The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(66)
Author: J.K. Rowling

In the darkness of his office, his thoughts veered suddenly and unhelpfully back in time, to the most personal death of all; the one that Lucy assumed, quite wrongly, haunted Strike’s every investigation, colored every case; the killing that had fractured his and Lucy’s lives into two epochs, so that everything in their memory was cleaved clearly into that which had happened before their mother died, and that which had happened afterwards. Lucy thought he had run away to join the RMP because of Leda’s death; that he had been driven to it by his unsatisfied belief in his stepfather’s guilt; that every corpse he saw in the course of his professional life must recall their mother to his mind; that every killer he met must seem to be an echo of their stepfather; that he was driven to investigate other deaths in an eternal act of personal exculpation.

But Strike had aspired to this career long before the last needle had entered Leda’s body; long before he had understood that his mother (and every other human) was mortal, and that killings were more than puzzles to be solved. It was Lucy who never forgot, who lived in a swarm of memories like coffin flies; who projected on to any and all unnatural deaths the conflicting emotions aroused in her by their mother’s untimely demise.

Tonight, however, he found himself doing the very thing that Lucy was sure must be habitual: he was remembering Leda and connecting her to this case. Leda Strike, supergroupie. It was how they always captioned her in the most famous photograph of all, and the only one that featured his parents together. There she was, in black and white, with her heart-shaped face, her shining dark hair and her marmoset eyes; and there, separated from each other by an art dealer, an aristocratic playboy (one since dead by his own hand, the other of AIDS) and Carla Astolfi, his father’s second wife, was Jonny Rokeby himself, androgynous and wild: hair nearly as long as Leda’s. Martini glasses and cigarettes, smoke curling out of the model’s mouth, but his mother more stylish than any of them.

Everyone but Strike had seemed to view Leda’s death as the deplorable but unsurprising result of a life lived perilously, beyond societal norms. Even those who had known her best and longest were satisfied that she herself had administered the overdose they found in her body. His mother, by almost unanimous consent, had walked too close to the unsavory edges of life, and it was only to be expected that she would one day topple out of sight and fall to her death, stiff and cold, on a filthy-sheeted bed.

Why she had done it, nobody could quite explain, not even Uncle Ted (silent and shattered, leaning against the kitchen sink) or Aunt Joan (red-eyed but angry at her little kitchen table, with her arms around nineteen-year-old Lucy, who was sobbing into Joan’s shoulder). An overdose had simply seemed consistent with the trend of Leda’s life; with the squats and the musicians and the wild parties; with the squalor of her final relationship and home; with the constant presence of drugs in her vicinity; with her reckless quest for thrills and highs. Strike alone had asked whether anyone had known his mother had taken to shooting up; he alone had seen a distinction between her predilection for cannabis and a sudden liking for her**n; he alone had unanswered questions and saw suspicious circumstances. But he had been a student of twenty, and nobody had listened.

After the trial and the conviction, Strike had packed up and left everything behind: the short-lived burst of press, Aunt Joan’s desperate disappointment at the end of his Oxford career, Charlotte, bereft and incensed by his disappearance and already sleeping with someone new, Lucy’s screams and scenes. With the sole support of Uncle Ted, he had vanished into the army, and refound there the life he had been taught by Leda: constant uprootings, self-reliance and the endless appeal of the new.

Tonight, though, he could not help seeing his mother as a spiritual sister to the beautiful, needy and depressive girl who had broken apart on a frozen road, and to the plain, homeless outsider now lying in the chilly morgue. Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as “tragic,” in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives.

How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.

Nearly all the physical evidence of Lula’s murder had long since been wiped away, trodden underfoot or covered by thickly falling snow; the most persuasive clue Strike had was, after all, that grainy black-and-white footage of two men running away from the scene: a piece of evidence given a cursory check and tossed aside by the police, who were convinced that nobody could have entered the building, that Landry had committed suicide, and that the film showed nothing more than a pair of larcenous loiterers with intent.

Strike roused himself and looked at his watch. It was half past ten, but he was sure the man to whom he wished to speak would be awake. He flicked on his desk lamp, took up his mobile and dialed, this time, a number in Germany.

“Oggy,” bellowed the tinny voice on the other end of the phone. “How the f**k are you?”

“Need a favor, mate.”

And Strike asked Lieutenant Graham Hardacre to give him all the information he could find on one Agyeman of the Royal Engineers, Christian name and rank unknown, but with particular reference to the dates of his tours of duty in Afghanistan.

12

IT WAS ONLY THE SECOND car he had driven since his leg had been blown off. He had tried driving Charlotte’s Lexus, but today, trying not to feel in any way emasculated, he had hired an automatic Honda Civic.

The journey to Iver Heath took under an hour. Entrance into Pinewood Studios was effected by a combination of fast talk, intimidation and the flashing of genuine, though outdated, official documentation; the security guard, initially impassive, was rocked by Strike’s air of easy confidence, by the words “Special Investigation Branch,” by the pass bearing his photograph.

“Have you got an appointment?” he asked Strike, feet above him in the box beside the electric barrier, his hand covering the telephone receiver.

“No.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mr. Evan Duffield,” said Strike, and he saw the security guard scowl as he turned away and muttered into the receiver.

After a minute or so, Strike was given directions and waved through. He followed a gently winding road around the outskirts of the studio building, reflecting again on the convenient uses to which some people’s reputations for chaos and self-destruction could be put.

He parked a few rows behind a chauffeured Mercedes occupying a space with a sign in it reading: PRODUCER FREDDIE BESTIGUI, made his unhurried exit from the car while Bestigui’s driver watched him in the rearview mirror, and proceeded through a glass door that led to a nondescript, institutional set of stairs. A young man was jogging down them, looking like a slightly tidier version of Spanner.

“Where can I find Mr. Freddie Bestigui?” Strike asked him.

“Second floor, first office on the right.”

He was as ugly as his pictures, bull-necked and pockmarked, sitting behind a desk on the far side of a glass partition wall, scowling at his computer monitor. The outer office was busy and cluttered, full of attractive young women at desks; film posters were tacked to pillars and photographs of pets were pinned up beside filming schedules. The pretty girl nearest the door, who was wearing a switchboard microphone in front of her mouth, looked up at Strike and said:

“Hello, can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Bestigui. Not to worry, I’ll see myself in.”

He was inside Bestigui’s office before she could respond.

Bestigui looked up, his eyes tiny between pouches of flesh, black moles sprinkled over the swarthy skin.

“Who are you?”

He was already pushing himself up, thick-fingered hands clutching the edge of his desk.

“I’m Cormoran Strike. I’m a private detective, I’ve been hired…”

“Elena!” Bestigui knocked his coffee over; it was spreading across the polished wood, into all his papers. “Get the f**k out! Out! OUT!”

“…by Lula Landry’s brother, John Bristow—”

“ELENA!”

The pretty, thin girl wearing the headset ran inside and stood fluttering beside Strike, terrified.

“Call security, you dozy little bitch!”

She ran outside. Bestigui, who was five feet six inches at the most, had pushed his way out from behind his desk now; as unafraid of the enormous Strike as a pit bull whose yard has been invaded by a Rottweiler. Elena had left the door open; the inhabitants of the outer office were staring in, frightened, mesmerized.

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a few weeks, Mr. Bestigui…”

“You are in a shitload of trouble, my friend,” said Bestigui, advancing with a set jaw, his thick shoulders braced.

“…to talk about the night Lula Landry died.”

Two men in white shirts and carrying walkie-talkies were running along the glass wall to Strike’s right; young, fit, tense-looking.

“Get him out of here!” Bestigui roared, pointing at Strike, as the two guards bounced off each other in the doorway, then forced their way inside.

“Specifically,” said Strike, “about the whereabouts of your wife, Tansy, when Lula fell…”

“Get him out of here and call the f**king police! How did he get in here?”

“…because I’ve been shown some photographs that make sense of your wife’s testimony. Get your hands off me,” Strike added to the younger of the guards now tugging his upper arm, “or I’ll knock you through that window.”

The security guard did not let go, but looked towards Bestigui for instructions.

The producer’s bright dark eyes were fixed intently on Strike. He clenched and relaxed his thug’s hands. After several long seconds he said:

“You’re full of shit.”

But he did not instruct the waiting guards to drag Strike from his room.

“The photographer was standing on the pavement opposite your house in the early hours of the eighth of January. The guy who took the pictures doesn’t realize what he’s got. If you don’t want to discuss it, fine; police or press, I don’t care. It’ll come to the same thing in the end.”

Strike took a few steps towards the door; the guards, each of whom was still holding him by the arm, were caught by surprise, and momentarily forced into the absurd position of holding him back.

“Get out,” Bestigui said abruptly to his minions. “I’ll let you know if I need you. Close the door behind you.”