a very beautiful young woman, but a good girl and a hard worker. She disappeared two weeks ago without a word, and pani Tosik is worried out of her skin. She doesn’t want to call the police, naturalnie.’
Janusz inclined his head in understanding. Maybe Poles were insubordinate by nature, or maybe it was a reaction to forty years of brutal foreign rule – either way, they didn’t roll out the welcome mat for the cops.
‘So? She’s found a boyfriend who’s getting rich doing loft conversions,’ he said, flicking a fat inch of ash off his cigar.
‘Maybe so, but the girl’s mother back home hasn’t heard from her and pani Tosik feels terribly guilty. She wants her tracked down,’ he met Janusz’s eyes, ‘And she’ll pay good money.’ Janusz couldn’t help smiling at the old man’s transparent look of guile as he delivered his trump card.
Finding a missing person was hard work and involved lots of schlepping round on the tube, which he loathed – but it was common knowledge that pani Tosik was loaded, and he could certainly do with the cash.
Father Pietruski drained the last of his drink and stood to go to the bar.
‘Anyway, I suggested you – God forgive me.’
The sky over the Thames was a milky, benevolent blue, but a freezing wind raked Detective Constable Natalie Kershaw’s face as the fast-response Targa tore over the steely water. As the speedboat swept under Tower Bridge, engine noise booming off the iron stanchions, the uniformed helmsman sneaked a sideways look at her profile, the blonde hair scraped back in a businesslike ponytail. He wondered if he dared ask her out. Probably not. She might only come up to his armpit, but she looked like a ball breaker – typical CID female.
Kershaw was miles away, thinking about her dad, scanning the southern bank for the Bermondsey wharf where he had hauled coke as a warehouseman in the sixties – his first job. He’d pointed it out to her from a tour boat – an outing they’d taken a couple of years ago, just before he’d died. She finally clocked his warehouse – harder to recognise now its hundred-year-old patina of coal smoke had been sandblasted off. Fancy new balconies, too, at the upper windows: all the signs of the warehouse’s new life as swanky apartments for City bankers – Yeah, a right bunch of bankers, she heard him say. He’d be pleased as punch to see her now, a detective out on her first suspicious death.
When her DS had dropped it on her that morning she’d been a bit hacked off – she already had to go up west for a court case, and this job meant her racing straight back to Wapping. Anyway, surely a floater pulled out of the Thames was a job for a uniform? But telling the Sarge that, however diplomatically, had been a bad move, she realised, almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Worse, she was on early turn this week, so this had all gone off at 0730 hours, and DS Bacon, known to his constables, inevitably, as Streaky, was not a morning person. He had torn a big fat strip off her in front of two of the guys.
‘Let’s get one thing straight, Kershaw – you’ll do whatever fucking job I throw at you and say thank you, Sarge, can I get you a cup of tea, Sarge. If I hear any more of your cheeky backchat I’ll have you back on Romford Rd wearing a lid faster than you can say diversity awareness.’
Streaky was in his fifties, old-school CID to his fag-stained fingertips, and Kershaw suspected that in his book, female detectives were good for one thing: interviewing witnesses in rape, domestic violence and brokenbaby cases.
Of course she could complain to the Guv, DI Bellwether. Streaky’s Neanderthal management style – the swearing, the borderline sexism, his old-school insistence on addressing DCs by their surnames – it was all a total no-no these days, but she’d rather keep her mouth shut and get on with it. You needed a thick skin to be in the job. If she got stick now and again for being a young, blonde female – and therefore brainless – she could give as good as she got. Anyway, everyone copped it for something. Being fat, thin, Northern, ginger, having a funny name, having a boring name, talking posh, talking Cockney, anything. At her first nick, one poor bastard had made the mistake of letting on that he did karate, and the next day his desk disappeared under a deluge of Chinese takeaway menus and house bricks. She couldn’t even remember his real name, because after that everybody – even the girls on switchboard – called him Chop Suey.
Giving – and taking – good banter was about bonding, fitting in, being part of a unit. If you couldn’t take friendly abuse from fellow cops you were finished, game over. One thing she was sure of: Natalie Kershaw wasn’t going to end up one of those sad cases moaning about sexism at an employment tribunal. If she hadn’t made Sergeant by the time she turned thirty, in three years’ time, she’d pack it in and do something else.
Anyway, once she’d had a proper look at the job Streaky had thrown her, she thought maybe it wasn’t so lame after all. The floater had come up naked, and you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that suicides don’t generally get their kit off before chucking themselves in the river. So maybe it was a good call to send a detective to have a look before the pathologist started slicing and dicing – Streaky might be a dinosaur in a bad suit, but occasionally he showed signs of being a good cop.
The Targa overtook a tourist boat – the occupants craning to check out the cop at the helm and his attractive plain-clothes passenger – and within seconds, they were pulling up at a long blue jetty on the north shore in front of Wapping Police Station. Kershaw gave the uniform a smile, but ignored his outstretched hand to step down from the bobbing boat unaided. She headed for the nick, a Victorian building with more curlicues and columns than a footballer’s wedding cake, but after a few steps his shout made her turn. Grinning, he pointed across the jetty to an oblong tent of blue tarpaulin, then, revving the Targa’s engine unnecessarily, he sped off.
He was cute, she thought. Why don’t guys like that ever ask me out?
She pulled the tarpaulin flap open and ducked inside. Just at that moment two river cops were unloading the contents of a black body bag into a shallow stainless steel bath, about twice the size of the one in her flat. The darkly slicked head of a girl, followed by her naked body, slithered out of the bag in an obscene parody of birth.
‘Fuck,’ muttered Kershaw, caught unawares. It wasn’t her first stiff – as a probationer she’d been sent on a call to a tower block in Poplar after some neighbours reported a foul liquid seeping through their ceiling. In the upstairs flat she’d found the remains of an old guy who’d been dead in his armchair for two weeks in front of a two-bar fire. He looked like a giant half-melted candle.
But she had to admit this one was a shocker. The girl’s skin was purplish and mottled, the breasts and stomach bore gaping slashes, and here and there were raw patches the size of a man’s hand, as though someone had taken a blowtorch to the body. The face was fairly intact, except for the eyes, which were now just two blackened empty pits.
One of the PCs left, and the other gave her the rundown.
He was a middle-aged, lifelong-plod type: a bit world-weary, but straight as a die, which was a relief, because she hadn’t anticipated the sheer embarrassment factor of looking over a naked female with a guy old enough to be her dad.
‘A runner spotted her on the foreshore at low tide,’ he told her. ‘Just this side of the Thames Barrier. We get quite a few floaters washed up on the sandbank there.’
Kershaw pulled out a notepad and pencil. ‘She didn’t
