The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(17)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“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 f**king 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 f**king 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?”

“There were four cars—but Deeby himself was with me.”

“Where did you wait for him, while he was in the nightclub?”

“I just parked the car and waited,” said Kolovas-Jones. “Just off Glasshouse Street.”

“With the other three cars? Were you all together?”

“You don’t find four parking spaces side by side in the middle of London, mate,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I dunno where the others were parked.”

Still holding the driver’s door open, he glanced at Wilson, then back at Strike.

“How’s any of this matter?” he demanded.

“I’m just interested,” said Strike, “in how it works, when you’re with a client.”

“It’s f**king tedious,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a sudden flash of irritation, “that’s what it is. Driving’s mostly waiting around.”

“Have you still got the control for the doors to the underground garage that Lula gave you?” Strike asked.

“What?” said Kolovas-Jones, although Strike would have taken an oath that the driver had heard him. The flicker of animosity was undisguised now, and it seemed to extend not only to Strike, but also to Wilson, who had listened without comment since noting aloud that Kolovas-Jones was an actor.

“Have you still got—”

“Yeah, I’ve still got it. I still drive Mr. Bestigui, don’t I?” said Kolovas-Jones. “Right, I gotta go. See ya, Derrick.”

He threw his half-smoked cigarette into the road and got into the car.

“If you remember anything else,” said Strike, “like the name of the friend Lula was meeting in Vashti, will you give me a call?”

He handed Kolovas-Jones a card. The driver, already pulling on his seat belt, took it without looking at it.

“I’m gonna be late.”

Wilson raised his hand in farewell. Kolovas-Jones slammed the car door, revved the engine and reversed out of the parking space, scowling.

“He’s a bit of a star-fucker,” said Wilson, as the car pulled away. It was a kind of apology for the younger man. “He loved drivin’ her. He tries to drive all the famous ones. He’s been hoping Bestigui’ll cast him in something for two years. He was well pissed off when he didn’t get that part.”

“What was it?”

“Drug dealer. Some film.”

They walked off together in the direction of Brixton underground station, past a gaggle of black schoolgirls in uniforms with blue plaid skirts. One girl’s long beaded hair made Strike think, again, of his sister, Lucy.

“Bestigui’s still living at number eighteen, is he?” asked Strike.

“Oh yeah,” said Wilson.

“What about the other two flats?”

“There’s a Ukrainian commodities broker and his wife renting Flat Two now. Got a Russian interested in Three, but he hasn’t made an offer yet.”

“Is there any chance,” asked Strike, as they were momentarily impeded by a tiny hooded, bearded man like an Old Testament prophet, who stopped in front of them and slowly stuck out his tongue, “that I could come and have a look inside sometime?”

“Yeah, all right,” said Wilson after a pause in which his gaze slid furtively over Strike’s lower legs. “Buzz mi. But it’ll have to be when Bestigui’s out, y’understand. He’s one quarrelsome man, and I need my job.”

8

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE WOULD be sharing his office again on Monday added piquancy to Strike’s weekend solitude, rendering it less irksome, more valuable. The camp bed could stay out; the door between inner and outer offices could remain open; he was able to attend to bodily functions without fear of causing offense. Sick of the smell of artificial limes, he managed to force open the painted-shut window behind his desk, which allowed a cold, clean breeze to wipe the fusty corners of the two small rooms. Avoiding every CD, every track, that transported him back to those excruciating, exhilarating periods he had shared with Charlotte, he selected Tom Waits to play loudly on the small CD player he had thought he would never see again, and which he had found at the bottom of one of the boxes he had brought from Charlotte’s. He busied himself setting up his portable television, with its paltry indoor aerial; he loaded his worn clothes into a black bin bag and walked to a launderette half a mile away; back at the office, he hung up his shirts and underwear on a rope he slung across one side of the inner office, then watched the three o’clock match between Arsenal and Spurs.

Through all these mundane acts, he felt as though he was accompanied by the specter that had haunted him during his months in hospital. It lurked in the corners of his shabby office; he could hear it whispering to him whenever his attention on the task in hand grew slack. It urged him to consider how far he had fallen; his age; his penury; his shattered love life; his homelessness. Thirty-five, it whispered, and nothing to show for all your years of graft except a few cardboard boxes and a massive debt. The specter directed his eyes to cans of beer in the supermarket, where he bought more Pot Noodles; it mocked him as he ironed shirts on the floor. As the day wore on, it jeered at him for his self-imposed habit of smoking outside in the street, as though he were still in the army, as though this petty self-discipline could impose form and order on the amorphous, disastrous present. He began to smoke at his desk, with the butts mounting in a cheap tin ashtray he had swiped, long ago, from a bar in Germany.