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.
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
