Anya Lipska - A Devil Under the Skin

They were both smiling, and Kasia’s hair was blonde, as it had been when he’d first met her. Seeing the sprinkle of youthful freckles across her nose he felt a tugging sensation in his chest. Folding the picture carefully so that Steve disappeared, he pocketed it, before starting to leaf through the SAS survival guide, a look of scorn growing on his face. A look that dissolved at what he found, tucked towards the back of the book.

It was a printout of a booking confirmation made out to Steven Fisher, for two seats on flight AM47 from Luton to Alicante. The second passenger name: Kasia Fisher. Janusz checked the departure details. The flight had left at 11.30 that morning.

Oskar paused in the act of conveying a forkload of gulasz to his mouth. ‘It’s simple science, Janek. As long as you eat according to your blood group, the excess weight will just fall off naturally!’

The two friends were having a late lunch in their favourite café, the Polska Kuchnia in Maryland, and Oskar was keen to proselytise about his latest fad diet.

‘You see. This is protein.’ Oskar gestured towards his plate with a professorial air. ‘So being blood type B, I can eat as much of it as I like.’ There was a moment’s silence while he dispatched the forkful, following it down with a swallow of beer that made his throat bulge.

‘Because of your blood group.’

‘ Dobrze . Type B dates from the time when man was nomadic, so I can eat most things and still lose weight.’ He spoke with the modesty of a man disinclined to boast of his good fortune.

‘Right. And this is all based on your ancestors having a varied diet – because they travelled around a lot.’

If Oskar detected any sarcasm, he ignored it. ‘That’s right. I just have to avoid hydrocarbons.’

‘Carbohydrates.’

‘ Tak , like I said.’

Watching Oskar take a glug of beer, Janusz toyed with the idea of explaining nutrition to him, or indeed the fundamentals of evolution, but he knew he’d only be doing it to put off the moment when he’d have to broach the Kasia situation. Pushing aside the meal he had barely touched, he told him the news.

‘ Kurwa mac , Janek!’ Oskar wiped his mouth with a balled napkin. ‘You should have said before!’

Janusz felt his chest tighten at the distress on his mate’s chubby face. He might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but since Janusz’s mother and father died, many years ago, Oskar was the closest thing to family he had.

‘I know how it looks,’ said Janusz. ‘But I don’t believe for one minute she’s gone off to Spain with Steve.’

‘But what about the flights?’

‘I don’t think she went on any flight. Her favourite sunglasses were still in the flat. Anyway, she’s not the type who’d leave a fridgeful of food to rot.’

Oskar popped another can of Tyskie, his face furrowed, and topped up their glasses, avoiding Janusz’s eyes. ‘You don’t think … Is it not possible …’

‘That she had second thoughts about moving in with me?’ Janusz growled. ‘No. I mean, of course it’s possible. But I know there’s no way she’d go without telling me – she’s not a coward. And she wouldn’t leave Barbara hanging like that, either.’

‘So what do you think happened, Janek?’

Janusz stared at the ceiling, trying to visualise for the hundredth time what might have happened between Saturday afternoon, when Kasia had left his apartment, and now.

‘I think he’s taken her somewhere.’ Voicing this unwelcome thought, he recalled how preoccupied she’d seemed recently. Had she been frightened – despite all her denials – about what Steve might be driven to do as her departure became a reality?

‘You mean taken against her will?’ asked Oskar, eyes wide.

‘ Tak. I think he tricked her into going somewhere out of town with him. I don’t know – told her he’d booked something to celebrate his birthday? Maybe he hoped that from there, he could persuade her to go to Spain with him.’

‘And when she refused, he wouldn’t let her go?’

Janusz gave a grim nod. ‘If he’s hurt her in any way …’ Realising that his hands were clenched into fists he made a conscious effort to unball them.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to find her. Find both of them.’

Oskar nodded. ‘If anyone can do it, kolego , you can.’

Janusz didn’t tell Oskar the thing that had been troubling him the most since his visit to the flat that afternoon. The tickets to Alicante Steve had booked for himself and Kasia had been one-way. Whatever the worthless skurwysyn had been planning, it hadn’t involved either of them coming back.

The Pineapple, which Janusz knew to be Steve Fisher’s local, was a rain-stained one-storey building of eighties vintage marooned in the midst of a Stratford council estate. Its car park stood empty but for an old torn sofa, contents bulging like entrails, but by the time Janusz pushed open the door at around 6 p.m., the place was already pretty busy, most eyes trained on the huge TV screen which showed three pundits warming up for the Arsenal v. West Ham match. It was the kind of pub where people came to spend their benefit or pension cheque on cheap lager and enjoy a bit of free heating and Sky Sports.

Janusz tried to ignore the smell of stale beer and old vomit, the unpleasant sensation of the carpet adhering to the underside of his boots. He clocked the flag of St George hanging above the bar with a wary eye – in his experience it sometimes signalled a less than warm welcome for someone sporting a foreign accent, which might hinder his intelligence gathering.

So it was a relief when the woman behind the bar – the landlady, judging by her proprietorial demeanour – greeted him in a brisk but not unfriendly manner. After ordering a drink, Janusz pulled up a bar stool and asked, ‘Steve Fisher been in today?’ – sending her a grin that suggested he and Steve went way back.

Uncapping his bottle of beer, she shook her head. ‘Nah. Haven’t seen him since Saturday. You meant to be meeting him?’

Janusz’s gaze flickered over her face but he decided she was just making small talk. In her early sixties, she was surprisingly well groomed for such a rat-shit boozer, he thought – her hair looked professionally coloured and her preternaturally even tan said spray-job or sunbed rather than recent holiday.

‘No. I just popped in on the off-chance.’

After she’d given him his change, he turned to scope the pub over the rim of his glass. A knot of lads – plasterers judging by the state of their boots – laughed quietly over their drinks in one corner. Polish , he decided, as much from their self-effacing manner as the half-discerned rhythms of their speech. His gaze slid over a noisier cluster of youngsters wearing Arsenal shirts, and the usual scatter of old guys drinking solo, before coming to rest on a group who sat separately in a raised area by the back wall. Six or seven white men in their forties and fifties, they made a morose huddle, paying no attention to the TV screen and barely talking, despite a forest of empties on their table.

They looked like the sort of working-class men Janusz had worked alongside on building sites back in the eighties and nineties, the kind who’d left the inner city in droves long ago for suburbs like Enfield or Romford – an exodus often disparagingly described as ‘white flight’. The ones left behind were largely the unskilled rump, a forgotten minority, routinely despised – in his experience, often unfairly – for their presumed xenophobic attitudes.

Fixing his gaze on the football coverage, Janusz settled down to wait. Ten minutes later, his strategy bore fruit when one of the men came up to the bar.