Death Can’t Take a Joke (23 page)

Just as he’d resolved to bump into her ‘by accident’, she made a sharp turn off the street, up an alleyway. He followed at a safe distance, keeping two or three clusters of ambling tourists between him and his target.

Suddenly, she stopped to look in a shop window, throwing a casual glance back behind her. He slipped behind a rack of postcards outside a newsagent. If she had spotted him, she gave no sign of it.

Varenka took a right onto Wigmore Street, then left onto Welbeck. The streets here were long and ruler-straight, allowing Janusz to keep her in view from a safe distance.

Where was she going?
There were no shops around here – just terrace after terrace of early Georgian houses, largely converted into offices and private clinics of one kind or another. Harley Street was just a couple of streets east. Moments later, she disappeared into a building a block long, its clean lines suggestive of twenties or thirties architecture.

Janusz stopped to light a cigar. After allowing five minutes in case she came straight back out, he headed for the entrance. Outside, the word ‘AMBULANCE’ was painted in the road, and next to the door a brass plate read: ‘Princess Louise Hospital’. Janusz raised an eyebrow. The Princess Louise wasn’t some lunch-hour Botox clinic; it was London’s private hospital of choice for major celebs, minor royalty and foreign billionaires.

He ground out his cigar in the ambulance bay, buttoned his coat and ventured inside.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ asked the pretty Indian girl on reception.

‘My wife and I have just moved to the area – we have a place on Regents Park,’ Janusz said, making a self-deprecating wave northward, ‘and she asked me to drop in and find out what …
procedures
you carry out here.’ He hoped that his vagueness might be taken for discretion.

‘I see,’ said the girl, lowering her voice. ‘Would it be something of a feminine nature, perhaps?’

He grimaced good-naturedly. ‘I’m not entirely sure, to be frank with you. Is that your main …
area
, as it were?’

‘Well, we cover all sorts of specialisms here, sir. Perhaps I could give you a brochure, then your wife can look at it at her leisure?’

Thanking the girl, Janusz accepted the cream-coloured brochure with the waxy finish that she held out.

He found a corner café with a view of the hospital entrance and after ordering a black coffee, started to leaf through the brochure. The Princess Louise appeared to leave no profit opportunity unturned: food allergy testing, acupuncture, and breast enlargement were on offer alongside kidney dialysis, cancer treatment and psychiatry. Its contents left him none the wiser as to the purpose of Varenka’s visit. She might simply have been visiting someone – and even if she had come for treatment of some kind, her medical issues were hardly likely to help him nail Romescu.

Three coffees later, Janusz decided that she must have left the Princess Louise by another exit. Had she had simply used the hospital as a ruse to shake off anyone who might be following her? He was sure that she hadn’t spotted him, but perhaps Romescu was in the habit of keeping tabs on her when he was out of the country. Straightforward proprietorial jealousy? Or was he worried that she might be about to fly the coop?

In any event, letting the girl give him the slip meant he’d wasted half a day. He was just wondering what his next move should be when the ‘message waiting light’ on his phone started winking.

Foreboding rushed in on him. Was it the hospital calling with bad news about Oskar? But as he played the voice message, his frown evaporated, to be replaced by a slow grin of triumph.

‘I hope you don’t mind me contacting you’ –
a woman’s voice, low-pitched, familiar:
Varenka
– ‘but my boyfriend had to go to Poland on business, leaving me with a spare ticket for the Royal Opera House tonight. Will you come?’

‘You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in Court …’

As DC Natalie Kershaw read him his rights, Andre Terrell sprawled in his chair, arms crossed and legs wide open, crotch aimed straight at her – body language that semaphored his lack of concern, spiked with contempt at the ‘feds’ for imposing on his valuable time.

‘And anything you do say may be given in evidence,’
she concluded
.
‘Andre, do you understand what being interviewed under caution means?’

‘Yeah. It means I don’t have to say nothing,’ he scoffed, ‘and if I want a brief you’ve gotta give me one.’ His salacious grin told her the double entendre was intentional.

She gave him her brightest smile. ‘Right! I almost forgot, it’s not exactly the first time you’ve been in a police interview room, is it?’

For an answer, Terrell kissed his teeth and directed a blank stare at the wall over her shoulder.

‘You’ve always been a bit of a tea leaf haven’t you, Andre?’ she said, peering at his rap sheet. ‘Stealing a mobile off a schoolmate … shoplifting at JD Sports … taking a car without the owner’s consent …’

‘All that was when I was a kid,’ he muttered.

Kershaw sent him a pitying smile. ‘Exactly. You’re twenty years old now, you’ve not been in trouble for a couple of years
and
you’ve landed a good job. So here’s the thing – why did you risk it all by stealing your boss’s laptop? Didn’t he pay you enough?’

‘I didn’t steal nothing.’ He yawned operatically, giving her a flash of diamond-studded incisor.

‘I’m afraid we have a statement from Courtney Carisford, giving us chapter and verse on how you sold him Jim Fulford’s laptop in the Five Kings pub, the Wednesday before last.’

‘He’s lying!’

‘He says he gave you fifty quid for it.’

Terrell opened his mouth to speak, and for a joyful split second Kershaw thought he was actually going to take the bait and complain that Carisford had only paid him thirty quid, but instead he gave a little shake of his head. ‘It’s my word against his – reasonable doubt, innit?’

Kershaw knew this wasn’t just wishful thinking on Terrell’s part – inner city juries were notoriously reluctant to convict their peers if there was even a molecule of doubt. She shuffled the paperwork in front of her, as if struggling for her next move. In her peripheral vision, she sensed something in his body language, an infinitesimal relaxation.

‘What I’m wondering,’ she said, ‘is whether Jim Fulford got the chance to give you the sack
before
he got knifed to death? Or did you just happen to see the letter on the screen of his laptop?’

Hoicking himself up in his chair, Terrell gaped at her. She had his full attention now.

‘What letter?’ His voice had gone up half an octave.

‘Are you saying you have no knowledge of the letter giving you notice from your position as deputy manager at the gym?’

Kershaw could see his eyes flickering around, no doubt trying to reassure himself that he had deleted all the files from the computer. From the way he folded his arms with a return to his former bravado, he’d clearly decided he was safe. ‘There ain’t no such letter.’

‘Would you say you’re good with computers, Andre?’

‘Yeah, course. I’m young aren’t I?’
Not like you,
his grin said.

‘I’m hopeless, to be honest.’ She pulled a self-deprecating smile. ‘For instance, I always thought if you deleted a file, then emptied the trash –
ping!
– that would be it gone forever.’ She shook her head, marvelling at her own stupidity.

He stared at her, uncertainty clouding his eyes.

‘So you can imagine how embarrassed I was when our computer forensics guy explained it to me. You know,’ she said, flapping a hand in a pantomime of female ditsyness, ‘how the files are actually still there in the background, until the space they occupy on the hard drive gets overwritten by new data?’

Fear froze Terrell’s face.

Bingo
, thought Kershaw. Retrieving the printout of the letter from her file, she pushed it across the desk, spinning it around for him. He craned his head to read it, apparently unwilling to pick it up.

‘I think the court would be very interested to hear that Jim Fulford wrote a letter sacking you the day before he was murdered, don’t you?’

Kershaw noticed that Terrell’s knee had started to jig up and down.

‘Yeah but … the person who stole the laptop, they could have deleted everything without knowing what was on it, couldn’t they?’

‘That’s true. Except it was the
only file
that had been opened and individually deleted, before the whole laptop was wiped. If it was a random theft, then why the focus on that one letter?’

His knee was jigging in double time now.

‘Look Andre, it seems to me you’ve got two options. Start telling the truth now and you’ve got a good chance of walking away with a fine and a probation order for theft. If you carry on telling lies … well, I know what I’d think if I was on a jury, I’d think the laptop theft wasn’t about making a few bob, it was about hiding the fact you’d been sacked. Hiding your motive for Jim Fulford’s murder.’

‘I didn’t kill him! I already told the fed … the police, I was playing squash at the leisure centre when it happened!’

She leaned back in her chair, shaking her head. ‘If I was you Andre, and I was facing a life sentence for murder, I’d think very carefully before relying on the uncorroborated alibi of a mate. What if he gets cold feet, or you have a falling out?’

Judging by his wavering gaze, this was a scenario that Terrell found all too credible. ‘I didn’t have nothing to do with it, you know?’ he said.

Kershaw picked up the note of desperation in his voice. ‘All the more reason to tell the truth. If you volunteer an honest statement now, in your first interview, it will show the court that you’re a straight-up kind of person.’

Twenty minutes later, Kershaw had the whole story. Terrell had got his marching orders the day before Jim’s murder, but when the cops had called with the news he’d seen a chance to rewrite history and keep his job, at least for the time being. He’d pinched the laptop and after his ham-fisted attempt to delete its contents sold it to Carisford, the neighbourhood fence. He gambled – correctly, as it happened – that Jim hadn’t got round to telling the lady who did the payroll about his dismissal.

Kershaw did wonder, briefly, whether
technically
the interview had been conducted within the mind-numbing requirements of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act guidelines, considering what had turned up in her inbox earlier that afternoon. The Calcott Leisure Centre had turned out to be surprisingly on the ball when it came to storage and retrieval of its CCTV footage, and the images they’d sent over of Andre and his friend leaving through the turnstiles around ten minutes after Jim was murdered had been crystal clear.

As she was ushering Terrell out through reception, he turned to her. ‘Listen. If I give you some information, will you tell the judge I helped out?’

She suppressed a grin at his expression: the wannabe gangsta act had disappeared, leaving behind a jumpy kid who was probably wondering how to break it to his mum he was in trouble with the cops again.

She shrugged, non-committal. ‘Depends how useful it is, Andre.’

‘The word on the street is that the murder, it was pussy-related … to do with a lady, I mean.’

‘Is that so?’ Kershaw said.

‘For real! You know that big Polish bruvva
he was friends with?
Yah-nuz
?’

‘Yan-oosh,’ she corrected, automatically.

‘Yeah, whatever.’ Narrowing his eyes, he gave a nod. ‘Well, he reckoned Jim was seeing someone on the side.’

‘Go on.’ Kershaw’s tone was cool but could feel her heart start to thump.

‘An Eastern European lady – a tall, blonde stunner.’

‘And did this vision of loveliness have a name?’

‘It sounded Russian, something beginning with V …’ Terrell screwed one eye almost shut. ‘Verruca …?’

Two minutes later, Kershaw was making her way up the stairs to the office when she bumped into Ben coming down.

‘What’s up, Nat?’ he asked, an amused yet quizzical look in his dark eyes.

She realised she must have been scowling. ‘Oh, nothing. I just found out that bastard Kiszka has been holding out on me.’ It hadn’t taken her long to work out that Terrell’s stab at the name of the mystery blonde was actually ‘Varenka’ – one of the names that Kiszka had asked her to look for on Jim’s laptop.

‘Anything important?’

‘I don’t know yet, but I’m gonna find out.’

‘If I was him, I’d be properly scared,’ he said, miming a terrified shiver.

‘Very funny. Anyway, I’ve gotta go, some of us have got murders to solve.’

‘By the way,’ he said. ‘I spoke to Carl, the PC who checked out Stride’s flat? His specs
were
there, thank goodness. He must’ve just rushed out without them.’

‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said. ‘You know what Streaky says about loose ends …’

‘… they have a nasty habit of tripping people up.’

From the instructions Varenka gave Janusz over the phone, it was clear that she didn’t want Romescu finding out about their evening at the opera. They were to arrive separately; his ticket would be waiting at the box office; and he shouldn’t join her until just before curtain up. Janusz made no comment on the cloak-and-dagger flavour of their rendezvous, but took it as further evidence that, rightly or wrongly, she expected to be followed. He hoped it was also a sign that she was starting to see him as a potential ally, someone to turn to should she decide to escape her gangster boyfriend.

Janusz had never actually been inside the Royal Opera House, unless you counted the stint he did there back in the nineties when the place was a building site undergoing a top to bottom renovation. He was impressed by the
fin de siècle
grandeur of the foyer and main staircase but nothing could prepare him for what lay the other side of the nondescript door marked Box 7 up on the third level.

As he entered the box, the first thing that hit him was the noise. The moans, squeaks and clatter of the orchestra tuning up, combined with the rustle and hum of the audience, bubbled out of the auditorium like steam off a cauldron. As he gazed out at the vast blood-red space intersected by the curved cream-coloured ribs of the balconies, he felt for a moment as though he were inside the belly of some colossal beast.