Читать книгу Where the Devil Can’t Go - Anya Lipska, Anya Lipska - Страница 14

Janusz raised his chin, and ran the razor from throat to jaw line, enjoying the rasping sound of the blade. As he rinsed it under the running tap he felt the prickle on the back of his neck that told him he was being watched.

He turned around to find Copernicus, the big grey tabby tomcat who had adopted him almost a decade ago, standing in the bathroom doorway. Although the cat’s gaze was impassive, his message was crystal clear.

‘Alright, Copetka. I know dinner is running a bit late at Hotel Kiszka,’ said Janusz, towelling off the last suds. With fluid grace, the cat turned and led him to the kitchen cupboard.

After feeding him, Janusz opened the kitchen window to let the cat onto the fire escape and watched as he trotted down the half-dozen flights of stairs. Through the gathering dusk, he could make out the first daffodils under the plane trees that edged Highbury Fields.

These days, it was one of North London’s most select areas. But back in the early eighties, when the latest wave of the Polish diaspora had washed him up on the shores of Islington, the locals – better-off English working-class types – couldn’t get out fast enough. Taking their place were Paddies, Poles and blacks, and a few bohemian types who weren’t fazed by the area’s reputation as crime central. The flat had been a cheap place to flop once he’d split the rent with workmates from building sites. And he’d always liked the view.

By the time his Jewish landlord had decided to up sticks and start a new life in Israel, Janusz had earned enough for a deposit and got a mortgage to buy the place. Now, his only problem was the odd funny look from his newer neighbours, the City types and advertising executives who were taken aback to find a Polish immigrant living next door in a Highbury mansion block. Well, tough luck, he thought, he was here first.

Janusz went to the fridge to check he had everything he needed for supper – Kasia would be arriving in less than an hour. He was happy with the look of the beef, a good dark-coloured fat-marbled slab of braising steak he’d paid a crazy price for at the Islington farmer’s market. It was always worth spending an extra pound or two when it came to meat.

He levered open the big bay window in the living room to get rid of the smell of stale cigars, and picked up a dirty glass and a pile of junk mail off the mantelpiece of the marble fireplace. Then he put them back, smiling to himself: Kasia would enjoy cleaning the place up later.

The evening started out well enough.

Sure, he and Kasia had been reserved with each other at first, an edge of awkwardness to their embrace at the door, but since this was their first date since they’d first slept together, it was to be expected. That night, a fortnight ago now, had been the culmination of weeks of assignations over coffee and cake snatched during her work breaks – encounters that couldn’t have been more tantalisingly proper had they been chaperoned by a brace of babcia. It was just his luck, reflected Janusz, to be dating the world’s most straitlaced stripper.

While Kasia tidied the living room, exclaiming at the mess, he cut the beef into three-centimetre chunks, and started to chop the onion and garlic.

After a few minutes she came and leant against the worktop, lighting a cigarette while he browned the beef. ‘I never saw a Polish man cook before – not even a boiled egg!’ she said, watching him slice a red pepper. He shrugged. ‘I think it’s good,’ she added. ‘I’m a katastrofa in the kitchen, and anyway, how would I cook with these?’ She brandished her sinister talons at him.

‘I always meant to ask: why do you paint your nails black?’ he asked, quartering the chestnut mushrooms.

‘I started doing it when I was a Goth,’ she said surveying her outstretched hands. ‘After that I never changed them.’ She took a thoughtful drag on her cigarette. ‘Maybe it’s nice to be a bit different.

‘So, how did you learn to cook? Do you watch the TV programmes from home?’

He shook his head. ‘My mama taught me, right from when I was a little boy.’ Using a wooden spoon, he scraped the onion and garlic into the hot oil of the pan, releasing an aromatic sizzle. ‘When there was nothing in the shops we’d take a basket into the countryside to find treats for Tata’s supper. In the summer, wild asparagus, lingonberries to make jam …’

Kasia smiled at the nostalgia in his voice. Janusz’s childhood, with its visits to his grandmother’s place, a crumbling farmhouse on the outskirts of Gdansk, was a million miles from her monochrome memories of a monolithic Soviet-built estate in industrial Rzewow. She loved to hear his boyhood tales of collecting warm eggs from the chicken house, or climbing up into the high branches of apple trees in the orchard. The funny thing was, even though his memories were so different from hers, they still made her feel homesick.

She tapped cigarette ash out of the kitchen window. ‘How did your mama know what was safe to eat?’

‘She came from a family of farmers, so she was a real country girl. She even knew how to make birch wine. In the spring, you cut through the bark’, he used his wooden spoon to demonstrate the lateral cut, ‘and drain off a few litres of sap. But you must be careful: if you make the wound too big the tree will die.’

Pouring a jugful of water over the meat and vegetables, he said over his shoulder, ‘October, November, I take the tube to Epping and go into the forest to look for mushrooms. If you get lucky, you can find boletas. I could take you, if you like – show you which ones are good to eat.’

There was a moment of silence as they shared the unspoken thought … if they were still seeing each other in six months’ time.

He threw a couple of roughly chopped red chilies in the pot. The dish’s final ingredients, a little sour plum jam and a cup of buttermilk, wouldn’t be added till the end.

He’d been sliding glances at her face while he cooked and was relieved to see that the old bruise on her cheekbone had faded completely, with no evidence of fresh ones. The warning he’d delivered to Steve had done the trick, at least for now. And according to Kasia, Steve had bought the story that Janusz was Kasia’s cousin over from Poland, which was a relief – he didn’t want to give that chuj another excuse to knock her about.

He opened the fridge and pulled out a jar filled with cream-coloured fat.

‘What’s that?’ asked Kasia.

‘Goose smalec for roasting the potatoes,’ he said, doling some into a roasting tray.

‘Ah, goose fat is good for you!’ exclaimed Kasia, examining the jar, ‘It helps you to lose weight.’ Then, on seeing his sceptical look: ‘It’s true – I read it in a magazine.’

Kasia might be blade-sharp, reflected Janusz, but like all Polish women, she had a vast collection of cherished – and often crazy – dietary folklore: a rich brew of Catholic injunctions, old wives’ tales from medieval Poland, and the crap peddled by glossy magazines.

Janusz brandished the jar in front of him and adopted a serious air: ‘Top government scientists are warning: too much goose fat can cause dangerous weight loss – please use it sparingly.’ Pretending to be insulted, she made to grab the jar back from him.

He caught her arm deftly, his big hand circling her slim wrist with ease. ‘Can you stay tonight?’ he asked. Best to get the question – and the phantom of Steve – out of the way early so that it didn’t overshadow their evening. She looked along her eyes at him, then nodded. ‘I’m staying at my sister’s.’ Breaking into a grin, he grabbed her by the waist and, ignoring her laughing protestations, danced her around the tiny kitchen.

Half an hour later, with a couple of glasses of a decent Czechoslovak pinot noir inside him, he settled into the big leather sofa and, wreathed in the aromas of the roasting potatoes and the peppery stew, let his gaze linger on Kasia, who stood examining the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves either side of the fireplace. He felt as relaxed and happy – the realisation rushed on him unawares – as he had with Iza, more than twenty-five years ago.

An image of her, sitting outside a harbourside cafe in Gdansk, flickered across his memory like an old home movie. One of her hands, wearing a red woollen glove, was curled around a steaming drink. She’d taken off her other glove and he was chafing the bare hand to warm it, laughing at how icy her fingers were.

He lit a cigar. To hell with the past, he thought.

‘There’s a Polanski movie on cable later, if you fancy it?’

His tone was careful – it wasn’t the first time he’d tried to rekindle her passion for movies. Despite her first-class degree from the world-famous Lodz film school, the last time Kasia had visited the cinema was to see GoodFellas.

‘Maybe,’ she said lifting one shoulder, before bending to pick up a discarded envelope from under an armchair.

‘It’s Knife in the Water. The one with the couple on a boating trip on the Lakes?’

‘The one with the psychol?’ She made a comic grimace that turned her beautiful long mouth down at the corners. ‘Too depressing!’

Oskar had once put forward a theory – which doubtless originated with his wife Gosia – regarding Kasia’s lack of enthusiasm for films. Apparently, she regretted abandoning her directing ambitions to marry Steve, and couldn’t bear any reminder of her mistake. In this analysis, Kasia didn’t stick with her marriage because of her Catholic faith, but because the alternative meant admitting she’d given up her youthful dreams for nothing.

Janusz was sceptical. To him, psychology was a slippery pseudoscience, without any empirical foundation. But now and again he found himself wondering if Oskar’s theory mightn’t contain a grain of truth.

‘You like my new outfit?’ she asked suddenly, doing a little catwalk sashay.

That put him on the spot: when she had arrived he’d noticed she was wearing a dress rather than her usual tight black jeans and T-shirt. But the longish black shift was the sort of thing a woman with a lousy figure might go for. Why would a looker like Kasia hide her body under a sack?

She sensed the hesitation. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘It’s … stylish, darling,’ he managed, ‘but I think you’d look good in something a bit more … figure-hugging.’

She cut her eyes away from him. ‘You mean an exotic dancer should dress like a whore?’

Kurwa! This was dangerous ground – it wasn’t the first time Kasia had gone all touchy over her job. It mystified him – if she didn’t like stripping why did she do it? And if she did like it, why be so uptight?

‘Of course not, darling. Anyway, you would look ladylike whatever you wore.’

She smiled at that, mollified, then came closer, wrinkling her nose at the cigar smoke – ‘Smells like a bonfire,’ she complained – before putting a Marlboro Light between her lips and leaning down for a light.

He took the opportunity, instead, to pull her face down to his and kiss her, properly this time. When she offered no resistance, he tumbled her onto the sofa and continued the clinch, pushing the dress, rustling, up her stockinged legs, desire humming between them. They had loads of time to make love before the oven timer started pinging, he calculated, and her tightly closed eyes signalled a green light.

Then the phone rang.

He cursed inwardly and for a moment was tempted to let it go to voicemail, but Kasia extricated herself and he caught her watchful look. He didn’t want her to think he had anything to hide.

His abrupt ‘Czesc?!’ was met with silence. Then a female voice, uncertain, said ‘Pan Kiszka?’

It was the dark-haired girl from pani Tosik’s restaurant, the one he’d given his card to. She told him her name was Justyna, but didn’t volunteer a surname. He apologised for his boorish manners, keeping half an eye on Kasia, who had returned to the kitchen. He could see her stirring the beef stew, ignoring the conversation, but something about the angle of her head suggested she was getting every word.

The trouble was, the girl was adamant that she had to meet him tonight, and when he suggested postponing, sounded like she might hang up. He was half-inclined to tell her no, but an undercurrent of urgency in her voice stopped him. Anyway, if he was to replenish his depleted cash reserves he needed to find the missing girl fast.

Thirty seconds later, he was jotting down the name of a Polish club in Stratford where the girl wanted to meet.

Janusz retrieved his cigar from the ashtray and joined Kasia in the kitchen. With a stab at a nonchalant air, he said, ‘Listen, darling. Something’s come up – a job I’m doing for someone.’

‘A woman?’ she asked.

‘Well, yes, the client is a woman, but an old lady – a babcia.’

‘And the woman on the phone – she is an old lady, too?’ Her green eyes had narrowed, and she would no longer meet his gaze.

‘Well, yes, she is young, but she’s just a contact. The thing is she insists on seeing me tonight, for some reason.’

Without a word, Kasia started to collect her things, her movements uncharacteristically jerky.

All his hopes for the evening teetered on a cliff edge. ‘Listen, Kasia,’ he said, aware of a cajoling note in his voice he didn’t like, ‘I can get there and still be back by ten, maybe half past, we can have a late supper.’

‘So I sit here and watch Sky while you go out drinking with a woman?’ She pulled a mirthless smile. ‘All the lies I have to tell Steve, making excuses so I can stay all night, and now this.’

Janusz felt the anger bolt out of him like an unleashed dog.

‘I have a job to do, money to earn! You are not my wife to tell me whom I can and cannot see!’ His voice boomed around the flat.

‘You are right – it’s none of my business,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘How can I complain if you have other girlfriends? I am just some dziwka you are sleeping with who other men pay to see naked.’

He clutched his head, mute before this irrational torrent.

‘And no, I’m not your wife,’ she went on. ‘I’m someone else’s – and I shouldn’t be here.’

Softening his voice with an effort of will, he said, ‘Listen, Kasia. You are still young, you could leave Steve, start life over again,’ but he knew it was hopeless – this was old ground, the argument well worn.

She pulled on her coat. ‘You know I can’t, Janek,’ sounding weary now.

He caught her arm as she opened the flat door.

‘Don’t go off this way, kotku,’ he said.

She smiled a sad smile at this big man calling her a little cat, touched her fingers to his lips, and left.

Thirty seconds later, the main door to the street boomed like a distant firing squad.

Janusz paced the flat, cursing; running the last hour’s dramat through his head on a continuous loop. Half an hour later he still couldn’t make any sense of it: what right did she have to be jealous when she was the one sleeping with another man? The fact that man was her husband didn’t make it any easier. No! Being able to picture that rat-faced Cockney screwing her made it a thousand times worse.

With an effort of will, he pushed Kasia to the back of his mind, threw himself onto the sofa and drank a glass of red wine in a single draught. He took the snap of Weronika, the one of her in the fur coat, out of his wallet. Something about this girl, her innocent beauty, and yes, okay, the way she reminded him of Iza, had got under his skin, made him preoccupied with finding her. Naprawde, it was even worse than that, he realised with an embarrassed grimace: he wanted to rescue her.

He went to turn off the oven, and after a moment’s hesitation, scraped the roast potatoes into the bin: once cooled you could never recapture their crust.

Leaving the block’s front door between the stone columns that flanked the entrance, Janusz noticed that a new ‘For Sale’ sign had sprouted overhead. Oskar said that if he sold up and bought a place further out he could pocket a couple of hundred grand, easy. But why would he want to live in some benighted suburb like Enfield?

When he left Highbury Mansions, it would be wearing an oak overcoat, as his father used to say – God rest his soul.

As usual, he took the shortest route to the tube, straight across the southern section of the darkened Fields, feeling the dew from the grass creeping into his shoes. Halfway across, without breaking his stride, he glanced backwards – there had been a spate of muggings here recently. All clear. But as his gaze swung forward again, he discovered that a big, heavyset man, almost as tall as him, had materialised on the pavement at the edge of the Fields, twenty-five, thirty metres ahead. He must have just stepped out of a parked car, but if so, why hadn’t Janusz heard the distinctive clunk of a car door? He kept his gaze locked on the bulky figure, clad in an expensive-looking parka jacket, strolling through the pools of orange thrown by the street lights, until finally, the guy disappeared out of sight behind the Leisure Centre.

Janusz couldn’t fathom what it was about the man that had caught his attention – he certainly didn’t look like a mugger. All he could say was there was something about him that looked indefinably out of place.

FlashKlub, the place that Justyna had named for their rendezvous, was located in a basement under a semi-derelict fifties factory building in an area called Maryland on Stratford’s eastern fringe. The name might suggest rural romance, but the area was depressed and scruffy – no Olympic effect visible here. Lining up with a queue of youngsters chattering away in Polish he felt middle-aged, out of place, but the young bouncer showed no surprise, greeting him with a polite ‘Dobry wieczor, panu.’ He did make an apologetic gesture at his cigar, though. Janusz ground it out on the pavement before heading down the rickety stairs toward the klub with all the enthusiasm of a man going to get his teeth drilled.

Justyna was sitting on a stool at the bar, fiddling with the straw in her drink. She was even more attractive than he remembered: glossy dark hair grazing her shoulders, eyes the colour of conac. She seemed relieved to see him – no doubt she’d been pestered non-stop by guys trying their luck. He ordered a Tyskie and another apple juice for her – she shook her head when he suggested a shot of bisongrass wodka to liven it up. Maybe she didn’t want to let her tongue run away with her, he thought.

A huge screen on one wall playing pop promos dominated the basement. The current one had been shot in some semi-derelict Soviet housing estate and starred two skinny crew-cut boys. Dressed like gangsters from an American ghetto, they bobbed and grimaced through a Polski hip hop number, their faces deadpan. Maybe he was just a narrow-minded old fart, but it set Janusz’s teeth on edge. The mindless beat and nihilistic lyrics struck him as an affront to the musical beauty of the language.

‘You don’t like it?’ she asked with a half-smile at his tortured expression.

‘No. Do you?’ he said, raising an eyebrow.

She shrugged. ‘Sure. I like all kinds of music.’

‘When I was your age, studying physics in Krakow,’ he said, ‘there was a craze in the cellar bars, for traditional music, folk, I suppose you’d call it.’

Her expression was attentive, but detached. She had one of those faces that you felt compelled to keep scanning because her emotions were so hard to read.

He paused, remembering those nights, the frenetic violins, the thrilling sounds infused with the wildness of Gypsy music, often a haunting woman’s voice in the mix, and felt the tug of nostalgia in his chest. He took a swallow of beer to cover his expression. ‘The thing was, the dumbass … excuse me … stupid Kommies thought traditional music was wholesome, harmless stuff – but of course, all those old partisan songs about carrying your heart around in a knapsack were dynamite.

‘The music had us stomping and cheering, climbing onto tables to sing along. After closing, all hyped up and full of wodka, me and my mates would dodge the police patrols and paint Solidarnosc graffiti all over town.’

‘Did you ever get caught?’ she asked. From the mild curiosity in her tone, she might have been asking about something that happened in the nineteenth century rather than two-and-a-half decades ago.

He hesitated. ‘Just once. There were three of us – my mates had hung me by my legs over the side of a railway bridge so I could paint some slogan or other. “THE TV LIES”, I think it was. When the milicja arrived, the lads just about managed to drag me back up, but by the time I was on solid ground they’d legged it and I got nicked.’

‘What happened to you?’

He looked away. ‘Nothing much, spent a night in the cell, got a few slaps, got sent home in the morning.’

Bullshit. The milicja had thrown him in the back of a van and taken him to Montepulich, Krakow’s notorious jail, where the Soviets had tortured and murdered hundreds of Polish nationalists after the war. It must have been a quiet night for them to commit so much time and effort to interrogating a seventeen-year-old boy over such a stupid thing – or maybe they just enjoyed their work. He’d been left with bruises and cuts that had taken weeks to fade, but they were nothing compared to the real legacy of that night, the thing that he carried inside him, like the shadow on an X-ray. He stamped the memories back down. Forget the past.

The girl and he gazed at the flickering video screen. The two boys were now in a car, lurching back and forward, zombie-like, to the beat. The camera cut to a shot of one of them, on his own, walking, before the camera pulled out to a wide aerial shot, revealing him as a tiny, lonely figure alone in a vast desolate wasteland.

She gestured with her chin. ‘He is like you, when you were young.’

‘Like me?’

‘You and your friends, back then, under the Komunistow – life was bad, society didn’t work for you. This music – for young people it says the same as your folk songs, it says fuck your society, we do our own thing.’

He knew that it was common for young women to swear these days, especially the ones who’d been in England a while, but it still shocked him in an almost physical way to hear it. When he had been her age it would have been unthinkable to use such language in front of one’s elders.

‘Is that what you feel about Poland today?’ he asked.

She sipped her apple juice, eyes cast down. ‘I want to go back one day, I guess,’ she said, choosing her words. ‘But not yet. What is there for me, in Katowice? I would earn maybe half of what I get here – I’d have to save for years just to buy a five-year-old Polski Fiat.’

There was no anger, only a resigned pragmatism in her voice.

‘Here, once I learn English, I can get a job in Marks and Spencer and earn good money, go to college part-time.’

‘What will you study?’

Her eyes lit up, animating her whole face for the first time. ‘Physiotherapy, or maybe chiropractic, I haven’t decided yet.’

Janusz knew Katowice: a powerhouse of heavy industry under the Soviets, many of its residential districts were now half-empty, depressing places, peopled by the old, the sick, and by those who lacked either the resources or the courage to leave. The thought of living there made him shudder. Maybe his generation had been lucky, after all – at least fighting the Kommies gave them a sense of common purpose.

‘Zamorski is a good guy,’ he assured her. ‘If anyone can put the country back on its feet, he will.’

His words hung there, shiny and shallow sounding, as she gazed at him with dark brown eyes.

‘Politicians are all the same.’ Her tone was polite but decisive. ‘You and your friends thought that Walesa was superman, right?’

Janusz had to admit she was right about that. He had idolised Lech Walesa once, only to watch in horrified disbelief, after the Solidarnosc leader became Poland’s first elected president, as he fell out with some of the revolution’s brightest thinkers and surrounded himself with yes-men.

Zamorski shared Walesa’s Solidarnosc credentials, but displayed none of his demagogic tendencies and had already pulled off an impressive political balancing act, drawing on Poles’ instinctive conservatism while resisting the temptations of full-blooded nationalism. But spending the night arguing politics with the self-possessed Justyna wasn’t going to help him find the lost girl, thought Janusz. He sensed he’d have to go gently – if he came out and asked where Weronika was, she might just clam up.

‘Did you ever come here with Weronika?’ he asked, taking a slug of beer.

‘Yes, sometimes.’

‘Was it here she met Pawel?’ he asked.

The faintest frown creased her forehead, but she didn’t ask how he knew about Weronika’s secret boyfriend.

‘No, he came into the restaurant one day and chatted her up as she served him pierogi.’

‘Do you remember when he first came in?’

‘Yes! It was February thirteenth – I remember because my Mama’s called Katarzyna and it’s her saint’s day,’ she said, with a shy smile. ‘After that, he came back every single day, flattering her, slipping her little presents – czekolatki, perfume – till she finally agreed to go out with him.’ Her voice became scornful as she talked about Adamski.

‘You didn’t like him.’

‘He was bad news,’ said Justyna, nodding her head for emphasis. ‘Nika was only nineteen’ – she used the affectionate diminutive of Weronika – ‘and he was thirty – much too old for her.’

Janusz left a silence, letting her talk. ‘He was always getting drunk,’ she went on, after a pause, ‘and then he’d get crazy. One time the three of us, we were in a pub and he threw a glass at the TV screen – just because they were talking about the election!’ She widened her eyes at the memory. ‘We used to come here, mostly – until he got barred.’

‘What happened?’ asked Janusz.

‘He said it was for arguing with a bouncer,’ she shrugged, sceptical. ‘But he was such a liar, who knows.’

Since the girl’s animosity toward Adamski appeared to outweigh her caginess, Janusz decided to play devil’s advocate.

‘Lots of Polish men like to drink,’ he said with a grin. ‘Maybe you were a bit jealous of your friend? Perhaps you would have liked Pawel for yourself?’

‘No way!’ she shot back, her face flushed, warming her olive complexion and making her even prettier, he noticed. ‘I didn’t say one word against him at the start – I’m not her mother. But then, one night, while Nika was in the toaleta, he put his hand up my skirt! Can you believe the guy?’

‘Did you tell her?’

‘I tried to, but she just shrugged it off, said he must have been joking. She was crazy about him, and anyway, you have to understand something about Nika: she’s bogu ducha winna.’ He smiled at the expression – innocent as a lamb – it was one his mother had often used.

‘Where did he work?’ If Justyna didn’t know – or wouldn’t tell him – where the pair were living, it would be his best hope of tracing the pair.

She fiddled with the straw in her drink, shrugged. ‘It’s a big mystery. At the beginning, Nika told me he’s a builder, one of those who stands on the side of the road and waits for an Irish boss to hire him?’ Janusz nodded – in the old days he’d sometimes had to tout himself out in that humiliating way. ‘But then he started throwing big money around – taking her out for fancy meals, buying expensive hi-fi, flashy clothes, acting like a gangster.’

‘Maybe he won some money – internet poker, betting on the football.’

‘Enough to buy a new BMW?’ she asked, her eyes wide. ‘He said he was dealing in antique furniture.’ Her words dripped with derision.

‘So how do you think he made the smalec?’

At that, a cloak of inscrutability dropped over her face again, and she looked off into the bar area, which was filling up as the night progressed.

‘I don’t know,’ she said after a pause. ‘I just hope Nika isn’t getting herself mixed up in any trouble.’

As Janusz waited at the bar to buy more drinks he let his eye roam over the club’s clientele. In their teens and twenties, mostly Polish, but with a sprinkling of English faces, they appeared – for the most part – smartly turned-out and well behaved. His gaze fell on a group of youngsters sitting at the table nearest the bar. Two boys and two girls, deep in animated conversation, talking and laughing just a bit too loudly. And they were constantly touching each other, he noticed – a squeeze of the arm, a stroke of the cheek. Maybe it was just the buzz and bonhomie you’d expect between good friends enjoying the first rush of alkohol. Maybe not. The eldest, a boy, was 18, tops, and, under their make-up the two giggling girls looked barely old enough to drink legally.

He ordered the drinks and, leaving a twenty on the bar to pay for them, strolled to the toilets. After using the urinal, he lingered at the washbasin, combing his hair in the mirror and praying nobody took him for a pedzio. Just as he expected, a minute or two later, a shaven-headed, rail-thin guy in a hooded jacket slid up to the sink next to him, turned on the taps, and made a pretence of washing his hands.

‘Wanna buy Mitsubishi?’ he asked in Polish, without turning his head.

Janusz had a pretty good idea he wasn’t being offered a used car. Pocketing the comb, he raised a non-committal eyebrow.

‘It’s good stuff,’ the guy urged, ‘double-stacked …’ Suddenly, he found his sales pitch interrupted as his face was brought into violent and painful contact with the mirror.

‘What the fu …?!’ He gazed open-mouthed at his contorted reflection and scrabbled at the back of his neck where Janusz’s rocklike fist gripped his balled-up hood.

Janusz shook his head, gave him another little push for the profanity.

‘A word of advice, my friend. The undercover policja are all over this place. Apparently, some scumbag is selling drugs to youngsters.’

The guy tried to wipe snot and blood from his nose.

‘Your best move would be to take your … business up to the West End, and rethink your policy on selling to anyone under twenty-one.’ Janusz bent his head down to the guy’s level, locked eyes with him in the mirror. ‘In fact, if I was you,’ he said softly, ‘I’d insist on seeing a driving licence.’

Straightening up, he released the guy, who bolted, and turning on the taps, gave his hands a thorough soaping. He frowned at his reflection. Had Adamski been dealing Ekstasa here? It could explain a lot: his bizarre and unpredictable behaviour, the glazed look Weronika wore in the dirty photos, his sudden acquisition of enough cash to buy a BMW. It might explain that fracas with the klub bouncer, too.

Rejoining Justyna, he told her he’d been offered drugs in the toilets. He hoped she might take the bait, confirm that Adamski was a dealer, but she just lifted a shoulder, non-committal.

‘When I was a student,’ he said, ‘the only way to get high, apart from booze, was the occasional bit of grass. A guy I knew started growing it on his bedroom windowsill – in the summer the plants would get really huge. Anyway, one day, his Babcia was cooking the family dinner when she ran out of herbs,’ he looked up, found her smiling in anticipation.

‘The old lady decided that Tomek’s plant was some kind of parsley, and chopped a whole bunch of the stuff into a bowl of potatoes. Luckily, it wasn’t all that strong. All the same, he said that after dinner, when the state news came on – you know, the old Kommie stuff about tractor production targets being broken yet again – the whole family started cracking up, laughing their heads off, and found they just couldn’t stop.’

Justyna met his gaze, a grin dimpling her cheeks.

‘Anyway, Tomek said that the night went down in family history,’ Janusz went on. ‘And whenever his parents told the story, they always said the same thing: “That batch of elderberry wine was the best that Babcia ever made!”’

They laughed together, any remaining ice between them fully broken. He seized the moment to ask, ‘But in London, you can get anything, of course. Kokaina, Ekstasa, so on …’

‘Sure,’ she agreed. ‘If you are a fucking idiota.’ She sucked some juice up through her straw. ‘One of my friends died, back home, from sniffing glue. He was fifteen.’ She shook her head. ‘If I’d taken drugs I’d probably be dead like him, or even worse – still stuck in Katowice.’ They shared a wry grin: the joke crossed the generational divide.

Seizing the moment, he asked, ‘You think Pawel messes about with drugs, don’t you?’

She hesitated, then met his eyes. ‘I think so, yes. How else does someone like him make such money?’

Janusz made his move.

‘You know that pani Tosik has hired me to find Weronika,’ he said. Justyna gave a barely perceptible nod. ‘I can see it’s difficult for you – you are loyal to your friend. But I think you are right to be worried that this boyfriend of hers might put her in danger.’

She played with the straw in her glass, a frown creasing her forehead.

‘I’m not asking you to betray her trust – just to give me a few pointers,’ he went on. ‘It would help if I knew how Adamski talked her into going off like that.’

The girl took a big breath, let it out slowly. Then, speaking in a low voice, she told him that two weeks earlier, while pani Tosik was out getting her hair done, Weronika had locked herself away in her bedroom above the restaurant. Suspecting that something was going on, Justyna kept knocking and calling her name through the door.

‘In the end, she let me in,’ she said. ‘She was bouncing off the walls with excitement. Then I saw the half-packed suitcase on the bed. At first, she wouldn’t tell me what was going on, said Pawel had sworn her to secrecy.’ A line appeared between Justyna’s dark eyebrows. ‘But Nika couldn’t keep a secret to save her own life. In the end she showed me the ring she was wearing on a chain round her neck.’

‘They were engaged?’ asked Janusz, incredulous. An image of Weronika in a G-string posing for the camera, her eyes unfocused, swam before him and he tensed his jaw. Some fiancé, he thought.

Justyna nodded. ‘She was as excited as a little child on Christmas Eve,’ she said, unable to suppress a smile at the memory.

‘Did she say where she was going, where they would be living?’

She shook her head – but judging by the way her gaze slid away from his, he suspected she was lying.

‘She said they’d be leaving London soon. Pawel had some business to finish up, and then they were going back home to get married.’ She popped her eyes. ‘All this, after she’d known him just a few weeks!’

Janusz was touched by Justyna’s concern. She couldn’t be more than five or six years older than Weronika, but it was clear the younger girl brought out the mother hen in her.

‘I tried to talk her out of it,’ she went on. ‘I said, imagine how upset your mama will be when she hears her little girl has run off with some man she barely knows.’

‘But it did no good?’

‘She went a bit quiet,’ recalled Justyna. ‘But then she said Mama would be fine so long as no one cut off her supply of cytrynowka,’ she shot him a look. The sickly lemon wodka was a notorious tipple of street drunks – and alcoholic housewives. ‘Nika told me she would often come home from school and find her lying unconscious on the kitchen floor.’

Apparently, Mama had been little more than a child herself when she’d fallen pregnant with Weronika. The little girl had grown up without a father and the only family apart from her chaotic drunk of a mother had been a distant uncle who visited once in a blue moon.

Poor kid, thought Janusz. It was hardly surprising that after leaving home, she should fall head over heels in love with the first person who showed her any affection – like a baby bird imprinting on whoever feeds it, however ill-advised the love object.

By now, there was standing room only in the bar area, and the crowd was encroaching on the small table where Janusz and Justyna sat. The thump thump of the music, the shouted conversations and the bodies pressing in all around set up a fluttering in Janusz’s stomach. So when the girl said she ought to go, she had an early start at the restaurant the next day, he felt a surge of relief.

He insisted on walking Justyna to her flat, which was a mile away to the west, the other side of Stratford, beyond the River Lea. The route took them through the centre of town, where the music and strident chatter spilling from the lit doorways of pubs and clubs and the clusters of smokers outside suggested the place was just waking up, although it was gone eleven and only a Tuesday. As they passed the entrance to an alleyway beside one pub Janusz heard urgent voices and, through the gloom, saw two men pushing a smaller guy up against the wall. He froze, muscles bunching, but a second later the scene came into focus. The little guy was catatonic with drunkenness, head drooping and limbs floppy, and the other two, weaving erratically themselves, were simply trying to keep their mate upright.

Janusz and Justyna shared a look and walked on. No one would describe Poles as abstemious, but any serious drinking was done at home and public drunkenness was frowned upon. Janusz’s mother, who’d visited London as a child before the war, had always spoken approvingly of the English as a decorous and reserved people, so it was fair to say that his first Friday night out with the guys from the building site had been something of an eye-opener. Still, the greatest compliment you could pay a man back then was to say he could carry his drink, and those who ended the night by falling over or picking a fight were viewed with pitying scorn.

Justyna shared a flat in a tidy-looking low-rise estate run by a housing association. Pausing on the pavement outside, she turned to him, drawing smoke from her cigarette deep into her lungs against the cold. ‘Thanks for the drinks,’ she said.

‘You’re welcome.’ He took a draw on his cigar, then exhaled, blowing his smoke downwind of her. She seemed in no hurry to go in.

‘Look, I really shouldn’t do this,’ she said at last. ‘I promised Nika …’

She pulled a folded slip of paper out of her pocket, and handed it to him.

‘Pawel made her swear not to give their address to anyone. But she wanted me to look out for letters from her mama, forward them on. She knew she could trust me,’ she stared off down the darkened street, ‘… thought she could trust me.’

He glanced at the paper, registering an address in Essex before pocketing it. ‘Listen, Justyna. You are the best friend Weronika has.’ He sought her gaze. ‘She’s probably found out by now that Pawel is no knight in shining armour – maybe she’s wondering how to leave him without too much fuss,’ he said, flexing his knuckles. ‘If that’s how it is, I’ll make sure her wishes are respected.’

She took a step toward him. ‘Be careful,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘I don’t think Pawel is right in the head. Nika must have let slip that I warned her off him, because one day he followed me home, all the way from work,’ her eyes widened. ‘He grabbed me by the arm and went crazy.’ Her lips trembled as she relived the shock of it. ‘He told me if I didn’t keep my fucking nose out, he’d kill me.’

The guy was clearly a psychol, thought Janusz. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told the girl. ‘Guys like him are usually all talk.’

She nodded, not entirely convinced. ‘And Nika said she’d phone me, but I’ve heard nothing, not even a text.’

A child cried sharply somewhere in her block and she shivered, then said in a rush: ‘It’s freezing – can I make you a coffee? Or maybe you’d like a wodka?’

That was unexpected. He sensed a fear of rejection in her averted face. Was she propositioning him? Compassion, good sense – and yes, temptation, too – wrestled briefly in his heart, and then a vision loomed up before him – the stern face of that old killjoy Father Pietruski.

He shook his head. ‘Another time, darling, I’ve got a lot on tomorrow.’

‘You’ll let me know when you find out where Nika is?’ said the girl, anxiety ridging her forehead.

‘You’ll be the first to hear,’ he said.

He watched her walk into the block, and two or three minutes later a first-floor light came on in what he guessed was her flat. He lingered, thinking that she might appear in the window, but was then distracted by the screech of a big dark-coloured car pulling out from the estate. Gunning its engine, it tore off down the street. When he looked back up at the block, the curtains had been closed on the oblong of light. Feeling a pang of loneliness, he threw down his cigar stub and left.