The Cuckoo's Calling

  “No,” said Strike.

  “So, anyway, I told Lula how groggy and sore Mum was feeling, and she said she might look in on her later. I left; I nipped into my office to get some files from Alison, because I wanted to work from Mum’s flat that day and keep her company. I next saw Lula at Mum’s, mid-morning. She sat with Mum for a while in the bedroom until my uncle arrived to visit, and then nipped into the study where I was working, to say goodbye. She hugged me before she…”

  Bristow’s voice cracked, and he stared down into his lap.

  “More coffee?” Strike suggested. Bristow shook his bowed head. To give him a moment to pull himself together, Strike picked up the tray and headed for the outer office.

  Bristow’s girlfriend looked up from her newspaper, scowling, when Strike appeared. “Aren’t you finished?” she asked.

  “Evidently not,” said Strike, with no attempt at a smile. She glared at him while he addressed Robin.

  “Could I get another cup of coffee, er…?”

  Robin stood up and took the tray from him in silence.

  “John needs to be back in the office at half past ten,” Alison informed Strike, in a slightly louder voice. “We’ll need to be off in ten minutes at the most.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Strike assured her blandly, before returning to the inner office, where Bristow was sitting as though in prayer, his head bowed over his clasped hands.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered, as Strike sat back down. “It’s still difficult talking about it.”

  “No problem,” said Strike, picking up his notebook again. “So Lula came to see your mother? What time was that?”

  “Elevenish. It all came out at the inquest, what she did after that. She got her driver to take her to some boutique that she liked, and then she went back to her flat. She had an appointment at home with a makeup artist she knew, and her friend Ciara Porter joined her there. You’ll have seen Ciara Porter, she’s a model. Very blonde. They were photographed together as angels, you probably saw it: naked except for handbags and wings. Somé used the picture in his advertising campaign after Lula died. People said it was tasteless.

  “So Lula and Ciara spent the afternoon together at Lula’s flat, and then they left to go out to dinner, where they met up with Duffield and some other people. The whole group went on to Uzi, the nightclub, and they were there until past midnight.

  “Then Duffield and Lula argued. Lots of people saw it happen. He manhandled her a bit, tried to make her stay, but she left the club alone. Everyone thought he’d done it, afterwards, but he turned out to have a cast-iron alibi.”

  “Cleared on the evidence of his drug dealer, wasn’t he?” asked Strike, still writing.

  “Yes, exactly. So—so Lula arrived back at her flat around twenty past one. She was photographed going inside. You probably remember that picture. It was everywhere afterwards.”

  Strike remembered: one of the world’s most photographed women, head bowed, shoulders hunched, eyes heavy and arms folded tightly around her torso, twisting her face away from the photographers. Once the verdict of suicide had been clearly established, it had taken on a macabre aspect: the rich and beautiful young woman, less than an hour from her death, attempting to conceal her wretchedness from the lenses she had courted, and which had so adored her.

  “Were there usually photographers outside her door?”

  “Yes, especially if they knew she was with Duffield, or they wanted to get a shot of her coming home drunk. But they weren’t only there for her that night. An American rapper was supposed to be arriving to stay in the same building that evening; Deeby Macc’s his name. His record company had rented the apartment beneath hers. In the event he never stayed there, because with the police all over the building it was easier for him to go to a hotel. But the photographers who had chased Lula’s car when she left Uzi joined the ones who were waiting for Macc outside the flats, so that made quite a crowd of them around the entrance of the building, though they all drifted away not long after she’d gone inside. Somehow they got a tip-off that Macc wouldn’t be there for hours.

  “It was a bitterly cold night. Snowing. Below freezing. So the street was empty when she fell.”

  Bristow blinked and took another sip of cold coffee, and Strike thought about the paparazzi who had left before Lula Landry fell from her balcony. Imagine, he thought, what a shot of Landry diving to her death would have gone for; enough to retire on, perhaps.

  “John, your girlfriend says you need to be somewhere at half past ten.”

  “What?”

  Bristow seemed to return to himself. He checked the expensive watch and gasped.

  “Good God, I had no idea I’d been here so long. What—what happens now?” he asked, looking slightly bewildered. “You’ll read my notes?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Strike assured him, “and I’ll call you in a couple of days when I’ve done some preliminary work. I expect I’ll have a lot more questions then.”

  “All right,” said Bristow, getting dazedly to his feet. “Here—take my card. And how would you like me to pay?”

  “A month’s fee in advance will be great,” said Strike. Quashing feeble stirrings of shame, and remembering that Bristow himself had offered a double fee, he named an exorbitant amount, and to his delight Bristow did not quibble, nor ask whether he accepted credit cards nor even promise to drop the money in later, but drew out a real check-book and a pen.

  “If, say, a quarter of it could be in cash,” Strike added, chancing his luck; and was staggered for the second time that morning when Bristow said, “I did wonder whether you’d prefer…” and counted out a pile of fifties in addition to the check.

  They emerged into the outer office at the very moment that Robin was about to enter with Strike’s fresh coffee. Bristow’s girlfriend stood up when the door opened, and folded her newspaper with the air of one who had been kept waiting too long. She was almost as tall as Bristow, large-framed, with a surly expression and big, mannish hands.

  “So you’ve agreed to do it, have you?” she asked Strike. He had the impression that she thought he was taking advantage of her rich boyfriend. Very possibly she was right.

  “Yes, John’s hired me,” he replied.

  “Oh well,” she said, ungraciously. “You’re pleased, I expect, John.”

  The lawyer smiled at her, and she sighed and patted his arm, like a tolerant but slightly exasperated mother to a child. John Bristow raised his hand in a salute, then followed his girlfriend out of the room, and their footsteps clanged away down the metal stairs.

  5

  STRIKE TURNED TO ROBIN, WHO had sat back down at the computer. His coffee was sitting beside the piles of neatly sorted mail lined up on the desk beside her.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking a sip, “and for the note. Why are you a temp?”

  “What d’you mean?” she asked, looking suspicious.

  “You can spell and punctuate. You catch on quick. You show initiative—where did the cups and the tray come from? The coffee and biscuits?”

  “I borrowed them all from Mr. Crowdy. I told him we’d return them by lunchtime.”

  “Mr. who?”

  Mr. Crowdy, the man downstairs. The graphic designer.”

  “And he just let you have them?”

  “Yes,” she said, a little defensively. “I thought, having offered the client coffee, we ought to provide it.”

  Her use of the plural pronoun was like a gentle pat to his morale.

  “Well, that was efficiency way beyond anything Temporary Solutions has sent here before, take it from me. Sorry I kept calling you Sandra; she was the last girl. What’s your real name?”

  “Robin.”

  “Robin,” he repeated. “That’ll be easy to remember.”

  He had some notion of making a jocular allusion to Batman and his dependable sidekick, but the feeble jest died on his lips as her face turned brilliantly pink. Too late, he realized that the most unfortunate constr
uction could be put on his innocent words. Robin swung the swivel chair back towards the computer monitor, so that all Strike could see was an edge of a flaming cheek. In one frozen moment of mutual mortification, the room seemed to have shrunk to the size of a telephone kiosk.

  “I’m going to nip out for a bit,” said Strike, putting down his virtually untouched coffee and moving crabwise towards the door, taking down the overcoat hanging beside it. “If anyone calls…”

  “Mr. Strike—before you go, I think you ought to see this.”

  Still flushed, Robin took, from on top of the pile of opened letters beside her computer, a sheet of bright pink writing paper and a matching envelope, both of which she had put into a clear plastic pocket. Strike noticed her engagement ring as she held the things up.

  “It’s a death threat,” she said.

  “Oh yeah,” said Strike. “Nothing to worry about. They come in about once a week.”

  “But—”

  “It’s a disgruntled ex-client. Bit unhinged. He thinks he’s throwing me off the scent by using that paper.”

  “Surely, though—shouldn’t the police see it?”

  “Give them a laugh, you mean?”

  “It isn’t funny, it’s a death threat!” she said, and Strike realized why she had placed it, with its envelope, in the plastic pocket. He was mildly touched.

  “Just file it with the others,” he said, pointing towards the filing cabinets in the corner. “If he was going to kill me he’d have made his move before now. You’ll find six months’ worth of letters in there somewhere. Will you be all right to hold the fort for a bit while I’m out?”

  “I’ll cope,” she said, and he was amused by the sour note in her voice, and her obvious disappointment that nobody was going to fingerprint the be-kittened death threat.

  “If you need me, my mobile number’s on the cards in the top drawer.”

  “Fine,” she said, looking at neither the drawer nor him.

  “If you want to go out for lunch, feel free. There’s a spare key in the desk somewhere.”

  “OK.”

  “See you later, then.”

  He paused just outside the glass door, on the threshold of the tiny dank bathroom. The pressure in his guts was becoming painful, but he felt that her efficiency, and her impersonal concern for his safety, entitled her to some consideration. Resolving to wait until he reached the pub, Strike headed down the stairs.

  Out in the street, he lit a cigarette, turned left and proceeded past the closed 12 Bar Café, up the narrow walkway of Denmark Place past a window full of multicolored guitars, and walls covered in fluttering fliers, away from the relentless pounding of the pneumatic drill. Skirting the rubble and wreckage of the street at the foot of Center Point, he marched past a gigantic gold statue of Freddie Mercury that stood over the entrance of the Dominion Theatre across the road, head bowed, one fist raised in the air, like some pagan god of chaos.

  The ornate Victorian face of the Tottenham pub rose up behind the rubble and roadworks, and Strike, pleasurably aware of the large amount of cash in his pocket, pushed his way through its doors, into a serene Victorian atmosphere of gleaming scrolled dark wood and brass fittings. Its frosted glass half-partitions, its aged leather banquettes, its bar mirrors covered in gilt, cherubs and horns of plenty spoke of a confident and ordered world that was in satisfying contrast to the ruined street. Strike ordered a pint of Doom Bar and took it to the back of the almost deserted pub, where he placed his glass on a high circular table, under the garish glass cupola in the ceiling, and headed straight into the Gents, which smelled strongly of piss.

  Ten minutes later, and feeling considerably more comfortable, Strike was a third of the way into his pint, which was deepening the anesthetic effect of his exhaustion. The Cornish beer tasted of home, peace and long-gone security. There was a large and blurry painting of a Victorian maiden, dancing with roses in her hands, directly opposite him. Frolicking coyly as she gazed at him through a shower of petals, her enormous breasts draped in white, she was as unlike a real woman as the table on which his pint rested, or the obese man with the ponytail who was working the pumps at the bar.

  And now Strike’s thoughts swarmed back to Charlotte, who was indubitably real; beautiful, dangerous as a cornered vixen, clever, sometimes funny, and, in the words of Strike’s very oldest friend, “fucked to the core.” Was it over, really over, this time? Cocooned in his tiredness, Strike recalled the scenes of last night and this morning. Finally she had done something he could not forgive, and the pain would, no doubt be excruciating once the anesthetic wore off: but in the meantime, there were certain practicalities to be faced. It had been Charlotte’s flat that they had been living in; her stylish, expensive maisonette in Holland Park Avenue, which meant that he was, as of two o’clock that morning, voluntarily homeless.

  (“Bluey, just move in with me. For God’s sake, you know it makes sense. You can save money while you’re building up the business, and I can look after you. You shouldn’t be on your own while you’re recuperating. Bluey, don’t be silly…

  Nobody would ever call him Bluey again. Bluey was dead.)

  It was the first time in their long and turbulent relationship that he had walked out. Three times previously it had been Charlotte who had called a halt. There had been an unspoken awareness between them, always, that if ever he left, if ever he decided he had had enough, the parting would be of an entirely different order to all those she had instigated, none of which, painful and messy though they had been, had ever felt definitive.

  Charlotte would not rest until she had hurt him as badly as she could in retaliation. This morning’s scene, when she had tracked him to his office, had doubtless been a mere foretaste of what would unfold in the months, even years, to come. He had never known anyone with such an appetite for revenge.

  Strike limped to the bar, secured a second pint and returned to the table for further gloomy reflection. Walking out on Charlotte had left him on the brink of true destitution. He was so deeply in debt that all that stood between him and a sleeping bag in a doorway was John Bristow. Indeed, if Gillespie called in the loan that had formed the down payment on Strike’s office, Strike would have no alternative but to sleep rough.

  (“I’m just calling to check how things are going, Mr. Strike, because this month’s installment still hasn’t arrived…Can we expect it within the next few days?”)

  And finally (since he had started looking at the inadequacies of his life, why not make a comprehensive survey?) there was his recent weight gain; a full stone and a half, so that he not only felt fat and unfit, but was putting unnecessary additional strain on the prosthetic lower leg he was now resting on the brass bar beneath the table. Strike was developing the shadow of a limp purely because the additional load was causing some chafing. The long walk across London in the small hours, kitbag over his shoulder, had not helped. Knowing that he was heading into penury, he had been determined to travel there in the cheapest fashion.

  He returned to the bar to buy a third pint. Back at his table beneath the cupola, he drew out his mobile phone and called a friend in the Metropolitan Police whose friendship, though of only a few years’ duration, had been forged under exceptional conditions.

  Just as Charlotte was the only person to call him “Bluey,” so Detective Inspector Richard Anstis was the only person to call Strike “Mystic Bob,” which name he bellowed at the sound of his friend’s voice.

  “Looking for a favor,” Strike told Anstis.

  “Name it.”

  “Who handled the Lula Landry case?”

  While Anstis searched out their numbers, he asked after Strike’s business, right leg and fiancée. Strike lied about the status of all three.

  “Glad to hear it,” said Anstis cheerfully. “OK, here’s Wardle’s number. He’s all right; loves himself, but you’ll be better off with him than Carver; he’s a cunt. I can put in a word with Wardle. I’ll ring him right now for you, if you like.”
br />   Strike tweaked a tourist leaflet from a wooden display on the wall, and copied down Wardle’s number in the space beside a picture of the Horse Guards.

  “When’re you coming over?” Anstis asked. “Bring Charlotte one night.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great. I’ll give you a ring; got a lot on just now.”

  After hanging up, Strike sat in deep thought for a while, then called an acquaintance much older than Anstis, whose life path had run in a roughly opposite direction.

  “Calling in a favor, mate,” said Strike. “Need some information.”

  “On what?”

  “You tell me. I need something I can use for leverage with a copper.”

  The conversation ran to twenty-five minutes, and involved many pauses, which grew longer and more pregnant until finally Strike was given an approximate address and two names, which he also copied down beside the Horse Guards, and a warning, which he did not write down, but took in the spirit in which he knew it was intended. The conversation ended on a friendly note, and Strike, now yawning widely, dialed Wardle’s number, which was answered almost immediately by a loud, curt voice.

  “Wardle.”

  “Yeah, hello. My name’s Cormoran Strike, and—”

  “You’re what?”

  “Cormoran Strike,” said Strike, “is my name.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Wardle. “Anstis just rang. You’re the private dick? Anstis said you were interested in talking about Lula Landry?”

  “Yeah, I am,” said Strike again, suppressing another yawn as he examined the painted panels on the ceiling; bacchanalian revels that became, as he looked, a feast of fairies: Midsummer Night’s Dream, a man with a donkey’s head. “But what I’d really like is the file.”

  Wardle laughed.

  “You didn’t save my fucking life, mate.”

  “Got some information you might be interested in. Thought we could do an exchange.”