A Devil Under the Skin (Kiszka & Kershaw, Book 3)

by Anya Lipska

  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 y
oung 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 fashi
on 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.’