The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(18)
Author: J.K. Rowling

But he had a job, he kept reminding himself; a paid job. Arsenal beat Spurs, and Strike was cheered; he turned off the television and, defying the specter, moved straight to his desk and resumed work.

At liberty, now, to collect and collate evidence in whatever way he chose, Strike continued to conform to the protocols of the Criminal Procedure and Investigation Act. The fact that he believed himself to be hunting a figment of John Bristow’s disturbed imagination made no difference to the thoroughness and accuracy with which he now wrote up the notes he had made during his interviews with Bristow, Wilson and Kolovas-Jones.

Lucy telephoned him at six in the evening, while he was hard at work. Though his sister was younger than Strike by two years, she seemed to feel herself older. Weighed down, young, by a mortgage, a stolid husband, three children and an onerous job, Lucy seemed to crave responsibility, as though she could never have enough anchors. Strike had always suspected that she wanted to prove to herself and the world that she was nothing like their fly-by-night mother, who had dragged the two of them all over the country, from school to school, house to squat to camp, in pursuit of the next enthusiasm or man. Lucy was the only one of his eight half-siblings with whom Strike had shared a childhood; he was fonder of her than of almost anyone else in his life, and yet their interactions were often unsatisfactory, laden with familiar anxieties and arguments. Lucy could not disguise the fact that her brother worried and disappointed her. In consequence, Strike was less inclined to be honest with her about his present situation than he would have been with many a friend.

“Yeah, it’s going great,” he told her, smoking at the open window, watching people drift in and out of the shops below. “Business has doubled lately.”

“Where are you? I can hear traffic.”

“At the office. I’ve got paperwork to do.”

“On Saturday? How does Charlotte feel about that?”

“She’s away; she’s gone to visit her mother.”

“How are things going between you?”

“Great,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. How’s Greg?”

She gave him a brief precis of her husband’s workload, then returned to the attack.

“Is Gillespie still on your back for repayment?”

“No.”

“Because you know what, Stick”—the childhood nickname boded ill: she was trying to soften him up—“I’ve been looking into this, and you could apply to the British Legion for—”

“Fucking hell, Lucy,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“What?”

The hurt and indignation in her voice were only too familiar: he closed his eyes.

“I don’t need help from the British Legion, Luce, all right?”

“There’s no need to be so proud…”

“How are the boys?”

“They’re fine. Look, Stick, I just think it’s outrageous that Rokeby’s getting his lawyer to hassle you, when he’s never given you a penny in his life. He ought to have made it a gift, seeing what you’ve been through and how much he’s—”

“Business is good. I’m going to pay off the loan,” said Strike. A teenaged couple on the corner of the street were having an argument.

“Are you sure everything’s all right between you and Charlotte? Why’s she visiting her mother? I thought they hated each other?”

“They’re getting on better these days,” he said, as the teenage girl gesticulated wildly, stamped her foot and walked away.

“Have you bought her a ring yet?” asked Lucy.

“I thought you wanted me to get Gillespie off my back?”

“Is she all right about not having a ring?”

“She’s been great about it,” said Strike. “She says she doesn’t want one; she wants me to put all my money into the business.”

“Really?” said Lucy. She always seemed to think that she made a good job of dissimulating her deep dislike of Charlotte. “Are you going to come to Jack’s birthday party?”

“When is it?”

“I sent you an invitation over a week ago, Stick!”

He wondered whether Charlotte had slipped it into one of the boxes he had left unpacked on the landing, not having room for all his possessions in the office.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” he said; there was little he wanted to do less.

The call terminated, he returned to his computer and continued work. His notes from the Wilson and Kolovas-Jones interviews were soon completed, but a sense of frustration persisted. This was the first case that he had taken since leaving the army that required more than surveillance work, and it might have been designed to remind him daily that he had been stripped of all power and authority. Film producer Freddie Bestigui, the man who had been in closest proximity to Lula Landry at the time of her death, remained unreachable behind his faceless minions, and, in spite of John Bristow’s confident assertion that he would be able to persuade her to talk to Strike, there was not yet a secured interview with Tansy Bestigui.

With a faint sense of impotence, and with almost as much contempt for the occupation as Robin’s fiancé felt for it, Strike fought off his lowering sense of gloom by resorting to more internet searches connected with the case. He found Kieran Kolovas-Jones online: the driver had been telling the truth about the episode of The Bill in which he had had two lines (Gang Member Two…Kieran Kolovas-Jones). He had a theatrical agent, too, whose website featured a small photograph of Kieran, and a short list of credits including walk-on parts in East Enders and Casualty. Kieran’s photograph on the Execars home page was much larger. Here, he stood alone in a peaked hat and uniform, looking like a film star, evidently the handsomest driver on their books.

Evening shaded into night beyond the windows; while Tom Waits growled and moaned from the portable CD player in the corner, Strike chased the shadow of Lula Landry across cyberspace, occasionally adding to the notes he had already taken while speaking to Bristow, Wilson and Kolovas-Jones.

He could find no Facebook page for Landry, nor did she ever seem to have joined Twitter. Her refusal to feed her fans’ ravenous appetite for personal information seemed to have inspired others to fill the void. There were countless websites dedicated to the reproduction of her pictures, and to obsessive commentary on her life. If half of the information here was factual, Bristow had given Strike but a partial and sanitized version of his sister’s drive towards self-destruction, a tendency which seemed to have revealed itself first in early adolescence, when her adoptive father, Sir Alec Bristow, a genial-looking bearded man who had founded his own electronics company, Albris, had dropped dead of a heart attack. Lula had subsequently run away from two schools, and been expelled from a third, all of them expensive private establishments. She had slit her own wrist and been found in a pool of blood by a dormitory friend; she had lived rough, and been tracked to a squat by the police. A fan site called LulaMyInspirationForeva.com, run by a person of unknown sex, asserted that the model had briefly supported herself, during this time, as a prostitute.

Then had come sectioning under the Mental Health Act, the secure ward for young people with severe illnesses, and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Barely a year later, while shopping in a clothing store on Oxford Street with her mother, there had come the fairy-tale approach from a scout for a modeling agency.

Landry’s early photographs showed a sixteen-year-old with the face of Nefertiti, who managed to project to the lens an extraordinary combination of worldliness and vulnerability, with long thin legs like a giraffe’s and a jagged scar running down the inside of her left arm that fashion editors seemed to have found an interesting adjunct to her spectacular face, for it was sometimes given prominence in photographs. Lula’s extreme beauty was on the very edge of absurdity, and the charm for which she was celebrated (in both newspaper obituaries and hysterical blogs) sat alongside a reputation for sudden outbursts of temper and a dangerously short fuse. Press and public seemed to have both loved her, and loved loathing her. One female journalist found her “strangely sweet, possessed of an unexpected naiveté”; another, “at bottom, a calculating little diva, shrewd and tough.”

At nine o’clock Strike walked to Chinatown and bought himself a meal; then he returned to the office, swapped Tom Waits for Elbow, and searched out online accounts of Evan Duffield, the man who, by common consent, even that of Bristow, had not killed his girlfriend.

Until Kieran Kolovas-Jones had displayed professional jealousy, Strike could not have said why Duffield was famous. He now discovered that Duffield had been elevated from obscurity by his participation in a critically acclaimed independent film, in which he had played a character indistinguishable from himself: a her**n-addicted musician stealing to support his habit.

Duffield’s band had released a well-reviewed album on the back of their lead singer’s newfound fame, and split up in considerable acrimony around the time that he had met Lula. Like his girlfriend, Duffield was extraordinarily photogenic, even in the unretouched long-lens photographs of him sloping along a street in filthy clothes, even in those shots (and there were several) where he was lunging in fury at photographers. The conjunction of these two damaged and beautiful people seemed to have supercharged the fascination with both; each reflecting more interest on to the other, which rebounded on themselves; it was a kind of perpetual motion.

The death of his girlfriend had fixed Duffield more securely than ever in that firmament of the idolized, the vilified, the deified. A certain darkness, a fatalism, hung around him; both his most fervent admirers and his detractors seemed to take pleasure in the idea that he had one booted foot in the afterworld already; that there was an inevitability about his descent into despair and oblivion. He seemed to make a veritable parade of his frailties, and Strike lingered for some minutes over another of those tiny, jerky YouTube videos, in which Duffield, patently stoned, talked on and on, in the voice Kolovas-Jones had so accurately parodied, about dying being no more than checking out of the party, and making a confused case for there being little need to cry if you had to leave early.

On the night that Lula had died, according to a multitude of sources, Duffield had left the nightclub shortly after his girlfriend, wearing—and Strike found it hard to see this as anything other than deliberate showmanship—a wolf’s mask. His account of what he had got up to for the rest of the night might not have satisfied online conspiracy theorists, but the police seemed to have been convinced that he had had nothing to do with subsequent events at Kentigern Gardens.

Strike followed the speculative train of his own thoughts over the rough terrain of news sites and blogs. Here and there he stumbled upon pockets of feverish speculation, of theories about Landry’s death that mentioned clues the police had failed to follow up, and which seemed to have fed Bristow’s own conviction that there had been a murderer. LulaMyInspirationForeva had a long list of Unanswered Questions, which included, at number five, “Who called off the paps before she fell?”; at number nine, “Why did the men with the covered faces runnin away from her flat at 2 a.m. never come forward? Where are they and who wer they?”; and at number thirteen, “Why was luLa wearing a different outfit to the one she came home in when she fell off the balcony?”