Where the Devil Can't Go (38 page)

Janusz stared at him. This was turning into a night of surprises. He’d barely had time to adjust to the idea that it wasn’t Adamski who’d been following him, and now the guy was grinning like a lovesick schoolboy over the girl he’d said he was ready to kill.

“Why did you threaten Justyna?” he asked, remembering the fear in her eyes that he’d failed to pick up on, the night he’d walked her home.

Adamski frowned at the name: “That one never liked me, she was always trying to cause trouble between me and Nika – you know the type.”

“Maybe because you hit on her while going out with her friend?”

Adamski looked uncomfortable. “That was before...” he trailed off.

“Before you fell in love with Weronika?”

A nod. “You don’t think it was
me
that killed Justyna?” he said suddenly, his eyes wide.

“How do you know she’s dead?” Janusz shot back.

“I read about it in the Metro.” His mouth twisted. “I haven’t told Nika, not yet – it would tear her apart.”

Janusz paused. He’d been convinced that it was Adamski who’d lured Justyna to her death in the Waveney Hotel, but the evidence of the CCTV footage couldn’t be denied. The guy in the hat had murdered poor Justyna, and whoever he was, his name wasn’t Pawel Adamski.

“Tell me this,” Janusz said. “If you love Weronika so much why are you still blackmailing her father?”

“I’m not,” burst out Adamski. “I want nothing more to do with him! Keeping Nika safe is more important than money.”

Janusz examined his face – and decided the turnip head didn’t have the brains to lie convincingly.

“So what makes you think you’re in danger?”

“After Nika left Polka, we rented a cottage, out in Essex.” His face softened. “And just like this,” he snapped his fingers, “I was happy for the first time in my life, all because of Nika.”

Janusz remembered the plasma screen, the fur coat he’d seen at the cottage. “Yeah, but you carried on screwing money out of her father.”

“So what?” Pawel pushed out his chin. “We had expenses, and I thought he owed his daughter something for leaving her to be raised by a drunken slut.” He drank off the last of the beer and set down the empty can.

“I swear on the Holy Mother, I’d already decided to stop contacting him – forget the whole thing, start over with Nika, wipe the board clean,” he dusted one hand off against the other, a decisive gesture. “Then these two
Polaks
turn up in the village driving a big car. They pull up next to Nika and start asking her a load of questions.” He tapped his temple, grinning proudly, “But Nika is smart – she can tell something is up, so she runs away from them.”

“One of these men wore a funny old-fashioned hat, right?” asked Janusz.

Adamski’s mouth dropped open –
like a dog that’s been shown a card trick
– as the expression went. “How do you know?” he exclaimed.

“I know more about this business than you think,” said Janusz, meeting Adamski’s eyes. The younger man dropped his gaze.

Janusz had wondered how the guy in the hat had managed to find the cottage, but now he’d met Adamski he realised his blackmail letters to Zamorski had probably arrived helpfully stamped with a Willowbridge postmark.

“Anyway, I knew they’d find the cottage before long, so the minute she told me, we didn’t even pack, we just jumped in the car and left.”

“What did Nika make of that?’” asked Janusz, leaning over to hand Adamski a fresh beer.

“I told her that Pani Tosik had people looking for us and they might force her to go home to her Mama, so we’d better lie low. And you know what? She never even asked a single question, she just said,
whatever you think, Pawel
” – he put a fist to his chest – “That’s how much she trusts me.” His accent was broadening as the beer went down.

Janusz processed the guy’s story – so far, it fitted what he knew of the facts. “So who was chasing you? Somebody you pissed off in the drugs trade?”

Holding up the beer can, Adamski laughed. “This is my only drug,
kolego
,”

Janusz lit another cigar – the guy was hardly likely to admit to dealing drugs. On the other hand, with every new revelation, Janusz sensed his theories about this affair starting to crumble beneath him. He took a deep draw on his cigar and faced the unwelcome truth. His whole investigation had been based on a series of flawed interpretations and imagined connections: the encounter with the drug dealer in the Flash Klub toilets, Justyna’s suspicions about Adamski’s dealing, her dying of a drug overdose. From these pathetically thin ‘clues’ he’d constructed an elaborate edifice which he now watched collapse in the face of the facts.

“These guys who came looking for you,” said Janusz, after a moment. “You think they were sent by Zamorski.”

Adamski shrugged. “Who else? He hired you to do the same, didn’t he?”

“That’s different. I’m a private detective, not some murdering thug.”

If what Adamski said was true, the big question was – why would Zamorski send out
two
search parties? He stood up and paced the room.

Then it hit him.
Zamorski could never have run the risk of Janusz, or even Konstanty Nowak, seeing the SB documents that Adamski had got his hands on — because then they’d find out he’d been an informer.
When his first search party failed to track down Adamski, he cooked up the birth certificate story and asked Nowak to find someone who knew his way round London’s
Polonia.
Although Janusz would do the legwork, Zamorski probably never intended to let him get anywhere near the SB documents. He’d been like one of those drones the Americans used, deployed simply to guide the real pursuers to their quarry. Zamorski’s man – the guy in the hat – must have been on his tail from the moment he took the case.

Janusz went over to open the bay window, and leaned out, like a man enjoying the night air. Lazily scanning the road along his side of Highbury Fields, the cars under the carbon lights appeared reassuringly empty; then, blowing out a plume of cigar smoke, he lifted his gaze to the road at the far side of the green. His gaze fell on a black boxy car – a 4X4. Inside, there was just enough light from the dashboard to illuminate the outline of a man in the driver’s seat. Janusz turned his head, but continued to watch the car out of the corner of his eye. After a beat, the man leaned forward, perhaps to change radio station, coming closer to the light source, and outlining for a split-second the brim of a hat.

Janusz felt his heart lurch in his chest. Did Zamorski know the sort of men he was employing? Could Poland’s next president know that murder had been committed in his name? Whether he knew it or not, with a
psychol
like that running around, his daughter’s life was in danger.

Then Janusz remembered the dead girl from the theology college.

“When did you last see Ela Wronska?” he asked.

“How do you know about me and Ela?” asked Adamski, his can frozen centimetres from his lips.

“I know you were in the same children’s home,” said Janusz, grinding his cigar out in the ashtray. “Did you read it in the paper, about her orchestra playing in Gorodnik?”

“No, I went to the concert,” Adamski’s long face broke into a wistful grin. “You should see have seen her – she plays like an angel.”

“And when you came to England, you went to her college, made contact with her, right?”

Adamski shook his head, a stubborn look on his face.

“Come on, I know you were sweethearts back in the home,” persisted Janusz. “You wanted to get back with her – before you started playing housey-housey with Weronika.”

“No! Ela is my friend!” said Adamski, face reddening.

Janusz took a swallow of beer. It occurred to him that the
psychol
in the hat could easily have discovered Ela’s connection to Pawel and paid her a little visit, tried to get her to reveal his whereabouts. He had a sudden disturbing vision of Justyna and Ela’s last few hours. The
skurwysyn
must have overpowered them, tied them up, fed them massive doses of the dodgy drugs to loosen their tongue, and after a few hours of fun, left them unconscious and dying, apparently of an accidental overdose.

Then something else struck Janusz: Adamski used the present tense when he talked about Ela. He cleared his throat. “The thing is, Pawel, I’m asking you all this because there’s something you probably don’t know.”

He looked up at the older man, puzzled at the use of his Christian name.

“I’ve got some bad news,” Janusz went on, avoiding his eyes. “About Ela.”

He took the news harder than Janusz could have foreseen: folding himself up in the chair and crying like a little child. Having never seen a grown man weep in that way, Janusz wasn’t sure what to do. He dug out a bottle of
wodka
, put a glassful in the boy’s hand, and, patting him clumsily on the shoulder, muttered a few consoling words.

Five minutes or more later, Pawel used the front of his sweatshirt to wipe his eyes and nose as he listened to Janusz reveal what he knew of Ela’s death.

When he’d finished, Pawel said: “It’s my fault she’s dead”. Grief lent his long, sallow face a melancholic dignity.

Janusz felt a pang of pity. Less than an hour ago, he’d happily have given this guy the beating of his miserable life and turned him over to the girl detective. Now, he was convinced that apart from his bungled blackmail plot, he was more or less harmless – and he seemed genuinely to love Weronika.

“Your fault why? Because it was you they were looking for?”

He shook his head, his eyes cast down. “Ela would never have caused him any trouble – it was me who stirred things up, put her in danger.”

His words confused Janusz –
how could Ela cause Zamorski trouble
? It was like looking down a child’s kaleidoscope: the shards of colour appeared to settle into one pattern, only to re-form into a new picture a moment later.

“If I tell you all of it,” said Pawel finally, meeting Janusz’s gaze. “Will you promise to leave me and Nika alone?”

Janusz paused. “
Tak.
You have my word on it.”

Fixing his gaze on the wall above Janusz’s head, Pawel started talking, his voice so low Janusz had to lean forward to hear him.

“They put me in the home because people said my Mama and Tata were bad people,” he said. “Maybe it was true, but at least they loved me.

“I was miserable there, in the home – until Ela arrived.” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “She used to make up these stories – how we would run away with the gypsies, that we were really the stolen children of a King and Queen, who’d come to collect us one day.”

Janusz recalled his own upbringing. While he’d been moaning to his Mama about sweet rationing and not having enough toys, thousands of children must have endured a childhood like Pawel and Ela’s.

“She looked after me like a sister. Once, when she found the big boys trying to burn me with a cigarette, she went for them like a wild boar!” Pawel’s smile faded. “She couldn’t do anything about Witold Struk though.”

Janusz felt a pulse start to drum in his throat.

Adamski lit a cigarette, the lighter flame trembling. “The first time, we were just excited to get a ride in his big fancy car,” he said. “He drove us into the forest, and then we met
him
, waiting at the
dacza
.”

Janusz’s gaze darted around the room as his brain tried to make sense of what he was hearing. Then his hands bunched, like he’d grabbed a live mains wire.

“Zamorski,” he said.

Pawel gave a single nod. “Yes – except I didn’t know his name, then.”

He frowned at the palms of his hands. “The first few times... nothing happened. We played checkers and he gave us things we never got in the home – Captain Kloss comics, Toblerone.” He tapped some ash off his cigarette into an empty beer can, never meeting Janusz’s eyes. “He was just softening us up, to make it harder to say no in the end. Later, he would say ‘What about all the sweets and the toys – how else are you going to pay me back?’”

He shook his head violently, as though trying to dislodge some image.

“Every time, I swore I would fight him, and every time I just froze, like a statue.” He pulled his jacket tighter. “Do you know what the worst thing was? Realising that Ela couldn’t protect me – or herself.”

“How old were you?” asked Janusz, his voice gruff.

“Six years old.” Pawel looked him straight in the eye for the first time since beginning his story. “Ela was seven.”

Janusz dug his nails into his palms. “What about the people at the home – couldn’t you tell them what was happening?”

Pawel snorted. “They all looked the other way, they didn’t want to lose their jobs by pissing off an
esbek.
”

“What about Struk?” asked Janusz, after a moment. “Was he involved in...the abuse?”

“No, he just played postman.” Pawel spat the word out. “But in a way I hated him more. He bundled us in and out of that place, week after week, pretending nothing bad was happening.” He cradled his arms across his body. “The one time I got up the guts to say that me and Ela weren’t going back there, he shouted at me, told me I was garbage, just like my
straszna
family.”

Janusz had to stand up and walk around.

“What about him and Zamorski?” he said, once he could trust his voice. “Did you ever see them exchange packages, or cash?”

“No, they hardly even spoke.” One side of Pawel’s face twisted in a bitter grin. “They couldn’t stand each other. Zamorski treated Struk like a doormat – one time he slapped him, right in front of us, for forgetting to bring some magazine he wanted.”

Janusz frowned. In the SB file he’d taken from Struk’s house, Lieutenant Struk had meticulously recorded his personal deliveries of Magpie/Zamorski’s ‘
wyplaty
’, his wage packets, which Janusz had always assumed to be envelopes stuffed with foreign currency. A second later, it dawned on him. The ‘wage packets’ had been six-year-old Pawel and seven-year-old Ela, taken from the children’s home and delivered to the Bureau’s star agent –
like takeaway meals
, he thought.