Death Can’t Take a Joke (31 page)

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘The reason I needed to talk to you is that I saw the girl, Varenka, today.’ He pulled a mirthless grin. ‘It seems she’s been careless enough to walk into Romescu’s fists again. I’m guessing he’s found out that she’s been talking to me, and that means her life is in peril.’

A frown line furrowed kershaw’s forehead. ‘I’ve got permission to have a chat with her, if she’ll speak to me, but I wasn’t planning on doing it today.’

‘If you don’t, you might be pulling another murder victim out of the undergrowth tomorrow.’

She caught her top lip between her teeth. Then, with a decisive gesture, pulled out her notepad. ‘Give me Romescu’s address, I’ll try to get down there this afternoon.’

He was just reading it out from his phone when he remembered Oskar’s mix-up over addresses earlier that day. And stopped in mid-sentence.

‘What is it?’ she asked, eyes searching his.

‘Stride lived in Walthamstow, right?’

She gave a half-nod, half-shrug, as if to say,
So what?

‘What was his address?’ he said.

‘You know I can’t divulge that.’

‘Fuck that, Natalia.’ He leaned across the table, his eyes boring into hers. ‘This is important.’

She gazed back at him, noticing the crow’s feet around his eyes for the first time. He was what, forty-five? But the wrinkles only softened his craggy features, making him more attractive.

‘I don’t know it,’ she said finally, ‘but I can find out easily enough.’

Letting herself out of the pub’s front door, she dialled a number. Janusz watched through the window as she put the phone to her ear and turned away from him. As she rejoined him, moments later, the look on her face told Janusz that she’d discovered something.

‘Stride lived at 157 Berkeley Rd, E17,’ she said, her voice troubled.

‘And Jim and Marika’s place?’
As if he didn’t know.

‘157
Barclay
Rd, E17,’ she said. ‘Unless you see them written down, they sound identical.’

Kershaw suddenly realised what it was that had been niggling away at the back of her brain since she saw the holiday snap of Jim reading a Spanish newspaper. ‘Jim wore glasses for reading, didn’t he?’

‘So?’

She flicked back through her notes of the interview with Marika. ‘When Marika and her sister left him at home that day he said he was looking forward to reading his paper.’

‘So when he answered the door to his killers, he was probably still wearing his spectacles,’ Janusz’s voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper.

Kershaw pictured Stride’s spectacles through the clear plastic of the evidence bag – the narrow rectangular lenses not unlike Jim’s reading glasses. ‘The killers thought they had the right address, and at night a crew-cut middle-aged guy in glasses could easily have passed for Anthony Stride.’

Janusz jumped to his feet, knocking his empty pint glass off the table. As it rolled around on the wooden boards, the room darkened before his eyes. Jim had died because some numbskulled
kutas
carried out a hit at the wrong house? It was like some bad cosmic joke. To be killed over a girl, or money, that would have been bad enough, but to die for nothing? It made his friend’s death meaningless, somehow.

He rounded on the girl: ‘The cops knew the addresses! Why didn’t you put two and two together?’

She shrugged awkwardly. ‘There was nothing to link the two cases, and anyway, we’ve only just started treating Stride’s death as a murder.’

The rage left Janusz as suddenly as it had arrived, his strength seeming to drain away with it. He lowered himself back into his seat like an old man, wrestling with a sudden, terrible thought. How would Marika take the news?

Kershaw’s brain was whirring and chiming like a faulty cuckoo clock. Two murders barely a week apart, at addresses that sounded identical unless you saw them written down … it was beyond coincidence. Jim Fulford’s murder had clearly been a case of mistaken identity.
The person with the most obvious motive for killing Stride was Jamie Ryan, who had a solid alibi for the night Stride died. But now it occurred to her that maybe he’d taken out a contract on Stride with local gangster Romescu? Then after the thugs screwed up and killed the wrong man, they might have been sent to finish the job by faking Stride’s suicide – a ruse to prevent police linking the murders.

They both sat for several minutes, lost in their own thoughts, until Janusz broke the silence.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Before you do anything else, please go and see Varenka, before Romescu does something terrible to her? She knows something about Jim’s murder, I’m sure of it. Another woman might be able to persuade her that there’s a way out of her situation.’

Kershaw hesitated. She could really do with getting back to the nick. But Kiszka’s hunches had a nasty habit of turning out to be right and she didn’t want the death of this girl on her conscience any more than he did. And there was another compelling reason to do a bit more digging: if she were able to deliver a breakthrough, get something from the girl that nailed Romescu, it would wipe away any lingering stain on her reputation from the cock-up over the Stride scene.

She left Janusz hunched in his coat, staring into the fireplace, so preoccupied with his thoughts that he didn’t even return her goodbye.

The mirror glass apartment blocks that ringed Millwall Dock looked soulless and unwelcoming under a leaden sky, Kershaw thought, although she knew that a luxury flat here could easily knock you back a couple of million. As she neared Barbu Romescu’s high-rise – its gleaming twin towers like two glassy fingers raised to the world – she slowed her pace, feeling a twinge of conscience. She was remembering her promise to the Sarge to bring back-up in case she should run into Romescu himself. There wouldn’t have been a hope in hell of getting a uniform allocated at such short notice, of course, but she knew that line of argument would cut no ice with Streaky.

She hovered by the dockside and gazed over the wind-ruffled waters, shoulders hunched against the horizontal wind. The indecisive weather echoed her mood, the skies a solid grey one minute, the sun breaking through the clouds the next, surprisingly bright for a November afternoon. She knew that going to the flat alone could be risky, but she trusted Kiszka’s instincts when he said the girl was in imminent danger.

A couple of minutes later, she’d come up with a plan. Stepping into the foyer of the apartment block, her ears still stinging from the cold, she showed the guy on reception her warrant card. After a brief chat, he picked up the phone and dialled a number.

‘Hello, it’s reception here. I have a delivery for Mr Romescu?’ Kershaw gave him an encouraging smile across the desk. ‘Is he there to sign for it?’ She held her breath. Meeting her eyes, the guy shook his head.
Result!
The girl was alone. ‘Oh, right …’ he said, ‘I’ll check if that’s okay.’ A nod from Kershaw. ‘Yes, that will be fine. It’s on the way up.’

‘Thanks for that,’ she told him, scribbling her mobile number on a scrap of paper. ‘Okay, you know what this Romescu guy looks like, yes? So if he turns up, you call me straight away.’

As the lift swished her up to the eleventh floor Kershaw reflected that, as a risk avoidance plan, it wasn’t exactly bulletproof, but in the real world, there were times when you had to ditch the health and safety rulebook. And as for Streaky, she reckoned that if she went back to the nick with a solid lead on the Fulford and Stride murders he’d probably never even ask whether she’d taken a minder.

The first thing that struck her about the girl who answered the door at flat 117 was how tall she was: even allowing for the spiky high heels, she must be knocking on for six foot. She was perhaps a couple of years younger than Kershaw, with legs to die for, although there was no makeup outside a circus that could entirely disguise her blackening eye and split lower lip – both injuries only a few hours old from the look of them.

‘Are you alone?’ Kershaw asked in a low voice.

The girl shot a half-look over her shoulder, but the gesture appeared to have been no more than a reflex because the next moment she nodded.

Only then did Kershaw flash her warrant card. ‘Detective Constable Natalie Kershaw,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’

‘What is this about, please?’ she asked, alarm blooming in her eyes. Her voice was husky, with an Eastern European lilt.

‘I really need to come in to explain properly,’ said Kershaw. ‘Unless you’d feel safer coming to the police station?’ She was maintaining eye contact, working the sympathetic but firm approach to the max, aware that the door could get slammed in her face at any moment. If you looked past her injuries, the girl was pretty enough, Kershaw decided – if not as gorgeous as Kiszka had made out.

Varenka twiddled a lock of hair, still damp at the ends from the shower. Then, with a sideways dip of her head: ‘Please, come in.’

They sat either side of the granite-topped breakfast bar. From her position, Kershaw could see right across the vast living room and through the plate glass to the great curve of the Thames cradling the Isle of Dogs, mouse grey and sluggish in the lowering half-light.

‘I would make you some coffee but … I’m afraid that I have run out of milk,’ said Varenka. ‘Unless you would like it black?’

Kershaw declined the half-hearted offer. She noticed a little cairn of blue beads lying on the granite beside a mobile phone – it looked like the girl had been saying her rosary.

‘Can I speak frankly with you, Varenka?’ she asked. ‘Just in case you are worrying that we might be disturbed, I’ve arranged to be alerted if Mr Romescu returns.’

‘It is okay,’ said Varenka with a little shrug, ‘I’m not expecting him back.’

‘Oh, right. Is he out for the day or has he gone back to Poland?’

‘Poland … yes, a business trip. He isn’t back until tomorrow.’

Kershaw allowed herself to relax a little. ‘Okay, good. I’d like to ask you about a murder that happened on Monday, 6th of November, in Walthamstow. A man called Jim Fulford?’

The girl showed no reaction.

‘Are you familiar with the name?’ Scanning her face, Kershaw wondered which way she’d jump. If she was going to deny even having heard of Fulford, it probably meant she’d decided to back Romescu.

‘Oh yes, that was such a terrible thing. I read about it in the
Metro
.’ She lifted one shoulder, a self-deprecating gesture. ‘I took a bouquet’ – she pronounced it
boo-ku-ette
– ‘to leave outside his house. This is the English tradition, yes?’

‘Kind of,’ said Kershaw, although now she thought about it, she couldn’t remember seeing any roadside shrines back when she was a kid. ‘Do you often do that? Buy flowers for a murder victim you didn’t know?’ Just a glint of steel under the words, enough for the girl to know she wasn’t going to be fobbed off.

Varenka spread her long fingers on the granite, frowning down at the nails. They were perfectly manicured and polished, but for the nail extension on her thumb, which Kershaw noticed was ripped clean off. ‘I don’t know why, really. Perhaps because I heard he was married to a Polish lady. I am from Ukraine but my blood, my family, is Polish.’

‘What about a man called Anthony Stride? The child abuser found hanged in the woods at Hollow Ponds? Did you read about him in the paper, too?’

Varenka shook her head, twisting a ring she wore on her little finger – her only piece of jewellery.

‘You see, Varenka, we have good reason to believe that Barbu Romescu was involved in the deaths of both these men,’ said Kershaw. Bit of stretch, really, given that the evidence was thinner than a size zero model, but she sensed she was going to need a tin opener to get this girl to talk
.
‘And I think you know something about his involvement in at least one of the murders. That was the real reason you left flowers at Jim Fulford’s house, wasn’t it? I’m sure you did feel sorry for his wife – but I think what made it so unbearable was the knowledge that it was your boyfriend who had him killed.’

Varenka had become very still, but from her distracted expression Kershaw could see that her brain was working overtime.

Kershaw looked out through the huge window at seagulls wheeling lazily above the dock. Her dad used to say that when they ventured this far inland it meant a storm was brewing out at sea. Leaning across the worktop, she adopted a new voice, one that was soft but deadly serious.

‘I have to make you aware that failure to pass any information you have relating to these murders on to the police would mean you being charged with a very serious offence.’

That seemed to do the job – the girl’s eyes darted around wildly.

‘Maybe he talked to you about it?’ Kershaw turned up the dial now, her eyes never leaving Varenka’s face. ‘Or perhaps you overheard him on the phone, giving someone the order to kill Stride? Does the name Jamie Ryan mean anything to you?’

Something changed in Varenka’s eyes, as though she’d reached a decision of some kind.

‘You cannot imagine how much Barbu has done for me,’ she said, the threat of tears thickening her voice.

‘I’m sure you must feel you owe him a lot,’ said Kershaw. ‘But he hasn’t always been kind to you, has he?’ She let her gaze linger on Varenka’s bruised eye, the busted lip. ‘In my experience, once a man starts to hit a woman, they very rarely stop.’

Kershaw heard a faint ‘thump’ from upstairs. For a wild moment, she wondered if Romescu was up there – had been here all along – but Varenka showed no reaction. Outside the sky had filled with rolling purple clouds and wind whistled across the plate glass.

‘If you make a statement and agree to testify against him, we can protect you,’ Kershaw went on. ‘And get you permission to remain in the UK, if that’s what you want.’

Varenka stared at the worktop, twisting that ring of hers round and round. Kershaw squinted at it. Two interlocking hearts on a cheap-looking chrome band, the kind of thing a little girl might buy with her pocket money – an eccentric choice for such a well-groomed woman.

When Varenka finally raised her eyes to meet Kershaw’s, they were full of sorrow. ‘It is true,’ she said. ‘I heard Barbu on the phone, a few weeks ago.’ She paused, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘He was telling someone to get rid of this Anthony Stride.’ She pronounced the ‘
th
’ in ‘Anthony’ phonetically.