Anya Lipska - A Devil Under the Skin

She gave a mulish nod. She’d never heard the Sarge sound so angry before: Toby Greenacre was legendary for his cool throughout the unit.

His expression softened. ‘Listen, Natalie. Just count your blessings that the guy didn’t want to make something of it, or you’d be up before Divisional Standards.’

Kershaw had to concede that it probably hadn’t been a good idea to stay on drinking in the pub on her own last night. It had been sweet of Matt to take her out for a post-work jar, when he’d seen how down she was after a ten-hour shift spent cleaning guns, checking equipment, updating the armoury’s records. But later, after Matt had gone home to his fiancee in Chingford, and she’d put away a couple more glasses of red wine, she’d started to get properly pissed off at the thought of how many more months of this purgatory she’d have to endure. She’d done nothing wrong and yet it felt as if she was sitting in the waiting room of her own life.

So, when some drunken lowlife started mouthing off at the girl behind the bar while Kershaw stood behind him waiting to order, it had been a monumentally bad accident of timing.

‘The guy was bang out of order,’ she told the Sarge, sticking her chin out. ‘He called her a “useless fucking slag” – because she forgot to put ice in his JD and coke. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen!’

She had tapped the guy on the shoulder, and politely told him to apologise. He threw a look backwards, clocked a five-foot-two-inch blonde girl, and laughed . Looking back, she thought it might have turned out differently if he’d sworn at her. It was the way he’d dismissed her in a glance – that was what had really pulled her trigger. Bang. Before she even knew what she was doing, she had his arm yanked up tight between his shoulder blades – all that upper body strength training paying off – and was reading him his rights.

‘I don’t think I need to remind you about the rules governing the behaviour of an off-duty officer, Natalie,’ the Sarge was saying. ‘Especially since you were visibly the worse for drink, according to the officer who got dragged in to sort things out.’

Kershaw knew she should just keep schtum but there was no stopping herself. ‘Are we supposed just to ignore it then, Sarge, when someone behaves like that?’

He fixed her with his calm brown eyes. ‘Do you think your intervention made the situation better or worse for the barmaid?’

She pictured the girl’s weary face throughout the hour-long drama that had played out in the street outside, as the local cops questioned all three of them. A drama that had ended with ‘no complaint’ by the girl and without so much as a ticking-off for the loudmouth. ‘I’m not going to caution him,’ she recalled the older uniform confiding to her, not unkindly. ‘If we do, he’ll only make trouble for you.’

‘And how do you think it would have played in the Standard ,’ the Sarge went on, ‘if it had come out that the officer involved in the Kyle Furnell shooting got herself into a pub scrap?’

Christ. She had to admit that scenario had never even occurred to her.

The Sarge regarded her in silence for a long moment, the look on his face suggesting he was waiting for an apology. She just stared at the floor. Finally, he stood up behind his desk, indicating the interview was over, and walked her to the door.

‘Speaking of the Furnell business – now the inquest is over, I hope you’re cracking on with your psych assessment?’

‘I’ve had the first session, Sarge.’ No point mentioning she hadn’t got round to booking another one yet.

‘I suggest you use the time off to go every day. The quicker you get the sign-off, Natalie, the quicker we can have you back on ops, where you belong. Okay?’

As Kershaw descended the stairs, she decided that the worst thing about the bollocking had been the expression in the Sarge’s eyes at the end. A few years ago, Sergeant Toby Greenacre had been in charge of a nasty hostage situation: a standoff that had ended with him slotting a man who was holding a shotgun to the head of his pregnant wife. The look he’d given her said that he’d been there – that he knew what it was like to be under the microscope for so long, waiting for normal life to restart.

She’d turned her mobile off for the bollocking. Switching it back on, she saw she’d missed a call. There was a text, too. It said simply: ‘ Call me. Janusz Kiszka. ’

Kershaw was the first to arrive in the Rochester, the Walthamstow gastropub where she’d arranged to meet Kiszka. Standing at the bar, it struck her that although it was only eighteen months since they’d last met here, a couple of weeks after the stabbing, it seemed like a memory from a distant era. Back then, she’d yet to trade her detective’s badge for an MP5, and was still debating whether she and Ben, her then-boyfriend, might still have a future together.

She pictured again the look in Ben’s Bournville-dark eyes, when she’d finally told him it was over. Had she done the right thing? It was a question to which her mind returned periodically, only to deliver the never-changing answer. Probably. Staying with Ben just hadn’t been an option, not after the way he’d let her down. She took a slug of her wine. Now what have I got to look forward to? She was thirty years old, boyfriend-less, and with her new career in firearms on hold before it had even properly got started.

Then she saw the rangy, unmistakable outline of Janusz Kiszka looming through the etched glass of the pub doors, and felt her spirits rise.

After insisting on buying her another glass of wine – which she made no more than a token effort to decline – he sat down opposite her, his big frame comically too large for the pub chair.

‘How are you?’ From the look he sent her under his brows the enquiry was more than just the routine social formula.

‘Oh, I’m fine. Fully recovered.’

‘So you got into the firearms unit, just as you wanted to?’

‘Yep.’

‘Congratulations.’ Despite looking a bit on the thin side, she was still an attractive little thing, Janusz decided – the kind of girl you’d definitely look twice at in the street. ‘I read about the crazy guy who got himself shot,’ he said frowning into his beer. ‘That was you, right?’

She nodded, her expression betraying no pride, but no regret either, before knocking back half a glass of wine. Janusz recalled that she’d been drinking for England the last time they met and, judging by the red veins clustered at the corners of her eyes and the bruised look beneath them, she still was. It stirred in him memories of dark times, long ago in Poland, when he’d sought the comforting blankness that only strong drink could bring.

‘You did the right thing,’ he growled. ‘Did it get you into trouble?’

‘Not in theory,’ she said. ‘But I’m still NAC … sorry, not authorised to carry. And I’ve got to confess my deepest, darkest feelings to a shrink before they’ll give me my gun back.’

The thought of her being subjected to the perambulations and circumlocutions of a trick cyclist made Janusz grin. ‘I bet that’s fun.’ She returned the smile, reminding him how much prettier she looked without the perpetual frown stitched between her brows.

‘Anyway. You wanted to see me about something?’ she asked. ‘Or was it just a social call?’

Janusz hesitated. Growing up under a totalitarian regime had instilled in him a profound distrust of authority of any kind – especially the police. In the Poland where he’d grown up you didn’t turn to the milicja to sort out your problems: you looked to family, to the community, or to your own devices. Even now, decades later, the idea of asking a cop for help still made him feel queasy.