by Anya Lipska
‘I left without finishing my degree, though,’ he admitted. ‘There were too many distractions in those days. Demos, strikes, throwing petrol bombs at the milicja and ZOMO …’ He stopped himself, embarrassed to hear the nostalgic note in his own voice.
‘It must have been terrible,’ said Magda. ‘And is it true you couldn’t get fashionable clothes, back then – not even branded jeans?’ Her tone suggested that this aspect of life must have been at least as bad as getting tear-gassed and shot at by riot police.
Janusz decided to change the subject: reminiscing about his glory days as a Solidarnosc firebrand wasn’t going to help him find out what Kasia had been doing here.
‘I’m coming back here with my fiancée in a couple of months,’ he said, ‘for a pre-wedding treat.’
‘Oh, congratulations!’ piped Magda. ‘Is that the guy with the moustache you came in with today?’
‘Kurwa! Nie!’ said Janusz, in a tone of loud protest. ‘Sorry. No, my fiancée is … a lady.’
‘Dobrze. I’m open-minded.’
‘Anyway, she was wondering whether you do nail extensions, you know, so that she’s ready for the big day?’
‘Przepraszam pana,’ she said, apologetic. ‘We don’t do that here.’
‘No plans to offer it alongside the spa services?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
Janusz backed off, keeping his conversation general for a few minutes before approaching the mystery from another direction.
‘What’s it like working here? Are they good employers?’
He felt her pause in her ministrations just for a second. ‘Oh, they’re okay,’ she said, unconvincingly.
‘It’s not easy, coming to work in a foreign country,’ he said. ‘I remember it well.’
‘I don’t mind that. There’s another Polish girl here and one from Lithuania.’ She hesitated. ‘It’s just so quiet here.’
‘What, out in the countryside, you mean?’
‘Nie. I mean the business,’ she went on, dropping her voice. ‘The hotel is empty most of the time. I don’t think they’re very … professional, you know?’ Then she patted his shoulders. ‘Dobrze. Turn over for me could you, prosze pana?’
Perhaps regretting her indiscretion, Magda wouldn’t be drawn any further on the shortcomings of the management, and Janusz was loath to press her. After finishing the massage, she dimmed the lights and left him lying there – smelling like he’d been greased and rolled in the contents of his herb rack.
By the time she came back, he’d fallen asleep.
‘I checked with the hotel manager, about your girlfriend?’ she said, turning up the lights. He blinked up at her, momentarily disorientated. ‘He says there are definitely no plans to offer nail extensions in the spa. But he says if you ask at the front desk, we can easily arrange a booking for your girlfriend at a local beauty clinic.’
Twenty-One
Dr Nathan King sounded genuinely pleased to hear Kershaw’s voice when she called his mobile.
‘Hello there, stranger. How’s life in the firearms unit?’
Phew. Kershaw heard nothing in his voice to indicate that he knew she’d been the shooter in the Kyle Furnell case, nor that she was on enforced sick leave – which meant no awkward questions to fend off. Nathan had been one of the main pathologists during her time in Walthamstow murder squad so their paths had crossed fairly frequently and, luckily enough given the favour she had to ask, they’d always got on well.
‘Yeah, it’s good – different,’ she said. ‘And I still get to do the odd bit of detective work, which is why I’m calling. Did you do the PM on a guy called Jared Bateman, by any chance – would have been, ooh, Monday or Tuesday?’
‘Bateman … Hang on a second and I’ll check.’ A minute later he came back on. ‘No, I was in court the whole of Tuesday so it went to a locum.’
‘I’m guessing it wasn’t a Home Office PM then?’
She heard the rustle of paperwork. ‘No, I’m afraid Mr Bateman only received the twenty-minute budget special,’ he said.
It was something the two of them had shared a moan about more than once. All standout suspicious deaths got the full Home Office post-mortem lasting several hours which had to be conducted by an accredited pathologist like Nathan, but the more borderline cases ended up getting the economy version, at a fraction of the cost.
‘To be fair, this one does look like a straightforward accidental death,’ he added. ‘It appears that our Mr Bateman had the misfortune to drill directly into the mains cable.’
Kershaw swallowed a laugh. Nathan was only a few years older than her, but he had that pompous way of talking she’d noticed before in pathologists – straight out of the medical lecture theatre. Maybe it was the isolated nature of the job – with only the dead for company there wasn’t much human interaction to knock the corners off them.
She was wondering how to proceed without raising Nathan’s suspicions, when he said, ‘Look I have to run – I’m just finishing up my list. But if you have time to pop over, we can discuss the report.’
After parking up near Walthamstow Mortuary, Kershaw put in another call to Kiszka. Voicemail again. She’d been calling him regularly since her drink with Streaky, but he wasn’t answering his phone, which – together with his failure to mention the deaths of two of Steve Fisher’s close friends – had her antennae doing the conga. Of course, it was possible he was unaware of Jared Bateman and Bill Boyce popping their clogs within three days of each other, but somehow she doubted it. Remembering his unguarded mention of the Pineapple as Steve’s local, she’d bet a month’s rent that he’d been down there asking questions.
Inside the mortuary, the staff had clocked off leaving the post-mortem room empty. The examining tables had been hosed down, their stainless steel surfaces gleaming under the fluorescent strip lights, the raw stench of offal and bodily fluids muted by an overpowering smell of bleach. The only sound was water chuckling down countless unseen drains and conduits. Yet no mortuary ever felt truly empty to Kershaw: she was always conscious of the silent human presence behind the doors of the lockers that lined one wall, the sub-zero dormitory where the mortuary’s inhabitants lay, awaiting the final stage of their journey.
Seeing Nathan emerge from a side room, Kershaw sloshed across the floor in her blue wellingtons to greet him. His dark curly hair needed cutting, she noted, but he had kind eyes, and even in bloodstained turquoise scrubs she had to admit he was pretty easy on the eye.
‘Good to see you, Nathan.’
There was an awkward pause: had they met elsewhere they might have exchanged a chummy kiss on the cheek but here, that felt … inappropriate.
‘Shall we have a quick look at our Mr Bateman?’ Nathan asked, heading over to the lockers.
They stopped at a drawer bearing the scrawled name ‘Bateman’ in wipe-clean marker – at least it had done, until some smartarse had smudged out the middle ‘e’, leaving the impression that the drawer held the remains of a crime-fighting superhero. The look she and Nathan exchanged betrayed disapproval and amusement – a shared understanding that black humour was a necessary survival mechanism in a place like this.
Jared Bateman didn’t look too bad, thought Kershaw – as if he were dozing and his mouth might fall open at any moment to emit a comedy snore. The unreflective pallor of his skin was the only giveaway. She’d been to so many post-mortems over the years that the sight of a dead body no longer triggered the normal, visceral, response. Whenever she’d admitted as much to her non-Job friends, they were always shocked: it was another of those yawning chasms between the world of the normal and those whose daily lives were defined by the consequences of violent death.
Nathan lifted the dead man’s forearm and showed her his right hand, or what remained of it. ‘There’s your entry point,’ he said, indicating a deep, dark red lesion that had split the palm from side to side. The fingers were desiccated mahogany-coloured claws, burned down to the first knuckle, an
d when he turned the hand she could see that even on the back the skin was blackened, peeled back to reveal the tracery of veins beneath. ‘Because he was holding a drill, the current would have caused his muscles to contract and grip it even tighter, prolonging the exposure.’
Pulling the drawer open further, he indicated an angry-looking crater on the sole of the cadaver’s foot. ‘And here’s where the current went to ground.’
‘He wasn’t wearing rubber soles, then?’
‘No, unfortunately he was in his stockinged feet.’
‘Stockinged …?’ Kershaw suppressed a grin. ‘Oh, you mean he was only wearing socks. So, any signs of foul play, pre-mortem?’
‘Umm,’ he consulted the report. ‘He sustained a broken cervical vertebra …’
‘Really?’
‘I wouldn’t read anything into it. Two hundred and thirty volts of alternating current can cause spasms violent enough to break limbs.’ He turned one of Jared’s legs this way and that. ‘There are a few more burns …’
‘Could they have been inflicted before he got electrocuted?’ asked Kershaw, recalling Streaky’s mention of blowtorch injuries to Bill Boyce.
‘Very difficult to say without a full PM. The current often arcs all over the place, trying to find the nearest route to earth.’
‘No suggestion then, that the cause of death was anything other than electrocution?’
He flipped through the PM report. ‘Congestion of the lungs … petechial haemorrhages – it’s all pretty much what I’d expect to see.’ Turning to the conclusion he read aloud: ‘“Cause of death: cardiac and/or pulmonary arrest due to electrocution.”’
She stared down at Jared’s face. ‘And the drill, the wiring at his place, does it say if that all checked out?’
‘Looks like it. Old-style fuse box at the property, apparently. The modern type would probably have thrown the whole circuit.’
Just then, Nathan’s phone rang and he dug beneath his turquoise scrubs to retrieve it.
A moment later, his head shot up to look at her, a look of consternation clouding his face. ‘Jared Bateman …?’
Widening her eyes, she shook her head urgently.
After a bit more chat, he hung up, an uncertain half-smile on his face. ‘That was DS Bacon. He was phoning to give the go-ahead for a full Home Office PM on our friend here.’ Kershaw could see disappointment in his eyes. ‘Um … Natalie. Why did you not want me to mention you were here?’
‘I’m really sorry, Nathan. I can explain. Shall we go and have that coffee?’
Twenty-Two
‘Treatment?! I call it legalised torture, more like,’ complained Oskar, pausing in his demolition of a chicken and bacon club sandwich. ‘I’ll be lucky if my spine ever goes back to normal. I tell you, Janek, that girl would’ve made a good interrogator for the milicja!’
‘Hold your muzzle, Oskar,’ murmured Janusz. ‘Remember what I said? About keeping a low profile?’
‘There’s hardly anyone here,’ said Oskar, looking round the hotel brasserie.
‘Even so. Keep it down.’ Janusz took a sip of his coffee and scowled: described as espresso on the menu, it tasted more like boiled and reheated Nescafe.
Both men were still wearing their white towelling robes. After showering off the herbal oil slick coating his skin, Janusz had been tempted to put his everyday clothes back on. But as Oskar had pointed out, with all the other guests wearing their robes even outside the spa, he’d stick out like a duck in a hen house.
‘So, did you pick up anything useful?’ Janusz murmured.
Oskar folded the last mouthful of sandwich into his mouth and washed it down with a gulp of Diet Coke. ‘Well,’ he said, narrowing his eyes conspiratorially, ‘Agnieszka doesn’t like the management, I got that much out of her, just before she tried to rearrange my spine.’ He rolled his shoulders cautiously.
‘Go on.’
‘She put me in a headlock and put her knee in my back, like this …’
‘Not that, kretynie – what did she say about the management?’
‘Oh. Well, Agnieszka said the guy who runs the place is nice enough, but useless as tits on a boar. The place is two-thirds empty even at weekends, but he doesn’t seem to care. Spends most of his time in the sauna.’
Pretty much in line with what Magda had said.
‘She says he’s a maminsynek … how do you say that in English?’
‘Mummy’s boy.’
‘Tak, he’s a “mummy’s boy”. Mama is a widow – and loaded. She hardly ever comes here, doesn’t get involved with the business. Agnieszka reckons she bought him the place like you buy a kid a train set, so he can play at being hotel manager.’
Janusz grunted. Agnieszka sounded a good deal less discreet than Magda; but perhaps Oskar’s artless naivety made him a more natural confidant. ‘So does anyone know how the mama got rich?’
‘She’s retired, but apparently she made her fortune in zlom,’ said Oskar, rubbing finger and thumb together.
Interesting. There were millions to be made in scrap metal, that was for sure – and it wasn’t a business that garnered many awards for its high ethical standards. Janusz gazed out of the window over the old golf course greens. The ‘landscaping’ trumpeted on the website appeared to amount to a couple of overgrown beds of bamboo, an oily-looking pond, and a stretch of terrace in a lurid pink stone, its edges marked by concrete neoclassical urns that were entirely innocent of vegetation – unless you counted the weeds.
‘Did you get a name?’
‘The family name is Duff and the useless son is called Sebastian,’ said Oskar.
‘And Mama?’
Oskar screwed up his face in an effort of memory. ‘Katarzyna,’ he said finally.
Janusz leaned closer. ‘Any suggestion these people might be villains?’
‘Nie. Just people with more money than sense.’
Janusz sat back in his chair, feeling the motes of information float down and settle in his brain, hopefully to germinate there and produce some answers. If the hotel was just a rich kid’s plaything, then why would this Sebastian bother getting Kasia out here to talk about providing nail extensions? And how might the Duff family be connected to Steve and his small-time criminal pals? He was painfully aware that this place was his sole lead. If he was barking up the wrong tree … well, the consequences for Kasia didn’t bear thinking about.
Getting to his feet, he tied the belt on his towelling robe more securely. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Oskar protested.
‘I don’t know. You could always get your balls waxed.’
Outside, the sun had burned off the clouds and the air felt surprisingly mild, which was just as well given his bare legs. He affected a meandering stroll until he’d left the terrace and passed out of view of the hotel’s windows, before pausing to call up a satellite view of the grounds on his phone. The aerial image was poor resolution but it was easy to make out the red-tiled roof of the original building, and the flat asphalt of the more recent additions extending out either side. But something a couple of hundred metres behind the main hotel complex caught his eye: a rectangle of flat green, darker than the surrounding grass, with a small building alongside it, all neatly edged by trees. He blew it up as much as possible but still couldn’t work out what the green lozenge might be – a badminton court, perhaps?
Only one way to find out. He struck out at an angle that would make it seem to any onlooker as though he were heading for a small artificial lake in the distance, no doubt a legacy of the original golf course. From there, the land dipped away out of sight, allowing him to cut across and back to his target unobserved.
It took him a good ten minutes via this circuitous route to reach the trees surrounding the site of the mysterious green rectangle. They were conifers, planted in neat lines, many years ago judging by their great height, apparently to screen whatever was behind. Passing through a gap between two of the tree trunks
, Janusz came up against a wall of wood, two and a half metres high, made of sections of solid board with concrete footings, the kind used to cordon off building sites. Cursing, he skirted the barrier, on the lookout for a weak point. At one of the corners, he found one. A sloppy workman had failed to slot a section properly into its concrete footing, so that when pulled, it gaped at the bottom, allowing just enough room to wriggle himself through.
Inside the barrier stood an empty cement mixer and a wheelbarrow, evidence of a part-completed building project: new slabs of the same pink stone used for the hotel’s main terrace had been freshly laid around the rectangle of dark green he’d seen on the satellite image. Now it was obvious what it was. Not a badminton court, but the cover for a swimming pool.
Janusz felt a stab of disappointment. He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d been hoping to find behind the fence, but this wasn’t it. He dropped to a squat, and lifted one edge of the tarpaulin, the dark waters beneath releasing a waft of chlorine that made his throat itch.
He turned his attention to the building he’d seen on the satellite image: a single-storey block, presumably housing a changing room for pool users. As well as the standard Yale lock on its double doors, it had a shiny-new chain and padlock wrapped around the door handles. He hefted the chain: it weighed a ton, and the padlock was a state of the art, high-security model the size of his fist, with a shackle made of what looked like 70mm-plus steel. There wasn’t a bolt cutter in existence that could get through chain or lock; even a heavy-duty grinder would take a solid ten minutes’ work – and make one hell of a noise.
For a swimming pool changing room in the middle of nowhere this seemed like security overkill – and it set Janusz’s mind racing. He skirted the building looking for windows. There was only one. High up in the wall, a square of frosted glass. Glass over which someone had fixed, from the inside, what looked like cardboard.
He was just pondering whether it was big enough for him to get through when he heard a shout.
