The Cuckoo''s Calling

  “Was this someone you knew, the man from the security firm?”

  “No, he was a new guy. Very young. They always send someone diff’rent. Missus Bestigui and Lula were still at home, so I let him into the middle flat, and showed him where the control panel was an’ got him started. Lula went out while I was still in there, showin’ the guy the fuse box an’ the panic buttons.”

  “You saw her go out, did you?”

  “Yeah, she passed the open door.”

  “Did she say hello?”

  “No.”

  “You said she usually did?”

  “I don’t think she noticed me. She looked like she was in a hurry. She was going to see her sick mother.”

  “How d’you know, if she didn’t speak to you?”

  “Inquest,” said Wilson succinctly. “After I’d shown the security guy where everything was, I went back downstairs, an’ after Missus Bestigui went out, I let him into their flat to check that system too. He didn’t need me tuh stay with him there; the positions of the fuse boxes and panic buttons are the same in all the flats.”

  “Where was Mr. Bestigui?”

  “He’d already left for work. Eight he leaves, every day.”

  Three men in hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets entered the café and sat at a neighboring table, newspapers under their arms, work boots clogged with filth.

  “How long would you say you were away from the desk each time you were with the security guy?”

  “Mebbe five minutes in the middle flat,” said Wilson. “A minute each for the others.”

  “When did the security guy leave?”

  “Late morning. I can’t remember exactly.”

  “But you’re sure he left?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Anyone else visit?”

  “There was a few deliveries, but it was quiet compared to how the rest of the week had been.”

  “Earlier in the week had been busy, had it?”

  “Yeah, we’d had a lot of coming and going, because of Deeby Macc arriving from LA. People from the production company were in and out of Flat Two, checking the place was set up for him, filling up the fridge and that.”

  “Can you remember what deliveries there were that day?”

  “Packages for Macc an’ Lula. An’ roses—I helped the guy up with them, because they come in a massive,” Wilson placed his large hands apart to show the size, “a huh-uge vase, and we set ’em up on a table in the hallway of Flat Two. That’s the roses that got smashed.”

  “You said that caused trouble; what did you mean?”

  “Mister Bestigui had sent them to Deeby Macc an’ when he heard they’d been ruined he was pissed off. Shoutin’ like a maniac.”

  “When was this?”

  “While the police were there. When they were trying to interview his wife.”

  “A woman had just fallen to her death past his front windows, and he was upset that someone had wrecked his flowers?”

  “Yeah,” said Wilson, with a slight shrug. “He’s like that.”

  “Does he know Deeby Macc?”

  Wilson shrugged again.

  “Did this rapper ever come to the flat?”

  Wilson shook his head.

  “After we had all this trouble, he went to a hotel.”

  “How long were you away from the desk when you helped put the roses in Flat Two?”

  “Mebbe five minutes; ten at most. After that, I was on the desk all day.”

  “You mentioned packages for Macc and Lula.”

  “Yeah, from some designer, but I gave them to Lechsinka to put in the flats. It was clothes for him an’ handbags for her.”

  “And as far as you’re aware, everyone who went in that day went out again?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Wilson. “All logged in the book at the front desk.”

  “How often is the code on the external keypad changed?”

  “It’s been changed since she died, because half the Met knew it by the time they were finished,” said Wilson. “But it din change the three months Lula lived there.”

  “D’you mind telling me what it was?”

  “Nineteen sixty-six,” said Wilson.

  “ ‘They think it’s all over’?”

  “Yeah,” said Wilson. “McLeod was always bellyaching about it. Wanted it changed.”

  “How many people d’you think knew the door code before Lula died?”

  “Not that many.”

  “Delivery men? Postmen? Bloke who reads the gas meter?”

  “People like that are always buzzed in by us, from the desk. The residents don’t normally use the keypad, because we can see them on camera, so we open the door for them. The keypad’s only there in case there’s no one on the desk; sometimes we’d be in the back room, or helping with something upstairs.”

  “And the flats all have individual keys?”

  “Yeah, and individual alarm systems.”

  “Was Lula’s set?”

  “No.”

  “What about the pool and the gym? Are they alarmed?”

  “Jus’ keys. Everyone who lives in the building gets a set of pool and gym keys along with their flat keys. And one key to the door leading to the underground car park. That door’s got an alarm on it.”

  “Was it set?”

  “Dunno, I wasn’t there when they checked that one. It shoulda been. The guy from the security firm had checked all the alarms that morning.”

  “Were all these doors locked that night?”

  Wilson hesitated.

  “Not all of them. The door to the pool was open.”

  “Had anyone used it that day, do you know?”

  “I can’t remember anyone using it.”

  “So how long had it been open?”

  “I dunno. Colin was on the previous night. He shoulda checked it.”

  “OK,” said Strike. “You said you thought the man Mrs. Bestigui had heard was Duffield, because you’d heard them arguing previously. When was that?”

  “Not long before they split, ’bout two months before she died. She’d thrown him out of her flat and he was hammerin’ on the door and kicking it, trying to break it down, calling her filthy names. I went upstairs to get him out.”

  “Did you use force?”

  “Didn’t need to. When he saw me coming he picked up his stuff—she’d thrown his jacket and his shoes out after him—and just walked out past me. He was stoned,” said Wilson. “Glassy eyes, y’know. Sweating. Filthy T-shirt with crap all down it. I never knew what the fuck she saw in him.

  “And here’s Kieran,” he added, his tone lightening. “Lula’s driver.”

  7

  A MAN IN HIS MID-TWENTIES was edging his way into the tiny café. He was short, slight and extravagantly good-looking.

  “Hey, Derrick,” he said, and the driver and security guard exchanged a dap greeting, gripping each other’s hands and bumping knuckles, before Kolovas-Jones took his seat beside Wilson.

  A masterpiece produced by an indecipherable cocktail of races, Kolovas-Jones’s skin was an olive-bronze, his cheekbones chiseled, his nose slightly aquiline, his black-lashed eyes a dark hazel, his straight hair slicked back off his face. His startling looks were thrown into relief by the conservative shirt and tie he wore, and his smile was consciously modest, as though he sought to disarm other men, and preempt their resentment.

  “Where’sa car?” asked Derrick.

  “Electric Lane.” Kolovas-Jones pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “I got maybe twenty minutes. Gotta be back at the West End by four. Howya doing?” he added, holding out his hand to Strike, who shook it. “Kieran Kolovas-Jones. You’re…?”

  “Cormoran Strike. Derrick says you’ve got—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I dunno whether it matters, probably not, but the police didn’t give a shit. I just wanna know I’ve told someone, right? I’m not saying it wasn’t suicide, you understand,” he added. “I’m just saying I’d like t
his thing cleared up. Coffee, please, love,” he added to the middle-aged waitress, who remained impassive, impervious to his charm.

  “What’s worrying you?” Strike asked.

  “I always drove her, right?” said Kolovas-Jones, launching into his story in a way that told Strike he had rehearsed it. “She always asked for me.”

  “Did she have a contract with your company?”

  “Yeah. Well…”

  “It’s run through the front desk,” said Derrick. “One of the services provided. If anyone wants a car, we call Execars, Kieran’s company.”

  “Yeah, but she always asked for me,” Kolovas-Jones reiterated firmly.

  “You got on with her, did you?”

  “Yeah, we got on good,” said Kolovas-Jones. “We’d got—you know—I’m not saying close—well, close, yeah, kinda. We were friendly; the relationship had gone beyond driver and client, right?”

  “Yeah? How far beyond?”

  “Nah, nothing like that,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a grin. “Nothing like that.”

  But Strike saw that the driver was not at all displeased that the idea had been mooted, that it had been thought plausible.

  “I’d been driving her for a year. We talked a lot, y’know. Had a lot in common. Similar backgrounds, y’know?”

  “In what way?”

  “Mixed race,” said Kolovas-Jones. “And things were a bit dysfunctional in my family, right, so I knew where she was coming from. She didn’t know that many people like her, not once she got famous. Not to talk to properly.”

  “Being mixed race was an issue for her, was it?”

  “Growing up black in a white family, what d’you think?”

  “And you had a similar childhood?”

  “Me father’s half West Indian, half Welsh; me mother’s half Scouse, half Greek. Lula usedta say she envied me,” he said, sitting up a little straighter. “She said, ‘You know where you come from, even if it is bloody everywhere.’ And on my birthday, right,” he added, as though he had not yet sufficiently impressed upon Strike something which he felt was important, “she give me this Guy Somé jacket that was worth, like, nine hundred quid.”

  Evidently expected to show a reaction, Strike nodded, wondering whether Kolovas-Jones had come along simply to tell somebody how close he had been to Lula Landry. Satisfied, the driver went on:

  “So, right, the day she died—day before, I should say—I drove her to her mum’s in the morning, right? And she was not happy. She never liked going to see her mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that woman’s fucking weird,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I drove them both out for a day, once, I think it was the mother’s birthday. She’s fucking creepy, Lady Yvette. Darling, my darling to Lula, every other word. She used to hang off her. Just fucking strange and possessive and over the top, right?

  “Anyway, that day, right, her mum had just got out of hospital, so that wasn’t gonna be fun, was it? Lula wasn’t looking forward to seeing her. She was uptight like I hadn’t seen her before.

  “And then I told her I couldn’t drive her that night, because I was booked for Deeby Macc, and she wasn’t happy about that, neither.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause she liked me driving her, didn’t she?” said Kolovas-Jones, as though Strike was being obtuse. “I used to help her out with the paps and stuff, do a bit of bodyguard stuff to get her in and out of places.”

  By the merest flicker of his facial muscles, Wilson managed to convey what he thought of the suggestion that Kolovas-Jones was bodyguard material.

  “Couldn’t you have swapped with another driver, and driven her instead of Macc?”

  “I coulda, but I didn’t want to,” Kolovas-Jones confessed. “I’m a big Deeby fan. Wanted to meet him. That’s what Lula was pissed off about. Anyway,” he hurried on, “I took her to her mum’s, and waited, and then, this is the bit I wanted to tell you about, right?

  “She come out of her mother’s place and she was strange. Not like I’d ever seen her, right? Quiet, really quiet. Like she was in shock or something. Then she asked me for a pen, and she started scribbling something on a bit of blue paper. Wasn’t talking to me. Wasn’t saying anything. Just writing.

  “So, I drove her to Vashti, ’cause she was supposedta be meeting her friend there for lunch, right—”

  “What’s Vashti? What friend?”

  “Vashti—it’s this shop—boutique, they call it. There’s a café in it. Trendy place. And the friend was…” Kolovas-Jones clicked his fingers repeatedly, frowning. “She was that friend she’d made when she was in hospital for her mental problems. What was her fucking name? I used to drive the two of them around. Christ…Ruby? Roxy? Raquelle? Something like that. She was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith. She was homeless.

  “Anyway, Lula goes into the shop, right, and she’d told me on the way to her mother’s she was gonna have lunch there, right, but she’s only in there a quarter of an hour or something, then she comes out alone and tells me to drive her home. So that was a bit fucking strange, right? And Raquelle, or whatever her name is—it’ll come back to me—wasn’t with her. We usedta give Raquelle a lift home normally, when they’d been out together. And the blue piece of paper was gone. And Lula never said a word to me all the way back home.”

  “Did you mention this blue paper to the police?”

  “Yeah. They didn’t think it was worth shit,” said Kolovas-Jones. “Said it was probably a shopping list.”

  “Can you remember what it looked like?”

  “It was just blue. Like airmail paper.”

  He looked down at his watch.

  “I gotta go in ten.”

  “So that was the last time you ever saw Lula?”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  He picked at the corner of a fingernail.

  “What was your first thought, when you heard she was dead?”

  “I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones, chewing at the hangnail he had been picking. “I was fucking shocked. You don’t expect that, do you? Not when you’ve just seen someone hours before. The press were all saying it was Duffield, because they’d had a row in that nightclub and stuff. I thought it might’ve been him, to tell you the truth. Bastard.”

  “You knew him, did you?”

  “I drove them a coupla times,” said Kolovas-Jones. A flaring of his nostrils, a tightness around the lines of his mouth, together suggested a bad smell.

  “What did you think of him?”

  “I thought he was a talentless tosser.” With unexpected virtuosity, he suddenly adopted a flat, drawling voice: “Are we gonna need him later, Lules? He’d better wait, yeah?” said Kolovas-Jones, crackling with temper. “Never once spoke to me directly. Ignorant, sponging piece of shit.”

  Derrick said, sotto voce, “Kieran’s an actor.”

  “Just bit parts,” said Kolovas-Jones. “So far.”

  And he digressed into a brief exposition of the television dramas in which he had appeared, exhibiting, in Strike’s estimation, a marked desire to be considered more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame. To have had it so often in the back of his car and not yet to have caught it from his passengers must (thought Strike) have been tantalizing and, perhaps, infuriating.

  “Kieran auditioned for Freddie Bestigui,” said Wilson. “Didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a lack of enthusiasm that told the outcome plainly.

  “How did that come about?” asked Strike.

  “Usual way,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a hint of hauteur. “Through my agent.”

  “Nothing came of it?”

  “They decided to go in another direction,” said Kolovas-Jones. “They wrote out the part.”

  “OK, so you picked up Deeby Macc from, where—Heathrow?—that night?”

  “Terminal Five, yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, apparently brought back to
a sense of mundane reality, and glancing at his watch. “Listen, I’d better get going.”

  “All right if I walk you back to the car?” asked Strike.

  Wilson showed himself happy to go along too; Strike paid the bill for all three of them and they left. Out on the pavement, Strike offered both his companions cigarettes; Wilson declined, Kolovas-Jones accepted.

  A silver Mercedes was parked a short distance away, around the corner in Electric Lane.

  “Where did you take Deeby when he arrived?” Strike asked Kolovas-Jones, as they approached the car.

  “He wanted a club, so I took him to Barrack.”

  “What time did you get him there?”

  “I dunno…half eleven? Quarter to twelve? He was wired. Didn’t want to sleep, he said.”

  “Why Barrack?”

  “Friday night at Barrack’s best hip-hop night in London,” said Kolovas-Jones, on a slight laugh, as though this was common knowledge. “And he musta liked it, ’cause it was gone three by the time he came out again.”

  “So did you drive him to Kentigern Gardens and find the police there, or…?”

  “I’d already heard on the car radio what had happened,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I told Deeby when he got back to the car. His entourage all started making phone calls, waking up people at the record company, trying to make other arrangements. They got him a suite at Claridges; I drove him there. I didn’t get home till gone five. Switched on the news and watched it all on Sky. Fucking unbelievable.”

  “I’ve been wondering who let the paparazzi staking out number eighteen know that Deeby wasn’t going to be there for hours. Someone tipped them off; that’s why they’d left the street before Lula fell.”

  “Yeah? I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones.

  He increased his pace very slightly, reaching the car ahead of the other two and unlocking it.

  “Didn’t Macc have a load of luggage with him? Was it in the car with you?”

  “Nah, it’d all been sent ahead by the record company days before. He got off the plane with just a carry-on bag—and about ten security people.”

  “So you weren’t the only car sent for him?”