by Anya Lipska
There was no clue to the identity of the girl, or her partner. ‘Lampart’ must have taken her clothes and personal effects with him, leaving only her empty patent leather handbag, which was probably too bulky for him to smuggle out unnoticed. From the grey tidemark she’d spotted in the bog, he’d even flushed their fag butts away.
“Can I check her bag?” she asked Dave, nodding at the handbag, lying on the floor in a plastic evidence bag.
“Yep, it’s already dusted.’
Using her pen to open it up, Kershaw found the main compartment and the zippered side section empty. But when she took a closer look she discovered a tiny hidden pocket sewn into the lining, just big enough for a lipstick and easy to miss. Inside, she could see a pale pink tube ticket. She borrowed tweezers from Dave and pulled out a one-week Travelcard. It had been bought the previous day, and covered zones one to four, allowing travel right out to the burbs.
“Ah, if it isn’t Miss Marple,” said Streaky as he breezed in, looking like a ginger-haired snowman in his protective suit. “I take it the Department’s pharmaceuticals specialist has already solved the case and completed the paperwork?”
She grinned – the wind-up was harmless enough and anyway, she was chuffed that Streaky had chosen her, and not Browning, for this job. Was the unreconstructed sexist routine just an act? Unless – God forbid! - he was getting the hots for her?
“Still a few loose ends, Sarge, but I did just find this,” showing him the ticket, “tucked away in the handbag. The only lead on her ID.”
“You’re hoping she used a debit card to buy it?”
“Or an Oystercard, Sarge. They’re all registered to the holder’s address these days.”
He nodded. “Talk to my mate Terry at London Underground: he’s as good as gold, he’ll pull you a name and address off the system”.
Streaky folded his arms, and stood, scanning the girl’s body intently as Kershaw filled him in.
“An IC1 male checked in at 0115 last night, Sarge. He used a credit card, but when I called the card provider they said it’s a clone. The desk clerk who checked the guy in is off ‘til tomorrow night.”
Without taking his eyes off the body Streaky said:
“Top priority, interview the clerk while his memory’s fresh, get a description.”
She followed him as he moved up the side of the bed.
He bent over the girl. “No obvious injuries,” he said, eyes flickering impassively over the splayed body.
Kershaw noticed a fuzz of underarm stubble beneath the girl’s out flung left arm – a detail so personal it made her feel uncomfortably like a voyeur.
“The sex was probably consensual,” Streaky went on. Wetting his finger he dabbed up a trace of white powder left on the bedside table and rubbed it on his gums.
“Probable cause of death – one snort too many of the old Peruvian marching powder.” He hitched up his trousers. “The late check-in...the drugs – I’d say we’re dealing with a working girl and her client. When she OD-ed, the client took fright and legged it.”
Kershaw didn’t reply. Bending to pick up a discarded black stocking that lay curled like a question mark on the carpet, between the head of the bed and the table, she turned it over in her hands. What were the stats? Sex workers were twelve times as likely as other women the same age to die violently. She skirted round the bed.
“This is odd, Sarge,” she said, holding out a second stocking, retrieved from the same spot on the opposite side.
“What, the fact a sex worker wore black stockings?” he said, bugging his eyes at her.
“No, Sarge,” said Kershaw, ignoring the sarcasm. “But when you take your stockings off, even in the throes of passion, they don’t tend to end up so far apart and so...,” she paused, struggling to put it into words, “symmetrical.”
Streaky raised his eyebrows: “I’ll have to bow to your superior knowledge of stocking removal procedure,” he said, “but what are you getting at exactly?” She looped the stocking through the bed head’s polished steel rungs and gave it a tug. “He might have used the stockings to tie her up and rape her, then, when she started OD-ing, untied them to cover his tracks.” Freeing the stocking, she let it fall to the floor.
“Or the S&M could have just have been part of the fun and games,” said Streaky.
He turned one of the girl’s wrists and peered at it. “No bruises or abrasions.” Replacing her arm on the bed, he stood silently for a moment. “Still, it’s not always obvious, post-mortem. Make sure the pathologist checks for bruising under the skin.”
Kershaw felt a ripple of excitement.
“But let’s stick to the known knowns for now, shall we?” he said, fixing her with a look. “What have we got here in terms of offences, detective?”
Kershaw checked her notebook, “Leaving a body, administering and supplying Class A drugs. Maybe even manslaughter, if the girl was still alive when her sexual partner legged it.”
Streaky sniffed his agreement. “What’s your best chance of finding him?”
“CCTV, Sarge,” she flipped open her notebook to find the notes from her chat with the manager. “Just two cameras in the lobby, one trained on the hotel entrance, the other on the check-in desk, the other three are all back of house: kitchens, store rooms and rear staff entrance.”
“More concerned about petty thievery than guest security, then,” said Streaky, frowning in disgust. “No cams in the lifts?”
“Manager says they’re both out of order.” They shared a meaningful look. Muppets.
He picked up the vodka bottle, in an evidence bag now that the CSI had finished with it. “Spot anything, detective?”
She held her breath, was he thinking the same thing she was?
“It’s Wyborowa, Sarge, a Polish brand,” she said, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice, “and with the drugs, I’m thinking maybe there’s a link to Ela, my floater...”
Streaky shook his head slowly, tutting theatrically.
“What a load of old bollocks. You need to get out more, Kershaw. Any London offie worth its salt sells Polish vodka these days. Beats the Russian tackle hands down, the aficionados tell me.”
She bit her lip. He was right. There was sod all to link the two girls’ deaths.
“What I see is a bottle – but no glasses,” Streaky went on. “Of course they might have been drinking it by the neck, but our friend ‘Mr Lampart’ would hardly leave it behind if it was covered in his DNA...” his gaze swivelled to a coffee table near the foot of the bed. Giving her a chance to redeem herself.
Her suit crackled as she dropped to a squat – from this vantage point the light from the window struck the varnished surface at a more oblique angle – then took the bagged bottle and hovered it over the table.
“There’s a ring, Sarge, too big for the bottle. Must be from a glass.”
“Well done, detective!” said Streaky, with only a trace of his usual sarcasm.
“But I haven’t seen any glasses in here – or in the bathroom,” she said, frowning.
Seized by a sudden thought, she stood and crossed the room and opened the door to the room’s miniscule balcony. From here, thirteen floors up, she could make out the half-built Olympic stadium, a couple of miles further east. Looking down, she saw a flat roof, five or six floors below.
“He might have taken the glass with him,” she said, re-entering the room, “But it’d be easier just to chuck it out the window. I’ll get a CSI up there to look for fragments.”
Geeky Dave, who was bagging the girl’s hands, threw her an evil look. Oops. CSIs had honorary DC rank these days and any suggestion that they were the hired help was a total no-no, especially since they had a say in approving forensic tests.
“I’ll leave you to sort that one out, shall I?” said Streaky with an acid smile.
Returning to the bedside he stood looking down at the girl’s face, half hidden behind its curtain of hair. Taking a well-chewed biro from his inside pocket he
handed it to Kershaw.
Gingerly, she scooped up the hair and hooked it behind the girl’s left ear, a gesture that felt oddly intimate. Her mouth was reddened and slightly swollen, but other than that the face appeared unblemished, her long, mascara-blackened eyelashes standing out dramatically against skin as pale as candle wax. Kershaw bent closer, searching for a bruise, a scratch, anything, when suddenly, the mouth started to open, gaping slowly like a door in a horror movie, and the girl moaned softly.
Kershaw jerked her head back violently. Jesus!
Streaky chuckled. “Never seen a stiff do that before, eh? Just a bit of air in the lungs.”
The girl lay, once again, utterly still.
“No bruising or ligature marks on the neck,” said Streaky peering over Kershaw’s shoulder.
Kershaw shook her head and was about to stand up, when she caught a glint of something in the back of the girl’s mouth, a flash of white up between the inside of her cheek and the gums.
“Sarge! She’s got something in her mouth, at the back there.”
Streaky called Dave over. He bent over the girl, carefully manoeuvred a pair of long tweezers into her mouth, and drew out a whitish rectangle, tightly rolled into a cylinder. It was a business card, sodden and bloated with saliva, but still perfectly readable.
ELEVEN
Janusz was awoken by the insistent sound of a buzz saw, and the panicky feeling that he was suffocating. But it was only Copernicus, sitting on his chest and purring at top volume. Cursing, he pushed the cat off. Now he was awake, he knew that he wouldn’t get back to sleep without addressing the urgent signals his brain was getting from his bladder.
Giving up on the search for Weronika yesterday had left Janusz feeling jumpy and depressed, so when Oskar asked him over for a drink he’d leapt at the offer. His mate lived in a council house overlooking the A12 near the Olympics site, with a young couple and their two young kids, and three other guys who shared the two remaining bedrooms. Janusz had tried to persuade him to go down the pub, but Oskar insisted on drinking at home to save money.
His room-mate was working nights so at least they were able to retreat from the mayhem downstairs to his bedroom where they sank a case of Tyskie and watched Legia Warsawa take Wisla Krakow apart on the Polish football channel.
Janusz swung his legs out of bed and stood up. Despite sticking to beer – it had been twenty-five or more years since he last touched wodka – he was already suffering the beginnings of a pounding headache, which would be even worse by the morning. Another fucking side effect of getting old, he thought.
He padded, naked and half asleep, down the hallway without reaching for the light switch: he knew from experience that even ten seconds’ exposure to light would keep him tossing and turning till morning. Anyway, there was enough orange light coming through the living room doorway from the street lamps outside to allow him to navigate his way to the toilet. He kept his eyes half closed as he pissed, trying to remember a science lecture from his time at Jagiellonska about how different colour temperatures affect the visual cortex.
Mother of a whore! His eyes shot open. He might have been drunk last night but one memory was clear: before going to bed he’d shooed the cat out of the living room, and to stop it getting back in and scratching the furniture, he’d shut the door. For light to reach the hallway, somebody must have opened it.
The blow struck him heavily at the base of the neck. You’re getting slow, old man he thought, as he heard his cheekbone hit the ceramic tiles with a whang like a tuning fork. Floating up from the dusky region of semi-consciousness he wondered what next? in a weirdly detached way. The answer was a vicious kick in the kidneys that bent him double and made him spew up a quantity of beer mingled with stomach acid onto the floor.
Then he felt a cold sharpness pressed against his windpipe and a black man’s face loomed close to his. No, not a black man, white skin gleamed around the edges of a black mask, like the ones ice hockey players wore. He got a flash of his eyes, full of malevolence, but before he saw anything else the guy shoved him face down into his own vomit so hard he felt his front tooth chip on the tiled floor. The blade pressed harder into his neck, breaking the skin.
“Stay away from me and the girl, you dirty old fucker,” hissed the man, in Polish. “If you fuck up my business with all your poking around I’ll come back and cut your balls off. Then I’ll watch you bleed to death.”
The guy had a powerful grip, but Janusz managed to crane his head around enough to see the edge of the masked face over his shoulder. He croaked out two words: “Fuck you”. Then came a mighty crack as the man whacked his head onto the floor again, plunging him into darkness.
The sky outside the bathroom window was almost light when Janusz opened his eyes and saw grey floor tiles. He flinched reflexively – for a split second he was back in a cell in Montepulich, after getting worked over by milicja thugs. Using the edge of the bath to lever himself up, he rose cautiously to his feet, his head a pulsing balloon of pain. Propping himself against the sink, he risked a look in the mirror.
From his left cheekbone to his eyebrow the swollen flesh was the colour of stewed red cabbage, and the cut on his temple where the fucker had cracked it on the floor had spun a spider’s web of dried blood across his face. At the base of his skull, a bruise the size of his palm was already beetroot purple, and just to round it all off, blood from the wound in his throat had run down in rivulets and clotted obscenely in his chest hair. He looked like the hands-down loser of an illegal cage fight.
Straightening up with exaggerated care, he gasped with pain and fingered his side. Kurwa! The fucking bastard had broken, or at least cracked, a rib as well. Seized with a paroxysm of rage, Janusz grabbed the ceramic toothbrush holder off the sink and smashed it into the mirror. It made a satisfying racket. He pulled a savage grin at his reflection, broken and distorted by the cracked glass. “Just wait till I find you, skurwysyn,” he said out loud.
A minute or two later he heard an urgent knocking. Holding a wad of bloodied bog roll to staunch the fresh cuts on his hand, Janusz threw open the front door to his flat so hard it hit the wall, sending up a puff of plaster dust. It was his next-door neighbour, a weedy type with trendy thick-rimmed glasses, worked in an art gallery or something. Oskar always insisted the guy was gay – but then, if you listened to Oskar, you’d think the only cast iron guarantee of heterosexuality was a manual job.
At the sight of Janusz, the guy’s mouth fell slackly open.
“I was...I was...I just...”
He couldn’t get the words out.
“I heard…rather, I think I heard..”
“I broke a cup,” said Janusz, deadpan. “You want to come in and check maybe?” he swept an arm into the flat, “Be my guest.”
“No. No!” The guy – Sebastian, that was his name – now had both hands out in front of him, palms flat, and started backing away down the hall.
It was only then that Janusz remembered he was stark naked.
“Sorry!” he called out after his neigbour.
He cranked the shower up to its hottest setting and let the jets batter his bruised flesh while he digested the meaning of his nighttime visitation.
Adamski – who else? – had obviously heard that Janusz was on his tail and tracked him down to the flat. The chuj could have no idea, of course, that he’d already quit the job.
He had just finished soaping himself all over when the landline started chirping. Cursing, he was tempted to ignore it, but then a thought struck him: it could be Kasia, calling before her shift. Maybe she regretted the stupid row two days before and wanted to meet up. He strode into the living room, towelling off the suds roughly.
“Czesc?” he said into the cracked receiver.
“Am I interrupting anything?” It was Marta, and straight onto the attack, as usual.
“No, Marta, I was just in the shower,” he said.
“Naprawde, Janusz, I can never get hold of you – haven’t you got
a new mobile phone yet?”
He glanced at the black oblong winking in its charger on the mantelpiece.
“I’m still looking for a good deal - shopping around,” he growled, pulling the towel round his shoulders. “What are you calling about?”
She adopted her understanding tone, the one that always made him grind his teeth.
“I know you are busy, Janek, but Bobek is thirteen next month – and it’s over six weeks since you telephoned him.”
Christ. Was it really fourteen years since that stupid drunken night when they nearly got back together? He recalled waking the next morning, gradually focussing on the watercolour landscapes hung on the grey walls – Marta had a modest talent as a painter, and they were her touching, pathetic attempt to enliven the grim Soviet tower block hutch in the Warsaw suburbs that had once been their marital home. Then the sensing of the body next to him and the jab of fear as he remembered her whispered ‘Don’t use anything’.
“I sent him cash at Christmas,” protested Janusz, hunkering down in his towel by the radiator, suppressing a gasp as his rib sent out shards of pain.
“Oh the cheque was fantastic,” said Marta, lapsing into her usual sarcasm. “Let me see. It took him out to play football, it helped him with his homework, it gave him a beating for taking a knife to school...”
“He took a blade to school? Mother of God, Marta!” He was gripped by the sudden, irrational fear that Bobek would grow up like Adamski. “You’ve got to be tougher with him!”
“Oh! and now Londonek Tata tells me I don’t bring my son up properly!” - when Marta raised her voice it became thin and grating, like a drill going through steel. Anger clawed at his throat.
“Marta...”
“But no doubt you are busy having a great time with some new girlfriend while I get teenage dirty looks and non-stop hip hop.” She was on a roll now.
He fought down his rage and guilt.
“Listen Marta, I swear on the Virgin that I will telephone him for a chat – soon.” Ignoring her enraged response he continued: “I have to go - there is someone at the door.”
