The Cuckoo's Calling

  “Cheers,” said Strike, taking the present. “I can’t wrap.”

  “I hope he likes it,” she replied, tucking the check away in her black handbag.

  “Yeah. And good luck with the interview. D’you want the job?”

  “Well, it’s quite a good one. Human resources in a media consultancy in the West End,” she said, sounding unenthusiastic. “Enjoy the party. I’ll see you Monday.”

  The self-imposed penance of walking down into Denmark Street to smoke became even more irksome in the ceaseless rain. Strike stood, minimally shielded beneath the overhang of his office entrance, and asked himself when he was going to kick the habit and set to work to restore the fitness that had slipped away along with his solvency and his domestic comfort. His mobile rang while he stood there.

  “Thought you might like to know your tip-off’s paid dividends,” said Eric Wardle, who sounded triumphant. Strike could hear engine noise and the sound of men talking in the background.

  “Quick work,” commented Strike.

  “Yeah, well, we don’t hang around.”

  “Does this mean I’m going to get what I was after?”

  “That’s what I’m calling about. It’s a bit late today, but I’ll bike it over Monday.”

  “Sooner rather than later suits me. I can hang on here at the office.”

  Wardle laughed a little offensively.

  “You get paid by the hour, don’t you? I’d’ve thought it suited you to string it out a bit.”

  “Tonight would be better. If you can get it here this evening, I’ll make sure you’re the first to know if my old mate drops any more tip-offs.”

  In the slight pause that followed, Strike heard one of the men in the car with Wardle say:

  “…Fearney’s fucking face…”

  “Yeah, all right,” said Wardle. “I’ll get it over later. Might not be till seven. Will you still be there?”

  “I’ll make sure I am,” Strike replied.

  The file arrived three hours later, while he was eating fish and chips out of a small polystyrene tray in his lap and watching the London evening news on his portable television. The courier buzzed the outer door and Strike signed for a bulky package sent from Scotland Yard. Once unwrapped, a thick gray folder full of photocopied material was disclosed. Strike took it back to Robin’s desk, and began the lengthy process of digesting the contents.

  Here were statements from those who had seen Lula Landry during the final evening of her life; a report on the DNA evidence lifted from her flat; photocopied pages of the visitors’ book complied by security at number 18, Kentigern Gardens; details of the medication Lula had been prescribed to control bipolar disorder; the autopsy report; medical records for the previous year; mobile phone and landline records; and a precis of the findings on the model’s laptop. There was also a DVD, on which Wardle had scribbled CCTV 2 Runners.

  The DVD drive on Strike’s secondhand computer had not worked since he acquired it; he therefore slipped the disc into the pocket of the overcoat hanging by the glass door, and resumed his contemplation of the printed material contained within the ring-binder, his notebook open beside him.

  Night descended outside the office, and a pool of golden light fell from the desk lamp on to each page as Strike methodically read the documents that had added up to a conclusion of suicide. Here, amid the statements shorn of superfluity, minutely detailed timings, the copied labels from the bottles of drugs found in Landry’s bathroom cabinet, Strike tracked the truth he had sensed behind Tansy Bestigui’s lies.

  The autopsy indicated that Lula had been killed on impact with the road, and that she had died from a broken neck and internal bleeding. There was a certain amount of bruising to the upper arms. She had fallen wearing only one shoe. The photographs of the corpse confirmed LulaMyInspirationForeva’s assertion that Landry had changed her clothes on coming home from the nightclub. Instead of the dress in which she had been photographed entering her building, the corpse wore a sequined top and trousers.

  Strike turned to the shifting statements that Tansy had given to the police; the first simply claiming a trip to the bathroom from the bedroom; the second adding the opening of her sitting-room window. Freddie, she said, had been in bed throughout. The police had found half a line of cocaine on the flat marble rim of the bath, and a small plastic bag of the drug hidden inside a box of Tampax in the cabinet above the sink.

  Freddie’s statement confirmed that he had been asleep when Landry fell, and that he had been woken by his wife’s screams; he said that he had hurried into the sitting room in time to see Tansy run past him in her underwear. The vase of roses he had sent to Macc, and which a clumsy policeman had smashed, were intended, he admitted, as a gesture of welcome and introduction; yes, he would have been glad to strike up an acquaintance with the rapper, and yes, it had crossed his mind that Macc might be perfect in a thriller now in development. His shock at Landry’s death had undoubtedly made him overreact to the ruin of his floral gift. He had initially believed his wife when she said she had overheard the argument upstairs; he had subsequently come, reluctantly, to accept the police view that Tansy’s account was indicative of cocaine consumption. Her drug habit had placed great strain on the marriage, and he had admitted to the police that he was aware that his wife habitually used the stimulant, though he had not known that she had a supply in the flat that night.

  Bestigui further stated that he and Landry had never visited each other’s flats, and that their simultaneous stay at Dickie Carbury’s (which the police appeared to have heard about on a subsequent occasion, for Freddie had been reinterviewed after the initial statement) had barely advanced their acquaintance. “She associated mainly with the younger guests, while I spent most of the weekend with Dickie, who is a contemporary of mine.” Bestigui’s statement presented the unassailable front of a rock face without crampons.

  After reading the police account of events inside the Bestiguis’ flat, Strike added several sentences to his own notes. He was interested in the half a line of cocaine on the side of the bath, and even more interested in the few seconds after Tansy had seen the flailing figure of Lula Landry fall past the window. Much would depend, of course, on the layout of the Bestiguis’ apartment (there was no map or diagram of it in the folder), but Strike was bothered by one consistent aspect of Tansy’s shifting stories: she insisted throughout that her husband had been in bed, asleep, when Landry fell. He remembered the way she had shielded her face, by pretending to push back her hair, as he pressed her on the point. All in all, and notwithstanding the police view, Strike considered the precise location of both Bestiguis at the moment Lula Landry fell off her balcony to be far from proven.

  He resumed his systematic perusal of the file. Evan Duffield’s statement conformed in most respects to Wardle’s secondhand tale. He admitted to having attempted to prevent his girlfriend leaving Uzi by seizing her by the upper arms. She had broken free and left; he had followed her shortly afterwards. There was a one-sentence mention of the wolf mask, couched in the unemotional language of the policeman who had interviewed him: “I am accustomed to wearing a wolf’s-head mask when I wish to avoid the attentions of photographers.” A brief statement from the driver who had taken Duffield from Uzi confirmed Duffield’s account of visiting Kentigern Gardens and moving on to d’ Arblay Street, where he had dropped his passenger and left. The antipathy Wardle claimed the driver had felt towards Duffield was not conveyed in the bald factual account prepared for his signature by the police.

  There were a couple of other statements supporting Duffield’s: one from a woman who claimed to have seen him climbing the stairs to his dealer’s, one from the dealer, Whycliff, himself. Strike recalled Wardle’s expressed opinion that Whycliff would lie for Duffield. The woman downstairs could have been cut in on any payment. The rest of the witnesses who claimed to have seen Duffield roaming the streets of London could only honestly say that they had seen a man in a wolf mask.

  Strike
lit a cigarette and read through Duffield’s statement again. He was a man with a violent temper, who had admitted to attempting to force Lula to remain in the club. The bruising to the upper arms of the body was almost certainly his work. If, however, he had taken heroin with Whycliff, Strike knew that the odds of him being in a fit state to infiltrate number 18, Kentigern Gardens, or to work himself into a murderous rage, were negligible. Strike was familiar with the behavior of heroin addicts; he had met plenty at the last squat his mother had lived in. The drug rendered its slaves passive and docile; the absolute antithesis of shouting, violent alcoholics, or twitchy, paranoid coke-users. Strike had known every kind of substance-abuser, both inside the army and out. The glorification of Duffield’s habit by the media disgusted him. There was no glamour in heroin. Strike’s mother had died on a filthy mattress in the corner of the room, and nobody had realized she was dead for six hours.

  He got up, crossed the room and wrenched open the dark, rain-spattered window, so that the thud of the bass from the 12 Bar Café became louder than ever. Still smoking, he looked out at Charing Cross Road, glittering with car lights and puddles, where Friday-night revelers were striding and lurching past the end of Denmark Street, umbrellas wobbling, laughter ringing above the traffic. When, Strike wondered, would he next enjoy a pint on a Friday with friends? The notion seemed to belong to a different universe, a life left behind. The strange limbo in which he was living, with Robin his only real human contact, could not last, but he was still not ready to resume a proper social life. He had lost the army, and Charlotte and half a leg; he felt a need to become thoroughly accustomed to the man he had become, before he felt ready to expose himself to other people’s surprise and pity. The bright orange cigarette stub flew down into the dark street and was extinguished in the watery gutter; Strike pushed down the window, returned to his desk and pulled the file firmly back towards him.

  Derrick Wilson’s statement told him nothing he did not already know. There was no mention in the file of Kieran Kolovas-Jones, or of his mysterious blue piece of paper. Strike turned next, with some interest, to the statements of the two women with whom Lula had spent her final afternoon, Ciara Porter and Bryony Radford.

  The makeup artist remembered Lula as cheerful and excited about Deeby Macc’s imminent arrival. Porter, however, stated that Landry “had not been herself,” that she had seemed “low and anxious,” and had refused to discuss what was upsetting her. Porter’s statement added an intriguing detail that nobody had yet told Strike. The model asserted that Landry had made specific mention, that afternoon, of an intention to leave “everything” to her brother. No context was given; but the impression left was of a girl in a clearly morbid frame of mind.

  Strike wondered why his client had not mentioned that his sister had declared her intention of leaving him everything. Of course, Bristow already had a trust fund. Perhaps the possible acquisition of further vast sums of money did not seem as noteworthy to him as it would to Strike, who had never inherited a penny.

  Yawning, Strike lit another cigarette to keep himself awake, and began to read the statement of Lula’s mother. By Lady Yvette Bristow’s own account, she had been drowsy and unwell in the aftermath of her operation; but she insisted that her daughter had been “perfectly happy” when she came to visit that morning, and had evinced nothing but concern for her mother’s condition and prospects of recovery. Perhaps the blunt, unnuanced prose of the recording officer was to blame, but Strike took from Lady Bristow’s recollections the impression of a determined denial. She alone suggested that Lula’s death had been an accident, that she had somehow slipped over the balcony without meaning to; it had been, said Lady Bristow, an icy night.

  Strike skim-read Bristow’s statement, which tallied in all respects with the account he had given Strike in person, and proceeded to that of Tony Landry, John and Lula’s uncle. He had visited Yvette Bristow at the same time as Lula on the day before the latter’s death, and asserted that his niece had seemed “normal.” Landry had then driven to Oxford, where he had attended a conference on international developments in family law, staying overnight in the Malmaison Hotel. His account of his whereabouts was followed by some incomprehensible comments about telephone calls. Strike turned, for elucidation, to the annotated copies of phone records.

  Lula had barely used her landline in the week prior to her death, and not at all on the day before she died. From her mobile, however, she had made no fewer than sixty-six calls on her last day of life. The first, at 9:15 in the morning, had been to Evan Duffield; the second, at 9:35, to Ciara Porter. There followed a gap of hours, in which she had spoken to nobody on the mobile, and then, at 1:21, she had begun a positive frenzy of telephoning two numbers, almost alternately. One of these was Duffield’s; the other belonged, according to the crabbed scribble beside the number’s first appearance, to Tony Landry. Again and again she had telephoned these two men. Here and there were gaps of twenty minutes or so, during which she made no calls; then she would begin telephoning again, doubtless hitting “redial.” All of this frenetic calling, Strike deduced, must have taken place once she was back in her flat with Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter, though neither of the two women’s statements made mention of repeated telephoning.

  Strike turned back to Tony Landry’s statement, which cast no light on the reason his niece had been so anxious to contact him. He had turned off the sound on his mobile while at the conference, he said, and had not realized until much later that his niece had called him repeatedly that afternoon. He had no idea why she had done so and had not called her back, giving as his reason that by the time he realized that she had been trying to reach him, she had stopped calling, and he had guessed, correctly as it turned out, that she would be in a nightclub somewhere.

  Strike was now yawning every few minutes; he considered making himself coffee, but could not muster the energy. Wanting his bed, but driven on by habit to complete the job in hand, he turned to the copies of security logbook pages showing the entrances and exits of visitors to number 18 on the day preceding Lula Landry’s death. A careful perusal of signatures and initials revealed that Wilson had not been as meticulous in his record-keeping as his employers might have hoped. As Wilson had already told Strike, the movements of the building’s residents were not recorded in the book; so the comings and goings of Landry and the Bestiguis were missing. The first entry Wilson had made was for the postman, at 9:10; next, at 9:22, came Florist delivery Flat 2; finally, at 9:50, Securibell. No time of departure was marked for the alarm checker.

  Otherwise it had been (as Wilson had said) a quiet day. Ciara Porter had arrived at 12:50; Bryony Radford at 1:20. While Radford’s departure was recorded with her own signature at 4:40, Wilson had added the entrance of caterers to the Bestiguis’ flat at 7, Ciara’s exit with Lula at 7:15 and the departure of the caterers at 9:15.

  It frustrated Strike that the only page that the police had photocopied was the day before Landry’s death, because he had hoped that he might find the surname of the elusive Rochelle somewhere in the entrance log’s pages.

  It was nearly midnight when Strike turned his attention to the police report on the contents of Landry’s laptop. They appeared to have been searching, principally, for emails indicating suicidal mood or intent, and in this respect they had been unsuccessful. Strike scanned the emails Landry had sent and received in the last two weeks of her life.

  It was strange, but nevertheless true, that the countless photographs of her otherworldly beauty had made it harder rather than easier for Strike to believe that Landry had ever really existed. The ubiquity of her features had made them seem abstract, generic, even if the face itself had been uniquely beautiful.

  Now, however, out of these dry black marks on paper, out of erratically spelled messages littered with in-jokes and nicknames, the wraith of the dead girl rose before him in the dark office. Her emails gave him what the multitude of photographs had not: a realization in the gut, rather than the brain, th
at a real, living, laughing and crying human being had been smashed to death on that snowy London street. He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file’s pages, but instead it was the ghost of Lula herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives.

  He saw, now, why John Bristow insisted that his sister had had no thought of death. The girl who had typed out these words emerged as a warmhearted friend, sociable, impulsive, busy and glad to be so; enthusiastic about her job, excited, as Bristow had said, about the prospect of a trip to Morocco.

  Most of the emails had been sent to the designer Guy Somé. They held nothing of interest except a tone of cheery confidentiality, and, once, a mention of her most incongruous friendship:

  Geegee, will you pleeeeeze make Rochelle something for her birthday, please please? I’ll pay. Something nice (don’t be horrible). For Feb 21st? Pleezy please. Love ya. Cuckoo.

  Strike remembered the assertion of LulaMyInspirationForeva that Lula had loved Guy Somé “like a brother.” His statement to the police was the shortest in the file. He had been in Japan for a week and had arrived home on the night of her death. Strike knew that Somé lived within easy walking distance of Kentigern Gardens, but the police appeared to have been satisfied with his assertion that, once home, he had simply gone to bed. Strike had already noted the fact that anyone walking from Charles Street would have approached Kentigern Gardens from the opposite direction to the CCTV camera on Alderbrook Road.

  Strike closed the file at last. As he moved laboriously through his office, undressing, removing the prosthesis and unfolding the camp bed, he thought of nothing but his own exhaustion. He fell asleep quickly, lulled by the sounds of humming traffic, the pattering rain and the deathless breath of the city.

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