The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(15)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“I grabbed the master key out the back room and I ran upstairs. No one on the stairwell. I unlocked the door of Lula’s flat—”

“Didn’t you think of taking anything with you, to defend yourself?” Strike interrupted. “If you thought there was someone in there? Someone who’d just killed a woman?”

There was a long pause, the longest so far.

“Didn’t think I’d need nothing,” said Wilson. “Thought I could take him, no problem.”

“Take who?”

“Duffield,” said Wilson quietly. “I thought Duffield was up there.”

“Why?”

“I thought he musta come in while I was in the bathroom. He knew the key code. I thought he musta gone upstairs and she’d let him in. I’d heard them rowing before. I’d heard him angry. Yeah. I thought he’d pushed her.

“But when I got up to the flat, it was empty. I looked in every room and there was no one there. I opened the wardrobes, even, but nothing.

“The windows in the lounge was wide open. It was below freezing that night. I didn’t close them, I didn’t touch nothing. I come out and pressed the button on the lift. The doors opened straight away; it was still at her floor. It was empty.

“I ran back downstairs. The Bestiguis were in their flat when I passed their door; I could hear them; she was still bawling and he was still shouting at her. I didn’t know whether they’d called the police yet. I grabbed my mobile off the security desk and I went back out the front door, back to Lula, because—well, I didn’t like to leave her lying there alone. I was gonna call the police from the street, make sure they were coming. But I heard the siren before I’d even pressed nine. They were there quick.”

“One of the Bestiguis had called them, had they?”

“Yeah. He had. Two uniformed coppers in a panda car.”

“OK,” said Strike. “I want to be clear on this one point: you believed Mrs. Bestigui when she said she’d heard a man up in the top flat?”

“Oh yeah,” said Wilson.

“Why?”

Wilson frowned slightly, thinking, his eyes on the street over Strike’s right shoulder.

“She hadn’t given you any details at this point, had she?” Strike asked. “Nothing about what she’d been doing when she heard this man? Nothing to explain why she was awake at two in the morning?”

“No,” said Wilson. “She never gave me no explanation like that. It was the way she was acting, y’know. Hysterical. Shaking like a wet dog. She kept saying ‘There’s a man up there, he threw her over.’ She was proper scared.

“But there was nobody there; I can swear that to you on the lives of mi kids. The flat was empty, the lift was empty, the stairwell was empty. If he was there, where did he go?”

“The police came,” Strike said, returning mentally to the dark, snowy street, and the broken corpse. “What happened then?”

“When Mrs. Bestigui saw the police car out her window, she came straight back down in her dressing gown, with her husband running after her; she come out into the street, into the snow, and starts bawling at them that there’s a murderer in the building.

“Lights are going on all over the place now. Faces at windows. Half the street’s woken up. People coming out on to the pavements.

“One of the coppers stayed with the body, calling for back-up on his radio, while the other one went with us—me and the Bestiguis—back inside. He told them to go back in their flat and wait, and then he got me to show him the building. We went up to the top floor again; I opened up Lula’s door, showed him the flat, the open window. He checked the place over. I showed him the lift, still on her floor. We went back down the stairs. He asked about the middle flat, so I opened it up with the master key.

“It was dark, and the alarm went off when we went in. Before I could find the light switch or get to the alarm pad, the copper walked straight into the table in the middle of the hall and knocked over this massive vase of roses. Smashed and went everywhere, glass an’ water an’ flowers all over the floor. That caused a loada trouble, later…

“We checked the place. Empty, all the cupboards, every room. The windows were closed and bolted. We went back to the lobby.

“Plainclothes police had arrived by this time. They wanted keys to the basement gym, the pool and the car park. One of ’em went off to take a statement from Mrs. Bestigui, another one was out front, calling for more back-up, because there are more neighbors coming out in the street now, and half of them are talking on the phone while they’re standing there, and some of them are taking pictures. The uniformed coppers are trying to make them go back into their houses. It’s snowing, really heavy snow…

“They got a tent up over the body when forensics arrived. The press arrived round the same time. The police taped off half the street, blocked it off with their cars.”

Strike had cleaned his plate. He shoved it aside, ordered fresh mugs of tea for both of them and took up his pen again.

“How many people work at number eighteen?”

“There’s three guards—me, Colin McLeod an’ Ian Robson. We work in shifts, someone always on duty, round the clock. I shoulda been off that night, but Robson called me roundabout four in the afternoon, said he had this stomach bug, felt really bad with it. So I said I’d stay on, work through the next shift. He’d swapped with me the previous month so I could sort out a bit of fambly business. I owed him.

“So it shouldn’ta been me there,” said Wilson, and for a moment he sat in silence, contemplating the way things should have been.

“The other guards got on OK with Lula, did they?”

“Yeah, they’d tell yuh same as me. Nice girl.”

“Anyone else work there?”

“We gotta couple of Polish cleaners. They both got bad English. You won’t get much outta them.”

Wilson’s testimony, Strike thought, as he scribbled into one of the SIB notebooks he had filched on one of his last visits to Aldershot, was of an unusually high quality: concise, precise and observant. Very few people answered the question they had been posed; even fewer knew how to organize their thoughts so that no follow-up questions were needed to prize information out of them. Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatized memories; he had made himself the confidant of thugs; he had bullied the terrified, baited the dangerous and laid traps for the cunning. None of these skills were required with Wilson, who seemed almost wasted on a pointless trawl through John Bristow’s paranoia.

Nevertheless, Strike had an incurable habit of thoroughness. It would no more have occurred to him to skimp on the interview than to spend the day lying in his underpants on his camp bed, smoking. Both by inclination and by training, because he owed himself respect quite as much as the client, he proceeded with the meticulousness for which, in the army, he had been both feted and detested.

“Can we back up briefly and go through the day preceding her death? What time did you arrive for work?”

“Nine, same as always. Took over from Colin.”

“Do you keep a log of who goes in and out of the building?”

“Yeah, we sign everyone in and out, ’cept residents. There’s a book at the desk.”

“Can you remember who went in and out that day?”

Wilson hesitated.

“John Bristow came to see his sister early that morning, didn’t he?” prompted Strike. “But she’d told you not to let him up?”

“He’s told you that, has he?” asked Wilson, looking faintly relieved. “Yeah, she did. But I felt sorry for the man, y’know? He had a contrac’ to give back to her; he was worried about it, so I let him go up.”

“Had anyone else come into the building that you know of?”

“Yeah, Lechsinka was already there. She’s one of the cleaners. She always arrives at seven; she was mopping the stairwell when I got in. Nobody else came until the guy from the security comp’ny, to service the alarms. We get it done every six months. He musta come around nine forty; something like that.”

“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.”