Anya Lipska - Death Can’t Take a Joke

‘Basia and I, we had gone out to our Pilates class,’ said Marika, ‘and when we came back, about nine o’clock, the police were waiting outside.’ Her voice was husky and almost toneless. ‘They’d … taken him away to the hospital by then, but they say he was already dead.’ Her eyes filled with tears again.

As Basia put an arm around her shoulder, murmuring words of comfort, Janusz realised that Marika was speaking in Polish, which he couldn’t remember her doing since she’d married Jim. Now grief had stripped away the last ten years, throwing her back on her mother tongue.

After a moment, she pulled herself upright and used both hands to sweep the tears from her cheeks – a determined gesture.

‘What did the cops say?’ he asked. ‘Did they question the neighbours straightaway? Right after the … after Jim was found?’

She nodded. ‘Jason who lives two doors down heard a shout when he was putting out the rubbish bags.’ She paused, took a steadying breath. ‘It was starting to get dark, but he saw two men running away, through the garden gate.’

‘Which way were they headed? Hoe Street? Or Lea Bridge Road?’ Janusz was relieved to find himself slipping into private investigator mode.

‘Hoe Street, I think he said.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘They both wore hoodies and balaclavas, ’ she said, dropping into English for these unfamiliar words. ‘So all he could say was that one was tall – almost two metres – and slim, the other a little shorter.’

‘Black? White?’

She gave a hopeless shrug. ‘It was dark, and with the faces covered, he couldn’t tell.’

Janusz hesitated. He needed to know exactly how Jim had died but he couldn’t think of a sensitive way to frame the question. From Laika’s basket came a tentative whine of distress.

Marika’s swollen eyes met his and a look of understanding passed between them. ‘The police said …’ her voice had fallen to a croak. ‘They told me he had suffered several deep stab wounds … in his stomach. One severed an artery …’ She tried to go on but then gave up. ‘I’m sorry, Janek,’ she said. ‘Is it okay if I let Basia tell you the rest? I need to lie down.’ She stood unsteadily, her chair grating harshly on the stone floor tiles.

Janusz jumped to his feet and went to her, his shovel-like hands encircling her slender forearms. At his touch, Marika’s eyes filled with fresh tears.

‘You know that he was an only child,’ she said, grief roughening her voice. ‘But he always said he didn’t miss not having a brother – because he had you.’

She winced and Janusz realised that, without meaning to, he had tightened his grip on her arms.

‘You rest, Marika,’ he said, bending to lock his gaze on hers. ‘But there’s something I want you to know. Whatever it takes, I will find the skurwysyny who did this.’

They embraced then, three times on alternate cheeks in the Polish way. He stood watching her walk slowly down the hall, choosing her footing carefully, as though stepping through the debris of her shattered life. Laika rose to follow her, bushy tail down, claws tick-ticking on the wooden floor.

To avoid disturbing Marika – her bedroom lay right above the kitchen – Basia took Janusz into the front room and closed the door.

‘There’s no way he could have been saved,’ she said, eyebrows steepled in sorrow. ‘Marika doesn’t know this, but the police told me those dirty chuje – excuse my language – they practically gutted him. He lost sixty per cent of his blood lying there on the garden path.’

Janusz blinked a few times, trying to dispel an image of his big strong mate lying helpless on the ground, his life ebbing away across the black and white tiles.

‘They wouldn’t let Marika near the house,’ Basia went on. ‘We went to my flat and I only brought her back here once …’ her knuckles flew to her lips ‘… once everything was cleaned up.’ Seeing her stricken face, Janusz remembered something. All those years ago, it had been Basia whom Jim had dated first, if only for a few weeks, before he’d become smitten with her older sister. Janusz had ensured, naturalnie , that Jim got plenty of ribbing down the building site for getting lucky with both sisters, but as far as he could recall, there had been no hard feelings between any of the trio when Jim and Marika became an item.

‘On the phone, you said something about junkies?’

Basia tipped her head. ‘It was something one of the policemen said, that maybe it was a robbery, to get money for narkotyki .’

Janusz frowned. The house was over a mile from the notorious council estates west of Hoe Street, bordering neighbouring Tottenham, that were home to Walthamstow’s drug gangs. Would those scumbags really travel all the way up here to rob a random householder on the doorstep of his modest terraced house? Then he remembered Jim’s text delaying their meeting.

‘Do you know why he was running late for our pint at the Rochester?’

She nodded. ‘Marika asked him to fix a leaking tap in the downstairs cloakroom, so he came back from work early to do it before going out again.’

‘He didn’t say anything about someone coming to the house to see him, before he came to meet me? Maybe that new deputy manager of his?’

The gym was doing so well that Jim had expanded six months earlier, taking on a young local guy to help manage it, although the last time they’d met, Jim had hinted that the new staff member wasn’t proving a great success. I’m not really cut out for bossing people about, he’d confided to Janusz, his usually sunny face downcast.

‘No,’ said Basia. ‘When we left here to go to Pilates, we were all joking around, Jim saying he couldn’t wait to get rid of us so he could sit down and read the paper.’ She lifted a shoulder in the peculiarly expressive way Polish women had. ‘It was just a normal day.’

Janusz gazed out of the bay window that framed the tiny front garden and flower-strewn wall like a tableau. Through the half-closed slats of the blinds a young woman came into view, slowing to a halt in front of the wall. She stooped to lay something, and he saw her lips moving, as though in silent prayer. There was something about her that caught his attention. It wasn’t just that, even half-obscured, she was strikingly beautiful; it was the powerful impression that the sadness on her face and in the slope of her shoulders seemed more profound – more personal – than might be expected from a neighbour or casual acquaintance of the dead man.

‘Basia,’ he growled in an undertone. ‘Do you recognise that girl?’

Basia frowned out through the blinds, shook her head. Outside, the girl bent her head in a respectful gesture, crossed herself twice, and turned to leave.

Driven by some instinct he couldn’t explain, Janusz leapt up from the sofa and, telling Basia that he’d phone to check on Marika later, let himself out of the front door. The girl had nestled a new bouquet among the other offerings, but her expensive-looking hand-tied bunch of cream calla lilies and vivid blue hyacinths stood out from the surrounding cellophane-sheafed blooms. After checking that there was no accompanying note or card, he scanned up and down the street. Empty. Crossing to the other side of the road, he was rewarded by the sight of the girl’s slender figure a hundred metres away, walking towards the centre of Walthamstow.

Gradually, he closed the gap to around fifty metres. By a stroke of luck, a young guy carrying an architect’s portfolio case had emerged from a garden gate ahead of him so that if the girl happened to glance behind she’d be unlikely to spot Janusz. From the glimpses he got he could see that, even allowing for the vertiginous heels, she was tall for a woman, her graceful stride reminiscent of a catwalk model’s.