stop.’
Justyna met his gaze, a grin dimpling her cheeks.
‘Anyway, Tomek said that the night went down in family history,’ Janusz went on. ‘And whenever his parents told the story, they always said the same thing: “That batch of elderberry wine was the best that Babcia ever made!”’
They laughed together, any remaining ice between them fully broken. He seized the moment to ask, ‘But in London, you can get anything, of course. Kokaina, Ekstasa, so on …’
‘Sure,’ she agreed. ‘If you are a fucking idiota.’ She sucked some juice up through her straw. ‘One of my friends died, back home, from sniffing glue. He was fifteen.’ She shook her head. ‘If I’d taken drugs I’d probably be dead like him, or even worse – still stuck in Katowice.’ They shared a wry grin: the joke crossed the generational divide.
Seizing the moment, he asked, ‘You think Pawel messes about with drugs, don’t you?’
She hesitated, then met his eyes. ‘I think so, yes. How else does someone like him make such money?’
Janusz made his move.
‘You know that pani Tosik has hired me to find Weronika,’ he said. Justyna gave a barely perceptible nod. ‘I can see it’s difficult for you – you are loyal to your friend. But I think you are right to be worried that this boyfriend of hers might put her in danger.’
She played with the straw in her glass, a frown creasing her forehead.
‘I’m not asking you to betray her trust – just to give me a few pointers,’ he went on. ‘It would help if I knew how Adamski talked her into going off like that.’
The girl took a big breath, let it out slowly. Then, speaking in a low voice, she told him that two weeks earlier, while pani Tosik was out getting her hair done, Weronika had locked herself away in her bedroom above the restaurant. Suspecting that something was going on, Justyna kept knocking and calling her name through the door.
‘In the end, she let me in,’ she said. ‘She was bouncing off the walls with excitement. Then I saw the half-packed suitcase on the bed. At first, she wouldn’t tell me what was going on, said Pawel had sworn her to secrecy.’ A line appeared between Justyna’s dark eyebrows. ‘But Nika couldn’t keep a secret to save her own life. In the end she showed me the ring she was wearing on a chain round her neck.’
‘They were engaged?’ asked Janusz, incredulous. An image of Weronika in a G-string posing for the camera, her eyes unfocused, swam before him and he tensed his jaw. Some fiancé, he thought.
Justyna nodded. ‘She was as excited as a little child on Christmas Eve,’ she said, unable to suppress a smile at the memory.
‘Did she say where she was going, where they would be living?’
She shook her head – but judging by the way her gaze slid away from his, he suspected she was lying.
‘She said they’d be leaving London soon. Pawel had some business to finish up, and then they were going back home to get married.’ She popped her eyes. ‘All this, after she’d known him just a few weeks!’
Janusz was touched by Justyna’s concern. She couldn’t be more than five or six years older than Weronika, but it was clear the younger girl brought out the mother hen in her.
‘I tried to talk her out of it,’ she went on. ‘I said, imagine how upset your mama will be when she hears her little girl has run off with some man she barely knows.’
‘But it did no good?’
‘She went a bit quiet,’ recalled Justyna. ‘But then she said Mama would be fine so long as no one cut off her supply of cytrynowka,’ she shot him a look. The sickly lemon wodka was a notorious tipple of street drunks – and alcoholic housewives. ‘Nika told me she would often come home from school and find her lying unconscious on the kitchen floor.’
Apparently, Mama had been little more than a child herself when she’d fallen pregnant with Weronika. The little girl had grown up without a father and the only family apart from her chaotic drunk of a mother had been a distant uncle who visited once in a blue moon.
Poor kid, thought Janusz. It was hardly surprising that after leaving home, she should fall head over heels in love with the first person who showed her any affection – like a baby bird imprinting on whoever feeds it, however ill-advised the love object.
By now, there was standing room only in the bar area, and the crowd was encroaching on the small table where Janusz and Justyna sat. The thump thump of the music, the shouted conversations and the bodies pressing in all around set up a fluttering in Janusz’s stomach. So when the girl said she ought to go, she had an early start at the restaurant the next day, he felt a surge of relief.
He insisted on walking Justyna to her flat, which was a mile away to the west, the other side of Stratford, beyond the River Lea. The route took them through the centre of town, where the music and strident chatter spilling from the lit doorways of pubs and clubs and the clusters of smokers outside suggested the place was just waking up, although it was gone eleven and only a Tuesday. As they passed the entrance to an alleyway beside one pub Janusz heard urgent voices and, through the gloom, saw two men pushing a smaller guy up against the wall. He froze, muscles bunching, but a second later the scene came into focus. The little guy was catatonic with drunkenness, head drooping and limbs floppy, and the other two, weaving erratically themselves, were simply trying to keep their mate upright.
Janusz and Justyna shared a look and walked on. No one would describe Poles as abstemious, but any serious drinking was done at home and public drunkenness was frowned upon. Janusz’s mother, who’d visited London as a child before the war, had always spoken approvingly of the English as a decorous and reserved people, so it was fair to say that his first Friday night out with the guys from the building site had been something of an eye-opener. Still, the greatest compliment you could pay a man back then was to say he could carry his drink, and those who ended the night by falling over or picking a fight were viewed with pitying scorn.
Justyna shared a flat in a tidy-looking low-rise estate run by a housing association. Pausing on the pavement outside, she turned to him, drawing smoke from her cigarette deep into her lungs against the cold. ‘Thanks for the drinks,’ she said.
‘You’re welcome.’ He took a draw on his cigar, then exhaled, blowing his smoke downwind of her. She seemed in no hurry to go in.
‘Look, I really shouldn’t do this,’ she said at last. ‘I promised Nika …’
She pulled a folded slip of paper out of her pocket, and handed it to him.
‘Pawel made her swear not to give their address to anyone. But she wanted me to look out for letters from her mama, forward them on. She knew she could trust me,’ she stared off down the darkened street, ‘… thought she could trust me.’
He glanced at the paper, registering an address in Essex before pocketing it. ‘Listen, Justyna. You are the best friend Weronika has.’ He sought her gaze. ‘She’s probably found out by now that Pawel is no knight in shining armour – maybe she’s wondering how to leave him without too much fuss,’ he said, flexing his knuckles. ‘If that’s how it is, I’ll make sure her wishes are respected.’
She took a step toward him. ‘Be careful,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘I don’t think Pawel is right in the head. Nika must have let slip that I warned her off him, because one day he followed me home, all the way from work,’ her eyes widened. ‘He grabbed me by the arm and went crazy.’ Her lips trembled as she relived the shock of it. ‘He told me if I didn’t keep my fucking nose out, he’d kill me.’
The guy was clearly a psychol, thought Janusz. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told the girl. ‘Guys like him are usually all talk.’
She nodded, not entirely convinced. ‘And Nika said she’d phone me, but I’ve heard nothing,