Death Can’t Take a Joke (2 page)

Meanwhile, Kershaw had taken charge of diverting City workers around the scene. They were harmless rubberneckers for the most part, interspersed with the occasional tosser who objected to some five-foot-two-inch blonde girl with a Cockney accent withdrawing his constitutional right to walk where he chose. To be really honest? She liked dealing with these ones the best.

Finally, the promised uniform had arrived from the nick.

‘You took your time,’ she said.

‘Oh, was it urgent?’ he replied, all innocence. ‘I had a croissant on the way.’

She grinned: Nick Ferris was one of the good guys. Recent intake, with none of the ‘who do you think you are, missy?’ undercurrent she still sensed from some of the older uniformed cops.

‘NOT that way, sir,’ Kershaw told a master of the universe wearing a two-grand suit who was attempting a body swerve around her.

‘Have the silly bankers been giving you grief?’ Nick asked under his breath.

‘Nah,’ she said with a sigh of mock-disappointment. ‘I haven’t even had to get my stick out.’

He produced a reel of police tape and they started to cordon off the scene.

‘What’s the story here then?’ Nick nodded towards the body, which the paramedics were in the process of shielding from view with a white pop-up tent. Kershaw shrugged. ‘No idea. Maybe the market turned and he was left holding too many yen.’

In the tower reception, she’d found an upright fit-looking guy in his fifties with prematurely grey hair – unquestionably the head of security – rapping out instructions over his walkie-talkie. She flashed her warrant card and he introduced himself as Dougal Murray before ushering her through the metal security arch and straight into a lift.

‘The highest floor where witnesses saw something go past is the 49th,’ he told her in a no-nonsense Scots accent as they hummed skywards. ‘There’s only one level above that, so I’ve got my team questioning all the companies on 50 to establish whether they have anyone missing.’

‘What about visitors?’ Kershaw asked.

He unfolded a printout. ‘All visitors sign in and out and are issued with a security pass,’ he said. ‘I’ve marked everyone who signed in to visit the 50th floor this morning.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ Kershaw said, eyeing him with admiration. ‘Are you ex-police by any chance?’

‘RMP,’ he said, sticking his chin out.

Military Police.
Kershaw grinned. With a bit of luck she’d have the jumper identified and be back at the nick in time for elevenses.

Two hours later, it had begun to dawn on her that she’d be lucky to be back for afternoon tea. Nick the PC had searched the body but found no clues to his identity: no wallet, no Oystercard, nothing. She’d worked through the entire list of 50th floor office workers who’d swiped in that morning and found them all alive and breathing. And then she’d reached the end of the visitors list. That had produced one brief glimmer of hope – a guy who had apparently left after a 7 a.m. meeting but whom the system showed as still present in the building. But when Kershaw called him on his mobile, he’d discovered he was still wearing the pass round his neck.
Muppet.

And there was another problem. She and Dougal had made a full tour of the 50th floor and found the windows, which weren’t designed to be opened, sealed and intact. Above that there was only the roof, which was accessible via two flights of concrete stairs in the emergency stairwell. At the top, a push-bar fire door, of the kind you saw in cinemas, gave straight onto the exterior. Green and white letters spelt out the legend: ‘ALARMED DOOR – FIRE EXIT ONLY’.

‘You’ve checked the alarm was working?’ Kershaw asked. Dougal nodded.

‘Since it gives straight onto the roof I’d rather keep it locked,’ he said. ‘But health and safety won’t allow it.’ An arch of his eyebrow had told her what he thought of that.

As Kershaw stepped outside, a cold wind had whipped the hair from her face and stung her eyes.

They traversed the narrow walkway that skirted the building’s iconic pyramid-shaped glass apex, stepping around the steel gantries used to haul window cleaners up and down the 700-foot length of the tower. Halfway along the east side they came to a stop and peered over the edge. At the foot of the yawning cliff of glass, they could see a white dot on the pavement below – the tent covering the body.

Kershaw buttoned her coat to the neck. Up here, the wind, barely noticeable at ground level, had a savage power. ‘I don’t get it,’ she told Dougal, raising her voice above the wind’s roar. ‘There’s no way to get out here without setting off the alarm.’

He shook his head.

She squinted down at the tent far below. ‘Just my luck to get an unidentified suicide on my last day.’

‘You’re on the move then?’

‘Yeah. I’m starting a new job up in Walthamstow. In Murder Squad.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks. But it looks like I’ll be spending my first few days trying to find out who this guy is.’ She worried at the nail on her little finger.

‘Can you not just leave the case to Docklands police?’ He pronounced it
poh-liss
.

‘Yeah, I could,’ she said, pulling a sheepish face. ‘But I’ve got this thing. Once I start something I have to finish it.’ From the set of her shoulders, Dougal could tell that the wee girl meant it.

Kershaw’s dad used to tell her that she’d been that way ever since she was little. Not long after her mum died, he’d taken her fishing for the first time up at Walthamstow Reservoir. He said she’d taken to it right away, but the fish weren’t biting that day. One by one the other anglers packed up, and as the sun faded he wanted to call it a day, too. But nine-year-old Natalie wouldn’t leave. He’d tried everything, including the barefaced bribe of a visit to McDonalds. But she just kept saying:
Not till I’ve caught a fish
. By the time she bagged one – a respectable size tench – her dad was dozing on the bank and the moon had risen, spilling quicksilver across the water.

Descending in the lift with Dougal, Kershaw fell silent, puzzling over the mystery of the falling man. To gain access to the roof he must have disabled the alarm – or got someone to do it for him. But given that he’d fallen at about 9 a.m., when loads of people would have been at their desks, surely somebody must have noticed a strange man prowling around?

‘I’m going to need to interview all your security staff,’ she told Dougal.

He nodded. ‘Including the ones who weren’t on duty?’

‘Especially the ones who weren’t on duty. I think our chum might have got onto the roof during the night, when it was quiet.’

By the time Kershaw had left the tower, dusk had fallen, bringing a penetrating chill to the air. The body and its protective tent had gone and a two-man unit from the local council were using high-pressure hoses to clean blood from the impact site. The wet pavement shone in the reflected glow of a thousand brightly lit offices.

Back at Canary Wharf nick, the uniform skipper on front desk beckoned her over. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. He held out a plastic evidence bag. ‘PC Ferris found this in the gutter. It might have nothing to do with our friend, but he says it was just a few feet from the body.’

A silver coin winked through the polythene: about the same size as a 10p piece, but inset with a bronze roundel depicting a crowned eagle, wings spread wide. Squinting to read the inscription around the edge, one word jumped out at her. Kershaw was no linguist but she knew one thing.
Polska
meant Poland.

At around 8 a.m. the morning after Jim had stood him up at the Rochester, Janusz Kiszka found himself back in Walthamstow, this time on the south side of Hoe Street. Reaching the end of a terrace of two-up two-downs, he spotted what he guessed to be his destination: just outside the ironwork gates of a cemetery, a low redbrick building in the Victorian municipal style. Checking on his phone that he had the right place, he went in and gave his name to the lady on reception.

As he stood waiting, the only thing that cut through the foggy hum that had enveloped his brain since he’d heard the news a couple of hours ago was the smell of the place – a century of dust and old paper mingled with a powerful disinfectant.

He barely acknowledged the uniformed cop awaiting him in the gloomy little anteroom at the end of the corridor. They exchanged a few words, then the cop led the way into a second, larger room. There, drawing back a blue sheet on a hospital-style gurney, he unveiled the face of Jim Fulford.

For a split second, Janusz didn’t recognise him, so alien was this version of his friend. In total repose his face looked … stern, an expression he couldn’t remember ever seeing in the living Jim. But his moment of confusion – and irrational hope – didn’t last. It might not be the friend he’d known for two decades, but there was no denying that this austere waxwork was his body. There was the thumbprint-sized dent in his left temple, souvenir of the time someone accidentally dropped a lump hammer off a scaffold tower. That had been a lifetime ago, on the Broadgate build – and yet Janusz could remember it as though it were yesterday.

A warning shout, Jim going down like a felled oak an arm’s length away, blood streaming from his head.
After coming round, he’d claimed he was absolutely fine, and wanted to get back to work. Janusz practically had to wrestle him into a cab, taking him to Whitechapel Hospital, where the medics diagnosed a severe concussion. Even twenty years later Jim was fond of saying, with his friendly bark of a laugh, that Janusz still owed him a monkey – five hundred quid – in lost earnings.

Janusz laid a tentative hand on his dead friend’s chest, still covered by the blue sheet, and found it as cold and unyielding as a sack of flour. He thought of his mother then: her body had at least still felt warm when he’d kissed her goodbye.
Was that all life was then – a matter of temperature?

He found himself out on the street again, with no memory of how he’d got there. His thoughts clashed and clattered like balls on a pool table, grief and disbelief battling rage at what had happened. How could it be that Jim had survived a decade working on building sites
and
an Argentinian torpedo, only to be stabbed to death on his own doorstep, apparently by a couple of junkies? It was
nieznosne –
unbearable.

People on their way to work
averted their eyes as they passed the big man pounding the pavement, his jaw set and eyes narrowed in some blistering inner fury.
Mental health case: best avoided,
most of them concluded.

Ten minutes later, Janusz turned into Barclay Road, Jim and Marika’s street. As he neared their neat, cream-painted terraced house, he slowed, and saw something that made his insides plummet. The low brick garden wall – a wall that Janusz and Jim had rebuilt with their own hands one hot, beer-fuelled summer’s day – had all but disappeared beneath a drift of cellophane-wrapped bouquets that rustled in the breeze. Two tea lights in red perspex holders on top of the wall completed its transformation into a shrine.

As Janusz watched, a middle-aged woman approached, holding the hand of a little girl. She leaned down to whisper to the child, who, taking an awkward step forward, bent to add a bunch of yellow flowers to the pile.

He paused in the porch to take a couple of deep breaths, determined to master himself. Of course, Marika knew that the man who paramedics had rushed to hospital last night from this address could only be her husband, but as she hadn’t been able to face identifying his body herself, she’d still be inhabiting that hazy hinterland of denial – a zone Janusz had barely left himself.

She opened the front door and searched his face, before sleepwalking into his arms. Holding her to his chest so tightly that her hot tears soaked through to his skin in an instant, he sent a grim-faced nod of greeting over her shoulder to Basia, her sister, who looked on from the kitchen doorway.

Finally, Marika drew her head back and looked up at him. ‘Thank you, Janek, for going to him,’ she said, her voice thick with tears. ‘I will go to see him later, with Basia.’

The three of them sat around the kitchen table nursing un-drunk cups of tea, under the mournful gaze of Laika, who had not raced to greet Janusz today but instead lay silent in her basket, her long black-and-white nose resting on crossed paws.

‘Basia and I, we had gone out to our Pilates class,’ said Marika, ‘and when we came back, about nine o’clock, the police were waiting outside.’ Her voice was husky and almost toneless. ‘They’d … taken him away to the hospital by then, but they say he was already dead.’ Her eyes filled with tears again.

As Basia put an arm around her shoulder, murmuring words of comfort, Janusz realised that Marika was speaking in Polish, which he couldn’t remember her doing since she’d married Jim. Now grief had stripped away the last ten years, throwing her back on her mother tongue.

After a moment, she pulled herself upright and used both hands to sweep the tears from her cheeks – a determined gesture.

‘What did the cops say?’ he asked. ‘Did they question the neighbours straightaway? Right after the … after Jim was found?’

She nodded. ‘Jason who lives two doors down heard a shout when he was putting out the rubbish bags.’ She paused, took a steadying breath. ‘It was starting to get dark, but he saw two men running away, through the garden gate.’

‘Which way were they headed? Hoe Street? Or Lea Bridge Road?’ Janusz was relieved to find himself slipping into private investigator mode.

‘Hoe Street, I think he said.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘They both wore
hoodies
and
balaclavas,
’ she said, dropping into English for these unfamiliar words. ‘So all he could say was that one was tall – almost two metres – and slim, the other a little shorter.’

‘Black? White?’

She gave a hopeless shrug. ‘It was dark, and with the faces covered, he couldn’t tell.’

Janusz hesitated. He needed to know exactly how Jim had died but he couldn’t think of a sensitive way to frame the question. From Laika’s basket came a tentative whine of distress.