Читать книгу A Devil Under the Skin - Anya Lipska, Anya Lipska - Страница 16

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.

‘My girlfriend … Kasia. She was meant to be moving in with me this week – but she’s gone missing.’ He stared at the table. ‘I think her husband may have abducted her.’

‘Because she told him she was leaving?’ asked Kershaw. He opened those big shovel-like hands in assent. ‘Have you considered that she might just have had second thoughts? People do – especially at the last minute.’

He met her gaze. ‘Not without a word to me. And she hasn’t turned up at work either.’

‘Maybe she’s pulled a sickie.’

Janusz bridled. ‘She runs her own business,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I checked their flat – there’s no sign of either of them.’

‘Right.’ Kershaw hesitated, trying to find a diplomatic way of telling him that ninety-nine per cent of missing persons cases turned out to be people disappearing of their own free will. Then there was the other one per cent. ‘Tell me a bit more about her – and this husband of hers.’

Janusz related how back home in Poland, Kasia had worked two jobs to help fund her studies at Lodz Film School, arriving in nineties London with a hundred pounds and a single goal: to get into the film industry. Instead, while working in a Polish bakery in Ealing, she’d met Steve – someone in whom she thought she saw an enterprising spirit to match her own. Three months later they were married.

‘And her directing ambitions?’

‘Soon went out of the window.’ He shrugged. ‘She discovered that Steve’s talk was just that. Talk. His business schemes were fantasy. He did the odd cash-in-hand job on building sites but she ended up being the main breadwinner, working in bars, mostly.’ Out of respect for Kasia, he didn’t mention her brief stint as a pole dancer in a Soho club – telling himself it could hardly have any relevance to her disappearance.

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure, as my nan used to say,’ said Kershaw. ‘So why did she stick with him all this time?’

‘The Church,’ he said, with a wry grimace.

Kershaw rotated her glass on the table, thinking. ‘So she’s a devout Catholic, who puts up with him for what, twenty years, because she doesn’t believe in divorce.’ She frowned up at him. ‘Why the sudden change of heart?’

As the girl’s unblinking gaze skewered Janusz he was reminded of the time she’d interrogated him about a murder, the first time they’d met. He shifted about in the narrow chair. Why had Kasia changed her mind about leaving Steve? The milestone of her recent fortieth birthday suddenly struck him as an inadequate motive for such a momentous volte-face.

To change the subject, he told her about the one-way tickets to Alicante Steve had booked, and his conviction that the couple were still in the UK.

Kershaw chewed at a nail. ‘So you think he strung her a line about a birthday dinner or something to get her somewhere quiet, then sprung the idea of this trip on her?’

‘Yeah. He’s a fantasist. He probably thought he could change her mind with some story about starting a new life in Spain.’

She nodded, that made sense. ‘What kind of guy is he? If your theory’s right, do you think she could be in danger?’

He paused, wondering how much to tell her. ‘He has hit her, a couple of times. I had to have a word with him once.’

She raised an eyebrow, imagining the one-sided nature of that discussion.

Janusz narrowed his eyes, recalling the impression of Steve he’d got from that single face-to-face encounter. Skinny and unprepossessing to look at, yet full of himself, Steve had alternated between braggadocio and aggrieved self-pity. ‘I think he’s a lazy lowlife with a big mouth, but I never thought he’d have it in him … to really hurt her. Not till now, anyway.’

‘Once a wife beater, always a wife beater, in my experience,’ she said, regretting her glib words when she saw his jaw clench in a spasm of distress.

She felt torn. The likeliest explanation was probably the most obvious one – that Kasia had got cold feet about going to live with Kiszka. His caveman looks, the edge of danger about him would no doubt be attractive to some girls, but as life partner material? On the other hand, she couldn’t help feeling intrigued by the story – especially since she knew what a big deal it must have been for Kiszka to ask for help from a cop.

‘Why are you asking me to get involved? Why not just report her missing?’

He lifted one shoulder. ‘Because the police would just assume I was a jilted boyfriend. Even if they did believe me, they’re hardly going to invest serious resources in finding yet another missing person, are they?’

‘Fair point.’

‘So … will you help?’ He drained the rest of his pint, avoiding her eyes.

Kershaw suddenly realised that her pulse was beating a little faster than when she’d first walked in the pub. It seemed that the mystery of Kiszka’s missing girlfriend had got under her skin. She’d need to tread carefully, of course: the last thing she needed was to get herself in any more trouble at work.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ she told him.

Janusz bared his teeth in a grin. ‘Another one of those?’ he asked, pointing at her empty wine glass.

After he’d gone to the bar, having waved away her attempt to buy a round, Kershaw realised that there was another reason she’d agreed to help, the return of a feeling she’d almost forgotten. There was something about being around Janusz Kiszka that somehow made her feel more alive.