The Cuckoo''s Calling

  “Hi,” said Strike.

  “Hello,” she said, moving to a door behind him and pulling out a tie rack. “Excuse, please.”

  He stood aside. She was short and very pretty in a pert, girlish way, with a rather flat face, a snub nose and Slavic eyes. She hung up the ties neatly while he watched her.

  “I’m a detective,” he said. Then he remembered that Eric Wardle had described her English as “crap.”

  “Like a policeman?” he ventured.

  “Ah. Police.”

  “You were here, weren’t you, the day before Lula Landry died?”

  It took a few tries to convey exactly what he meant. When she grasped the point, however, she showed no objection to answering questions, as long as she could continue putting the clothes away as she talked.

  “I always clean stair first,” she said. “Miz Landry is talking very loud at her brudder; he shouting that she gives boyfriend too much moneys, and she very bad with him.

  “I clean number two, empty. Is clean already. Quick.”

  “Were Derrick and the man from the security firm there while you were cleaning?”

  “Derrick and…?”

  “The repairman? The alarm man?”

  “Yes, alarm man and Derrick, yes.”

  Strike could hear Robin and Wilson talking in the hall, where he had left them.

  “Do you set the alarms again after you’ve cleaned?”

  “Put alarm? Yes,” she said. “One nine six six, same as door, Derrick tells me.”

  “He told you the number before he left with the alarm man?”

  Again, it took a few tries to get the point across, and when she grasped it, she seemed impatient.

  “Yes, I already say this. One nine six six.”

  “So you set the alarm after you’d finished cleaning in here?”

  “Put alarm, yes.”

  “And the alarm man, what did he look like?”

  “Alarm man? Look?” She frowned attractively, her small nose wrinkling, and shrugged. “I not see he’s face. But blue—all blue…” she added, and with the hand not holding polythened dresses, she made a sweeping gesture down her body.

  “Overall?” he suggested, but she met the word with blank incomprehension. “OK, where did you clean after that?”

  “Number one,” said Lechsinka, returning to her task of hanging up the clothes, moving around him to find the correct rails. “Clean big windows. Miz Bestigui talking on telephone. Angry. Upset. She say she no want to lie no more.”

  “She didn’t want to lie?” repeated Strike.

  Lechsinka nodded, standing on tiptoes to hang up a floor-length gown.

  “You heard her say,” he repeated clearly, “on the phone, that she didn’t want to lie anymore?”

  Lechsinka nodded again, her face blank, innocent.

  “Then she see me and she shout ‘Go away, go away!’ ”

  “Really?”

  Lechsinka nodded and continued to put away clothes.

  “Where was Mr. Bestigui?”

  “Not there.”

  “Do you know who she was speaking to? On the phone?”

  “No.” But then, a little slyly, she said, “Woman.”

  “A woman? How do you know?”

  “Shouting, shouting on telephone. I can hear woman.”

  “It was a row? An argument? They were yelling at each other? Loud, yeah?”

  Strike could hear himself lapsing into the absurd, overdeliberate language of the linguistically challenged Englishman. Lechsinka nodded again as she pulled open drawers in search of the place for the belt, the only item now remaining in her arms. When at last she had coiled it up and put it away, she straightened and walked away from him, into the bedroom. He followed.

  While she made the bed and neatened the bedside tables, he established that she had cleaned Lula Landry’s flat last that day, after the model had left to visit her mother. She had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nor had she spotted any blue writing paper, whether written on or blank. Guy Somé’s handbags, and the various items for Deeby Macc, had been delivered to the security desk by the time she had finished, and the last thing she had done at work that day had been to take the designer’s gifts up to Lula’s and Macc’s respective flats.

  “And you set the alarms again after putting the things in there?”

  “I put alarms, yes.”

  “Lula’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “And one nine six six in Flat Two?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you remember what you put away in Deeby Macc’s flat?”

  She had to mime some of the items, but she managed to convey that she remembered two tops, a belt, a hat, some gloves and (she made a fiddling mime around her wrists) cufflinks.

  After stowing these things in the open shelving area of the walk-in wardrobe, so that Macc could not miss them, she had reset the alarm and gone home.

  Strike thanked her very much, and lingered just long enough to admire once more her tightly denimed backside as she straightened the duvet, before rejoining Robin and Wilson in the hall.

  As they proceeded up the third flight of stairs, Strike checked Lechsinka’s story with Wilson, who agreed that he had instructed the repairman to set the alarm to 1966, like the front door.

  “I jus’ chose a number that’d be easy for Lechsinka to remember, because of the front door. Macc coulda reset it to somethin’ different if he’d wanted.”

  “Can you remember what the repairman looked like? You said he was new?”

  “Really young guy. Hair to here.”

  Wilson indicated the base of his neck.

  “White?”

  “Yeah, white. Didn’t even look like he was shaving yet.”

  They had reached the front door of Flat Three, once the home of Lula Landry. Robin felt a frisson of something—fear, excitement—as Wilson opened the third smoothly painted white front door, with its glassy bullet-sized peephole.

  The top flat was architecturally different from the other two: smaller and airier. It had been recently decorated throughout in shades of cream and brown. Guy Somé had told Strike that the flat’s famous previous inhabitant loved color; but it was now as impersonal as any upmarket hotel room. Strike led the way in silence to the sitting room.

  The carpet here was not lush and woolen as in Bestigui’s flat, but made of rough sand-colored jute. Strike ran his heel across it; it made no mark or track.

  “Was the floor like this when Lula lived here?” he asked Wilson.

  “Yeah. She chose it. It was nearly new, so they left it.”

  Instead of the regularly spaced long windows of the lower flats, each with three separate small balconies, the penthouse flat boasted a single pair of double doors leading on to one wide balcony. Strike unlocked and opened these doors and stepped outside. Robin did not like watching him do it; after a glance at Wilson’s impassive face, she turned and stared at the cushions and the black-and-white prints, trying not to think about what had happened here three months previously.

  Strike was looking down into the street, and Robin might have been surprised to know that his thoughts were not as clinical or dispassionate as she supposed.

  He was visualizing someone who had lost control completely; someone running at Landry as she stood, fine-boned and beautiful, in the outfit she had thrown on to meet a much-anticipated guest; a killer lost in rage, half dragging, half pushing her, and finally, with the brute strength of a highly motivated maniac, throwing her. The seconds it took her to fall through the air towards the concrete, smothered in its deceptively soft covering of snow, must have seemed to last an eternity. She had flailed, trying to find handholds in the merciless empty air; and then, without time to make amends, to explain, to bequeath or to apologize, without any of the luxuries permitted those who are given notice of their impending demise, she had broken on the road.

  The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they lef
t scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her. The truth was coming slowly into focus out of the mass of disconnected detail. What he lacked was proof.

  His mobile phone rang as he stood there. John Bristow’s name and number were displayed; he took the call.

  “Hi, John, thanks for getting back to me.”

  “No problem. Any news?” asked the lawyer.

  “Maybe. I’ve had an expert look at Lula’s laptop, and he found out a file of photographs had been deleted from it after Lula died. Do you know anything about that?”

  His words were met by complete silence. The only reason Strike knew that they had not been cut off was that he could hear a small amount of background noise at Bristow’s end.

  At last the lawyer said, in an altered voice:

  “They were taken off after Lula died?”

  “That’s what the expert says.”

  Strike watched a car roll slowly down the street below, and pause halfway along. A woman got out, swathed in fur.

  “I—I’m sorry,” Bristow said, sounding thoroughly shaken. “I’m just—just shocked. Perhaps the police removed this file?”

  “When did you get the laptop back from them?”

  “Oh…sometime in February, I suppose, early February.”

  “This file was removed on March the seventeenth.”

  “But—but this just doesn’t make sense. Nobody knew the password.”

  “Well, evidently somebody did. You said the police told your mother what it was.”

  “My mother certainly wouldn’t have removed—”

  “I’m not suggesting she did. Is there any chance she could have left the laptop open, and running? Or that she gave somebody else the password?”

  He thought that Bristow must be in his office. He could hear faint voices in the background, and, distantly, a woman laughing.

  “I suppose that’s possible,” said Bristow slowly. “But who would have removed photographs? Unless…but God, that’s horrible…”

  “What is?”

  “You don’t think one of the nurses could have taken the pictures? To sell to a newspaper? But that’s a dreadful thought…a nurse…”

  “All the expert knows is that they were deleted; there’s no evidence that they were copied and stolen. But as you say—anything’s possible.”

  “But who else—I mean, naturally I hate to think it could be a nurse, but who else could it be? The laptop’s been at my mother’s ever since the police gave it back.”

  “John, are you aware of every visitor your mother’s had in the last three months?”

  “I think so. I mean, obviously, I can’t be sure…”

  “No. Well, there’s the difficulty.”

  “But why—why would anyone do this?”

  “I can think of a few reasons. It would be a big help if you could ask your mother about this, though, John. Whether she had the laptop running in mid-March. Whether any of her visitors expressed an interest in it.”

  “I—I’ll try.” Bristow sounded very stressed, almost tearful. “She’s very, very weak now.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Strike, formally. “I’ll be in touch shortly. ’Bye.”

  He stepped back from the balcony and closed the doors, then turned to Wilson.

  “Derrick, can you show me how you searched this place? What order you looked in the rooms that night?”

  Wilson thought for a moment, then said:

  “I come in here first. Looked around, seen the doors open. Didn’t touch ’em. Then,” he indicated that they should follow him, “I looked in here…”

  Robin, following in the two men’s wake, noticed a subtle change in the way that Strike was talking to the security man. He was asking simple, deft questions, focusing on what Wilson had felt, touched, seen and heard at each step of his way through the flat.

  Under Strike’s guidance, Wilson’s body language started to change. He began to enact the way he had held the doorjambs, leaning into rooms, casting a rapid look around. When he crossed to the only bedroom, he did it at a slow-motion run, responding to the spotlight of Strike’s undivided attention; he dropped to his knees to demonstrate how he had looked under the bed, and at Strike’s prompting remembered that a dress had lain crumpled beneath his legs; he led them, face set with concentration, to the bathroom, and showed them how he had swiveled to check behind the door before sprinting (he almost mimed it, arms moving exaggeratedly as he walked) back to the front door.

  “And then,” said Strike, opening it and gesturing Wilson through, “you came out…”

  “I came out,” agreed Wilson, in his bass voice, “an’ I jabbed the lift button.”

  He pretended to do it, and feigned pushing open the doors in his anxiety to see what was inside.

  “Nothing—so I started running back down again.”

  “What could you hear now?” Strike asked, following him; neither of them were paying any attention to Robin, who closed the flat door behind her.

  “Very distant—the Bestiguis yelling—and I turn round this corner and—”

  Wilson stopped dead on the stair. Strike, who seemed to have anticipated something like this, stopped too; Robin careered straight into him, with a flustered apology that he cut off with a raised hand, as though, she thought, Wilson was in a trance.

  “And I slipped,” said Wilson. He sounded shocked. “I forgot that. I slipped. Here. Backwards. Sat down hard. There was water. Here. Drops. Here.”

  He was pointing at the stairs.

  “Drops of water,” repeated Strike.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not snow.”

  “No.”

  “Not wet footprints.”

  “Drops. Big drops. Here. Mi foot skidded and I slipped. And I just got up and kept running.”

  “Did you tell the police about the drops of water?”

  “No. I forgot. Till now. I forgot.”

  Something that had bothered Strike all along had at last been made clear. He let out a great satisfied sigh and grinned. The other two stared.

  4

  THE WEEKEND STRETCHED AHEAD, WARM and empty. Strike sat at his open window again, smoking and watching the hordes of shoppers passing along Denmark Street, the case report open on his lap, the police file on the desk, making a list for himself of points still to be clarified, and sifting the morass of information he had collected.

  For a while he contemplated a photograph of the front of number 18 as it had been on the morning after Lula died. There was a small, but to Strike significant, difference between the frontage as it had been then, and as it was now. From time to time he moved to the computer; once to find out the agent who represented Deeby Macc; then to look at the share price for Albris. His notebook lay open beside him at a page full of truncated sentences and questions, all in his dense, spiky handwriting. When his mobile rang, he raised it to his ear without checking who was on the other end.

  “Ah, Mr. Strike,” said Peter Gillespie’s voice. “How nice of you to pick up.”

  “Oh, hello, Peter,” said Strike. “Got you working weekends now, has he?”

  “Some of us have no option but to work at weekends. You haven’t returned any of my weekday phone calls.”

  “I’ve been busy. Working.”

  “I see. Does that mean we can expect a repayment soon?”

  “I expect so.”

  “You expect so?”

  “Yeah,” said Strike. “I should be in a position to give you something in the next few weeks.”

  “Mr. Strike, your attitude astounds me. You undertook to repay Mr. Rokeby monthly, and you are now in arrears to the tune of—”

  “I can’t pay you what I haven’t got. If you hold tight, I should be able to give you all of it back. Maybe even in a oner.”

  “I’m afraid that simply
isn’t good enough. Unless you bring these repayments up to date—”

  “Gillespie,” said Strike, his eyes on the bright sky beyond the window, “we both know old Jonny isn’t going to sue his one-legged war-hero son for repayment of a loan that wouldn’t keep his butler in fucking bath salts. I’ll give him back his money, with interest, within the next couple of months, and he can stick it up his arse and set fire to it, if he likes. Tell him that, from me, and now get off my fucking back.”

  Strike hung up, interested to note that he had not really lost his temper at all, but still felt mildly cheerful.

  He worked on, in what he had come to think of as Robin’s chair, late into the night. The last thing he did before turning in was to underline, three times, the words “Malmaison Hotel, Oxford” and to circle in heavy ink the name “J. P. Agyeman.”

  The country was lumbering towards election day. Strike turned in early on Sunday and watched the day’s gaffes, counterclaims and promises being tabulated on his portable TV. There was an air of joylessness in every news report he watched. The national debt was so huge that it was difficult to comprehend. Cuts were coming, whoever won; deep, painful cuts; and sometimes, with their weasel words, the party leaders reminded Strike of the surgeons who had told him cautiously that he might experience a degree of discomfort; they who would never personally feel the pain that was about to be inflicted.

  On Monday morning Strike set out for a rendezvous in Canning Town, where he was to meet Marlene Higson, Lula Landry’s biological mother. The arrangement of this interview had been fraught with difficulty. Bristow’s secretary, Alison, had telephoned Robin with Marlene Higson’s number, and Strike had called her personally. Though clearly disappointed that the stranger on the phone was not a journalist, she had initially expressed herself willing to meet Strike. She had then called the office back, twice: firstly to ask Robin whether the detective would pay her expenses to travel into the center of town, to which a negative answer was given; next, in high dudgeon, to cancel the meeting. A second call from Strike had secured a tentative agreement to meet in her local pub; then an irritable voicemail message cancelled once more.

  Strike had then telephoned her for a third time, and told her that he believed his investigation to be in its final phase, after which evidence would be laid to the police, resulting, he had no doubt, in a further explosion of publicity. Now that he came to think about it, he said, if she was unable to help, it might be just as well for her to be protected from another deluge of press inquiry. Marlene Higson had immediately clamored for her right to tell everything she knew, and Strike condescended to meet her, as she had already suggested, in the beer garden of the Ordnance Arms on Monday morning.