Where the Devil Can’t Go
THE FIRST KISZKA AND KERSHAW MYSTERYA naked girl has washed up on the banks of the River Thames. The only clue to her identity is a heart-shaped tattoo encircling two foreign names. Who is she – and why did she die?Life’s already complicated enough for Janusz Kiszka, unofficial 'fixer' for East London’s Polish community: his priest has asked him to track down a young waitress who has gone missing; a builder on the Olympics site owes him a pile of money; and he’s falling for married Kasia, Soho’s most strait-laced stripper. But when Janusz finds himself accused of murder by an ambitious young detective, Natalie Kershaw, and pursued by drug dealing gang members, he is forced to take an unscheduled trip back to Poland to find the real killer.In the mist-wreathed streets of his hometown of Gdansk, Janusz must confront painful memories from the Soviet past if he is to uncover the conspiracy – and with it, a decades-old betrayal.
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WHERE THE
DEVIL CANâT GO
ANYA LIPSKA
The Friday Project
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by The Friday Project in 2013
Copyright © Anya Lipska 2013
Anya Lipska asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007504589
Ebook Edition © February 2013 ISBN: 9780007504596
Version: 2015-02-18
For Tomasz
Our homeland is on the verge of collapse ⦠The atmosphere of conflicts, misunderstanding, hatred causes moral degradation, surpasses the limits of toleration.Strikes, the readiness to strike, actions of protest have become a norm of life.
Citizens! ⦠I declare, that today the Military Council of National Salvation has been formed. In accordance with the Constitution, the State Council has imposed martial law all over the country.
General Jaruzelski, Communist Leader of Poland, speaking on December 13, 1981
The winter is yours, but the summer will be ours.
Solidarnosc graffiti during martial law,
Poland, 1981â83
Table of Contents
If I can just crawl to the bottom step, I might be able to reach the stair rail, pull myself up with my good arm. My legs are useless â the fall must have broken something in my back.
I knew the risk. I knew when I told the boy who I was that he might kill me, but I had to do it â how else could I bring up the matter of our mutual friend? At first, he didnât believe me, didnât remember my face. I had to raise my voice then, remind him what had happened to him â incredible that he should need reminding!
That did the trick. Something in his eyes changed.
I told him I regretted his sacrifice, tried to explain what a dangerous time it had been for the country â if we had lost our nerve, well, there would have been tanks on the streets again â and not our own ones this time.
He didnât see it that way. So I ended up in a puddle of my own piss on the cellar floor.
It was worth it. The boy read the document. He wants revenge â I saw it in his eyes â and that means Iâll get mine.
If I can just make it to the bottom step.
Janusz slammed the younger man so hard against the flatâs freshly painted plasterboard that he heard the fixings pop, and twisted the neck of the guyâs sweatshirt around his throat.
âHonest to God, Janusz!â Another shove. âSorry. Panie Kiszka. The contractor didnât pay me yet, but in two days Iâm getting a thousand, I swear on the wounds of Christ.â
As Janusz paused for breath, his free hand propped against the wall, he caught his reflection in the triple-glazed window next to Slawekâs shoulder. It showed a big man in early middle age, wide-shouldered and lean, and with a strong jaw, yes â but with the unmistakable beginnings of a stoop, and a scatter of grey in the thick dark hair. Naprawde, he was getting too old for this kind of thing.
Straightening his spine with caution, but keeping a grip on Slawekâs collar, he scanned the room, a newly fitted âluxuryâ studio apartment in a tower block overlooking the moonscape of the Olympic construction site. Floor to ceiling windows framed the black skeleton of the half-built main stadium, which sat like a giant teacup, ringed by attending cranes, seventeen floors below. When the block was finished, the view would put an extra forty, maybe fifty thousand, on the fat price tag.
Unbelievable. From what heâd seen of Stratford â and he saw far too much of it for his liking, now so many Poles were working around the Olympic site â the place was a dump. After the Luftwaffe had flattened it, along with most of the East End, the town planners had decided to recreate the town centre as a poured concrete shopping mall on a giant three-lane roundabout. It reminded him of the stuff the Communists had crapped out all over Poland in the fifties and sixties.
