Death Can’t Take a Joke (19 page)

Mazurek’s pistol had been an albatross around his neck ever since he’d separated the cursed thing from its owner. He’d slept with it under his pillow with the safety on – just in case the big thug was dumb enough to come after him – with some vague idea of sneaking out early in the morning to dump it in a litterbin. But he’d overslept. The next thing he knew, he was shaking hands with the chief of police in downtown Przeczokow, while packing a concealed weapon.

‘What’s the joke?’ asked Natalia, her steely blue eyes surveying him over the lip of her glass.

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said, pressing the smile from his lips. He’d been picturing the look on the face of the unsuspecting plumber who would one day lift the lid of the cistern in the cop shop toilets to discover a semi automatic pistol nestling beside the ballcock. ‘Do you fancy one of those pretzels?’

Just as they were about to head through passport control, Janusz spotted Angelika waving to them across the arrivals hall.

‘
Dzien dobry
!
I wanted to come and wish you both a very pleasant flight,’ she said in Polish, a little out of breath.

Janusz eyed her flushed cheeks. ‘That’s very thoughtful of you.’

Kershaw gave the girl a polite nod of greeting. ‘What’s going on?’ she muttered to Janusz.

‘Angelika has come to bid us
bon voyage.
’

Suddenly, the girl put her arms around Janusz and kissed him three times on alternate cheeks in the Polish manner. Turning to Kershaw she hesitated, before offering her a handshake. Then, with a shy wave, she was gone.

‘What was all that about?’ Kershaw asked him, raising an eyebrow.

Janusz flashed a piratical grin. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Girls find me irresistible.’

In truth, he was a bit mystified, too. It had been a somewhat over-familiar embrace for a young girl to give an older man she barely knew and, joking aside, he didn’t think for a moment that Angelika entertained any romantic thoughts about him. It occurred to him that the boy – her lovesick swain Boguslaw – might have reported some version of last night’s events back to her. Perhaps she’d wanted to speak to him but had lost her nerve with the girl detective there, hanging on every word. Once he got home, perhaps he should call young Angelika for an off-the-record chat.

At a little after 7.30 the following morning, Kershaw was back in her East London comfort zone, attending a call at Whipps Cross Hospital accident and emergency department with a newbie uniform called Justin.

An ambulance had been called to a sixteen-year-old boy with gang-related stab wounds in Hoe Street in the early hours. He was out of danger, but when members of the rival gang started turning up in A&E, one of the nurses had called the nick. The uniform skipper wanted a detective down there, to see if the boy would lay a complaint, and as everyone in Divisional CID – Ben’s department – was busy, Kershaw copped the job.

As soon as the police car pulled up outside A&E, blue lights and sirens blazing, the teenage gangsters melted away. The knifing victim was a soft-eyed boy called Jackson, who’d acquired a fearsome rack of stitches, like red barbed wire, from nipple to navel, but after ten minutes of one-sided and unproductive bedside chat, Kershaw gave up on him.

‘Well, he was falling over himself to cooperate with the forces of law and order,’ she said, slamming the passenger door.

‘Yeah,’ Justin started the engine. ‘I
know
that kebab shop where he got stabbed – it’s bang under a street lamp – but he can’t even tell us if his attacker was black or white?’

‘Yeah, funny that.’

‘Isn’t it just?’

Hearing the bitterness in his voice, Kershaw shot him a sideways look. It was one thing for her to play the battle-hardened cop after five years in the Job, but cynicism in a rookie like Justin was a bit … depressing. At his age, she’d still been all starry-eyed about making a difference. Truth be told, there was a part of her that probably always would be. She was wondering whether to launch into a little speech about keeping the faith, when the radio fizzed into life.

‘Control Room to Echo One, please attend a Sierra Delta 13 in the woods on the north-east side of Hollow Ponds.’

‘An SD13?’ asked Justin after Kershaw acknowledged the call.

‘Do try and keep up, Justin,’ she said. ‘It’s control room code for an unexpected death.’

‘Awesome!’ His acne-flecked cheeks flushed with excitement. ‘Can we put the blues and twos on again?’

‘Go on then,’ she said, secretly pleased to see his world-weary cop routine give way to boyish enthusiasm.

It was easy to see why they’d been given the job. Hollow Ponds was less than two minutes drive from the hospital campus, just the other side of the main east-west route between the Green Man roundabout and the top of Lea Bridge Road. A couple of acres of scruffy woodland bounded on every side by busy roads, it was technically part of Epping Forest, but any first-time visitor who turned up expecting sylvan glades was in for a disappointment.

After pulling into the roadside car park, Justin and Kershaw crunched across the gravel to the log cabin café that overlooked the biggest of the man-made ponds the spot was named after. Framed in the cabin’s serving hatch, a big balding man was making tea from an urn.

‘You must be Paul Jarrett?’ asked Kershaw as they reached the hatch.

‘That’s me,’ he said.

‘Thanks for calling it in, sir. And the gentleman who discovered the body?’

The guy leaned his meaty forearms on the counter and nodded conspiratorially over their shoulder. ‘He’s over there.’

There was only one occupant at the outdoor picnic-style tables – which was hardly surprising given it was about two degrees above freezing. ‘The chap in the Barbour jacket?’

A nod. ‘It wasn’t what you’d call
easy
to persuade him to stick around.’ His husky voice sounded like it had been marinated in the smoke of about a million Benson & Hedges.
A Londoner, bred and buttered
, thought Kershaw.

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yeah. Said he had a “prior engagement”.’ Jarrett smiled, but his eyes didn’t join the party. ‘I gave him a cuppa and told him to sit tight where I could keep an eye on him till the Old Bill arrived.’

Kershaw sent Justin ahead with a reel of tape to secure the access points into the woodland to stop people tramping all over their scene, while she popped over for a heart to heart with Barbour man.

‘So Mr …’

‘Mr Green.’

Yeah right
, thought Kershaw – the patently fake name simply confirming her suspicions.

‘So, Mr uh, Green. Can I ask what you were doing in the woods back there at this time in the morning?’ asked Kershaw, treating him to one of her most reasonable smiles.

‘Simply taking a morning c-constitutional.’ He stirred his tea in a doomed stab at nonchalance.

‘Oh!’ she said, as though something had just dawned on her. ‘I didn’t realise you had a dog with you.’ She cast around as though hunting for the phantom pooch.

‘No, I don’t have a dog. I wasn’t aware it was a legal requirement for a woodland walk.’

Bravo,
thought Kershaw.

She eyed his Barbour – the real deal, not some Petticoat Lane knock off – and the posh-looking shirt beneath, one of those stripy jobs you only ever saw City boys wearing. ‘Right. So other than the dead man, did you come across anyone else during your stroll?’

Green opened his mouth, closed it again. Then, ‘I saw a couple of people, yes.’

Now she fixed him with a deadpan stare. ‘Do you ever bring your
wife
on these early morning outings, Mr Green?’

He looked down at his wedding ring and then up at Kershaw. Although the air was cold enough to turn their breath to vapour, she noticed that his forehead was sheened with sweat.

‘You know what?’ she said with an elaborate shiver. ‘It’s freezing out here. Let’s continue this interview at your house.’

Ten minutes later, she was ducking under the skein of blue and white tape Justin had strung across the footpath. Skirting the pond, she passed an armada of wooden rowboats, tied up and shrouded in blue tarpaulin, and suddenly remembered her dad bringing her here one baking hot summer day when she was about nine or ten. They’d taken one of the boats out and he’d taught her how to row.
Catch a crab.
That’s what he’d called it when one of her oars hit the water at the wrong angle, making a splash.

By the time she reached the north shore, where Justin was waiting for her, a fine freezing drizzle was misting the air. For a so-called beauty spot, the view was pretty bleak: there was no grass underfoot, just compacted sand and gravel, presumably the spoil left from the dredging of the ponds a century or more ago. The khaki-coloured waters of the boating lake looked murky, sinister.

‘He’s just in here,’ said Justin, indicating a narrow path through the trees.

‘You checked his pulse, like I told you?’

‘Yep. Long dead. I called the fire brigade to come and cut him down.’

‘So what was the story with the witness at the caff?’ asked Justin over his shoulder. ‘Potential customer for us?’

‘Nah,’ said Kershaw. ‘Just a member of the LGBT community looking for love in the undergrowth.’

Justin shivered theatrically. ‘Bit flipping cold for that kind of thing.’

‘Well, you’re not a closet gay with a wife, two kids and a job at a merchant bank, are you?’ said Kershaw. ‘At least he called it in. He could have legged it and left it to some poor mum out with her kids to find the body.’

‘Yeah, it’s not a pretty sight, that’s for sure.’

He was right about that.

The dead man hung from a blue nylon rope tied round one of the lower limbs of a tree in the middle of a clearing. Kershaw circled the hanging figure, treading carefully and scanning the leaf litter for anything out of place. Early middle-aged, white, heavily built, the man’s hair was crew-cut. He wore jeans and a cheap-looking bomber jacket. His trainer-clad feet hanging in mid-air, no more than a foot from the ground.

It struck her that, unlike the hanged people you saw in films, the body wasn’t twisting or swinging in the breeze, the rope creaking atmospherically. He just hung there, absolutely motionless, as though fixed to the ground by invisible steel hawsers, his utter stillness lending the scene an unambiguous finality.

Kershaw stepped closer. Beneath the tight-stretched noose was a deep ligature mark where the rope had cut into his neck. It was like the tideline on a beach: below it the skin appeared to be a normal colour, more or less; above it his face was a uniform, unnaturally deep red. The tip of a swollen tongue poked through his slightly parted lips, and there was a track of dried blood beneath one nostril. Standing on tiptoe to examine the skin around the rope she made out several bloody scratches above and below the shiny blue nylon.

She tried to picture the poor sap’s last moments. He’d probably prepared the noose before climbing the tree, tying the rope just before jumping off. But it looked like the drop he’d given himself hadn’t been long enough to break his neck cleanly. Finding himself slowly strangling, he’d scrabbled desperately at the rope, leaving those claw marks around the ligature line. She squatted to examine his right hand and nodded to herself. She’d lay a bet that the blood visible under the empurpled fingernails of his right hand would prove to be his own.

Going to view the body from the other side, she became aware of something nagging at the back of her mind, a feeling that his face looked vaguely familiar.

Before Kershaw had a chance to pursue the thought, she heard Justin say ‘Morning, Sarge,’ his voice respectful.

She turned to find Ben entering the clearing
.
It wouldn’t have been apparent to anyone else, but she could see amusement dancing in his eyes. He’d crawled into her bed smelling of whiskey in the early hours, after some leaving do, and they hadn’t really spoken that morning, unless you counted their sleepy fuck just before dawn.

‘Morning, Natalie,’ he said, raising an amused eyebrow as he awaited her response.

‘Morning,
Skipper
,’ she said, deliberately overdoing the deference.

‘What have we got here then?’

He listened as she gave him the lowdown, barely glancing at the body. ‘Suicide note?’

‘I was just about to look.’

‘Don’t worry – I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘It all looks pretty straightforward. Oh, and DS Bacon asked if you could head back to the nick.’

‘We could hang around for a bit, if you like? Keep any rubberneckers at bay?’

‘No need,’ said Ben. ‘I’ve got a couple more uniforms and the pathologist on their way.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Come on, Justin. I’ll buy you a cuppa.’

With the case looking like a straight up and down suicide, she knew it was one for Divisional CID rather than Murder Squad. And Christ knew she could do without another unidentified suicide in her inbox. All the same, as she made her way back around the pond she couldn’t help feeling slightly miffed at the way Ben had dismissed her from the scene.

Later that evening, Ben came by her place for a meal. He’d already moved his stuff into the new flat, only to discover that the cooker wasn’t working.

‘This looks a bit dry,’ said Kershaw, bending to peer at the ready-made pizza she was heating up in the oven. ‘I’m down to the last dregs of the freezer, so it’s probably about a year past its sell-by date.’ She reached a couple of plates down from the cupboard. ‘Have you talked to the landlord about the cooker at the flat?’

‘Yeah, he just texted me actually,’ said Ben. ‘He can get an electrician there tomorrow morning, but now we’re going public with the Stride business, there’s no way I’ll make it.’

She screwed up her face at him. ‘What Stride business?’

‘You must have heard,’ he said, applying the corkscrew to a bottle of red. ‘It was all over the nick.’

She shook her head. ‘I got stuck in court this afternoon – some credit card fraud from Canning Town come back to haunt me.’

‘That guy who hanged himself up at Hollow Ponds?’ Ben plucked the cork from the bottle with a pop. ‘It only turned out to be Anthony Stride.’