Death Can’t Take a Joke. Anya Lipska

then: her body had at least still felt warm when he’d kissed her goodbye. Was that all life was then – a matter of temperature?

      He found himself out on the street again, with no memory of how he’d got there. His thoughts clashed and clattered like balls on a pool table, grief and disbelief battling rage at what had happened. How could it be that Jim had survived a decade working on building sites and an Argentinian torpedo, only to be stabbed to death on his own doorstep, apparently by a couple of junkies? It was nieznosne – unbearable.

      People on their way to work averted their eyes as they passed the big man pounding the pavement, his jaw set and eyes narrowed in some blistering inner fury. Mental health case: best avoided, most of them concluded.

      Ten minutes later, Janusz turned into Barclay Road, Jim and Marika’s street. As he neared their neat, cream-painted terraced house, he slowed, and saw something that made his insides plummet. The low brick garden wall – a wall that Janusz and Jim had rebuilt with their own hands one hot, beer-fuelled summer’s day – had all but disappeared beneath a drift of cellophane-wrapped bouquets that rustled in the breeze. Two tea lights in red perspex holders on top of the wall completed its transformation into a shrine.

      As Janusz watched, a middle-aged woman approached, holding the hand of a little girl. She leaned down to whisper to the child, who, taking an awkward step forward, bent to add a bunch of yellow flowers to the pile.

      He paused in the porch to take a couple of deep breaths, determined to master himself. Of course, Marika knew that the man who paramedics had rushed to hospital last night from this address could only be her husband, but as she hadn’t been able to face identifying his body herself, she’d still be inhabiting that hazy hinterland of denial – a zone Janusz had barely left himself.

      She opened the front door and searched his face, before sleepwalking into his arms. Holding her to his chest so tightly that her hot tears soaked through to his skin in an instant, he sent a grim-faced nod of greeting over her shoulder to Basia, her sister, who looked on from the kitchen doorway.

      Finally, Marika drew her head back and looked up at him. ‘Thank you, Janek, for going to him,’ she said, her voice thick with tears. ‘I will go to see him later, with Basia.’

      The three of them sat around the kitchen table nursing un-drunk cups of tea, under the mournful gaze of Laika, who had not raced to greet Janusz today but instead lay silent in her basket, her long black-and-white nose resting on crossed paws.

      ‘Basia and I, we had gone out to our Pilates class,’ said Marika, ‘and when we came back, about nine o’clock, the police were waiting outside.’ Her voice was husky and almost toneless. ‘They’d … taken him away to the hospital by then, but they say he was already dead.’ Her eyes filled with tears again.

      As Basia put an arm around her shoulder, murmuring words of comfort, Janusz realised that Marika was speaking in Polish, which he couldn’t remember her doing since she’d married Jim. Now grief had stripped away the last ten years, throwing her back on her mother tongue.

      After a moment, she pulled herself upright and used both hands to sweep the tears from her cheeks – a determined gesture.

      ‘What did the cops say?’ he asked. ‘Did they question the neighbours straightaway? Right after the … after Jim was found?’

      She nodded. ‘Jason who lives two doors down heard a shout when he was putting out the rubbish bags.’ She paused, took a steadying breath. ‘It was starting to get dark, but he saw two men running away, through the garden gate.’

      ‘Which way were they headed? Hoe Street? Or Lea Bridge Road?’ Janusz was relieved to find himself slipping into private investigator mode.

      ‘Hoe Street, I think he said.’

      ‘What did they look like?’

      ‘They both wore hoodies and balaclavas,’ she said, dropping into English for these unfamiliar words. ‘So all he could say was that one was tall – almost two metres – and slim, the other a little shorter.’

      ‘Black? White?’

      She gave a hopeless shrug. ‘It was dark, and with the faces covered, he couldn’t tell.’

      Janusz hesitated. He needed to know exactly how Jim had died but he couldn’t think of a sensitive way to frame the question. From Laika’s basket came a tentative whine of distress.

      Marika’s swollen eyes met his and a look of understanding passed between them. ‘The police said …’ her voice had fallen to a croak. ‘They told me he had suffered several deep stab wounds … in his stomach. One severed an artery …’ She tried to go on but then gave up. ‘I’m sorry, Janek,’ she said. ‘Is it okay if I let Basia tell you the rest? I need to lie down.’ She stood unsteadily, her chair grating harshly on the stone floor tiles.

      Janusz jumped to his feet and went to her, his shovel-like hands encircling her slender forearms. At his touch, Marika’s eyes filled with fresh tears.

      ‘You know that he was an only child,’ she said, grief roughening her voice. ‘But he always said he didn’t miss not having a brother – because he had you.’

      She winced and Janusz realised that, without meaning to, he had tightened his grip on her arms.

      ‘You rest, Marika,’ he said, bending to lock his gaze on hers. ‘But there’s something I want you to know. Whatever it takes, I will find the skurwysyny who did this.’

      They embraced then, three times on alternate cheeks in the Polish way. He stood watching her walk slowly down the hall, choosing her footing carefully, as though stepping through the debris of her shattered life. Laika rose to follow her, bushy tail down, claws tick-ticking on the wooden floor.

      To avoid disturbing Marika – her bedroom lay right above the kitchen – Basia took Janusz into the front room and closed the door.

      ‘There’s no way he could have been saved,’ she said, eyebrows steepled in sorrow. ‘Marika doesn’t know this, but the police told me those dirty chuje – excuse my language – they practically gutted him. He lost sixty per cent of his blood lying there on the garden path.’

      Janusz blinked a few times, trying to dispel an image of his big strong mate lying helpless on the ground, his life ebbing away across the black and white tiles.

      ‘They wouldn’t let Marika near the house,’ Basia went on. ‘We went to my flat and I only brought her back here once …’ her knuckles flew to her lips ‘… once everything was cleaned up.’ Seeing her stricken face, Janusz remembered something. All those years ago, it had been Basia whom Jim had dated first, if only for a few weeks, before he’d become smitten with her older sister. Janusz had ensured, naturalnie, that Jim got plenty of ribbing down the building site for getting lucky with both sisters, but as far as he could recall, there had been no hard feelings between any of the trio when Jim and Marika became an item.

      ‘On the phone, you said something about junkies?’

      Basia tipped her head. ‘It was something one of the policemen said, that maybe it was a robbery, to get money for narkotyki.’

      Janusz frowned. The house was over a mile from the notorious council estates west of Hoe Street, bordering neighbouring Tottenham, that were home to Walthamstow’s drug gangs. Would those scumbags really travel all the way up here to rob a random householder on the doorstep of his modest terraced house? Then he remembered Jim’s text delaying their meeting.

      ‘Do you know why he was running late for our pint at the Rochester?’

      She nodded. ‘Marika asked him to fix a leaking tap in the downstairs cloakroom, so he came back from work early to do it before going out again.’

      ‘He didn’t say anything about someone coming to the house to see him, before he came to meet me? Maybe that new deputy manager of his?’

      The gym was doing so well