Copyright

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd in 2015

Copyright © Anya Lipska 2015

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Anya Lipska asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue record of this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008100353

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008100360

Version: 2015-05-12

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Kasia

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Kasia

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Kasia

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Epilogue

Glossary

Notes and Thanks

About the Publisher

For my brothers, Chris and Nick

He prays, but has a devil under the skin

Polish proverb

Prologue

PC Natalie Kershaw gripped the wheel as she steered the armed response vehicle around the Green Man roundabout, the scream of the two-tone scything a path through the rush-hour traffic.

‘Third exit. Left, left,’ said Matt from the passenger seat, sending her a grin. She smiled back, breathing fast, her pulse marking a purposeful beat, yet feeling totally focused. This was what she’d spent eight weeks training for, and from what they’d been told about the shout, it was no false alarm this time – no kid poking a toy gun out of his bedroom window. Her brain noted the comforting cocoon of the body armour flattening her breasts, forcing her to sit upright, and the reassuring pressure of the Glock in its pancake holster against her thigh.

She felt … safe.

‘It’s the Maccy D’s on Leytonstone High Street, right?’ she asked, her voice sounding to her ears as tight and high as the engine of the BMW. She knew where they were going, obviously, but saying it out loud made it feel more real.

The gravelled voice of the Silver Commander came over the radio: ‘Control room to Trojan 3. Latest we have is the suspect is in the toilets. Staff have been instructed to stay clear.’

The Sarge leaned in from the back seat, his face impassive. ‘Pull up beyond the curry house, Natalie,’ he said, as calmly as if they were about to pop in for a biryani. A restless knot of rubberneckers had gathered on the pavement outside the McDonald’s. ‘No borough uniforms,’ he noted, with just the ghost of a sigh. ‘Natalie, you cover the front exit and manage the MOPs, okay?’ Although still conversational, his tone brooked no objection.

‘Sarge.’ She knew her place in the trio: she was the newbie, just a couple of months out of firearms training – still learning the ropes. No problem.

Matt and the Sarge approached the glass door of the McDonald’s at a crabbing run, cradling their weapons, while Kershaw radioed in an update. After signing off, she left the ARV and took a few steps towards the onlookers. ‘Armed police!’ she shouted, one hand on the MP5 carbine slung from her shoulder, the other gesturing south down the high street. ‘Move away now!’

Most of them scurried off sharpish, either at her tone or the sight of the gun. But one guy stood his ground, ignoring her command. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked in that ‘I know my rights’ tone that always made her heart sink.

She threw a look back at the Maccy D’s – wondering if the boys had immobilised the suspect yet. Where the fuck were the local uniforms?

‘Sir, will you just …’ She didn’t finish the sentence. Registered instead the sudden widening of his eyes, fixed over her shoulder. Heard the Sarge bellow ‘Natalie!’ His voice not cool any more.

She spun round. In the car park, jogging towards her from behind a parked van was a young guy. Not very big or threatening to look at. Mousy, you might call him. Except for the thing he whirled in a great flashing arc out to one side. Something that made a rushing noise as it carved a passage through the air.

A giant samurai sword.

One

‘This one is nice, no?’ Kasia leaned over to look at the pricetag. ‘Janek?’

Janusz Kiszka dragged his gaze from the black-denimed curve of his girlfriend’s rear to squint at yet another sofa, no doubt called something like Dipstykk or Kolon by some marketing executive in Stockholm.

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, it’s … nice.’

Tucking a lock of auburn hair behind one ear, Kasia shot him a mock-reproachful look. ‘You’re not taking this seriously, Janek! It’s your apartment we’re talking about here, you know.’

‘Your apartment, too, in a few days’ time,’ he told her, feeling the corner of his mouth tug upward. He and Kasia might have been lovers for almost three years but now, standing on the brink of this new chapter in their lives, he kept experiencing a return of that fizzing, heady feeling that had accompanied the affair’s early days.

Kasia regarded him sideways along her long lovely eyes, a dent in one cheek betraying a fugitive smile, before frowning down at the sofa again. She raked a long black-painted nail along its arm before giving a decisive nod. ‘Tak. I liked the tweedy one but leather is more hard-wearing, which is important with that cat of yours.’

Women, thought Janusz amiably. So … implacably practical. How the hell did men come to be labelled the unromantic sex?

As they queued to pay under the fluorescent glare of the IKEA exit hangar, he glanced over at another couple, also in their forties, in the neighbouring line. The woman looked purposeful, contented, but the guy had the air of someone who’d been shot with a tranquilliser dart before being handcuffed to the overloaded trolley he was steering. The men exchanged a comradely look. It lasted no more than a second but it summed up everything Janusz knew he was about to lose – and gain – by giving up his bachelor lifestyle.

Later, back at his apartment in a Highbury mansion block, Janusz knelt on the living room floor trying to assemble a bedside cabinet, while Kasia tidied around him, her movements quicksilver. She bent to retrieve an ashtray overflowing with cigar butts from under the sofa, wrinkling her nose – after giving up smoking a few weeks earlier she could no longer stand the smell of stale tobacco – before moving to the wide bay window, where she tried to straighten the collapsing ramparts of New Scientist magazines stacked against the radiator.

‘I’ll find another home for them,’ he promised, grinning up at her. She was still looking a little drawn and preoccupied, as she had for the last couple of weeks, but whenever he brought it up she just waved off his concern. He reminded himself that it must be a stressful time for her.

She paused for a moment, gazing out of the window over the soft green ellipse of Highbury Fields, marshalled on its eastern side by a phalanx of Georgian terraces. ‘Such a fantastic location,’ she said. ‘It must be worth a fortune these days. Have you never been tempted to move, buy something bigger a bit further out?’

Janusz had bought the place off his landlord for a song back in the eighties, the deposit hard earned by toil on a dozen building sites. Since then the cars parked around the Fields had grown sleeker and glossier by the year, the windowsills of the houses sprouting boxes of conifers so manicured they looked artificial. Only one of his original neighbours in the block remained – a cantankerous sitting tenant called Ron; the rest were junior investment bankers, or something in branding. Whenever Janusz bumped into one of them, he relished their evident confusion and shock at finding a big Polish guy in a shabby greatcoat, here in their exclusive block.

Abandoning his attempt to locate the elusive lug A, a critical component of the cabinet, he went to join Kasia at the window. Threading his arms around her waist he noticed that the first leaf buds were emerging on the plane tree outside. ‘Nie, kotku,’ he said. ‘Practically all my work is in the East End, and from here I can be there in twenty minutes.’

He was looking forward to playing house with Kasia, especially the novelty of sleeping together every night and waking up next to her, but some things were non-negotiable. He’d be wearing an oak overcoat before he’d consider relocating to some suburban hellhole in Zone 6.

‘Nie, nie, I love it here!’ she said. ‘And only ten minutes to get into the West End!’ She turned her head up to him, eyes wide. ‘We could join the National Film Theatre!’

‘Sure. Why not?’ Janusz smiled to see her excitement. In her youth, Kasia had graduated from Lodz Film School, whose alumni included world class directors like Kieslowski and Wajda, but since Janusz had known her she rarely expressed any interest in film, and if he tried to bring up the subject, her manner seemed to say it was all a piece of a long-lost youthful foolishness.

Taking her hand, his fingers encountered her wedding band. She tugged at it. ‘I can’t get it off,’ she told him, ‘not even with oil.’

He sensed tears at the edge of her voice – most unlike Kasia.

‘I have a bolt cutter, if you want me to …?’

There was a tiny pause, before she said, ‘Okay. But not now. Next time I come, misiu.’

He kissed the nape of her neck, where wisps of hair had escaped the ponytail she’d put it in to do the cleaning. Leaning back into him, she turned her face up to his. Their kiss was just getting interesting when the entryphone buzzer shattered the mood. She arched an enquiring eyebrow.

‘It’s probably Oskar,’ murmured Janusz. ‘We’re going over to his place, to pick up the bathroom tiles.’ Kasia hadn’t asked for many improvements to his admittedly down-at-heel apartment, but on one score she’d been resolute: the vintage avocado bathroom suite and mould-streaked tiles had to go. Women were fussy about things like that.

Thirty seconds later, the barrel-shaped form of Janusz’s lifelong mate Oskar burst through the door. ‘Put your pantyhose on, ladyboy, I’m on a single yellow …’ He stopped in mid-flow. ‘Oh, przepraszam, Kasia, I didn’t know you were here.’ They kissed three times on alternate cheeks in the Polish manner, but – not for the first time – Janusz wondered if he didn’t detect a certain … reserve in Oskar’s body language. Had it always been there and he’d simply not noticed before, or was it a new development?

‘You boys go ahead,’ said Kasia. ‘I’ve got to get back to the nail bar anyway. Saturday afternoons are always busy.’

‘You haven’t eaten anything all day!’ Janusz chided; her lack of appetite was clearly another sign of the strain she was under. ‘Have a couple of pierogi at least, before you go?’

‘No time!’ she said, picking up her coat. ‘I’ll grab something in Stratford.’

‘I could manage a few pierogi,’ offered Oskar, before clocking the meaningful look Janusz sent him. ‘Dobrze. I’ll go and wait in the van, Janek, head off any traffic wardens. They’re like sharks round here.’ And with a lubricious wink at his mate, he disappeared.

Janusz drew Kasia to him by her coat lapels, getting a waft of the cinnamony scent he’d bought her for Christmas. She was tall, for a girl, but the top of her head only came to his nose. ‘Are you sure it’s a good idea to go back to the flat tonight?’ he asked.

‘Tak, why not?’ She lifted one shoulder.

‘Well, you said you’re not sure whether Steve really believes it yet – that you’re leaving?’ His voice darkened. ‘I don’t want him giving you any trouble.’ In the past, during domestic arguments, Kasia’s husband had been known to compensate for the poverty of his vocabulary by resorting to his fists.

‘Don’t worry. I told you, he hasn’t laid a finger on me in years.’ She reached up to set her hands on his shoulders. ‘Listen, I promised I’d stay for his birthday and I won’t go back on that. He says there’s something important he wants my advice on.’

Janusz didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Like what?!’

‘I don’t know – he won’t say. It’s probably just one of his business ideas.’

‘And what if he tries to talk you out of leaving?’ Janusz scowled at the floor, appalled at how needy the words made him sound.

‘Janek, kochanie. He knows I’m moving out Monday evening. I already booked the cab to bring my things. I know I’ve talked about leaving before, but you have to believe me.’ She cupped his jaw in her hand, let her seaweed-green eyes linger on his. ‘This time it’s different.’

After she’d left, he went over to the bay window so he could watch her crossing the Fields. Her figure, while no longer girlish, was still slender, and her brisk and hopeful walk gave her the look of a woman on the cusp of a great adventure. He craned to keep her in sight until the last possible moment before turning away, a lop-sided grin twisting his big jaw.

Had Janusz been able to keep Kasia in view for another twenty or thirty metres he would have seen something else: the outline of a black-clad figure hurrying across the park towards her.

Two

‘I made three and a half grand off the last shipment, and I can barely keep up with the orders!’ Oskar was in high spirits as the Transit van sped off Highbury Corner roundabout. The two men were heading east to Oskar’s lock-up garage, to collect the tiles Kasia had chosen for the bathroom.

Janusz grunted. Importing ceramic tiles from Poland, where they cost a fraction of the London price, was the latest in Oskar’s long line of moneymaking ventures and, even allowing for the inevitable exaggeration, it did sound like it might prove his most lucrative yet.

‘The tile factory’s in Torun, so I’ve been able to see Gosia and the girls twice in the last month.’ Oskar’s round face was flushed with excitement – or perhaps from the half-drunk can of Tyskie sitting in the cup holder between them. ‘I’m thinking I might hire a bigger van for the next run.’

When Janusz and Oskar had left Poland in the eighties, its economy had been flatlining, decimated by decades of Communist rule and the ideological inanities of a state-run economy. Nowadays, the rationing and queues for flour were ancient history, but like so many of their compatriots who’d arrived in the UK more recently, Oskar still couldn’t earn a decent income back home to support himself and his family – wife Gosia and two girls under ten.

‘Kurwa, Janek! I said, does that mate of yours in Hackney still have a Luton van?’ Janusz had been gazing out of the window, lost in thoughts of Kasia. ‘You should see your face!’ crowed Oskar, making loud kissing noises. ‘You look like a schoolgirl just back from her first date!’ Janusz rearranged his face into a scowl but it was too late – Oskar was on a roll. ‘What’s she got you doing next, loverboy, after the new bathroom? New carpets? Flowery curtains maybe? Mind you, that would be right up your street.’

‘If I need any advice on patterns I’ll give you a call,’ growled Janusz, digging in his pocket for his smokes – despite all his attempts to cut down he still got through a tin a day of the small slim cigars he’d smoked for twenty-odd years. ‘Anyway’ – he sent Oskar a broad grin – ‘whatever she wants, it’ll be a small price to pay for having her between my sheets every night of the week.’

Oskar roared with laughter. ‘Don’t tell me! After she moves in, you think it’s going to be pussy on demand?!’ He slapped the steering wheel. ‘You wait, sisterfucker. After a few weeks, she’ll be spending all her time and energy scrubbing the kitchen floor – when she’s not kicking your dupe because the place is a pigsty.’

The wind-up was to be expected, but this all-too-plausible picture triggered a flicker of disquiet in Janusz nonetheless. He hadn’t lived with a woman since his brief and disastrous marriage to Marta back in Communist Poland, a lifetime ago. Was he kidding himself that he could adjust so late in life to the inevitable compromises it would require of him?

‘We’d better grab a few beers before your prison door slams shut,’ said Oskar, draining the contents of his can. ‘I expect you lovebirds will be having a big romantic dinner tonight.’

Janusz wound the window down a few centimetres, tapped out some cigar ash. ‘She’s not moving in till Monday night.’

‘Why not?’ Oskar sounded mystified.

Janusz shifted in his seat. ‘It’s Steve’s fortieth birthday tomorrow. He begged her to stay till then.’

Oskar tapped his fingers on the wheel, fallen uncharacteristically silent.

Janusz studied his mate out of the tail of his eye. They’d first met on national service, a pair of green and gawky nineteen-year-olds, but even now – more than a quarter-century later – Oskar hadn’t got any better at hiding his feelings. He remembered the awkwardness he’d picked up in his body language towards Kasia, back at the apartment.

‘Spit it out, Oskar,’ he sighed.

‘I just don’t want to see you disappointed, Janek,’ he said – a wary expression on his chubby features. ‘After all, she’s talked about leaving him before, hasn’t she? Before some priest or other talked her out of it.’

Janusz fought down a spurt of fury, telling himself that Oskar only had his interests at heart. ‘It’s different this time,’ he said, hearing the pathetic cry of the eternally hopeful lover. Might Oskar be right – was he being a fool to believe her?

It was true that, up until the last few months – despite her clear disillusionment with her husband – Kasia had been adamant on one score: as a devout Catholic the idea of abandoning her marriage was niemozliwe. Impossible.

Steve Fisher was a loudmouthed Cockney who, in two decades of marriage, had never held down a proper job for any length of time. From what Janusz could gather, he was the type who was permanently on the brink of some get-rich-quick scheme or other, none of which ever came to fruition. Then, as Kasia was approaching forty, she suddenly announced she was starting her own business, opening a nail bar with a friend. Perhaps the venture’s subsequent success had given her confidence, or perhaps the milestone of her birthday had forced her to stare down the barrel of another four decades yoked to her useless kutas of a husband. Whatever the reason, a couple of weeks ago she’d indicated to Janusz that if he’d still have her, she was prepared to risk her mortal soul for the chance of earthly happiness.

Janusz threw his spent cigar stub out of the window. ‘She says the pair of them grew up together, reckons she owes him something.’ When Oskar didn’t respond he went on, ‘Listen, kolego, I know Kasia. Once she’s made her mind up about something it would take a thermonuclear device to change it. I can wait a couple more days.’

Oskar heaved a theatrical sigh. ‘It’s your life, Janek. I just never thought you’d go to such extreme lengths to protect your cover story.’

Janusz frowned in incomprehension.

‘Moving in with a woman, just to pretend you’re heterosexual.’

Janusz was spared a further onslaught by a piercing whistled ditty – the unbearably chirpy ringtone of Oskar’s new mobile. While he took the call, Janusz retrieved a crumpled newspaper from the footwell.

It was yesterday’s copy of the Evening Standard, with a front-page headline that screamed: ‘GIRL COP WHO SHOT SWORD MAN CLEARED’. Inside, Janusz found the full story, which covered an inquest into the death of some nutjob who’d gone berserk with a samurai sword in Leytonstone McDonald’s the previous year – an incident which, not surprisingly, had left swordboy with three police bullets in the chest. Janusz dimly recalled there had been a great fuss in the media about it all when the story first broke.

To protect her identity, the female firearms cop who’d shot the guy was referred to solely by her codename, and yet as Janusz read on, it dawned on him that he knew exactly who officer V71 was. Natalie Kershaw. The girl detektyw who’d crossed his path more than once, most recently when she’d investigated the murder of one of his dearest friends – an investigation that had led to her being brutally stabbed. According to the report, V71 was the only female member of the armed response unit based at Walthamstow. Hadn’t she told him, the last time they’d met, eighteen months back, that she was about to become Walthamstow’s first female firearms officer?

The inquest verdict was ‘lawful killing’, but a senior officer at the Met was quoted as saying that V71 would have to undergo ‘extensive psychological assessment’ to decide whether she was fit to return to operational duties.

Janusz closed the paper, a frown corrugating his brow. ‘You remember that girl cop, Natalia?’ he said, after Oskar had hung up.

‘Blondie, you mean? The one who tried to get you arrested once?’

‘Yeah, that’s her. I think she’s the one who shot that guy in Leytonstone, outside McDonald’s, last year.’

‘Naprawde?’ said Oskar. ‘Still, what do they expect, handing guns out to girls? She probably had a row with her boyfriend at breakfast, then some poor kutas looks at her the wrong way.’ Holding the steering wheel steady with his knees, he used both hands to aim an imaginary gun at Janusz. ‘Boum!’

‘Oskar!’ Janusz pressed himself back into his seat as the van veered to the left. ‘Anyway, this guy had it coming – he went for her with a samurai sword.’

‘Kurwa mac!’ Oskar gave an appreciative whistle. ‘The girl’s got bigger jaja than you, kolego!’

‘Yeah, and in any sane country they’d give the girl a medal, but here she’ll probably get a big black mark on her record.’

‘It’s “health and safety gone mad”,’ said Oskar. It was one of his favourite English phrases and one he used often, even when it signally failed to fit the circumstances.

Janusz stared at the front-page headline. The girl might have threatened him with arrest in the past, it was true, but she’d also saved his life once, and he’d grown to respect her uncompromising stance, her determination to nail the bad guys. He wondered if he should call her. And say what, exactly? That shooting the fruitcake had clearly been the right thing to do? As though his opinion on the subject would mean anything to her.

The last time he’d seen her, in a Walthamstow pub, she’d been recovering from the knifing, an attack that he still felt responsible for. He remembered sensing a change in her then, a feeling that beneath her usual tough girl bravado she was as raw as a freshly skinned blister.

Three

‘Perhaps I can turn the question around. Why do you think you’re here?’ The sunlight streaming through the window bounced off the letterbox specs of the lady shrink, making it impossible for PC Natalie Kershaw to make out the expression in her eyes.

Kershaw picked at a loose thread that had escaped the inside seam of her jacket sleeve. ‘Because I shot a paranoid schizophrenic who was about to disembowel me on Leytonstone High Street.’

The shrink didn’t respond, but as Kershaw was already learning, Pamela – or was it Paula? – had the disconcerting ability to fill even her silences with meaning. She risked a sideways glance at the wall clock: barely twenty minutes into her first session of psych assessment and already she felt like chewing her own arm off. In the eleven months since she’d shot Kyle Furnell, every tiny detail of her actions on that day had already been picked apart, first by internal investigators, then by counsel at the inquest – and now she had to go through it all over again. She swallowed a sigh, hearing again her old Sarge and confidant, DS ‘Streaky’ Bacon, telling her to play the game and get it over with so she could get back to operational duties.

‘I totally understand it’s a big deal when somebody gets shot,’ said Kershaw, trying for a more conciliatory tone. ‘But like I told everyone from the start, when I pulled the trigger, I honestly believed there was an immediate threat to my life.’

Pamela/Paula bestowed a half-smile of what could be encouragement but still said nothing.

Christ on a bike.

‘The inquest did exonerate me,’ Kershaw went on, feeling sweat prickle on her scalp – it was stifling in here. ‘The coroner said it was wholly understandable, in the circumstances, for me to shoot him.’ She remembered his summing-up, and how he’d described Furnell as a ‘profoundly disturbed young man’. He’d gone on to remind the jury what Furnell had ingested that day, in the hours leading up to his fateful realisation that the staff at Leytonstone Maccy D’s were secret members of a cult bent on eliminating the citizens of E11 – presumably by poisoning their Chicken McNuggets. The list had included Temazepam, Ketamine, a four-pack of Special Brew and a bottle of Night Nurse, the last item prompting a few titters from the public benches. On hearing the coroner’s words, a great wave of relief had engulfed Kershaw as she sensed which way the verdict would go.

When she’d watched the TV coverage of the inquest at home that night, well on her way through the evening’s first bottle of red wine, it had stirred more complex emotions. The family’s solicitor – all sharp suit and professional outrage – did most of the talking on the court steps after the verdict, but it was the figure standing alongside him whom Kershaw’s eyes kept being drawn back to. Furnell’s mum.

Tanya Furnell was a shapeless lump of a woman in a shabby fake fur jacket with badly dyed red hair. She looked nearer fifty than her actual age of thirty-eight – and yet she held herself ramrod-straight on those steps, her expression defiant yet dignified. When the reporter asked for her response to the verdict, she said that all she’d ever wanted was some word of regret from the Met about the way her son had died. Dream on, Kershaw had thought, not unsympathetically. That just wasn’t gonna happen – not after the Met had won the case.

Almost a year on, Kershaw could barely remember the shooting itself beyond a series of blurred freeze-frame images, but for some reason, the look on Tanya Furnell’s face in the news report – that had burned itself indelibly into her memory.

She pulled at the errant thread on her sleeve again, before snapping it clean off.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable taking your jacket off?’ asked the shrink.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Kershaw bared her teeth in a facsimile of a grin. She’d never been on the wrong end of an interrogation before and she wasn’t enjoying the experience.

The therapist checked something in the file she had open on her knee. ‘The coroner did also say, didn’t he, that a more experienced officer would probably have reached for their Taser, rather than the, um …’

‘Glock 17.’

Oops. Now she was looking at Kershaw like she just said something really interesting.

‘And the other weapon you were carrying?’

‘A Heckler and Koch MP5.’

‘How would you describe that to a lay person?’

Kershaw shrugged, looked at the floor. ‘It’s a 9mm semi-automatic carbine, set to single fire.’

‘Carrying lethal weapons like that, I’d imagine it must give you a great feeling of power?’

‘Not really. It’s not like we go out planning to use them.’

The shrink’s face was arranged in a caring expression but behind the glasses, her gaze was unblinking. ‘It would be understandable though, to imagine shooting someone who was about to do you great harm.’

‘Well I never have,’ she lied.

‘Let’s go back a bit, to when you first applied to become an Authorised Firearms Officer.’ Pamela/Paula looked down at the file on her lap. ‘I’m sure it must have crossed your mind that being armed might have saved you from the very serious assault you’d suffered, just a few months earlier?’

Kershaw froze, her throat tightening. The cry of a seagull. The sight of the Thames far below, through a plate glass window. A bloody handprint on white paint. Mentally batting away the other images, she gripped the armrests of her chair, fighting the sudden swoop of vertigo.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ she said, abandoning all efforts to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘It had nothing to do with my decision to go into SCO19!’

Paula – yes, Paula, that was her name – fell silent again, but her gaze flickered down, just for a millisecond. Kershaw realised that her right hand had gone to her side, and was cradling the spot where she’d been stabbed. Feeling the warmth of her skin through her shirt, she pictured the line of stitches: they looked like the backbone of a swordfish, fading to silver now but still there to greet her every time she caught an unwitting glimpse of herself naked in the mirror. The place where her spleen had once nestled, thinking itself safe behind the bones of her ribcage; the place where sometimes she’d swear she could still feel an … absence.

She remembered what Streaky had drummed into her, years ago when she’d started in CID, his golden rule when interrogating suspects. Take control.

She cleared her throat. ‘If I could ask a question?’

Paula nodded.

‘I appreciate that it’s important to assess an AFO after there’s been … a fatal shooting,’ she said, choosing her words uber-carefully, ‘but I’d be really grateful if you could give me an idea of how long you expect … all this to take? It’s just, well, it cost a shedload of taxpayers’ money to train me up as a firearms officer and I think it’s my responsibility to get back to work as quickly as possible.’

Paula gave her a long, intent look. ‘I think your sense of responsibility is to be admired.’ Kershaw scanned her expression, but couldn’t find any sarcasm there. ‘You’re an intelligent woman, Natalie, so I’ll tell you frankly what I think. In my view, it was … unusual, to say the least, that you were accepted for firearms training so soon after suffering such a serious assault. It makes the process we have to go through now a more complex and potentially lengthy one. Because it’s my responsibility to ensure that officers are not returned to firearms duty unless I am one hundred per cent sure it is safe and prudent to do so.’

Smiling at Kershaw, she closed the file on her knee. ‘Time’s up for today. Please book another appointment at reception on your way out.’

As the door clicked shut behind her, Kershaw was struck by an infuriating realisation. For the entirety of their forty-five-minute encounter, it had been the shrink, and not her, who’d been in complete control.

Four

On Monday morning, as Janusz climbed the long up-escalator at Wanstead tube – a station so far east on the Central line it could make your ears bleed – he reflected that the new contract with the insurance company couldn’t have come at a better time.

His work as a private investigator, which largely involved chasing bad debts and missing persons for clients from East London’s Polish community, tended to follow the feast-or-famine model. Most years, it produced more than enough for a single man to live on, but with Kasia moving in he needed something more solidne – even if she was a successful businesswoman in her own right. Or perhaps because she was, he allowed, with a wry grin. An old-fashioned outlook perhaps, but that was how he’d been brought up – and at his age he wasn’t likely to suddenly come over all metrosexual.

Then there was Bobek, his son back in Poland, to think about. The boy might have been fathered in a single misjudged night of reunion with ex-wife Marta, but from the moment Janusz had laid eyes on the shockingly vulnerable scrap of humanity in the maternity ward crib, he’d loved him beyond reason. He made it a point of principle never to miss a single month’s maintenance cheque, even when times had been tough. And now Bobek was fifteen, would be sixteen in a couple of months – Mother of God! Incredible to think he was almost a man – there would be new expenses, university fees for one, to think about.

Five minutes’ walk from the tube, Janusz found the place he was looking for – the St Francis of Assisi Residential Home. Even with half the facade obscured by a lattice of builders’ scaffolding, the place was an imposing chunk of nineteenth-century Gothic, its pillared entrance so reminiscent of a church that Janusz had to check an impulse to make the sign of the cross as he stepped over the threshold. Having braced himself for the familiar undernote of old piss and Dettol he’d encountered in old people’s homes, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the only smell was the lavender whiff of furniture polish. Sure, the faded floral carpet and striped wallpaper hadn’t been in fashion since the eighties, but the double height lobby bisected by an old oak staircase made the place feel pleasingly airy and bright.

‘I have an appointment to see Mr Raczynski,’ Janusz told the apricot-cheeked girl on reception. ‘On behalf of Haven Insurance.’ She was no more than twenty, and clearly Polish, judging by her accent – not to mention a level of grooming rarely seen among English girls of that age. She started dialling a number but before she’d even finished, Janusz heard a gravelly voice close by his ear.

‘I just saw Wojtek going into the conservatory, Beata – why don’t I take our guest through?’

Janusz turned to see the beaky profile of an elderly man, tall in spite of his advanced age, if somewhat stooped.

Beata nodded, smiling. ‘Dziekuje bardzo, Panie Kasparek.’

‘English, please, Beata, English.’ As the old guy wagged a skinny finger at her, the tableau formed by the pair of them put Janusz in mind of some medieval engraving – Death warning Youth of the brevity of Life, perhaps.

He turned his gaze on Janusz – eyes dark as a sparrow’s and alive with intelligence – and in a sibilant whisper that could have been heard fifty metres away told him, ‘Integration. That’s the way to get on. No point coming to London and behaving like you’re still in fucking Poznan.’

Janusz grinned. ‘I agree.’ He put out his hand. ‘Janusz Kiszka. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

‘I’m forgetting my manners. Stefan Kasparek. Enchanté.’ The old man’s hand felt bony but his grip was a match for Janusz’s meaty fist, nonetheless. ‘You’ll need a guide – I’m afraid the place is an absolute rabbit warren.’ His English sounded unmistakably upper class, with only the trace of a Polish accent, and he was well turned out in a tweed jacket and tie, although Janusz couldn’t help noticing the worn elbows of the jacket, the shirt collar fraying at the edges.

‘Onward,’ said Kasparek. He grasped the younger man’s arm with the unembarrassed pragmatism of the old and they set out, Janusz adjusting his step to his companion’s determined – if somewhat lurching – gait. ‘Lost the kneecap, to a Boche sniper, in ’44,’ said Stefan, succinctly. ‘The son of a whore.’

Along the way, they encountered several residents making their dogged way to and fro, Stefan handing out greetings and advice like some cheerful early pontiff dispensing indulgences. ‘Bohuslaw!’ he cried, spying a shuffling bald man with a pronounced pot belly. ‘I’m going to the bookmakers later, if you’d like me to place a wager for you?’ Bohuslaw raised a shaky thumbs-up. ‘Used to shag anything that moved,’ Stefan confided, in his penetrating sotto voce, once he’d passed. ‘But now he’s down to one testicle, he sticks to the four-legged fillies.’

‘Is everyone here Polish?’ Janusz asked.

‘No, no,’ Stefan shook his head, ‘there’s a good few Irish and English here, too. Some Catholic do-gooder started the place back in the eighties, so there tend to be a lot of left-footers, but I’m reliably informed that a belief in the Virgin Birth isn’t compulsory.’

At a set of French doors, he paused to kiss the hand of an etiolated woman, who must have been a great beauty in her youth. Now, her well-cut frock seemed to mock her flat chest and wasted flanks. She smiled vaguely, in another world, until Stefan stooped to whisper something in her ear, making her laugh and returning the ghost of a blush to her once-pretty cheeks.

‘You should see pictures of her as a girl,’ sighed Stefan. ‘She’d have given Maureen O’Hara a run for her money.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Janusz. ‘You seem to know everyone. Have you been here long?’

‘Oh for ever,’ said Stefan with a dismissive wave. ‘As billets go, it’s not bad – but there’s no time off for good behaviour and when you do leave, it’s a one-way voyage to the boneyard.’ He pronounced ‘voyage’ in the French way.

In the conservatory, Stefan steered him to a rattan sofa overlooking the garden where a chubby man in his eighties sat eating biscuits, a mug of tea in his hand. ‘Ah, here he is,’ said Stefan. ‘Wojtek! You have a visitor, you lucky dog.’

After Stefan’s acerbic intelligence, Janusz found the interview uphill work. Wojtek Raczynski was a jolly soul, a little like a clean-shaven Father Christmas, but all too easily sidetracked onto the subject of his great-grandchildren, who he believed were learning okropne habits – swearing and cheeking their elders – from their comprehensive school in Leyton.

According to Tomek Morski, Janusz’s contact at Haven Insurance, the firm paid Wojtek a £25,000 annual pension, funded by an annuity he’d bought some twelve years earlier, and since they’d be shelling out till he dropped off the twig, they wanted to make sure he hadn’t done so already. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for family members to ‘forget’ to tell the insurance company to halt payments after their loved one had departed this life.

Janusz had been hired to run spot checks on a random selection of their Polish-speaking annuitants: with getting on for a million Poles in the UK, there was a growing demand for investigators who spoke the language and had a nose for anything fishy. As much as it grieved him to admit it, the scale of the recent influx of his compatriots had inevitably brought with it a number of scam artists and criminals. According to Tomek, if Janusz did a good job on this first round of work for them, he’d be up for a slice of the insurance fraud pie – fake whiplash claims, staged car accidents, and the like – cases whose complexity could make them highly lucrative.

Wojtek’s case promised to be child’s play by comparison. He was demonstrably alive and – judging by the number of biscuits he demolished during their half-hour interview – in robust health for a man of eighty-eight. The only hitch was that Janusz needed to see photographic ID to confirm beyond doubt that Wojtek was who he said he was – but he didn’t have anything to hand. Janusz arranged to return to check the old boy’s passport, which his daughter looked after for him, in a few days’ time.

Half an hour later, Janusz emerged between the Corinthian columns that framed the front porch into a surprisingly spring-like March day, with a powerfully positive impression of life at St Francis. He’d always thought he’d rather die than go into an old people’s home, but he had to admit that seeing out your final days at a place like this one mightn’t be the ordeal he’d feared, after all.

He’d just reached the street and was about to light a cigar when he heard a voice behind him calling his name. It was Stefan, one skinny arm raised as though hailing a taxi, the other leaning on a walking stick.

‘What a splendid day!’ he said, on reaching Janusz. ‘Walk with me to the High Street,’ he added, brandishing his stick like a battle standard. Suppressing a smile at the old boy’s imperious manner, Janusz fell into step alongside him.

At the corner of the High Street, he turned to bid Stefan farewell, but the old guy said, ‘Let me buy you a cup of tea. It isn’t often I get the opportunity to converse with someone still in possession of a full set of marbles.’

Janusz barely paused before bowing his head in acceptance: he wasn’t in a rush, and anyway, he enjoyed the company of old people. It wasn’t far to what was clearly Stefan’s regular café, judging by the effusive welcome he received from the Turkish guys behind the counter.

‘When I first came to London, in ’45, all the greasy spoons were run by Eyeties,’ said Stefan, in a whisper loud enough to turn heads as they made for a window table. ‘Now, it’s Turks. Next year, who knows!’ His chuckle sounded like a rusted iron door being wrenched open.

Sitting opposite each other, Janusz got his first proper look at his companion. Age had sculpted what remained of the flesh on Stefan’s face into dramatic folds and fissures, but he still had a luxuriant head of white hair, swept back from a pronounced widow’s peak in a style that had last enjoyed popularity in the fifties or early sixties. And yet there was something about his darting gaze and ever-changing expression that gave him an air of irrepressible youth, making it hard for Janusz to guess his age. Late seventies, perhaps?

The bird-like eyes caught Janusz’s gaze. ‘You’re wondering how old I am’ – an age-spotted hand waved away his polite murmur of protest – ‘Don’t worry. I’m used to it. Paradoxically, I find it’s always the young who are the most obsessed with age.’

He poured a stream of sugar into his black tea – Janusz noting, approvingly, that his commitment to integration stopped short of polluting the brew with milk – and stirred it briskly. ‘I was born in Lwow, which I believe the Ukrainians now call Lviv – in 1923.’

Kurwa! Janusz did the sums: the old boy must be ninety. He appeared in astonishingly good shape for his age – as well as being sharp as a tack. ‘You don’t look it,’ he said; the automatic response to learning the age of anyone over thirty, although this time, sincerely meant.

Stefan straightened his back. ‘My father lived to 101, God Rest his Soul. Never missed a day in his vegetable garden, and dropped dead hoeing the asparagus bed.’

‘So … were you in Lwow when the Russians invaded?’

‘Indeed I was. The tanks arrived the day after my seventeenth birthday. As a boy scout, I naturally took part in the defence of the city – until the generals kapitulowali.’ It was the first time he’d slipped into Polish, as if such a shameful event could only properly be named in their mother tongue.

The waiter delivered Stefan’s bacon sandwich but instead of starting to eat, he lifted off the top layer of bread and set it aside.

‘I ended up in Kolyma, in the camps, mining gold for Stalin.’ As Stefan talked, he retrieved a plastic bag from his breast pocket, and produced a pair of nail scissors, before starting to snip the fatty rind from a rasher, apparently oblivious to Janusz’s mystified look. ‘Mining!’ he chuckled. ‘That’s a fancy word for hacking lumps out of permafrost with a fucking pickaxe.’

After dropping the spiral of bacon rind into his plastic bag, he was just starting surgery on a second rasher when he noticed Janusz’s expression. ‘I have to watch my figure, you know,’ he said, patting his trim midriff. ‘The birdies are the beneficiaries. Waste not, want not – Kolyma taught me that.’

Once the bacon had been denuded of all its fat, Stefan cleaned his scissors on a paper napkin, continuing in a matter of fact tone, ‘It was minus 50 the first winter. Men died like snowflakes on a hot stove. I was young. I survived.’ Bracing his shoulders, he took a surprisingly large bite of his sandwich.

‘How long were you there?’

Stefan took his time finishing his mouthful, before dabbing his lips with a napkin. ‘They let me out in ’42 to join Anders’ Army – the Allies were desperate for young men by that time. So I exchanged Siberia for la bella Italia.’

‘You fought in Italy?’ Janusz was impressed: General Anders’ Second Polish Corps had played a decisive role in the Allied push through Italy, earning renown for their bravery at the Battle of Monte Cassino. ‘Yes. That was where I mislaid my kneecap, just outside Ancona.’

Janusz struggled to think of something to say that wouldn’t be a platitude: he always felt overawed to hear of the bravery and sacrifice made by the wartime generation of his fellow Poles. Stefan would have grown up under the Second Republic, when Poland had been one of the great European powers – until its invasion by the Nazis from one side, and the Red Army from the other. Then, to have survived Kolyma – the most brutal place in the entire gulag, graveyard to hundreds of thousands of Poles and countless other ‘enemies of socialism’ – to fight as an Allied soldier … and for what? To see America and Britain deliver his country into the arms of Stalin and decades of Soviet rule.

Stefan was frowning down at his stick-like wrists as if they belonged to someone else. ‘I was built like a bull, then, though you wouldn’t believe it now.’ Suddenly he flapped his free hand. ‘Anyway, that’s all ancient history, old men’s war stories. What about you? I take it you’re some kind of insurance investigator?’

Janusz paused. Put like that, he wasn’t at all sure he liked the sound of his new role. Private investigator was one thing, ‘insurance investigator’ summoned up something more corporate and somehow less … honorowy – especially when measured alongside Stefan’s life. He realised he felt something close to envy for the old man’s generation. He would never experience an existential fight, never be part of a band of brothers. He remembered something someone had once said on the subject that had always stuck in his mind: ‘War exists so that men can experience unconditional love.’

He laid out the bare bones of what he was doing for Haven – avoiding any confidential details – while making it plain that most of his work as a private investigator was carried out not for corporations but on behalf of fellow Poles.

The opening bars of a Chopin polka sounded from Stefan’s pocket. Setting down his sandwich, he pulled out an iPhone – Janusz was amused to see it was the latest model – and using a stylus device, tapped in his passcode.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, squinting at the screen, ‘I’m playing chess with someone in Kiev and the bastard has just threatened my queen.’

While Stefan decided his next move, Janusz took the opportunity to check his own phone. He wanted to find out what time Kasia would be arriving at the flat with her stuff that evening, but the two texts he’d sent since they parted on Saturday had so far gone unanswered.

Still nothing. There was, however, a missed call from Barbara, her partner in the nail bar.

‘Janek,’ she said, her voice strung as tight as piano wire. ‘Please call me the minute you get this. It’s urgent.’

Five

Kershaw swiped her card at the entrance of the SCO19 office, trying to ignore the sour churning in her gut – which wasn’t entirely down to the bottle of Shiraz followed by Metaxa chasers she’d put away the previous night while watching some forgettable DVD box-set.

Throughout the long months of the internal inquiry, then the inquest, she’d convinced herself that once she’d been exonerated – and she’d never seriously considered the alternative – she’d be out on shouts within a few weeks. Yesterday’s session with the shrink had upended a bucket of cold water over that idea. She cursed her own naivety: she should have known they’d make her jump through hoops before she got back her firearms authorisation – if only for the benefit of the media.

‘Here she is,’ said a friendly voice. It was Matt, her fellow crewmate in the ARV on the day that Kyle Furnell had got shot. He set a mug of tea down on her desk. ‘Saw you parking up, so I made you a brew.’

‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Matt,’ she said, raising a quizzical eyebrow. ‘You’re not working up to a proposal of marriage, are you?’

He pretended to consider the idea, before shaking his head. ‘Nah. No offence, Nat, but I’ve set my heart on having kids who’ll grow up bigger than hobbits.’

With the routine hostilities out of the way, Matt sat down at his desk, opposite hers. ‘You all right?’ he asked – concern softening his features. She pulled a half shrug, half nod. ‘You did get my message, after the inquest?’

‘Yeah, thanks for that, Matt. Sorry I didn’t reply. I decided to have a quiet weekend, you know, after all the hoo-hah last week.’ She’d almost taken Matt up on his suggestion of a few jars down the local to celebrate the result, but after seeing the news report with Kyle Furnell’s mum, she just hadn’t felt like it.

He nodded. ‘I can imagine. I just wanted you to know that everyone here was made up for you, after the coroner gave you the all-clear?’

‘Ah, bless them,’ she said. A year ago, after the shooting, when she’d got back to the unit, all the guys had made a point of coming over to tell her they’d have done exactly the same thing in her situation. Well, nearly all the guys. ‘What about Lee Carver?’ she asked, eyebrows raised. They both knew there would be a few in SCO19 who’d be revelling in her recent troubles, older guys who still had a visceral reaction to the idea of a woman carrying – aka armed. Lee Carver, a firearms training instructor in his fifties, was one of them.

‘Well, maybe not him.’ Matt sank his head into his shoulders and deepened his voice to an inarticulate growl. ‘The only thing I want to see a female carrying is my dinner – on a fucking tray.’

They both laughed – but Kershaw’s heart wasn’t really in it.

During her first week of firearms training, Carver had more or less blanked her – pointedly avoiding eye contact and only addressing her when it was absolutely necessary. Then, out on the range one day, just as she was lining up on a target, he’d dropped to a crouch alongside her. ‘Help me out would you, Kershaw?’ he murmured close by her ear, all friendly curiosity.

‘Yes, Skipper?’ Men like Carver loved being called Skipper.

‘You are a woman, right?’ He let his eyes flick down to her breasts, once – as if they puzzled him.

‘Yes, Skipper.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ She could still see his hot blue eyes, inches from her face, and smell the gusts of his notoriously rank breath. ‘So what exactly are you doing here – on my fucking range?’

Pretty much everyone on the course – all of them guys her age or a few years older – thought Carver was a knuckle-dragging gobshite. And if Kershaw had reported his outburst, he’d have been chin-deep in shit. But that wasn’t her way: never had been, in all the four and a half years she’d been in the Job. No. Her response was to memorise the instruction manual and use every second of the target practice on offer, as well as doubling the hours she spent in the gym. Marksmanship was only half the story: you had to be superfit, too, especially when it came to the fiendish ‘run and shoot’ exercise. Sprint for 100 metres, adopt shoot position shouted by instructor, one shot at target. Miss and you fail. Exceed 45 seconds and you fail.

After five or six weeks, Kershaw was hitting body mass on the bad-guy-shaped target, 46, sometimes 48, times out of a possible 50.

By the last day, of the sixteen who’d started, only Kershaw and seven others had gone the distance and qualified – and she’d risen to become the second best shooter of her intake. Later, when everyone was down the local celebrating, she’d picked her moment to collar Lee Carver at the bar. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, Skipper,’ she said, smiling up at him, ‘I probably would have packed it in after the first week.’ He stared down at her, confusion and three pints of Stella narrowing his eyes. ‘So … I got you a thank-you pressie,’ she said, handing him a Boots bag. Left him staring at a bottle of Listerine.

The thought of Lee Carver and his kind getting off on her current predicament did have one positive, though: it iron-plated her resolve to get her firearms authorisation back and prove them all wrong.

Taking a gulp of tea, Kershaw started to go through her email inbox, but found her thoughts drifting back to the day she’d qualified, almost a year ago. At the moment the chief instructor had handed her the little red book that was her authorisation to carry, she’d fizzed like a freshly popped bottle of champagne. But on the heels of the elation came a deep sadness. She’d convinced herself, wrongly as it turned out, that such a big life landmark would bring the return of something she had lost.

Because the worst legacy of getting stabbed hadn’t been the loss of her spleen, but the disappearance of something she valued far more: her dad’s voice. After he’d died of cancer nearly five years ago, she would still hear him popping into her head with one of his sayings or daft gags – his East End drawl, always on the brink of a chuckle, sounding as clear and real as if he was standing next to her. He usually appeared just when she most needed a word of consolation or encouragement – or even, now and again, a telling-off.

But ever since the stabbing – even at the moment she’d won her spurs as a firearms officer – silence. Just when she’d needed him most, his voice had disappeared. Like Scotch mist.

‘Nat? Are you all right?’

Looking up to find Matt’s worried eyes on her, she realised she must have said the phrase – one of her dad’s – out loud.

‘Sorry. Must be going bonkers.’

‘Good job you’re seeing a shrink, then.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘How’s that working out for you by the way?’

‘Like having a root canal and a bikini wax at the same time.’

The phone on her desk trilled. After a brief exchange she hung up, blowing out an exasperated breath.

‘What’s up?’ asked Matt.

‘Guess what I’m gonna be doing the rest of the day?’

Matt shrugged.

‘Cleaning weapons in the armoury. Five years as a cop, two as a detective, all that grief getting my ticket to carry? And now I’ve literally been demoted to oily rag.’

Six

The nail bar business that Kasia co-owned with Barbara stood in one of the farthest reaches of Stratford’s old shopping centre. Built in the early seventies, when poured concrete was the building material of choice for the trend-conscious architect, the mall squatted sulkily in the midst of Stratford’s one-way system, ugly sister to the glittering new towers of Westfield Stratford City across the way.

In fact, Janusz had always preferred the older, shabbier development over the flashy new pretender. For starters, it still housed an old-fashioned market on weekdays that – alongside the familiar ranks of anaemic Dutch tomatoes and golden delicious – now also boasted a Lithuanian stall selling passable kielbasa and decent pickles.

As he pushed open the door of Elegant Nailz, he was hit by a vaporous wave of solvent that made his eyes water. The place was more of a glorified kiosk than a proper shop, the original premises having been split down the middle to create two shop fronts, the other housing a shoe repairers run by a family from Hong Kong. There was barely enough room for three nail tables, but Kasia and Barbara did a brisk enough trade in acrylic and gel extensions to keep them busy past 7 p.m. most evenings.

Barbara was working on the nails of a pretty black girl with long straightened hair. Turning on the tabletop fan, she left her client drying her talons under the air stream and came over to the minuscule reception desk, to embrace him.

‘I kept getting your voicemail,’ he said. ‘So I came straight over. What’s up?’

‘Have you heard anything from Kasia?’ Her anxious eyes scanned his face.

‘Nie. Not for a couple of days.’ Seeing Barbara’s pretty features crumple at his response, Janusz felt a physical sense of dread – as if someone just blasted his gut full of quick-setting cement.

‘I haven’t seen her since Saturday,’ Barbara went on. ‘When she didn’t turn up this morning I wasn’t too worried – Monday mornings are always quiet so she often works from home on the website, or following up email queries. You know me, I am a katastrofa with computers. But she missed three appointments this afternoon and her phone is going straight to voicemail – Kasia’s never done that before.’

After disgorging this rush of information, Barbara glanced over her shoulder and managed a smile at the black girl, still playing an invisible piano beneath the fan dryer. The girl returned the smile – she could see there was some drama unfolding between nail-lady and the big guy in the old-school army-style coat but since they were speaking Polish there was very little point in trying to earwig on their conversation.

Seeing how jittery Barbara was, Janusz took her hands in his and spoke quietly, reassuringly. ‘Dobrze. So she came in on Saturday afternoon, right?’ – as he said it, he saw again Kasia trotting across Highbury Fields, her hair glinting in the sunshine.

‘Tak. Around 4 p.m., in time for the late appointments. She left at seven.’

‘And you’ve had no contact since then?’ He kept his voice low and his eyes locked on hers.

‘Zero.’

‘And … Steve?’

‘I can’t raise him either.’ Barbara’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘It’s as if they both dropped off the face of the earth.’

‘I am sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.’ Janusz dredged up a comforting grin. ‘Maybe she’s sick and Steve was meant to call you to let you know. You know what he’s like.’

She looked doubtful.

‘Look, I’m going to head over to the flat,’ he said. ‘Just to make sure everything’s okay.’

‘Dobrze,’ she sighed, twisting a bangle on her wrist. ‘I hope it’s the right thing to do.’ She met his gaze, before looking away, embarrassed. ‘You might run into Steve.’ As Kasia’s closest friend, Barbara knew all about their three-year affair, and – no doubt – the fact she was finally leaving Steve.

Barbara took a breath and for a moment seemed on the brink of saying more, but instead gave a tiny shake of her head. ‘Just be careful.’

He patted her hand. ‘Don’t you worry, Barbara, I can handle Steve.’

Twenty minutes later, he was approaching the Victorian terrace within sight of the Olympic stadium where Kasia and Steve lived, wondering what he’d say if he did encounter her husband. Their paths had crossed once before, after Kasia had turned up to meet Janusz sporting a black eye that make-up couldn’t quite conceal. After Janusz had coaxed out of her what had happened, he’d paid Steve a surprise visit, pretending to be Kasia’s cousin over from Poland, and given the chuj a taste of what it felt like to be on the wrong end of a fist. It seemed the encounter had achieved the intended effect – according to Kasia, he’d never raised his hand to her again.

It suddenly occurred to him that Kasia’s impending departure might have changed that. Was Kasia lying in a darkened room, ashamed to go out, wearing the souvenirs of her husband’s ungovernable rage? As that image rose before him, Janusz knocked on the front door of their maisonette louder than was really necessary. Far from being worried about bumping into Steve, he was starting to look forward to it.

When, after a second knock, it was clear that there was nobody home, Janusz pulled out the bump key he always carried with him. Twenty seconds of jiggling later and he was inside.

‘Kasia?’ he tried. ‘Steve?’ Nothing.

It was strange to be back here. The woodwork had been painted in one of those dreary heritage colours that Kasia liked – and she’d probably done the graft, too, no doubt while Steve was down the pub talking up his latest moneymaking scheme.

The place was as clean as a teardrop – even the skirting boards betrayed not a speck of dust – and the citrus smell of cleaning product sang in the air. The only sound was the discreet burble of the fridge freezer in the kitchen, where he found nothing out of place but for a single upended coffee cup in a rack on the draining board. He checked the fridge, which held a cling-filmed plateful of pierogi, a pint of fresh milk missing an inch, and a chiller drawer full of plastic wrapped vegetables, with use-by dates a couple of days hence.

So far, his professionalism had allowed Janusz to case the joint as if this were just another investigation, but he was finding it hard to fight down a yawing sensation in the pit of his stomach. Where was Kasia? And Steve? What the fuck was going on?

He realised he’d been putting off checking the bedroom till last. Grow up, he growled to himself as he opened the door.

Still, seeing the double bed, it was hard not to visualise Kasia lying there beside her husband. Janusz shut his eyes, trying to retrieve something she had said to him one night, early on in their relationship. How had she put it? Something like ‘the physical side of the marriage died a long time ago’.

The bedside tables bore no sign of any of the paraphernalia of illness – no water glass, no box of tissues. He tried the drawers of one, finding nothing more exciting than a Bible in Polish, a pair of women’s sunglasses he recognised as Kasia’s and a few female bits and bobs. Then he tried Steve’s side. Some survival book by an ex-SAS man, a few old lottery scratch cards (all losers – just like the fucker who bought them, he thought savagely) and a tatty photo of Kasia and Steve holding ice-cream cones, which looked like it had been taken ages ago, on holiday somewhere.

They were both smiling, and Kasia’s hair was blonde, as it had been when he’d first met her. Seeing the sprinkle of youthful freckles across her nose he felt a tugging sensation in his chest. Folding the picture carefully so that Steve disappeared, he pocketed it, before starting to leaf through the SAS survival guide, a look of scorn growing on his face. A look that dissolved at what he found, tucked towards the back of the book.

It was a printout of a booking confirmation made out to Steven Fisher, for two seats on flight AM47 from Luton to Alicante. The second passenger name: Kasia Fisher. Janusz checked the departure details. The flight had left at 11.30 that morning.

Oskar paused in the act of conveying a forkload of gulasz to his mouth. ‘It’s simple science, Janek. As long as you eat according to your blood group, the excess weight will just fall off naturally!’

The two friends were having a late lunch in their favourite café, the Polska Kuchnia in Maryland, and Oskar was keen to proselytise about his latest fad diet.

‘You see. This is protein.’ Oskar gestured towards his plate with a professorial air. ‘So being blood type B, I can eat as much of it as I like.’ There was a moment’s silence while he dispatched the forkful, following it down with a swallow of beer that made his throat bulge.

‘Because of your blood group.’

‘Dobrze. Type B dates from the time when man was nomadic, so I can eat most things and still lose weight.’ He spoke with the modesty of a man disinclined to boast of his good fortune.

‘Right. And this is all based on your ancestors having a varied diet – because they travelled around a lot.’

If Oskar detected any sarcasm, he ignored it. ‘That’s right. I just have to avoid hydrocarbons.’

‘Carbohydrates.’

‘Tak, like I said.’

Watching Oskar take a glug of beer, Janusz toyed with the idea of explaining nutrition to him, or indeed the fundamentals of evolution, but he knew he’d only be doing it to put off the moment when he’d have to broach the Kasia situation. Pushing aside the meal he had barely touched, he told him the news.

‘Kurwa mac, Janek!’ Oskar wiped his mouth with a balled napkin. ‘You should have said before!’

Janusz felt his chest tighten at the distress on his mate’s chubby face. He might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but since Janusz’s mother and father died, many years ago, Oskar was the closest thing to family he had.

‘I know how it looks,’ said Janusz. ‘But I don’t believe for one minute she’s gone off to Spain with Steve.’

‘But what about the flights?’

‘I don’t think she went on any flight. Her favourite sunglasses were still in the flat. Anyway, she’s not the type who’d leave a fridgeful of food to rot.’

Oskar popped another can of Tyskie, his face furrowed, and topped up their glasses, avoiding Janusz’s eyes. ‘You don’t think … Is it not possible …’

‘That she had second thoughts about moving in with me?’ Janusz growled. ‘No. I mean, of course it’s possible. But I know there’s no way she’d go without telling me – she’s not a coward. And she wouldn’t leave Barbara hanging like that, either.’

‘So what do you think happened, Janek?’

Janusz stared at the ceiling, trying to visualise for the hundredth time what might have happened between Saturday afternoon, when Kasia had left his apartment, and now.

‘I think he’s taken her somewhere.’ Voicing this unwelcome thought, he recalled how preoccupied she’d seemed recently. Had she been frightened – despite all her denials – about what Steve might be driven to do as her departure became a reality?

‘You mean taken against her will?’ asked Oskar, eyes wide.

‘Tak. I think he tricked her into going somewhere out of town with him. I don’t know – told her he’d booked something to celebrate his birthday? Maybe he hoped that from there, he could persuade her to go to Spain with him.’

‘And when she refused, he wouldn’t let her go?’

Janusz gave a grim nod. ‘If he’s hurt her in any way …’ Realising that his hands were clenched into fists he made a conscious effort to unball them.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to find her. Find both of them.’

Oskar nodded. ‘If anyone can do it, kolego, you can.’

Janusz didn’t tell Oskar the thing that had been troubling him the most since his visit to the flat that afternoon. The tickets to Alicante Steve had booked for himself and Kasia had been one-way. Whatever the worthless skurwysyn had been planning, it hadn’t involved either of them coming back.

Seven

The Pineapple, which Janusz knew to be Steve Fisher’s local, was a rain-stained one-storey building of eighties vintage marooned in the midst of a Stratford council estate. Its car park stood empty but for an old torn sofa, contents bulging like entrails, but by the time Janusz pushed open the door at around 6 p.m., the place was already pretty busy, most eyes trained on the huge TV screen which showed three pundits warming up for the Arsenal v. West Ham match. It was the kind of pub where people came to spend their benefit or pension cheque on cheap lager and enjoy a bit of free heating and Sky Sports.

Janusz tried to ignore the smell of stale beer and old vomit, the unpleasant sensation of the carpet adhering to the underside of his boots. He clocked the flag of St George hanging above the bar with a wary eye – in his experience it sometimes signalled a less than warm welcome for someone sporting a foreign accent, which might hinder his intelligence gathering.

So it was a relief when the woman behind the bar – the landlady, judging by her proprietorial demeanour – greeted him in a brisk but not unfriendly manner. After ordering a drink, Janusz pulled up a bar stool and asked, ‘Steve Fisher been in today?’ – sending her a grin that suggested he and Steve went way back.

Uncapping his bottle of beer, she shook her head. ‘Nah. Haven’t seen him since Saturday. You meant to be meeting him?’

Janusz’s gaze flickered over her face but he decided she was just making small talk. In her early sixties, she was surprisingly well groomed for such a rat-shit boozer, he thought – her hair looked professionally coloured and her preternaturally even tan said spray-job or sunbed rather than recent holiday.

‘No. I just popped in on the off-chance.’

After she’d given him his change, he turned to scope the pub over the rim of his glass. A knot of lads – plasterers judging by the state of their boots – laughed quietly over their drinks in one corner. Polish, he decided, as much from their self-effacing manner as the half-discerned rhythms of their speech. His gaze slid over a noisier cluster of youngsters wearing Arsenal shirts, and the usual scatter of old guys drinking solo, before coming to rest on a group who sat separately in a raised area by the back wall. Six or seven white men in their forties and fifties, they made a morose huddle, paying no attention to the TV screen and barely talking, despite a forest of empties on their table.

They looked like the sort of working-class men Janusz had worked alongside on building sites back in the eighties and nineties, the kind who’d left the inner city in droves long ago for suburbs like Enfield or Romford – an exodus often disparagingly described as ‘white flight’. The ones left behind were largely the unskilled rump, a forgotten minority, routinely despised – in his experience, often unfairly – for their presumed xenophobic attitudes.

Fixing his gaze on the football coverage, Janusz settled down to wait. Ten minutes later, his strategy bore fruit when one of the men came up to the bar.

‘Five pints of Stella with whisky chasers, Kath, love.’ He was a big guy in his fifties with a despondent air, wearing a suit jacket that had fitted him, once, before he’d started the really serious work on his beer gut.

‘Singles or doubles?’

He popped his cheeks, blew out a breath. ‘Go on then, make ’em doubles.’

The Stella foamed up while the landlady was pulling the first pint and, as she disappeared to put a new barrel on, Janusz seized the chance to strike up a conversation. ‘Who do you fancy for tonight then?’ he asked, nodding at the screen.

The guy frowned up at the screen. ‘Wenger’s lot. So long as they keep their heads this time.’ He examined the big Pole with frank but friendly curiosity. ‘What about you?’

‘I think you’re right,’ Janusz said. ‘2-0 to Arsenal.’

‘You Polish, I’m guessing?’

Janusz tipped his head in assent.

The man lodged one buttock on the nearest bar stool, taking the weight off. He had a pouchy, lugubrious face, which a badly trimmed moustache did nothing to cheer up. ‘My first job was crewing on the container ships – we went all over the Baltic. Whereabouts in Poland you from?’

‘Gdansk.’

‘You’re having a laugh?!’ he chuckled. ‘If I sailed into Gdynia once I must have done it a hundred times!’

The guy introduced himself as Bill Boyce and soon the two of them were swapping stories about some of the Baltic seaboard’s least salubrious nightspots, memories that evidently recalled happier times for the older man.

‘What line of work are you in now?’ asked Janusz.

‘Chippie,’ he said. ‘Not that I get a lot of work these days. Last job I had was a month ago, fitting a front door for an old girl I know.’ He grinned, baring a set of disturbingly white dentures. ‘I blame your lot, pricing us honest English tradesmen out of business.’

Janusz made a rueful face: there was some truth in Bill’s point. Twenty, thirty years ago, when he’d worked on building sites, Poles were a rarity and he was welcomed as an exotic breed – but the arrival of so many of his countrymen over the last decade had inevitably depressed wage levels and stirred resentment. But he wasn’t here to discuss the downside of globalisation and the free movement of labour.

He nodded over at Bill’s table. ‘Your friends, they don’t seem very interested in the footie?’

Bill stared at the floor, his face crumpling even more. ‘We had a bit of bad news this morning.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. We just heard that one of our muckers upped and died.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Janusz left a respectful pause. ‘Elderly gent, was 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.’

Eight

‘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 a ticking-off for the loudmouth. ‘I’m not going to caution him,’ she recalled the older uniform confiding to her, not unkindly. ‘If we do, he’ll only make trouble for you.’

‘And how do you think it would have played in the Standard,’ the Sarge went on, ‘if it had come out that the officer involved in the Kyle Furnell shooting got herself into a pub scrap?’

Christ. She had to admit that scenario had never even occurred to her.

The Sarge regarded her in silence for a long moment, the look on his face suggesting he was waiting for an apology. She just stared at the floor. Finally, he stood up behind his desk, indicating the interview was over, and walked her to the door.

‘Speaking of the Furnell business – now the inquest is over, I hope you’re cracking on with your psych assessment?’

‘I’ve had the first session, Sarge.’ No point mentioning she hadn’t got round to booking another one yet.

‘I suggest you use the time off to go every day. The quicker you get the sign-off, Natalie, the quicker we can have you back on ops, where you belong. Okay?’

As Kershaw descended the stairs, she decided that the worst thing about the bollocking had been the expression in the Sarge’s eyes at the end. A few years ago, Sergeant Toby Greenacre had been in charge of a nasty hostage situation: a standoff that had ended with him slotting a man who was holding a shotgun to the head of his pregnant wife. The look he’d given her said that he’d been there – that he knew what it was like to be under the microscope for so long, waiting for normal life to restart.

She’d turned her mobile off for the bollocking. Switching it back on, she saw she’d missed a call. There was a text, too. It said simply: ‘Call me. Janusz Kiszka.’

Nine

Kershaw was the first to arrive in the Rochester, the Walthamstow gastropub where she’d arranged to meet Kiszka. Standing at the bar, it struck her that although it was only eighteen months since they’d last met here, a couple of weeks after the stabbing, it seemed like a memory from a distant era. Back then, she’d yet to trade her detective’s badge for an MP5, and was still debating whether she and Ben, her then-boyfriend, might still have a future together.

She pictured again the look in Ben’s Bournville-dark eyes, when she’d finally told him it was over. Had she done the right thing? It was a question to which her mind returned periodically, only to deliver the never-changing answer. Probably. Staying with Ben just hadn’t been an option, not after the way he’d let her down. She took a slug of her wine. Now what have I got to look forward to? She was thirty years old, boyfriend-less, and with her new career in firearms on hold before it had even properly got started.

Then she saw the rangy, unmistakable outline of Janusz Kiszka looming through the etched glass of the pub doors, and felt her spirits rise.

After insisting on buying her another glass of wine – which she made no more than a token effort to decline – he sat down opposite her, his big frame comically too large for the pub chair.

‘How are you?’ From the look he sent her under his brows the enquiry was more than just the routine social formula.

‘Oh, I’m fine. Fully recovered.’

‘So you got into the firearms unit, just as you wanted to?’

‘Yep.’

‘Congratulations.’ Despite looking a bit on the thin side, she was still an attractive little thing, Janusz decided – the kind of girl you’d definitely look twice at in the street. ‘I read about the crazy guy who got himself shot,’ he said frowning into his beer. ‘That was you, right?’

She nodded, her expression betraying no pride, but no regret either, before knocking back half a glass of wine. Janusz recalled that she’d been drinking for England the last time they met and, judging by the red veins clustered at the corners of her eyes and the bruised look beneath them, she still was. It stirred in him memories of dark times, long ago in Poland, when he’d sought the comforting blankness that only strong drink could bring.

‘You did the right thing,’ he growled. ‘Did it get you into trouble?’

‘Not in theory,’ she said. ‘But I’m still NAC … sorry, not authorised to carry. And I’ve got to confess my deepest, darkest feelings to a shrink before they’ll give me my gun back.’

The thought of her being subjected to the perambulations and circumlocutions of a trick cyclist made Janusz grin. ‘I bet that’s fun.’ She returned the smile, reminding him how much prettier she looked without the perpetual frown stitched between her brows.

‘Anyway. You wanted to see me about something?’ she asked. ‘Or was it just a social call?’

Janusz hesitated. Growing up under a totalitarian regime had instilled in him a profound distrust of authority of any kind – especially the police. In the Poland where he’d grown up you didn’t turn to the milicja to sort out your problems: you looked to family, to the community, or to your own devices. Even now, decades later, the idea of asking a cop for help still made him feel queasy.

‘My girlfriend … Kasia. She was meant to be moving in with me this week – but she’s gone missing.’ He stared at the table. ‘I think her husband may have abducted her.’

‘Because she told him she was leaving?’ asked Kershaw. He opened those big shovel-like hands in assent. ‘Have you considered that she might just have had second thoughts? People do – especially at the last minute.’

He met her gaze. ‘Not without a word to me. And she hasn’t turned up at work either.’

‘Maybe she’s pulled a sickie.’

Janusz bridled. ‘She runs her own business,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I checked their flat – there’s no sign of either of them.’

‘Right.’ Kershaw hesitated, trying to find a diplomatic way of telling him that ninety-nine per cent of missing persons cases turned out to be people disappearing of their own free will. Then there was the other one per cent. ‘Tell me a bit more about her – and this husband of hers.’

Janusz related how back home in Poland, Kasia had worked two jobs to help fund her studies at Lodz Film School, arriving in nineties London with a hundred pounds and a single goal: to get into the film industry. Instead, while working in a Polish bakery in Ealing, she’d met Steve – someone in whom she thought she saw an enterprising spirit to match her own. Three months later they were married.

‘And her directing ambitions?’

‘Soon went out of the window.’ He shrugged. ‘She discovered that Steve’s talk was just that. Talk. His business schemes were fantasy. He did the odd cash-in-hand job on building sites but she ended up being the main breadwinner, working in bars, mostly.’ Out of respect for Kasia, he didn’t mention her brief stint as a pole dancer in a Soho club – telling himself it could hardly have any relevance to her disappearance.

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure, as my nan used to say,’ said Kershaw. ‘So why did she stick with him all this time?’

‘The Church,’ he said, with a wry grimace.

Kershaw rotated her glass on the table, thinking. ‘So she’s a devout Catholic, who puts up with him for what, twenty years, because she doesn’t believe in divorce.’ She frowned up at him. ‘Why the sudden change of heart?’

As the girl’s unblinking gaze skewered Janusz he was reminded of the time she’d interrogated him about a murder, the first time they’d met. He shifted about in the narrow chair. Why had Kasia changed her mind about leaving Steve? The milestone of her recent fortieth birthday suddenly struck him as an inadequate motive for such a momentous volte-face.

To change the subject, he told her about the one-way tickets to Alicante Steve had booked, and his conviction that the couple were still in the UK.

Kershaw chewed at a nail. ‘So you think he strung her a line about a birthday dinner or something to get her somewhere quiet, then sprung the idea of this trip on her?’

‘Yeah. He’s a fantasist. He probably thought he could change her mind with some story about starting a new life in Spain.’

She nodded, that made sense. ‘What kind of guy is he? If your theory’s right, do you think she could be in danger?’

He paused, wondering how much to tell her. ‘He has hit her, a couple of times. I had to have a word with him once.’

She raised an eyebrow, imagining the one-sided nature of that discussion.

Janusz narrowed his eyes, recalling the impression of Steve he’d got from that single face-to-face encounter. Skinny and unprepossessing to look at, yet full of himself, Steve had alternated between braggadocio and aggrieved self-pity. ‘I think he’s a lazy lowlife with a big mouth, but I never thought he’d have it in him … to really hurt her. Not till now, anyway.’

‘Once a wife beater, always a wife beater, in my experience,’ she said, regretting her glib words when she saw his jaw clench in a spasm of distress.

She felt torn. The likeliest explanation was probably the most obvious one – that Kasia had got cold feet about going to live with Kiszka. His caveman looks, the edge of danger about him would no doubt be attractive to some girls, but as life partner material? On the other hand, she couldn’t help feeling intrigued by the story – especially since she knew what a big deal it must have been for Kiszka to ask for help from a cop.

‘Why are you asking me to get involved? Why not just report her missing?’

He lifted one shoulder. ‘Because the police would just assume I was a jilted boyfriend. Even if they did believe me, they’re hardly going to invest serious resources in finding yet another missing person, are they?’

‘Fair point.’

‘So … will you help?’ He drained the rest of his pint, avoiding her eyes.

Kershaw suddenly realised that her pulse was beating a little faster than when she’d first walked in the pub. It seemed that the mystery of Kiszka’s missing girlfriend had got under her skin. She’d need to tread carefully, of course: the last thing she needed was to get herself in any more trouble at work.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ she told him.

Janusz bared his teeth in a grin. ‘Another one of those?’ he asked, pointing at her empty wine glass.

After he’d gone to the bar, having waved away her attempt to buy a round, Kershaw realised that there was another reason she’d agreed to help, the return of a feeling she’d almost forgotten. There was something about being around Janusz Kiszka that somehow made her feel more alive.

Ten

At Walthamstow Central tube station, heading home to Highbury, Janusz found himself in the midst of a deepening crush on the southbound Victoria line platform, the muffled drone of the announcer overhead saying something about signal problems. Luckily, Walthamstow was the line’s northernmost terminus, so when a train finally did arrive it emptied completely, allowing him to bag a seat. The journey was slow, punctuated by long stops in tunnels, and the fresh influx of rush-hour humanity that squeezed itself onto the packed train at Tottenham Hale triggered a very English symphony of muted tuts.

Right under Janusz’s nose, a guy in his twenties wearing a too-tight suit all but body-blocked an older woman carrying shopping bags to capture a just-vacated seat opposite. Seeking eye contact to establish whether the lady might take offence – an advisable step in London, he had long ago discovered – Janusz wordlessly offered her his seat, and when she smiled her thanks, stood to make way for her. Taking hold of the overhead passenger rail with both hands, he proceeded to direct an unblinking stare down on the discourteous kutas in the suit, who grew increasingly fidgety during the long wait in the next tunnel, before unaccountably deciding to get off at the next stop. Claustrophobic, probably, thought Janusz with an inward grin.

Minutes later, as the train lurched to a halt yet again, Janusz idly scanned the faces of the passengers either side of him, each immured within their own private citadel. A head-scarfed Asian girl, eyes elongated with kohl, playing a game on her phone, a man intently reading an article on London house prices in the Standard, and a white girl with dreadlocks, tinny music spilling out of her headphones. He let his eyes drift back to the man reading the paper. He remembered noticing the same guy amid the crush on the packed platform at Walthamstow. And he’d been reading the same page of the paper then.

No one was that slow a reader. Janusz squinted at the tube map just above his eye level, relying on his peripheral vision to build a picture of the guy. Reddened, pockmarked skin, like someone who’d spent too many years in the sun – or in extreme cold. Forty-five, or thereabouts, around Janusz’s age. Close-cropped hair, balding at the temples. Expensive-looking bomber jacket.

Maybe he was just being paranoid, but Janusz had long ago learned a valuable lesson: in his line of work, a little paranoia could seriously boost your life expectancy. So when the train reached Highbury, he made sure he was first up the short flight of stairs from the platform and into the exit tunnel. Rounding a sharp bend which meant he couldn’t be seen from behind, he broke into a jog, and didn’t slow down when he reached the escalator, climbing it two steps at a time, the metal treads flashing beneath his boots. Highbury was one of the network’s deepest stations and by the time he neared the top, his breathing was sawing like an old tree in a high wind. He slapped his Oyster card on the reader – praying it would work first time – and the gates parted to release him.

Outside, twilight was descending, and Janusz ducked into the pub next to the station where he sometimes had a homecoming beer, positioning himself by a window with a view of the station exit. Twenty or thirty seconds later, he spotted bomber jacket cutting a path through the seething tide of homeward-bound passengers, scoping his surroundings with an alert yet casual gaze. For a heart-stopping moment his eyes lingered on the pub, before he disappeared from view towards the main road.

The guy’s body language appeared unhurried. But his watchful air, the purposefulness of that measured stride – all said professional tail. Suspecting that his new-found friend might double back at any moment to check out the pub, Janusz headed out back towards the lavatories. Down a corridor and past the door marked Gents he found what he was looking for: an emergency exit he occasionally used to nip out for a cigar. It gave onto a quiet backstreet that bore west towards Liverpool Road, the opposite direction to his apartment.

He pushed the bar – and a deafening two-tone wail split the air.

Kurwa mac! When did the officious bastards get the door alarmed? Janusz took off running down the street. No point hoping that bomber jacket would fail to notice the ear-piercing racket – you could probably hear it a mile away. All he could do was put as much distance as possible between the two of them while he still had the chance.

After fifty or sixty metres, he shot a glance over his shoulder. And saw the man burst out of the emergency exit like a human cannonball. Despite his short and stocky build, he ran like a pro, head down, arms tucked into his sides, gaze fixed laser-like on his target.

The sight sent adrenaline rushing through Janusz’s veins. He could swear he felt his heart inflating, vascular system dilating to deliver blood to his muscles, the pavement becoming a blur beneath his pounding feet. Realising that the street’s lack of bends would make him an easy target should his pursuer have a gun, he took a last-minute decision to swerve sharp left into a side turning, his right ankle sending a memo of protest to his brain. Then left again into a narrow cobbled alleyway, its high walls distilling the darkness. Knowing the geography of the area was a big advantage: every turn he made bought precious seconds, forcing bomber jacket to work out the route his quarry had taken.

A hipster with a portfolio pressed himself against the wall, open-mouthed, as the big guy barrelled past, his greatcoat flapping either side of him. Janusz could see the traffic on the busy main road at the end of the alleyway now, the headlights of vehicles coming on as the sky darkened. He risked another look back, hoping against hope he might have shaken off his tail. Saw the guy skidding to a halt at the mouth of the alleyway, close enough for Janusz to make out his lips working in a silent curse.

On reaching Upper Street, he found his progress slowed by knots of straggling pedestrians and baby buggies, and decided to cut across the road. The traffic slowed here as it approached Highbury Corner roundabout but he still had to employ a jinking jog and a raised palm, which did nothing to quell the cacophony of horns or the angry gestures of drivers. On the other side stood a double decker bus, pulled up at a stop. As Janusz rounded its rear, he saw a last passenger boarding and put on a determined spurt. The bus hid him momentarily from view – and, with luck, would whisk him away before bomber jacket had even worked out where he’d gone.

Janusz reached the front of the bus, his lungs burning – just as the doors sighed shut. Tapping politely on the glass, he caught the driver’s eye and – abandoning all dignity – pantomimed a hopeful ‘Please?’ Nearly three decades in London made the driver’s responding shrug depressingly easy to decipher. It said ‘Not my problem, sunshine.’

With a consumptive wheeze of its air brakes, the bus trundled away – leaving Janusz feeling brutally exposed. He looked back across Upper Street – and straight into the face of the man in the bomber jacket, standing on the kerb opposite. Seeing his vulpine half-smile, Janusz realised what a sorry picture he must make – one arm flung round the bus stop for support, gasping like a landed carp. As Janusz gathered up his last vestiges of energy to run, bomber jacket threw a look to his left and stepped off the kerb towards him.

There came the shriek of rubber on tarmac, a horn blast – and a bang. Janusz squinted through the traffic, trying to make sense of what just happened. The scene came into focus: a red mail van skewed across the lane blocking the traffic, a scatter of mirror fragments in the gutter behind it. And bomber jacket on all fours, in the road, a solicitous cluster of passers-by forming around him. He was shaking his head as if trying, unsuccessfully, to clear it.

Janusz allowed himself a grin before limping off into the thickening dusk.

After putting some distance between himself and his erstwhile pursuer he lit a cigar, dragging the reviving smoke deep into his lungs, but it was still five minutes or more before his pulse rate returned to normal and he was able to think clearly. Why on earth should anyone want to follow him? There couldn’t be any connection with Kasia and Steve’s disappearing act – could there? An all too plausible scenario occurred to him: if Steve had been driven into a murderous rage by the prospect of Kasia leaving him, then Janusz would be the obvious target for his revenge. He recalled Kasia complaining more than once that her husband had some questionable friends – including one who’d been in jail – so taking out a hit on his rival might not overly stretch his skillset.

Replaying the chase with bomber jacket in his mind, Janusz came to a sudden halt in the middle of the pavement. His pursuer had looked to the left before stepping out into the traffic. From which Janusz deduced that he either had the road sense of a four-year-old – or had recently arrived from a country where they drove on the right.

Whoever the guy was, Janusz had to admit the incident had left him rattled. Not because he feared for his own safety – he could look after himself. But if Steve really was crazy enough to take out a contract on him, then what did it say about the danger Kasia was in?

Just as this terrible thought entered his head, he saw the pale spire of St Stanislaus up ahead. He decided to pay Father Pietruski a visit: Kasia had been going to confession at St Stan’s for the last year, so there was just a chance that the priest might be able to offer some clue as to her whereabouts.

Hearing the deep clunk of the church door closing, Father Piotr Pietruski looked up from the altar where he was setting out wine and communion wafers, and peered into the gloom.

His expression brightened as he saw who his visitor was – although his tone sounded as caustic as ever. ‘Ah! Look what the wind blew in. I was thinking only today how long it had been since you had graced us with your presence.’ The old man bustled down the stairs from the altar, holding on to the rail. ‘I would hear your konfesja, but it will no doubt take some time, and as you can see, I am preparing for Holy Mass …’

‘I haven’t come to make confession, prosze pana. I need to talk to you about Kasia Fisher.’

Father Pietruski dropped his gaze, but not before Janusz saw his face sag in disappointment – and something else. Disapproval. Unlike Janusz, Kasia made her confession once a week without fail, so the old boy knew all about their affair, and since he steadfastly refused to recognise even Janusz’s two-decades-old divorce, in his eyes they were both committed and unrepentant adulterers.

‘Come into the vestry,’ he said. Janusz followed him through a side door, noting with a pang how stooped the old guy was getting, and how the sparse silver combover barely covered his age-spotted scalp.

Pietruski lowered himself into one of two dilapidated leather armchairs and waved at the other. ‘Siadaj. Sit. You’d better tell me what all this is about.’

Janusz sketched out what he knew about Kasia’s disappearance, her failure to show up at work and the couple’s empty flat. When he mentioned that she’d been due to move into his apartment, Pietruski didn’t look happy, but he didn’t betray any surprise either.

Janusz felt his spirits lift. The fact that Kasia had got up the courage to tell her priest she was leaving the marriage dissipated any last whisper of doubt he might have had about her changing her mind.

‘Perhaps she realised the terrible sin she was about to commit in betraying her marriage vows,’ said Pietruski, sending Janusz a reproachful look. ‘A sin you seem determined to encourage her in, despite being a married man yourself.’ He plucked distractedly at the embroidered cover on the arm of his chair.

Janusz tried to tell himself that he was immune to the old man’s disapproval, but he knew that wasn’t true. Pietruski had saved him from self-annihilation when he first arrived from Poland, a skinny nineteen-year-old fleeing a disastrous marriage. He’d wed Marta just weeks after his girlfriend Iza died at a demonstration against the Communist regime – a tragedy for which he held himself responsible. Father Pietruski – still in possession of a full head of hair back then – had found him sprawled across the steps of this very church, insensible with wodka. He had given Janusz a meal and found him somewhere to sleep, later introducing him to the Irish building contractor who gave him his first labouring job.

Janusz shifted about in the armchair – its high leather sides made it narrow and too deep for comfort, and an errant spring in the base pressed insistently into the back of his thigh. ‘I respect your views on how we should conduct our lives, Father,’ he said, making an effort to keep his temper. ‘But the fact remains that Kasia is an adult woman, free to do as she sees fit.’

‘The modern-day doctrine of “please oneself”, you mean? Which has brought people nothing but unhappiness, it seems to me. You do realise, that if she does leave, you can never marry, naturalnie?’ The look in Pietruski’s eyes was one of profound compassion.

The marriage question meant next to nothing to Janusz – his faith was a hazy affair, grounded more in nostalgia and respect for tradition than in any profound supernatural belief – although he knew what it would cost Kasia to live in sin for the rest of their days together, denied the sacrament of communion.

‘I’m not here to debate doctrine. And I don’t think Kasia has gone missing because she’s suddenly seen the light – I think her husband has abducted her.’

Pietruski blinked rapidly. ‘Surely not? Might they not simply have gone away to celebrate his birthday?’

Janusz stared at him for a moment. ‘It was you who persuaded her to stay till his birthday, wasn’t it?’

The old man lifted his chin. ‘You know very well that I cannot divulge what is said within the sacred confines of the confessional,’ he said – as good as confirming Janusz’s hunch – ‘but I would never apologise for doing everything within my power to preserve the sacrament of marriage.’

Janusz imagined the guilt trip the priest would have laid on Kasia about her plan to leave her husband. He could practically hear the scheming old bastard murmuring through the grille of the confession box: ‘Stay until his birthday, at least. Surely you owe him that?’

Abandoning himself to a surge of rage, Janusz jack-knifed out of the chair, freeing himself from its imprisoning embrace.

‘You care so much about her soul that you never considered she might be in danger of her life,’ he growled. ‘You, who must surely know of his violence towards her?’

‘A man striking a woman is an evil I would never …’

Janusz didn’t let him finish. ‘If she has come to harm because of your interference, I shall never forgive you.’

The words were out of his mouth before he even knew he’d said them, ringing around the stone walls of the vestry like a curse.

As he strode up the aisle of the empty church, he could still see the stricken expression on the face of his father confessor as if it were branded on his brain.

Eleven

While Janusz was quizzing Father Pietruski at St Stanislaus, Kershaw was back home in her flat on the blower to her cousin Jason in Special Branch for the second time that day.

‘Any joy?’ she asked.

‘Yep. It’s actually one of the easier things you’ve asked for.’

Kershaw had called Jason right after she’d left Kiszka, to see if he could get hold of the passenger manifest for flight AM47 to Alicante, the one Steve had booked himself and Kasia onto. Jason wasn’t supposed to run checks without signed documentation, of course, but since she was godmother – and occasional babysitter – to his two increasingly boisterous boys, he’d been happy to do her the favour.

‘You won’t get into any trouble, will you?’ she asked.

‘Nah. We’re always asking the airlines for stuff like that. Anyway, the girl there fancies me.’

‘Who can blame her?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So, were they on the flight or what?’

‘Nope. They were both marked down as no-shows.’

She felt a little buzz of excitement. Kiszka had been right about one thing: Steve and his wife hadn’t boarded the flight. ‘Thanks, Jason. I appreciate it.’

‘No worries. When are you coming over anyway? The boys would love to see their Auntie Nat – and Kirsty was saying the other day we haven’t seen you in ages.’

Together with Jason’s mum, her Auntie Carol, they were the only family Kershaw had left and yet it must be a year at least, she realised, since she’d been out to Billericay to visit. Since the shooting – in fact, even since she got stabbed – she’d become a bit of a hermit, her life distilling down to a cycle of work, drink, sleep: her only social life the occasional after-work drink or visit to the gym.

Before hanging up, she promised Jason that once spring finally arrived, she’d come out for a family barbecue.

Kershaw reached for the last bottle of Argentinian Malbec in the rack, before switching the kettle on instead – she needed a clear head to think things through. Obviously, it was still a major leap from a missed flight to believing that Steve was holed up somewhere, holding Kasia against her will, but she wondered whether she should just play it safe and report Kasia Fisher missing to Walthamstow CID. Coming from her, they might be persuaded to take it seriously. But by the time the kettle had boiled she’d concluded that it would still sit in someone’s inbox for days before any action would be taken. Meanwhile, she was sitting around on her arse with her brain on standby.

She decided there was only one sensible course of action: do the initial spadework herself, and if she found any solid leads on Kasia’s whereabouts, hand the case over to her old boss, DS ‘Streaky’ Bacon. Congratulating herself on having made the right decision, she opened the cupboard and awarded herself a chocolate biscuit.

Twelve

The following day, Janusz found himself once again passing through the pillared portico of St Francis of Assisi Residential Home. He’d been hyper-vigilant during the journey from Highbury – but had seen no evidence of anyone tailing him. He’d even considered postponing today’s appointment to check Wojtek Raczynski’s passport, before deciding that it was better to stay busy, if only to try to keep his mind off the Kasia situation. What good would it do her, after all, if he let himself go to pieces?

Sunk in his thoughts, he suddenly found himself at the reception desk – and did a double-take. Instead of the creamy cheeks of the young Polish receptionist, the face that looked up at him from behind the computer monitor was as brown and corrugated as an Arabian wadi.

‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ said Stefan, peering over his reading specs. ‘Beata asked me to look at her computer. It’s got more viruses than a clap clinic waiting room.’

‘And you … can fix it?’ Janusz was having a job concealing his disbelief.

‘Heavens, no.’ He chuckled. ‘But I know people who work in IT who are up to speed on these things. I’m just emailing over some details.’ He tapped the keyboard. ‘There, I think that’s gone. Now, I’m guessing you’re here for Wojtek?’

Janusz found his own way to the conservatory, where Wojtek was waiting for him. He had resigned himself to another lengthy bulletin on the doings of his wayward grandchildren, but this time, the old fellow barely said a word, sitting quietly as Janusz copied his passport details into a notebook. The passport was the old pre-EU kind, its midnight blue cover bearing the cruel profile of the Polish eagle above outstretched wings.

‘Haven’t seen one of these in a while,’ said Janusz.

Wojtek shrugged, failing to take the conversational bait, and took a sip of his tea – no biscuits today – spilling a little down his chin.

Janusz sneaked a look at him out of the corner of his eye. The papers were full of scandals about the maltreatment of old people in residential homes – stories that filled him with a vision-darkening rage. What kind of skurwysyn would harm a helpless old person? St Francis’s seemed a happy enough place on the surface, but he knew that wherever the strong held sway over the weak, there was the ever-present risk of abuse. What was it somebody once said? Man makes evil like a bee makes honey.

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