The Cuckoo's Calling

  “You mean…in general?” she said at last. “On principle?”

  “No,” said Strike, continuing his report. “I mean that I specifically do not want to allow the defending counsel in the trial of the person who killed Lula Landry to get off because he was able to show that I can’t keep records properly, thereby calling into question my reliability as a witness.”

  Strike was showing off again, and he knew it; but he could not help himself. He was, as he put it to himself, on a roll. Some might have questioned the taste of finding amusement in the midst of a murder inquiry, but he had found humor in darker places.

  “Couldn’t nip out for some sandwiches, Robin, could you?” he added, just so that he could glance up at her satisfyingly astonished expression.

  He finished his notes during her absence, and was just about to call an old colleague in Germany when Robin burst back in, holding two packs of sandwiches and a newspaper.

  “Your picture’s on the front of the Standard,” she panted.

  “What?”

  It was a photograph of Ciara following Duffield into his flat. Ciara looked stunning; for half a second Strike was transported back to half past two that morning, when she had lain, white and naked, beneath him, that long silky hair spread on the pillow like a mermaid’s as she whispered and moaned.

  Strike refocused: he was half cropped out of the picture; one arm raised to keep the paparazzi at bay.

  “That’s all right,” he told Robin with a shrug, handing her back the paper. “They think I was the minder.”

  “It says,” said Robin, turning to the inside page, “that she left Duffield’s with her security guard at two.”

  “There you go, then.”

  Robin stared at him. His account of the night had terminated with himself, Duffield and Ciara at Duffield’s flat. She had been so interested in the various pieces of evidence he had laid out before her, she had forgotten to wonder where he had slept. She had assumed that he had left the model and the actor together.

  He had arrived at the office still wearing the clothes in the photograph.

  She turned away, reading the story on page two. The clear implication of the piece was that Ciara and Duffield had enjoyed an amorous encounter while the supposed minder waited in the hall.

  “Is she stunning-looking in person?” asked Robin with an unconvincing casualness as she folded the Standard.

  “Yeah, she is,” said Strike, and he wondered whether it was his imagination that the three syllables sounded like a boast. “D’you want cheese and pickle, or egg mayonnaise?”

  Robin made her selection at random and returned to her desk chair to eat. Her new hypothesis about Strike’s overnight whereabouts had eclipsed even her excitement over the progress of the case. It was going to be difficult to reconcile her view of him as a blighted romantic with the fact that he had just (it seemed incredible, and yet she had heard his pathetic attempt to conceal his pride) slept with a supermodel.

  The telephone rang again. Strike, whose mouth was full of bread and cheese, raised a hand to forestall Robin, swallowed, and answered it himself.

  “Cormoran Strike.”

  “Strike, it’s Wardle.”

  “Hi, Wardle; how’s it going?”

  “Not so good, actually. We’ve just fished a body out of the Thames with your card on it. Wondered what you could tell us about it.”

  10

  IT WAS THE FIRST TAXI that Strike had felt justified in taking since the day he had moved his belongings out of Charlotte’s flat. He watched the charges mount with detachment, as the cab rolled towards Wapping. The taxi driver was determined to tell him why Gordon Brown was a fucking disgrace. Strike sat in silence for the entire trip.

  This would not be the first morgue Strike had visited, and far from the first corpse he had viewed. He had become almost immune to the despoliation of gunshot wounds; bodies ripped, torn and shattered, innards revealed like the contents of a butcher’s shop, shining and bloody. Strike had never been squeamish; even the most mutilated corpses, cold and white in their freezer drawers, became sanitized and standardized to a man with his job. It was the bodies he had seen in the raw, unprocessed and unprotected by officialdom and procedure, that rose again and crawled through his dreams. His mother in the funeral parlor, in her favorite floor-length bell-sleeved dress, gaunt yet young, with no needle marks on view. Sergeant Gary Topley lying in the blood-spattered dust of that Afghanistan road, his face unscathed, but with no body below the upper ribs. As Strike had lain in the hot dirt, he had tried not to look at Gary’s empty face, afraid to glance down and see how much of his own body was missing…but he had slid so swiftly into the maw of oblivion that he did not find out until he woke up in the field hospital…

  An Impressionist print hung on the bare brick walls of the small anteroom to the morgue. Strike fixed his gaze on it, wondering where he had seen it before, and finally remembering that it hung over the mantelpiece at Lucy and Greg’s.

  “Mr. Strike?” said the gray-haired mortician, peering around the inner door, in white coat and latex gloves. “Come on in.”

  They were almost always cheerful, pleasant men, these curators of corpses. Strike followed the mortician into the chilly glare of the large, windowless inner room, with its great steel freezer doors all along the right-hand wall. The gently sloping tiled floor ran down to a central drain; the lights were dazzling. Every noise echoed off the hard and shiny surfaces, so that it sounded as though a small group of men was marching into the room.

  A metal trolley stood ready in front of one of the freezer doors, and beside it were the two CID officers, Wardle and Carver. The former greeted Strike with a nod and a muttered greeting; the latter, paunchy and mottle-faced, with suit shoulders covered in dandruff, merely grunted.

  The mortician wrenched down the thick metal arm on the freezer door. The tops of three anonymous heads were revealed, stacked one above the other, each draped in a white sheet worn limp and fine through repeated washings. The mortician checked the tag pinned to the cloth covering the central head; it bore no name, only the previous day’s scribbled date. He slid the body out smoothly on its long-runnered tray and deposited it efficiently on to the waiting trolley. Strike noticed Carver’s jaw working as he stepped back, giving the mortician room to wheel the trolley clear of the freezer door. With a clunk and a slam, the remaining corpses vanished from view.

  “We won’t bother with a viewing room, seeing as we’re the only ones here,” said the mortician briskly. “Light’s best in the middle,” he added, positioning the trolley just beside the drain, and pulling back the sheet.

  The body of Rochelle Onifade was revealed, bloated and distended, her face forever wiped of suspicion, replaced by a kind of empty wonder. Strike had known, from Wardle’s brief description on the telephone, whom he would see when the sheet was revealed, but the awful vulnerability of the dead struck him anew as he looked down on the body, far smaller than it had been when she had sat opposite him, consuming fries and concealing information.

  Strike told them her name, spelling it so that both the mortician and Wardle could transcribe it accurately on to clipboard and notebook respectively; he also gave the only address he had ever known for her: St. Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless, in Hammersmith.

  “Who found her?”

  “River police hooked her out late last night,” said Carver, speaking for the first time. His voice, with its south London accent, held a definite undertone of animosity. “Bodies usually take about three weeks to rise to the surface, eh?” he added, directing the comment, more statement than question, at the mortician, who gave a tiny, cautious cough.

  “That’s the accepted average, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be less in this case. There are certain indications…”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll get all that from the pathologist,” said Carver, dismissively.

  “It can’t have been three weeks,” said Strike, and the mortician gave him a tiny smile o
f solidarity.

  “Why not?” demanded Carver.

  “Because I bought her a burger and chips two weeks ago yesterday.”

  “Ah,” said the mortician, nodding at Strike across the body. “I was going to say that a lot of carbohydrates taken prior to death can affect the body’s buoyancy. There’s a degree of bloating…”

  “That’s when you gave her your card, is it?” Wardle asked Strike.

  “Yeah. I’m surprised it was still legible.”

  “It was stuck in with her Oyster card, in a plastic cover inside her back jeans pocket. The plastic protected it.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “Big pink fake-fur coat. Like a skinned Muppet. Jeans and trainers.”

  “That’s what she was wearing when I bought her the burger.”

  “In that case, the contents of the stomach should give an accurate—” began the mortician.

  “D’you know if she’s got any next of kin?” Carver demanded of Strike.

  “There’s an aunt in Kilburn. I don’t know her name.”

  Slivers of glistening eyeball showed through Rochelle’s almost closed lids; they had the characteristic brightness of the drowned. There were traces of bloody foam in the creases around her nostrils.

  “How are her hands?” Strike asked the mortician, because Rochelle was uncovered only to the chest.

  “Never mind her hands,” snapped Carver. “We’re done here, thanks,” he told the mortician loudly, his voice reverberating around the room; and then, to Strike: “We want a word with you. Car’s outside.”

  He was helping police with their inquiries. Strike remembered hearing the phrase on the news when he had been a small boy, obsessed by every aspect of police work. His mother had always blamed this strange early preoccupation on her brother, Ted, ex-Red Cap and fount of (to Strike) thrilling stories of travel, mystery and adventure. Helping police with their inquiries: as a five-year-old, Strike had imagined a noble and disinterested citizen volunteering to give up his time and energy to assist the police, who issued him with magnifying glass and truncheon and allowed him to operate under a cloak of glamorous anonymity.

  This was the reality: a small interrogation room, with a cup of machine-made coffee given to him by Wardle, whose attitude towards Strike was devoid of the animosity that crackled from Carver’s every open pore, but free of every trace of former friendliness. Strike suspected that Wardle’s superior did not know the full extent of their previous interactions.

  A small black tray on the scratched desk held seventeen pence in change, a single Yale key and a plastic-covered bus pass; Strike’s card was discolored and crinkled but still legible.

  “What about her bag?” Strike asked Carver, who was sitting across the desk, while Wardle leaned up against the filing cabinet in the corner. “Gray. Cheap and plastic-looking. That hasn’t turned up, has it?”

  “She probably left it in her squat, or wherever the fuck she lived,” said Carver. “Suicides don’t usually pack a bag to jump.”

  “I don’t think she jumped,” said Strike.

  “Oh don’t you, now?”

  “I wanted to see her hands. She hated water over her face, she told me so. When people have struggled in the water, the position of their hands—”

  “Well, it’s nice to get your expert opinion,” said Carver, with sledgehammer irony. “I know who you are, Mr. Strike.”

  He leaned back in his chair, placing his hands behind his head, revealing dried patches of sweat on the underarms of his shirt. The sharp, sour, oniony smell of BO wafted across the desk.

  “He’s ex-SIB,” threw in Wardle, from beside the filing cabinet.

  “I know that,” barked Carver, raising wiry eyebrows flecked with scurf. “I’ve heard from Anstis all about the fucking leg and the life-saving medal. Quite the colorful CV.”

  Carver removed his hands from behind his head, leaned forwards and laced his fingers together on the desk instead. His corned-beef complexion and the purple bags under his hard eyes were not flattered by the strip lighting.

  “I know who your old man is and all.”

  Strike scratched his unshaven chin, waiting.

  “Like to be as rich and famous as Daddy, would you? Is that what all this is about?”

  Carver had the bright blue, bloodshot eyes that Strike had always (since meeting a major in the Paras with just such eyes, who was subsequently cashiered for serious bodily harm) associated with a choleric, violent nature.

  “Rochelle didn’t jump. Nor did Lula Landry.”

  “Bollocks,” shouted Carver. “You’re speaking to the two men who proved Landry jumped. We went through every bit of fucking evidence with a fine-toothed fucking comb. I know what you’re up to. You’re milking that poor sod Bristow for all you can get. Why are you fucking smiling at me?”

  “I’m thinking what a tit you’re going to look when this interview gets reported in the press.”

  “Don’t you dare fucking threaten me with the press, dickhead.”

  Carver’s blunt, wide face was clenched; his glaring blue eyes vivid in the purple-red face.

  “You’re in a heap of trouble here, pal, and a famous dad, a peg leg and a good war aren’t going to get you out of it. How do we know you didn’t scare the poor bitch into fucking jumping? Mentally ill, wasn’t she? How do we know you didn’t make her think she’d done something wrong? You were the last person to see her alive, pal. I wouldn’t like to be sitting where you are now.”

  “Rochelle crossed Grantley Road and walked away from me, as alive as you are. You’ll find someone who saw her after she left me. Nobody’s going to forget that coat.”

  Wardle pushed himself off the filing cabinets, dragged a hard plastic chair over to the desk and sat down.

  “Let’s have it, then,” he told Strike. “Your theory.”

  “She was blackmailing Lula Landry’s killer.”

  “Piss off,” snapped Carver, and Wardle snorted in slightly stagey amusement.

  “The day before she died,” said Strike, “Landry met Rochelle for fifteen minutes in that shop in Notting Hill. She dragged Rochelle straight into a changing cubicle, where she made a telephone call begging somebody to meet her at her flat in the early hours of the following morning. That call was overheard by an assistant at the shop; she was in the next cubicle; they’re separated by a curtain. Girl called Mel, red hair and tattoos.”

  “People will spout any amount of shit when there’s a celebrity involved,” said Carver.

  “If Landry phoned anyone from that cubicle,” said Wardle, “it was Duffield, or her uncle. Her phone records show they were the only people she called, all afternoon.”

  “Why did she want Rochelle there when she made the call?” asked Strike. “Why drag her friend into the cubicle with her?”

  “Women do that stuff,” said Carver. “They piss in herds, too.”

  “Use your fucking intelligence: she was making the call on Rochelle’s phone,” said Strike, exasperated. “She’d tested everyone she knew to try and see who was talking to the press about her. Rochelle was the only one who kept her mouth shut. She established that the girl was trustworthy, bought her a mobile, registered it in Rochelle’s name but took care of all the charges. She’d had her own phone hacked, hadn’t she? She was getting paranoid about people listening in and reporting on her, so she bought a Nokia and registered it to somebody else, to give herself a totally secure means of communication when she wanted it.

  “I grant you, that doesn’t necessarily rule out her uncle, or Duffield, because calling them on the alternative number might have been a signal they’d organized between them. Alternatively, she was using Rochelle’s number to speak to somebody else; someone she didn’t want the press to know about. I’ve got Rochelle’s mobile number. Find out what network she was with and you’ll be able to check all this. The unit itself is a crystal-covered pink Nokia, but you won’t find that.”

  “Yeah, because it’s at the bottom o
f the Thames,” said Wardle.

  “Course it isn’t,” said Strike. “The killer’s got it. He’ll have got it off her before he threw her into the river.”

  “Fuck off!” jeered Carver, and Wardle, who had seemed interested against his better judgment, shook his head.

  “Why did Landry want Rochelle there when she made the call?” Strike repeated. “Why not make it from the car? Why, when Rochelle was homeless, and virtually destitute, did she never sell her story on Landry? They’d have given her a great wad for it. Why didn’t she cash in, once Landry was dead, and couldn’t be hurt?”

  “Decency?” suggested Wardle.

  “Yeah, that’s one possibility,” said Strike. “The other’s that she was making enough by blackmailing the killer.”

  “Boll-ocks,” moaned Carver.

  “Yeah? That Muppet coat she was pulled up wearing cost one and a half grand.”

  A tiny pause.

  “Landry probably gave it to her,” said Wardle.

  “If she did, she managed to buy her something that wasn’t in the shops back in January.”

  “Landry was a model, she had inside contacts—fuck this shit,” snapped Carver, as though he had irritated himself.

  “Why,” said Strike, leaning forwards on his arms into the miasma of body odor that surrounded Carver, “did Lula Landry make a detour to that shop for fifteen minutes?”

  “She was in a hurry.”

  “Why go at all?”

  “She didn’t want to let the girl down.”

  “She got Rochelle to come right across town—this penniless, homeless girl, the girl she usually gave a lift home afterwards, in her chauffeur-driven car—dragged her into a cubicle, and then walked out fifteen minutes later, leaving her to make her own way home.”

  “She was a spoiled bitch.”

  “If she was, why turn up at all? Because it was worth it, for some purpose of her own. And if she wasn’t a spoiled bitch, she must have been in some kind of emotional state that made her act out of character. There’s a living witness to the fact that Lula begged somebody, over the phone, to come and see her, at her flat, sometime after one in the morning. There’s also that piece of blue paper she had before she went into Vashti, and which nobody’s admitting to having seen since. What did she do with it? Why was she writing in the back of the car, before she saw Rochelle?”