bar area, which was filling up as the night progressed.
‘I don’t know,’ she said after a pause. ‘I just hope Nika isn’t getting herself mixed up in any trouble.’
As Janusz waited at the bar to buy more drinks he let his eye roam over the club’s clientele. In their teens and twenties, mostly Polish, but with a sprinkling of English faces, they appeared – for the most part – smartly turned-out and well behaved. His gaze fell on a group of youngsters sitting at the table nearest the bar. Two boys and two girls, deep in animated conversation, talking and laughing just a bit too loudly. And they were constantly touching each other, he noticed – a squeeze of the arm, a stroke of the cheek. Maybe it was just the buzz and bonhomie you’d expect between good friends enjoying the first rush of alkohol. Maybe not. The eldest, a boy, was 18, tops, and, under their make-up the two giggling girls looked barely old enough to drink legally.
He ordered the drinks and, leaving a twenty on the bar to pay for them, strolled to the toilets. After using the urinal, he lingered at the washbasin, combing his hair in the mirror and praying nobody took him for a pedzio. Just as he expected, a minute or two later, a shaven-headed, rail-thin guy in a hooded jacket slid up to the sink next to him, turned on the taps, and made a pretence of washing his hands.
‘Wanna buy Mitsubishi?’ he asked in Polish, without turning his head.
Janusz had a pretty good idea he wasn’t being offered a used car. Pocketing the comb, he raised a non-committal eyebrow.
‘It’s good stuff,’ the guy urged, ‘double-stacked …’ Suddenly, he found his sales pitch interrupted as his face was brought into violent and painful contact with the mirror.
‘What the fu …?!’ He gazed open-mouthed at his contorted reflection and scrabbled at the back of his neck where Janusz’s rocklike fist gripped his balled-up hood.
Janusz shook his head, gave him another little push for the profanity.
‘A word of advice, my friend. The undercover policja are all over this place. Apparently, some scumbag is selling drugs to youngsters.’
The guy tried to wipe snot and blood from his nose.
‘Your best move would be to take your … business up to the West End, and rethink your policy on selling to anyone under twenty-one.’ Janusz bent his head down to the guy’s level, locked eyes with him in the mirror. ‘In fact, if I was you,’ he said softly, ‘I’d insist on seeing a driving licence.’
Straightening up, he released the guy, who bolted, and turning on the taps, gave his hands a thorough soaping. He frowned at his reflection. Had Adamski been dealing Ekstasa here? It could explain a lot: his bizarre and unpredictable behaviour, the glazed look Weronika wore in the dirty photos, his sudden acquisition of enough cash to buy a BMW. It might explain that fracas with the klub bouncer, too.
Rejoining Justyna, he told her he’d been offered drugs in the toilets. He hoped she might take the bait, confirm that Adamski was a dealer, but she just lifted a shoulder, non-committal.
‘When I was a student,’ he said, ‘the only way to get high, apart from booze, was the occasional bit of grass. A guy I knew started growing it on his bedroom windowsill – in the summer the plants would get really huge. Anyway, one day, his Babcia was cooking the family dinner when she ran out of herbs,’ he looked up, found her smiling in anticipation.
‘The old lady decided that Tomek’s plant was some kind of parsley, and chopped a whole bunch of the stuff into a bowl of potatoes. Luckily, it wasn’t all that strong. All the same, he said that after dinner, when the state news came on – you know, the old Kommie stuff about tractor production targets being broken yet again – the whole family started cracking up, laughing their heads off, and found they just couldn’t stop.’
Justyna met his gaze, a grin dimpling her cheeks.
‘Anyway, Tomek said that the night went down in family history,’ Janusz went on. ‘And whenever his parents told the story, they always said the same thing: “That batch of elderberry wine was the best that Babcia ever made!”’
They laughed together, any remaining ice between them fully broken. He seized the moment to ask, ‘But in London, you can get anything, of course. Kokaina, Ekstasa, so on …’
‘Sure,’ she agreed. ‘If you are a fucking idiota.’ She sucked some juice up through her straw. ‘One of my friends died, back home, from sniffing glue. He was fifteen.’ She shook her head. ‘If I’d taken drugs I’d probably be dead like him, or even worse – still stuck in Katowice.’ They shared a wry grin: the joke crossed the generational divide.
Seizing the moment, he asked, ‘You think Pawel messes about with drugs, don’t you?’
She hesitated, then met his eyes. ‘I think so, yes. How else does someone like him make such money?’
Janusz made his move.
‘You know that pani Tosik has hired me to find Weronika,’ he said. Justyna gave a barely perceptible nod. ‘I can see it’s difficult for you – you are loyal to your friend. But I think you are right to be worried that this boyfriend of hers might put her in danger.’
She played with the straw in her glass, a frown creasing her forehead.
‘I’m not asking you to betray her trust – just to give me a few pointers,’ he went on. ‘It would help if I knew how Adamski talked her into going off like that.’
The girl took a big breath, let it out slowly. Then, speaking in a low voice, she told him that two weeks earlier, while pani Tosik was out getting her hair done, Weronika had locked herself away in her bedroom above the restaurant. Suspecting that something was going on, Justyna kept knocking and calling her name through the door.
‘In the end, she let me in,’ she said. ‘She was bouncing off the walls with excitement. Then I saw the half-packed suitcase on the bed. At first, she wouldn’t tell me what was going on, said Pawel had sworn her to secrecy.’ A line appeared between Justyna’s dark eyebrows. ‘But Nika couldn’t keep a secret to save her own life. In the end she showed me the ring she was wearing on a chain round her neck.’
‘They were engaged?’ asked Janusz, incredulous. An image of Weronika in a G-string posing for the camera, her eyes unfocused, swam before him and he tensed his jaw. Some fiancé, he thought.
Justyna nodded. ‘She was as excited as a little child on Christmas Eve,’ she said, unable to suppress a smile at the memory.
‘Did she say where she was going, where they would be living?’
She shook her head – but judging by the way her gaze slid away from his, he suspected she was lying.
‘She said they’d be leaving London soon. Pawel had some business to finish up, and then they were going back home to get married.’ She popped her eyes. ‘All this, after she’d known him just a few weeks!’
Janusz was touched by Justyna’s concern. She couldn’t be more than five or six years older than Weronika, but it was clear the younger girl brought out the mother hen in her.
‘I tried to talk her out of it,’ she went on. ‘I said, imagine how upset your mama will be when she hears her little
