Anya Lipska - A Devil Under the Skin

‘Five pints of Stella with whisky chasers, Kath, love.’ He was a big guy in his fifties with a despondent air, wearing a suit jacket that had fitted him, once, before he’d started the really serious work on his beer gut.

‘Singles or doubles?’

He popped his cheeks, blew out a breath. ‘Go on then, make ’em doubles.’

The Stella foamed up while the landlady was pulling the first pint and, as she disappeared to put a new barrel on, Janusz seized the chance to strike up a conversation. ‘Who do you fancy for tonight then?’ he asked, nodding at the screen.

The guy frowned up at the screen. ‘Wenger’s lot. So long as they keep their heads this time.’ He examined the big Pole with frank but friendly curiosity. ‘What about you?’

‘I think you’re right,’ Janusz said. ‘2-0 to Arsenal.’

‘You Polish, I’m guessing?’

Janusz tipped his head in assent.

The man lodged one buttock on the nearest bar stool, taking the weight off. He had a pouchy, lugubrious face, which a badly trimmed moustache did nothing to cheer up. ‘My first job was crewing on the container ships – we went all over the Baltic. Whereabouts in Poland you from?’

‘Gdansk.’

‘You’re having a laugh?!’ he chuckled. ‘If I sailed into Gdynia once I must have done it a hundred times!’

The guy introduced himself as Bill Boyce and soon the two of them were swapping stories about some of the Baltic seaboard’s least salubrious nightspots, memories that evidently recalled happier times for the older man.

‘What line of work are you in now?’ asked Janusz.

‘Chippie,’ he said. ‘Not that I get a lot of work these days. Last job I had was a month ago, fitting a front door for an old girl I know.’ He grinned, baring a set of disturbingly white dentures. ‘I blame your lot, pricing us honest English tradesmen out of business.’

Janusz made a rueful face: there was some truth in Bill’s point. Twenty, thirty years ago, when he’d worked on building sites, Poles were a rarity and he was welcomed as an exotic breed – but the arrival of so many of his countrymen over the last decade had inevitably depressed wage levels and stirred resentment. But he wasn’t here to discuss the downside of globalisation and the free movement of labour.

He nodded over at Bill’s table. ‘Your friends, they don’t seem very interested in the footie?’

Bill stared at the floor, his face crumpling even more. ‘We had a bit of bad news this morning.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. We just heard that one of our muckers upped and died.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Janusz left a respectful pause. ‘Elderly gent, was he?’

‘No. Forty-three .’

Janusz made the kind of shocked noises that were appropriate to the death of someone so young, albeit a stranger.

Bill shook his head. ‘Yeah. He was bit of a scallywag, was Jared, but a good mate. I’ve known him twenty-odd years – we met on a building site down by Royal Docks.’

‘What happened?’

Bill hesitated, but the compulsion to talk won out. ‘It was a freak accident, happened yesterday they think. He was found in his flat, electrocuted.’

‘Christ!’

‘Yeah. They say he drilled into a live cable, putting up a shelf or something.’ Perplexity creased his face – either at Jared’s stupidity, or perhaps at the cosmic lottery of sudden, unexpected death.

‘Jared …’ mused Janusz, before taking a slug of beer. ‘That’s an unusual name. What’s his surname?’

‘Bateman.’

‘Yeah, I think my mate Steve might have mentioned him once or twice.’ A total fabrication, of course, but worth a punt.

‘Steve Fisher, you mean? Yeah, him and Jared were as thick as thieves.’ Bill’s look suggested that in their case, the expression might be more than just a turn of phrase.

Before Janusz had a chance to probe further, the landlady reappeared looking harassed. ‘Sorry, Bill love, but I just couldn’t get that barrel on. You’ll have to have something else, I’m afraid.’

‘You must be out of practice, Kath,’ said Bill with a grin. ‘Make it four pints of Foster’s then.’

He turned back to Janusz. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of Steve, as it happens, ever since we heard about Jared. But he isn’t answering his phone. You wouldn’t be seeing him soon, I suppose?’

‘Yeah, I might be, later on,’ Janusz lied. ‘Shall I get him to call you?’

As they exchanged phone numbers, one of Bill’s friends came over to help him carry the drinks. Although he was shorter than Janusz, his muscled neck and broad shoulders gave him the look of a bull mastiff – and one that might bite at the smallest provocation. The guy, who Janusz gathered was called Simeon, smiled readily enough but his eyes sized Janusz up as though he were a second-hand car with no service history. He had a high-pitched voice, which sounded incongruous coming out of that stocky frame.

Deciding not to expose himself to further scrutiny, Janusz made a show of checking his watch and drank up. As he headed for the door, the sticky carpet sucked at the soles of his feet as though reluctant to let him go.

That night, Janusz stayed up cooking till the early hours. He made some barszcz , followed by a batch of pork meatballs stuffed with mushrooms, and a loaf of half-rye bread, not because he felt like eating, but because cooking always cleared his head, helping him to puzzle out conundrums. And because focusing on the facts of the case was the only way of keeping at bay the images that lurked at the periphery of his vision, images of what might be happening to Kasia, right that minute .

By 2 a.m., he had enough food for a week but no bolt-of-lightning revelations about where Steve might have taken Kasia. It would have to be somewhere remote, where she couldn’t escape or raise the alarm – but Steve was a Londoner, bred and buttered, hardly the type to have access to some rural bolthole. As for the death-by-DIY of Steve’s electrician mate, Jared: Janusz had turned it over in his mind, but could discern no plausible connection to the couple’s disappearance. No. The law of Occam’s Razor told him the simplest solution was the most likely: Steve had lured Kasia away somewhere, and after she refused to go along with his idea of moving to Spain, starting afresh, was holding her there against her will.

The question was, where? And was she in imminent danger? Janusz sent up a fervent prayer: that Kasia would say – and do – whatever she needed to in order to keep Steve sweet, until he could track her down.

Slumping onto the sofa with a bottle of beer he barely noticed the cat, Copetka, jumping onto his lap. What seemed like moments later he woke with a sudden shudder, blinking open his eyes to find himself lying at full stretch, sunlight streaming through the open curtains. The cat, which now lay on his chest, yawned companionably in his face and started to purr.

Janusz realised that while he slept, he’d reached a decision.

‘Copetka?’ he growled into the cat’s face. ‘You’ve never heard me say it before. But I think I’m going to have to call the police.’

‘I’m putting you on sick leave from today.’

‘But, Sarge!’

‘No arguments. I don’t want to see your face anywhere in the unit for the next two weeks.’

Kershaw stared at the floor. She’d known she was in for a bollocking, of course, but even being on non-operational duties was preferable to this … exile . What the fuck was she going to do with herself for two weeks? Drink , probably , replied a sarcastic voice in her head.

‘ Natalie . Is that understood?’