bottle of Baileys.

Now it was Tuesday morning, and the moment she’d been dreading: going back to work. It would be bad enough seeing Streaky and not being able to say anything about the secret they shared, but there was another, even worse prospect: what the fuck would she do if she bumped into Ben?

He hadn’t called again, which probably meant that Streaky had been in touch, told him to keep his head down. What could she take from that? Was it a simple act of loyalty by the Sarge, to warn his protégé in advance that he would have to report his concealment of evidence up the chain of command?
Maybe.
But deep down, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there might be something more sinister, some old-school-style cover-up going on.

Streaky was nowhere to be seen when she arrived at work, although the evidence sitting on his desk – an unopened Greggs bag transparent with grease – suggested he’d been unexpectedly called upstairs. On his return, half an hour later, he called the team together round his desk for a briefing – and dropped his bombshell.

‘You’ll all be aware of the sudden, if widely unmourned, death of Anthony Stride, convicted paedophile, late of this parish.’

Fuck!
Kershaw tried to ignore the speculative looks ricocheting between her colleagues, making a supreme effort to keep her gaze fixed on the Sarge and her expression one of detached curiosity.

‘It appeared to be a nice simple case of suicide, with Mr Stride hanging himself from “yon lonely oak” following a sudden attack of conscience. But there has been a development.’ Kershaw held her breath. ‘This morning, a member of the public handed in a pair of spectacles which they found in the undergrowth up at Hollow Ponds. Anthony Stride’s spectacles.’

There were murmurs of surprise, and all eyes flickered towards Kershaw as people remembered that she’d been first on scene and wondered, understandably enough, whether she’d dropped a bollock. But all she felt was a great rolling wave of relief: relief that Streaky had made things right by engineering the retrieval of the evidence – and without revealing Ben’s crime.

‘This public-spirited citizen even took the trouble to mark the spot where he found the evidence,’ Streaky went on, ‘which was more than a hundred yards from Stride’s body.’ That brought a sharp little gasp from Kershaw’s fellow DC, Sophie, sitting in front of her.

A memory of Ben turning up at the scene that day flashed into Kershaw’s mind, something about his manner and the way he’d seemed keen to get rid of her. She was gripped by a sudden and searing knowledge. At that moment, Ben had
already found
the glasses, had them tucked in his pocket, and even as he joked with her, had already decided not to hand them in.

‘Of course,’ Streaky was saying, ‘it’s possible that Stride simply dropped his specs and failed to pick them up, but initial examination has revealed damage to one of the arms and possible traces of blood. Furthermore, they were found on the edge of the car park, close to some tyre tracks, suggesting they may have fallen off while he was being dragged from a vehicle.’

Pausing to extract what looked like a steak and onion slice from the grease-stained paper bag on his desk, he frowned at it, as though a valuable clue might be concealed beneath its pallid crust. ‘The upshot is that the case has been promoted to a Category 1 death and has just plummeted from a great height into Murder Squad’s inbox.’

‘Are the press being told, Sarge – that the initial search of the area didn’t find his glasses?’ The question came from Ackroyd.

‘They’ll have to be, at some stage,’ sighed Streaky. ‘And of course they’ll make a meal of it – which will no doubt result in above average levels of impatience from our masters upstairs. So I want everyone working on this for the foreseeable. Except for DC Kershaw.’ All eyes swivelled back to her. ‘Natalie, after you’ve briefed the team on your initial assessment of the Stride scene, I’ll need you 100 per cent focused on the Jim Fulford case – it’s been sixteen days now and we still haven’t got a single decent lead. Go back to basics, see if we’ve missed anything.’

‘And now,’ he announced, raising the steak slice to his lips. ‘I’m going to have my breakfast.’

Reviewing the evidence in the Fulford case kept Kershaw busy all day, with scant opportunity to catch Streaky on his own. At five o’clock, she saw him pick his jacket up off the back of his chair and disappear. Two minutes later, she shrugged on her own coat and, with a general wave goodbye, headed down the stairs. She caught up with him halfway across the car park.

‘Ah, DC Kershaw,’ he said. ‘Good day at the office?’

‘I’ve had better. So, Sarge … How did you pull that off?

He didn’t slow his pace. ‘Pull what off?’

‘Come on, Sarge!’ Her voice was low but urgent. ‘Where does this leave Ben? This is my life – our lives – we’re talking about here. You can’t leave me hanging like that!’

He appeared to relent. ‘Walk with me as far as the boozer then. And pay attention – I’m only going to say this once.’

Leaving the car park, they took a right turn towards Hoe Street.

‘You came to me with a situation that threatened the proper upholding of law and order. I have dealt with it in such a way that the investigations that
should have
taken place
will now
take place. Beyond that, the less you know about it, the better.’

‘Thank you, Sarge.’ She knew what a big deal it was for him to have stuck his neck out, to put things right the way he had. If anyone upstairs ever found out, it would mean instant dismissal, the end of a twenty-odd-year career, and probably goodbye to his pension, too. For all his macho posturing, Streaky’s loyalty to his troops was legendary. ‘So … what about Ben?’

Streaky’s face became grim. ‘DS Crowther is taking an extended period of sick leave during which he will be conducting a thorough examination of his attitude to policing in general and the disinterested enforcement of the law in particular.’

Kershaw pictured for a moment the colossal bollocking Streaky must have given his protégé, in the light of Ben’s spectacular fuck-up – especially since the Sarge had played a big part in getting him the job in Divisional CID.

‘Will people believe the cover story, that he’s off sick?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ Streaky turned innocent blue eyes on her. ‘He’s provided a sick note saying he’s got a suspected slipped disc. And by the time he comes back, the furore over Stride’s glasses, the search, it will all have blown over.’

She chewed at a fingernail. ‘What about me and him?’ she said in a low voice.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you with that one, not being a qualified relationship counsellor.’ He came to a halt – they were now at the doorstep of the pub – and met her gaze. ‘Look, Natalie, I’ve known Ben for a long old time now and I’m sure of one thing: he’s one of the good guys. He got over-involved in the Ryan case, happens to the best of us. He saw an opportunity to save the family any further grief – and took it. Moment of madness, he called it.’

Just as Kershaw had suspected: Ben had been protecting the Ryans. An honourable motive, at least.

He stood there scanning her face. ‘I’m sure you two’ll get over it.’ Then, hiking up his trousers, he pushed open the door to the bar, releasing a gust of beery warmth and low-pitched chatter.

‘Just one more thing, Sarge.’ He looked back at her, one eyebrow raised. ‘How did you work the business with the glasses?’

‘Eh?’

‘The guy you had recover them – he must be someone you’d trust with your life.’

Streaky’s lips twitched as he tried to resist the temptation to tell her – and failed.

‘The public-spirited gent who stumbled across the specs, you mean? Here’s a funny thing: he used to be in the Royal Artillery back in the day – just like me. Small world, isn’t it?’

Kershaw watched him disappear into the bar, a wry smile on her face.

As Kershaw walked back towards the car park, she pulled up Ben’s number on her mobile. Her thumb hovered over the button, an inner voice telling her that they needed to talk about what had happened, whether there was any way around or over it, or whether, for her, his ‘moment of madness’ as he was now calling it, was a deal-breaker. Half a minute passed before she pocketed the phone, number undialled. She just couldn’t face seeing him yet: the feeling of betrayal was still too raw. Maybe in a couple of days’ time.

Halfway through the doorway of Tesco Express, where she was planning to replenish her supplies of cheap red wine, Kershaw came to a halt abrupt enough to cause the man behind to bump into her. Why spend yet another evening getting pissed in her empty flat, torturing herself over the Ben situation, she asked herself, when she could be focusing on the Jim Fulford murder? Her review of the painfully sparse evidence in the case had confirmed Streaky’s assessment: they had hit a brick wall. She knew that with every passing day, the chances of finding who killed Fulford, and why, were slipping away.

The only unexplored lead was Andre Terrell’s claim that, according to Janusz Kiszka, Jim Fulford had been seeing some gorgeous Eastern European girl, the mysterious Varenka Kalina. The time had come, she decided, to have another crack at the double-dealing Pole.

Half an hour later, Kiszka was buzzing her into his apartment.

‘Can you explain something to me?’ she asked, on the offensive the moment she got through his front door. ‘Why would you share significant information about Jim Fulford’s private life with Andre Terrell, but withhold it from the detectives investigating his murder?’

‘What information?’

‘The fact that he had an East European girlfriend.’

‘I didn’t tell him that. He’s a lying little scumbag.’

‘So he pulled the name Varenka out of the air, did he? And by another staggering coincidence, wasn’t Varenka Kalina one of the names you had me search for on Jim’s laptop?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t know, and I
still
don’t know that they were having an affair.’

‘But you knew that they knew each other.’

‘No! I’m not sure they ever even met!’

They stood there, either side of his kitchen table, eyeballing each other.

‘You look terrible,’ he said, peering into her face. ‘Sit down, I’m making you something to eat.’

She sunk onto a kitchen chair, feeling suddenly and alarmingly bone-weak, her sleepless nights and diet of red wine and toast catching up with her. ‘A biscuit wouldn’t go amiss, if you’ve got one,’ she admitted.

‘You’re getting chicken and wild mushroom soup,’ he said over his shoulder from the stove.

As Kershaw took her first mouthfuls of soup – steaming and woodily autumnal – she told herself she was skating on thin ice. Having a cosy meal with a potential witness in a murder case without getting permission from the Sarge was the kind of thing that had got her in trouble with Divisional Standards a couple of years back.
But given the events of the last few days, the rules and regs felt like some foreign country she’d visited long ago.

‘So, what’s the story with this Varenka woman?’ she asked.

Scanning the girl’s serious little face as she tucked into the soup, Janusz felt a stirring of remorse. Maybe he had nothing to lose, sharing some of what he knew.

He sawed a couple of slabs of sourdough off the still-warm loaf. ‘I saw her leaving flowers outside Jim’s house, after the murder.’

‘And assumed that she must have known him?’

He tipped his head –
perhaps.

Kershaw made a sceptical face. ‘Couldn’t she simply have read about it in the local paper?’

‘It’s unlikely. She lives in Canary Wharf, and …’ He paused, visualising the beautifully groomed Varenka walking down Hoe Street, a hummingbird in a crowd of pigeons. ‘She just didn’t belong there.’