The Cuckoo's Calling

  “Yeah, really.”

  She began eating fast. Strike was afraid that she would leave the moment she had finished.

  “Was Lula depressed when you met her at Vashti, the day before she died?”

  “Yeah, she wuz.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “There don’t ’ave to be a reason why. It’s uh nillness.”

  “But she told you she was feeling bad, did she?”

  “Yeah,” she said, after a fractional hesitation.

  “You were supposed to be having lunch together, weren’t you?” he asked. “Kieran told me that he drove her to meet you. You know Kieran, right? Kieran Kolovas-Jones?”

  Her expression softened; the corners of her mouth lifted.

  “Yeah, I know Kieran. Yeah, she come to meet me at Vashti.”

  “But she didn’t stop for lunch?”

  “No. She wuz in a hurry,” said Rochelle.

  She bowed her head to drink more coffee, concealing her face.

  “Why didn’t she just ring you? You’ve got a phone, have you?”

  “Yeah, I gotta phone,” she snapped, bristling, and drew from the fur jacket a basic-looking Nokia, stuck all over with gaudy pink crystals.

  “So why d’you think she didn’t call to say she couldn’t see you?”

  Rochelle glowered at him.

  “Because she didn’t like using the phone, because of them listenin’ in.”

  “Journalists?”

  “Yeah.”

  She had almost finished her cookie.

  “Journalists wouldn’t have been very interested in her saying that she wasn’t coming to Vashti, though, would they?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Didn’t you think it was odd, at the time, that she drove all the way to tell you she couldn’t stay for lunch?”

  “Yeah. No,” said Rochelle. And then, with a sudden burst of fluency:

  “When ya gotta driver it don’t matter, does it? You jus’ go wherever you want, don’t cost you nothing extra, you just get them to take you, don’t ya? She was passing, so she come in to tell me she wasn’t gonna stop because she ’ad to get ’ome to see fucking Ciara Porter.”

  Rochelle looked as though she regretted the traitorous “fucking” as soon as it was out, and pursed her lips together as though to ensure no more swear words escaped her.

  “And that was all she did, was it? She came into the shop, said ‘I can’t stop, I’ve got to get home and see Ciara’ and left?”

  “Yeah. More uh less,” said Rochelle.

  “Kieran says they usually gave you a lift home after you’d been out together.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well. She wuz too busy that day, weren’ she?”

  Rochelle did a poor job of masking her resentment.

  “Talk me through what happened in the shop. Did either of you try anything on?”

  “Yeah,” said Rochelle, after a pause. “She did.” Another hesitation. “Long Alexander McQueen dress. He killed hiself and all,” she added, in a distant voice.

  “Did you go into the changing room with her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened in the changing room?” prompted Strike.

  Her eyes reminded him of those of a bull he had once come face to face with as a small boy: deep-set, deceptively stoic, unfathomable.

  “She put on the dress,” said Rochelle.

  “She didn’t do anything else? Didn’t call anyone?”

  “No. Well, yeah. She mighta.”

  “D’you know who she called?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  She drank, obscuring her face again with the paper cup.

  “Was it Evan Duffield?”

  “It mighta bin.”

  “Can you remember what she said?”

  “No.”

  “One of the shop assistants overheard her, while she was on the phone. She seemed to be making an appointment to meet someone at her flat much later. In the early hours of the morning, the girl thought.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So that doesn’t seem like it could have been Duffield, does it, seeing as she already had an arrangement to meet him at Uzi?”

  “Know a lot, don’t you?” she said.

  “Everyone knows they met at Uzi that night,” said Strike. “It was in all the papers.”

  The dilating or contracting of Rochelle’s pupils would be almost impossible to see, because of the virtually black irises surrounding them.

  “Yeah, I s’pose,” she conceded.

  “Was it Deeby Macc?”

  “No!” She yelped it on a laugh. “She din’ know his number.”

  “Famous people can nearly always get each other’s numbers,” said Strike.

  Rochelle’s expression clouded. She glanced down at the blank screen on her gaudy pink mobile.

  “I don’ think she had his,” she said.

  “But you heard her trying to make an arrangement to meet someone in the small hours?”

  “No,” said Rochelle, avoiding his eyes, swilling the dregs of her coffee around the paper cup. “I can’ remember nuthin’ like that.”

  “You understand how important this could be?” said Strike, careful to keep his tone unthreatening. “If Lula made an arrangement to meet someone at the time she died? The police never knew about this, did they? You never told them?”

  “I gotta go,” she said, throwing down the last morsel of cookie, grabbing the strap of her cheap handbag and glaring at him.

  Strike said:

  “It’s nearly lunchtime. Can I buy you anything else?”

  “No.”

  But she did not move. He wondered how poor she was, whether she ate regularly or not. There was something about her, beneath the surliness, that he found touching: a fierce pride, a vulnerability.

  “Yeah, all right then,” she said, dropping her handbag and slumping back on to the hard chair. “I’ll have a Big Mac.”

  He was afraid she might leave while he was at the counter, but when he returned with two trays, she was still there; she even thanked him grudgingly.

  Strike tried a different tack.

  “You know Kieran quite well, do you?” he asked, pursuing the glow that had illuminated her at the mention of his name.

  “Yeah,” she said, self-consciously. “I met him a lot with ’er. ’E wuz always driving ’er.”

  “He says that Lula was writing something in the back of the car, before she arrived at Vashti. Did she show you, or give you, anything she’d written?”

  “No,” she said. She crammed fries into her mouth and then said, “I ain’t seen nuthin like that. Why, what was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it were a shopping list or something?”

  “Yeah, that’s what the police thought. You’re sure you didn’t notice her carrying a bit of paper, a letter, an envelope?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Kieran know you’re meeting me?” asked Rochelle.

  “Yeah, I told him you were on my list. He told me you used to live at St. Elmo’s.”

  This seemed to please her.

  “Where are you living now?”

  “What’s it to you?” she demanded, suddenly fierce.

  “It’s nothing to me. I’m just making polite conversation.”

  This drew a small snort from Rochelle.

  “I got my own place in Hammersmith now.”

  She chewed for a while and then, for the first time, proffered unsolicited information.

  “We usedta listen to Deeby Macc in his car. Me, Kieran and Lula.”

  And she began to rap:

  No hydroquinone, black to the backbone,

  Takin’ Deeby lightly, better buy an early tombstone,

  I’m drivin’ my Ferrari—fuck Johari—got my head on straight

  Nothin’ talks like money talks—I’m shoutin’ at ya, Mister Jake.

  She looked proud, as though she had put him firmly in his place, with no retort possible.
br />   “Tha’s from ‘Hydroquinone,’ ” she said. “On Jake On My Jack.”

  “What’s hydroquinone?” Strike asked.

  “Skin light’ner. We usedta rap that with the car windows down,” said Rochelle. A warm, reminiscent smile lit her face out of plainness.

  “Lula was looking forward to meeting Deeby Macc, then, was she?”

  “Yeah, she wuz,” said Rochelle. “She knew ’e liked ’er, she wuz pleased with herself about that. Kieran wuz proper excited an’ all, he kep’ askin’ Lula to introduce him. He wanted to meet Deeby.”

  Her smile faded; she picked morosely at her burger, then said:

  “Is that all you wanna know, then? ’Cause I gotta go.”

  She began wolfing the remnants of her meal, cramming food into her mouth.

  “Lula must have taken you to a lot of places, did she?”

  “Yeah,” said Rochelle, her mouth full of burger.

  “Did you go to Uzi with her?”

  “Yeah. Once.”

  She swallowed, and began to talk about the other places she had seen during the early phase of her friendship with Lula, which (in spite of Rochelle’s determined attempts to repudiate any suggestion that she had been dazzled by the lifestyle of a multimillionairess) had all the romance of a fairy tale. Lula had snatched Rochelle away from the bleak world of her hostel and group therapy and swept her, once a week, into a whirl of expensive fun. Strike noted how very little Rochelle had told him about Lula the person, as opposed to Lula the holder of the magic plastic cards that bought handbags, jackets and jewelry, and the necessary means by which Kieran appeared regularly, like a genie, to whisk Rochelle away from her hostel. She described, in loving detail, the presents Lula had bought her, shops to which Lula had taken her, restaurants and bars to which they had gone together, places lined with celebrities. None of these, however, seemed to have impressed Rochelle in the slightest; for every name she mentioned there was a deprecating remark:

  “ ’E wuz a dick.” “She’s plastic all over.” “They ain’t nuthing special.”

  “Did you meet Evan Duffield?” Strike asked.

  “ ’Im.” The monosyllable was heavy with contempt. “ ’E’s a twat.”

  “Is he?”

  “Yeah, ’e is. Ask Kieran.”

  She gave the impression that she and Kieran stood together, sane, dispassionate observers of the idiots populating Lula’s world.

  “In what way was he a twat?”

  “ ’E treated ’er like shit.”

  “Like how?”

  “Sold stories,” said Rochelle, reaching for the last of her fries. “One time she tested ev’ryone. Told us all a diff’rent story to see which ones got in the papers. I wuz the only one who kep’ their mouf shut, ev’ryone else blabbed.”

  “Who’d she test?”

  “Ciara Porter. ’Im, Duffield. That Guy Summy,” Rochelle pronounced his first name to rhyme with “die,” “but then she reckoned it wasn’t ’im. Made excuses for ’im. But ’e used ’er as much as anyone.”

  “In what way?”

  “He di’n’t want ’er to work for anyone else. Wanted ’er to do it all for ’is company, get ’im all the publicity.”

  “So, after she’d found out she could trust you…”

  “Yeah, then she bought me the phone.”

  There was a missed beat.

  “So she cud get in touch wiv me whenever she wanted.”

  She swept the sparkling pink Nokia suddenly off the table and stuffed it deep into the pocket of her squashy pink coat.

  “I suppose you’ve had to take over the charges yourself now?” Strike asked.

  He thought that she was going to tell him to mind his own business, but instead she said:

  “ ’Er family ’asn’t noticed they’re still payin’ for it.”

  And this thought seemed to give her a slightly malicious pleasure.

  “Did Lula buy you that jacket?” Strike asked.

  “No,” she snapped, furiously defensive. “I got this myself, I’m working now.”

  “Really? Where are you working?”

  “Whut’s it to you?” she demanded again.

  “I’m showing polite interest.”

  A tiny, brief smile touched the wide mouth, and she relented again.

  “I’m doing afternoons in a shop up the road from my new place.”

  “Are you in another hostel?”

  “No,” she said, and he sensed again the digging in, the refusal to go further that he would push at his peril. He changed tack.

  “It must have been a shock to you when Lula died, was it?”

  “Yeah. It wuz,” she said, thoughtlessly; then, realizing what she had said, she backtracked. “I knew she wuz depressed, but you never ’spect people tuh do that.”

  “So you wouldn’t say she was suicidal when you saw her that day?”

  “I dunno. I never saw ’er for long enough, did I?”

  “Where were you when you heard she’d died?”

  “I wuz in the hostel. Loadsa people knew I knew her. Janine woke me up and told me.”

  “And your immediate thought was that it was suicide?”

  “Yeah. An’ I gotta go now. I gotta go.”

  She had made up her mind and he could see that he was not going to be able to stop her. After wriggling back into the ludicrous fur jacket, she hoisted her handbag onto her shoulder.

  “Say hullo to Kieran for me.”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  “See yuh.”

  She waddled out of the restaurant without a backward glance.

  Strike watched her walk past the window, her head down, her brows knitted, until she passed out of sight. It had stopped raining. Idly he pulled her tray towards him and finished her last few fries.

  Then he stood up so abruptly that the baseball-capped girl who had been approaching his table to clear and wipe it jumped back a step with a little cry of surprise. Strike hurried out of the McDonald’s and off up Grantley Road.

  Rochelle was standing on the corner, clearly visible in her furry magenta coat, part of a knot of people waiting for the lights to change at a pedestrian crossing. She was gabbling into the pink jeweled Nokia. Strike caught up with her, insinuating himself into the group behind her, making of his bulk a weapon, so that people moved aside to avoid him.

  “…wanted to know who she was arrangin’ to meet that night…yeah, an’—”

  Rochelle turned her head, watching traffic, and realized that Strike was right behind her. Removing the mobile from her ear, she jabbed at a button, cutting the call.

  “What?” she asked him aggressively.

  “Who were you calling then?”

  “Mind yer own fuckin’ business!” she said furiously. The waiting pedestrians stared. “Are you followin’ me?”

  “Yeah,” said Strike. “Listen.”

  The lights changed; they were the only two not to start off over the road, and were jostled by the passing walkers.

  “Will you give me your mobile number?”

  The implacable bull’s eyes looked back at him, unreadable, bland, secretive.

  “Wha’ for?”

  “Kieran asked me to get it,” he lied. “I forgot. He thinks you left a pair of sunglasses in his car.”

  He did not think she was convinced, but after a moment she dictated a number, which he wrote down on the back of one of his own cards.

  “That all?” she asked aggressively, and she proceeded across the road as far as an island, where the lights changed again. Strike limped after her. She looked both angry and perturbed by his continuing presence.

  “What?”

  “I think you know something you’re not telling me, Rochelle.”

  She glared at him.

  “Take this,” said Strike, pulling a second card out of his overcoat pocket. “If you think of anything you’d like to tell me, call, all right? Call that mobile number.”

  She did not answer.

  “If Lula wa
s murdered,” said Strike, while the cars whooshed by them, and rain glittered in the gutters at their feet, “and you know something, you could be in danger from the killer too.”

  This evoked a tiny, complacent, scathing smile. Rochelle did not think she was in danger. She thought she was safe.

  The green man had appeared. Rochelle gave a toss of her dry, wiry hair and moved away across the road, ordinary, squat and plain, still clutching her mobile in one hand and Strike’s card in the other. Strike stood alone on the island, watching her with a feeling of impotence and unease. She might never have sold her story to the newspapers, but he could not believe that she had bought that designer jacket, ugly though he found it, from the proceeds of a job in a shop.

  9

  THE JUNCTION OF TOTTENHAM COURT and Charing Cross Roads was still a scene of devastation, with wide gashes in the road, white hardboard tunnels and hard-hatted builders. Strike traversed the narrow walkways barricaded by metal fences, past the rumbling diggers full of rubble, bellowing workmen and more drills, smoking as he walked.

  He felt weary and sore; very conscious of the pain in his leg, of his unwashed body, of the greasy food lying heavily in his stomach. On impulse, he took a detour right up Sutton Row, away from the clatter and grind of the roadworks, and called Rochelle. It went to voicemail, but it was her husky voice that answered: she had not given him a fake number. He left no message; he had already said everything he could think of saying; and yet he was worried. He half wished he had followed her, covertly, to find out where she was living.

  Back on Charing Cross Road, limping on to the office through the temporary shadow of the pedestrian tunnel, he remembered the way that Robin had woken him up that morning: the tactful knock, the cup of tea, the studied avoidance of the subject of the camp bed. He ought not to have let it happen. There were other routes to intimacy than admiring a woman’s figure in a tight dress. He did not want to explain why he was sleeping at work; he dreaded personal questions. And he had let a situation arise in which she had called him Cormoran and told him to do up his buttons. He ought never to have overslept.

  As he climbed the metal stairs, past the closed door of Crowdy Graphics, Strike resolved to treat Robin with a slightly cooler edge of authority for the rest of the day, to counterbalance that glimpse of hairy belly.

  The decision was no sooner made than he heard high-pitched laughter, and two female voices talking at the same time, issuing from his own office.