Death Can’t Take a Joke. Anya Lipska

don’t hate me but I can’t make it tonight. We have so many late bookings for extensions, I’m going to have to stay here and help out. I’m really sorry. I’ll call again later and we can rebook? I love you, misiaczku.’

      Janusz flung his phone down, sending up a dust cloud of flour, where it lay like an alien spacecraft crashed in a snowdrift. This wasn’t the first time Kasia had stood him up lately. She was always protesting that he was the love of her life, but these days her burgeoning nail bar business and inconvenient husband left barely any time for him. When she’d left her job as a pole dancer, Janusz had hoped that she might move on from Steve, too, but on the subject of her marriage her position was unwavering: as a devout Catholic, she said, she couldn’t countenance a divorce.

      Staring at the sourdough, he contemplated binning it, but then resumed his kneading. It felt therapeutic, slamming the dough into the worktop. The cat, who was curled up on a kitchen chair cleaning himself, broke off from his ministrations to gaze up at Janusz.

      ‘You probably won’t see it this way, Copetka,’ he told him, ‘but when the vet took your nuts away, he saved you a world of trouble.’

      Janusz arrived in Walthamstow ten minutes ahead of the Romanian’s scheduled meeting time. He bought a half of lager in Hoe Street’s last surviving pub and stationed himself in the window, almost directly opposite the Pasha Café, which had a sign advertising ‘Cakes, Shakes and Shisha’. And sure enough, even on this chilly day, there were two dark-skinned men seated at one of the pavement tables chatting and smoking shisha pipes beneath a plastic canopy. Janusz remembered reading somewhere that an hour spent smoking tobacco this way was the equivalent of getting through 100 cigarettes. Lucky bastards, he thought, cursing the smoking ban.

      At two minutes to four, the black Discovery pulled up right outside the café and the bullet-headed man climbed out of the driver’s seat – no chauffeur today. He bent to retrieve something from the rear seat, a manbag, from the look of it, then turned, giving Janusz a view of short-clipped hair, a muscled back under a well-cut jacket, before heading for the café entrance. Janusz was just thinking he’d have to wait till the guy came out again for a good look at his face when, at the threshold, he turned to aim his key fob at the 4X4. It took barely a second – but long enough for Janusz to take a mental snapshot. The thing that caught his attention was a curious scar running down the side of his face. Reaching from temple to jaw, it looked too wide to have been carved by a blade, and yet unusually regular for a burn.

      Janusz took a slug of lager, aware of a pulse starting to thrum in his throat. He’d seen his type before. His bearing, the way he walked and held himself, revealed more accurately than any psychiatrist’s report what kind of man he was: someone who saw other people as tools to achieve his ends – or as obstacles to be neutralised.

      Around forty minutes later, Scarface re-emerged. Expressionless, he retrieved the plastic-wrapped parking ticket that a warden had left pinned under his wiper and dropped it into the gutter, before pulling out into the stream of traffic. Janusz decided that his disfigurement was a burn, despite its neat edges – the sort of thing that might be caused if someone had pressed a red-hot iron bar against the side of his face.

      Janusz took his time finishing his drink and headed over to the café. Inside, it was surprisingly plush, kitted out with low, upholstered seating and Middle Eastern-style wall hangings. To the café’s rear, a doorway hung with heavy dark red velvet curtains led to what he assumed was a private salon. The Christmas cake smell of fruit-flavoured shisha tobacco hung in the air. Opposite the long glass counter was a giant TV screen tuned to Al Jazeera, on which a female presenter in a headscarf was interviewing an Israeli diplomat. English subtitles revealed that the subject of the interview was the shelling of southern Israel by Hamas militants in Gaza; attacks returned – with sky-high inflation – by Israeli forces. Not for the first time, the shared guttural phonetics of the Arabic and Hebrew languages struck Janusz as deeply ironic.

      A young man aged about eighteen or nineteen, wearing a Galatasaray shirt, appeared behind the counter through a tinkling bead curtain. He greeted Janusz across the counter: if he was surprised to find a big white Pole wearing a military greatcoat in a shisha café, he didn’t show it.

      Janusz pretended to be checking out the trays of sticky-looking pastries. There were squares of filo layered with green pistachio paste, nests of deep fried vermicelli, syrup-slicked dumpling balls … Dupa blada! You could get diabetes just looking at this stuff.

      He made a random selection, then threw in: ‘Is the boss around today?’

      The kid paused, the serrated jaws of his steel tongs hovering over a pastry, and flashed Janusz a smile. ‘I’m the boss,’ he said, gesturing at a document on the wall behind him.

      Yeah, thought Janusz, and I’m the Dalai Llama.

      ‘That’s too bad,’ said Janusz. ‘I might have some information that would work to his advantage.’

      The guy shrugged regretfully, as though to say if Janusz refused to believe him, there was nothing he could do about it.

      Janusz turned to watch the TV, which had now moved on to the situation in Syria, a conflict so savage it made the Hamas–Israel stand-off look like a game of pat-a-cake. A moment later, the velvet drapes guarding the private sanctum were parted by a tall, mournful-looking man with a moustache. After giving Janusz a tiny nod of acknowledgement, he stood beside him looking up at the TV.

      ‘What is it you are selling, my friend?’ he asked in a soft voice.

      ‘I’ve just inherited a business, round the corner from here,’ said Janusz, ‘and I’m offering special rates to my fellow businessmen in Hoe Street.’

      He turned to receive the box of pastries from the kid, passing a tenner across the counter.

      ‘If it is a Polish supermarket,’ said the man, ‘I’m afraid we buy our supplies from Costco.’ His gaze flicked back to the television, signalling an end to the conversation.

      Janusz pocketed the change the kid gave him. ‘No, nothing like that,’ he said with a grin.

      The man didn’t move his gaze from the screen. ‘What sort of business are we talking about then?’

      Janusz held his silence until, finally, the man turned to look at him.

      ‘I suppose you’d call it a fitness club,’ he said. ‘Used to be run by a good friend of mine. It’s called Jim’s Gym.’

      The man blinked, once. Left a pause that was just a fraction of a second too long. ‘I’m not familiar with it. But I’m afraid I am not a great exercise enthusiast.’

      ‘Pity. But if you do change your mind, drop in any time,’ said Janusz, holding out one of Jim’s cards. ‘We do a really competitive off-peak membership.’ When the man made no move to take it, Janusz left it on the countertop.

      It was almost dark when he emerged onto Hoe Street and the temperature had taken a nosedive, but after the warm sweet fug of the café he welcomed the clean chilly air. As he navigated his way through the rush-hour throng he reflected on what he’d just done. It had been a moment of impulse, an urge to heave a boulder into the lake, to see where the ripples might meet land. He had no idea whether the Turk who owned the Pasha Café would report back to his Romanian associate. Nor had he any clue to the nature of their dealings, or whether they were in some way connected to Jim’s murder. All Janusz had was a powerful hunch: that the girl Varenka leaving flowers for Jim meant something. And he’d bet his apartment that the ‘something’ would lead him right back to Scarface.

      Outside Walthamstow tube, he paused, and pulled out his phone: by the time he surfaced at Highbury it would be past office hours.

      ‘Czesc, Wiktor! How’s the weather in Swansea? … Oh? Shame. Listen, have you had a chance to check that reg number I texted you? That’s right, a black Land Rover Discovery …’

      His big face creased in a smile. ‘Wspaniale! Text me over the address, would you?’