getting a tirade of abuse. Even from this distance the man gave off the unmistakable aura of power and menace. When he appeared to fall silent for a moment, the girl turned and said something. A swift blur of movement and the girl’s head ricocheted off the side window. Janusz clenched his fists: the fucker had hit her! Only a conscious act of self-control stopped him sprinting to the car and dragging the skurwiel out to administer a lesson in the proper treatment of women. A half-second later, the kerbside door flew open and he pushed the girl out onto the pavement. The door slammed, the car performed a screeching U-turn, mounting the opposite pavement in the process, and sped off back to Hoe Street.
Janusz could restrain himself no longer: he jogged over to where the girl half-sat, half-sprawled on the kerb, her long legs folded beneath her like a fawn. She looked up at him, a dazed look in her greenish eyes, before accepting his arm and getting to her feet. Her movements were calm and dignified, but he noticed how badly her hands were shaking as she attempted to button her coat.
He retrieved one of her high-heeled shoes from the gutter and, once he was sure she was steady on her feet, stepped back. The last thing she needed right now was a man crowding her personal space.
‘Can I do anything?’ he asked. ‘I got the number plate – if you wanted to get the police involved, I mean?’
She touched the side of her head – the bastard had clearly hit her where the bruise wouldn’t show – and met his eyes with a look that mixed resignation with wary gratitude.
‘Thank you,’ she said finally, her dry half-smile telling him that the police weren’t really an option. ‘It is kind of you. But really, is not a problem.’ Her voice was attractively husky, with an Eastern European lilt – that much he was sure of – but not entirely Polish. If he had to lay money on it he’d say she hailed from further east, one of the countries bordering Russia, perhaps.
As she dusted the pavement grit from her palms his eyes lingered on her fine, long-boned fingers. Then he remembered why he had followed her in the first place: to find out her connection to Jim and why she would leave a bunch of expensive flowers in his memory. He was tempted for a moment to broach it with her there and then, but some instinct told him that a blunt enquiry would scare her off.
‘Allow me to give you my card, all the same,’ he said, proffering it with a little old-fashioned bow. It gave nothing away beyond his name and number and offered his only hope of future contact with the girl. ‘In case you change your mind – or should ever find yourself in need of assistance.’
She took the card, the wariness in her eyes giving way to a cautious warmth.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘A girl never knows when she might need a little assistance.’ And pocketing it, she turned, as graceful as a ballet dancer, and started to walk away.
‘May I know your name?’ Janusz asked to her departing back.
For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then, without breaking step, she threw a single word over her shoulder.
‘Varenka!’
Natalie Kershaw woke with a jolt, her heart pounding, convinced she was falling from the top of the Canary Wharf tower. Then the dream was gone, as evanescent as the vapour made by breath in frosty air. Turning over, she threaded an arm across Ben’s warm stomach and dozed, unconsciously synchronising her breathing with his. Ten minutes later, they both surfaced, woken by the muffled roar of a descending plane.
‘Shouldn’t you be getting up, Nat?’ murmured Ben. ‘First day of school and all that?’
Kershaw dug him in the ribs. ‘Don’t start pulling rank on me, just cos we’re in the same nick now.’
‘Am I sensing insubordination, Detective Constable?’ said Ben, putting a hand on her hip and pulling her towards him. ‘I hope this doesn’t mean a return of your well-known issues with the chain of command.’
After a quick mental calculation of how long it would take her to get from Ben’s place to Walthamstow, she added ten minutes to allow for traffic, then reached up to return his lazy kiss.
She and Ben had been together for almost two years now. They’d met while working at Canning Town CID but shortly afterwards their then-sergeant DS ‘Streaky’ Bacon had moved to Walthamstow, and encouraged Ben to apply for a sergeant post there in Divisional CID. Now that Kershaw was joining Streaky’s team on Walthamstow Murder Squad, she and Ben would be working in the same nick again for the first time in ages, although not – luckily – in the same office.
The relationship had had its ups and downs, for sure, but despite her instinctive caution, Kershaw was pretty sure that Ben was a keeper. As a fellow detective, he knew the score, which meant that unlike her previous boyfriend, an estate agent, he never lost the plot if she had to stand him up for dinner or rolled in a bit pissed after drinking with the team. More to the point, he seemed to understand that for her, the Job wasn’t, well, just a job. Okay, so she had, privately, felt somewhat irked when Ben had reached sergeant rank before her, but then he hadn’t been hauled up in front of Professional Standards for ‘flagrant disregard of the rulebook’ like she had.
Ancient history, she told herself. Today’s a fresh start.
She arrived at the nick a comfortable twelve minutes before the start of her shift. It had been three months since she’d heard she’d got the job, but when she told the receptionist that she was there to start work on Murder Squad, she felt her stomach perform a loop-the-loop.
Climbing the stairs, it hit her that she’d be thirty next year, and only now was her life panning out the way she’d imagined when she left uni. Better late than never, girl, she heard her dad saying. Better late than never. He’d been dead for three years, but so long as she could hear his voice in her head from time to time, it felt like he was still alongside her, somehow. Her mum was a much hazier memory but then Kershaw had been barely nine when she’d died, leaving Dad to bring her up single-handed.
She’d just reached the door marked Murder Squad when her mobile went off: Ben.
‘I was about to tell you, before you went and distracted me this morning, that I got a call from the agents,’ he said. ‘We can move into the new flat end of next week.’
Christ, she
‘Nat?’
‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ she replied. ‘Should give me plenty of time to box stuff up.’ She hoped her voice didn’t betray the sudden tightening she felt in her chest. Wasn’t this what she wanted? Kershaw told herself. To settle down, share her life with Ben?
‘You sure you’re cool with this?’ he asked. ‘Moving in together, I mean. If it’s too soon for you …’
The note of uncertainty in his voice prompted a rush of guilt. She tried to nail what it was, exactly, that was giving her the heebie jeebies. The prospect of giving up her independence after living on her own for the last two years? Partly, yes, but that wasn’t the whole story. Was it because Ben was sometimes
