he?’
‘No. Forty-three.’
Janusz made the kind of shocked noises that were appropriate to the death of someone so young, albeit a stranger.
Bill shook his head. ‘Yeah. He was bit of a scallywag, was Jared, but a good mate. I’ve known him twenty-odd years – we met on a building site down by Royal Docks.’
‘What happened?’
Bill hesitated, but the compulsion to talk won out. ‘It was a freak accident, happened yesterday they think. He was found in his flat, electrocuted.’
‘Christ!’
‘Yeah. They say he drilled into a live cable, putting up a shelf or something.’ Perplexity creased his face – either at Jared’s stupidity, or perhaps at the cosmic lottery of sudden, unexpected death.
‘Jared …’ mused Janusz, before taking a slug of beer. ‘That’s an unusual name. What’s his surname?’
‘Bateman.’
‘Yeah, I think my mate Steve might have mentioned him once or twice.’ A total fabrication, of course, but worth a punt.
‘Steve Fisher, you mean? Yeah, him and Jared were as thick as thieves.’ Bill’s look suggested that in their case, the expression might be more than just a turn of phrase.
Before Janusz had a chance to probe further, the landlady reappeared looking harassed. ‘Sorry, Bill love, but I just couldn’t get that barrel on. You’ll have to have something else, I’m afraid.’
‘You must be out of practice, Kath,’ said Bill with a grin. ‘Make it four pints of Foster’s then.’
He turned back to Janusz. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of Steve, as it happens, ever since we heard about Jared. But he isn’t answering his phone. You wouldn’t be seeing him soon, I suppose?’
‘Yeah, I might be, later on,’ Janusz lied. ‘Shall I get him to call you?’
As they exchanged phone numbers, one of Bill’s friends came over to help him carry the drinks. Although he was shorter than Janusz, his muscled neck and broad shoulders gave him the look of a bull mastiff – and one that might bite at the smallest provocation. The guy, who Janusz gathered was called Simeon, smiled readily enough but his eyes sized Janusz up as though he were a second-hand car with no service history. He had a high-pitched voice, which sounded incongruous coming out of that stocky frame.
Deciding not to expose himself to further scrutiny, Janusz made a show of checking his watch and drank up. As he headed for the door, the sticky carpet sucked at the soles of his feet as though reluctant to let him go.
That night, Janusz stayed up cooking till the early hours. He made some barszcz, followed by a batch of pork meatballs stuffed with mushrooms, and a loaf of half-rye bread, not because he felt like eating, but because cooking always cleared his head, helping him to puzzle out conundrums. And because focusing on the facts of the case was the only way of keeping at bay the images that lurked at the periphery of his vision, images of what might be happening to Kasia, right that minute.
By 2 a.m., he had enough food for a week but no bolt-of-lightning revelations about where Steve might have taken Kasia. It would have to be somewhere remote, where she couldn’t escape or raise the alarm – but Steve was a Londoner, bred and buttered, hardly the type to have access to some rural bolthole. As for the death-by-DIY of Steve’s electrician mate, Jared: Janusz had turned it over in his mind, but could discern no plausible connection to the couple’s disappearance. No. The law of Occam’s Razor told him the simplest solution was the most likely: Steve had lured Kasia away somewhere, and after she refused to go along with his idea of moving to Spain, starting afresh, was holding her there against her will.
The question was, where? And was she in imminent danger? Janusz sent up a fervent prayer: that Kasia would say – and do – whatever she needed to in order to keep Steve sweet, until he could track her down.
Slumping onto the sofa with a bottle of beer he barely noticed the cat, Copetka, jumping onto his lap. What seemed like moments later he woke with a sudden shudder, blinking open his eyes to find himself lying at full stretch, sunlight streaming through the open curtains. The cat, which now lay on his chest, yawned companionably in his face and started to purr.
Janusz realised that while he slept, he’d reached a decision.
‘Copetka?’ he growled into the cat’s face. ‘You’ve never heard me say it before. But I think I’m going to have to call the police.’
‘I’m putting you on sick leave from today.’
‘But, Sarge!’
‘No arguments. I don’t want to see your face anywhere in the unit for the next two weeks.’
Kershaw stared at the floor. She’d known she was in for a bollocking, of course, but even being on non-operational duties was preferable to this … exile. What the fuck was she going to do with herself for two weeks? Drink, probably, replied a sarcastic voice in her head.
‘Natalie. Is that understood?’
She gave a mulish nod. She’d never heard the Sarge sound so angry before: Toby Greenacre was legendary for his cool throughout the unit.
His expression softened. ‘Listen, Natalie. Just count your blessings that the guy didn’t want to make something of it, or you’d be up before Divisional Standards.’
Kershaw had to concede that it probably hadn’t been a good idea to stay on drinking in the pub on her own last night. It had been sweet of Matt to take her out for a post-work jar, when he’d seen how down she was after a ten-hour shift spent cleaning guns, checking equipment, updating the armoury’s records. But later, after Matt had gone home to his fiancee in Chingford, and she’d put away a couple more glasses of red wine, she’d started to get properly pissed off at the thought of how many more months of this purgatory she’d have to endure. She’d done nothing wrong and yet it felt as if she was sitting in the waiting room of her own life.
So, when some drunken lowlife started mouthing off at the girl behind the bar while Kershaw stood behind him waiting to order, it had been a monumentally bad accident of timing.
‘The guy was bang out of order,’ she told the Sarge, sticking her chin out. ‘He called her a “useless fucking slag” – because she forgot to put ice in his JD and coke. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen!’
She had tapped the guy on the shoulder, and politely told him to apologise. He threw a look backwards, clocked a five-foot-two-inch blonde girl, and laughed. Looking back, she thought it might have turned out differently if he’d sworn at her. It was the way he’d dismissed her in a glance – that was what had really pulled her trigger. Bang. Before she even knew what she was doing, she had his arm yanked up tight between his shoulder blades – all that upper body strength training paying off – and was reading him his rights.
‘I don’t think I need to remind you about the rules governing the behaviour of an off-duty officer, Natalie,’ the Sarge was saying. ‘Especially since you were visibly the worse for drink, according to the officer who got dragged in to sort things out.’
Kershaw knew she should just keep schtum but there was no stopping herself. ‘Are we supposed just to ignore it then, Sarge, when someone behaves like that?’
He fixed her with his calm brown eyes. ‘Do you think your intervention made the situation better or worse for the barmaid?’
She pictured the girl’s weary face throughout the hour-long drama that had played out in the street outside, as the local cops questioned all three of them. A drama that had ended with ‘no complaint’ by the girl and without so much as