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.
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
