The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(26)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“No,” said Strike.

“He’s one of the senior partners. John’s uncle, you know?”

“Yes.”

“Very attractive. He wouldn’t go for Alison in a million years. I suppose she’s settled for John as consolation prize.”

The thought of Alison’s doomed infatuation seemed to afford the sisters great satisfaction.

“This is all common gossip at the office, is it?” asked Strike.

“Oh, yah,” said Ursula, with relish. “Cyprian says she’s absolutely embarrassing. Like a puppy dog around Tony.”

Her antipathy towards Strike seemed to have evaporated. He was not surprised; he had met the phenomenon many times. People liked to talk; there were very few exceptions; the question was how you made them do it. Some, and Ursula was evidently one of them, were amenable to alcohol; others liked a spotlight; and then there were those who merely needed proximity to another conscious human being. A subsection of humanity would become loquacious only on one favorite subject: it might be their own innocence, or somebody else’s guilt; it might be their collection of pre-war biscuit tins; or it might, as in the case of Ursula May, be the hopeless passion of a plain secretary.

Ursula was watching Bristow through the window; he was standing on the pavement, talking hard into his mobile as he paced up and down. Her tongue properly loosened now, she said:

“I bet I know what that’s about. Conway Oates’s executors are making a fuss about how the firm handled his affairs. He was the American financier, you know? Cyprian and Tony are in a real bait about it, making John fly around trying to smooth things over. John always gets the shitty end of the stick.”

Her tone was more scathing than sympathetic.

Bristow returned to the table, looking flustered.

“Sorry, sorry, Alison just wanted to give me some messages,” he said.

The waiter came to collect their plates. Strike was the only one who had cleared his. When the waiter was out of earshot, Strike said:

“Tansy, the police disregarded your evidence because they didn’t think you could have heard what you claimed to have heard.”

“Well they were wrong, weren’t they?” she snapped, her good humor gone in a trice. “I did hear it.”

“Through a closed window?”

“It was open,” she said, meeting none of her companions’ eyes. “It was stuffy, I opened one of the windows on the way to get water.”

Strike was sure that pressing her on the point would only lead to her refusing to answer any other questions.

“They also allege that you’d taken coc**ne.”

Tansy made a little noise of impatience, a soft “cuh.”

“Look,” she said, “I had some earlier, during dinner, OK, and they found it in the bathroom when they looked around the flat. The f**king boredom of the Dunnes. Anyone would have done a couple of lines to get through Benjy Dunne’s bloody anecdotes. But I didn’t imagine that voice upstairs. A man was there, and he killed her. He killed her,” repeated Tansy, glaring at Strike.

“And where do you think he went afterwards?”

“I don’t know, do I? That’s what John’s paying you to find out. He sneaked out somehow. Maybe he climbed out the back window. Maybe he hid in the lift. Maybe he went out through the car park downstairs. I don’t bloody know how he got out, I just know he was there.”

“We believe you,” interjected Bristow anxiously. “We believe you, Tansy. Cormoran needs to ask these questions to—to get a clear picture of how it all happened.”

“The police did everything they could to discredit me,” said Tansy, disregarding Bristow and addressing Strike. “They got there too late, and he’d already gone, so of course they covered it up. No one who hasn’t been through what I went through with the press can understand what it was like. It was absolute bloody hell. I went into the clinic just to get away from it all. I can’t believe it’s legal, what the press are allowed to do in this country; and all for telling the truth, that’s the bloody joke. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t I? I would have, if I’d known what was coming.”

She twisted her loose diamond ring around her finger.

“Freddie was asleep in bed when Lula fell, wasn’t he?” Strike asked Tansy.

“Yah, that’s right,” she said.

Her hand slid up to her face and she smoothed nonexistent strands of hair off her forehead. The waiter returned with menus again, and Strike was forced to hold back his questions until they had ordered. He was the only one to ask for pudding; all the rest had coffee.

“When did Freddie get out of bed?” he asked Tansy, when the waiter had left.

“What do you mean?”

“You say he was in bed when Lula fell; when did he get up?”

“When he heard me screaming,” she said, as though this was obvious. “I woke him up, didn’t I?”

“He must have moved quickly.”

“Why?”

“You said: ‘I ran out of the flat, past Freddie, and downstairs.’ So he was already in the room before you ran out to tell Derrick what had happened?”

A missed beat.

“That’s right,” she said, smoothing her immaculate hair again, shielding her face.

“So he went from fast asleep in bed, to awake and in the sitting room, within seconds? Because you started screaming and running pretty much instantaneously, from what you said?”

Another infinitesimal pause.

“Yah,” she said. “Well—I don’t know. I think I screamed—I screamed while I was frozen on the spot—for a moment, maybe—I was just so shocked—and Freddie came running out of the bedroom, and then I ran past him.”

“Did you stop to tell him what you’d seen?”

“I can’t remember.”

Bristow looked as though he was about to stage one of his untimely interventions again. Strike held up a hand to forestall him; but Tansy plunged off on another tack, eager, he guessed, to leave the subject of her husband.

“I’ve thought and thought about how the killer got in, and I’m sure he must have followed her inside when she came in that morning, because of Derrick Wilson leaving his desk and being in the bathroom. I thought Wilson ought to have been bloody sacked for it, actually. If you ask me, he was having a sneaky sleep in the back room. I don’t know how the killer would have known the key code, but I’m sure that’s when he must have got in.”

“Do you think you’d be able to recognize the man’s voice again? The one you heard shouting?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “It was just a man’s voice. It could have been anyone. There was nothing unusual about it. I mean, afterwards I thought, Was it Duffield?” she said, gazing at him intently, “because I’d heard Duffield shouting upstairs, once before, from the top landing. Wilson had to throw him out; Duffield was trying to kick in Lula’s door. I never understood what a girl with her looks was doing with someone like Duffield,” she added in parenthesis.

“Some women say he’s sexy,” agreed Ursula, emptying the wine bottle into her glass, “but I can’t see the appeal. He’s just skanky and horrible.”

“It’s not even,” said Tansy, twisting the loose diamond ring again, “as though he’s got money.”

“But you don’t think it was his voice you heard that night?”

“Well, like I say, it could have been,” she said impatiently, with a small shrug of her thin shoulders. “He’s got an alibi, though, hasn’t he? Loads of people said he was nowhere near Kentigern Gardens the night Lula was killed. He spent part of it at Ciara Porter’s, didn’t he? Bitch,” Tansy added, with a small, tight smile. “Sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend.”

“Were they sleeping together?” asked Strike.

“Oh, what do you think?” laughed Ursula, as though the question was too naive for words. “I know Ciara Porter, she modeled in this charity fashion show I was involved in setting up. She’s such an airhead and such a slut.”

The coffees had arrived, along with Strike’s sticky toffee pudding.

“I’m sorry, John, but Lula didn’t have very good taste in friends,” said Tansy, sipping her espresso. “There was Ciara, and then there was that Bryony Radford. Not that she was a friend, exactly, but I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

“Who’s Bryony?” asked Strike disingenuously, for he remembered who she was.

“Makeup artist. Charges a fortune, and such a bloody bitch,” said Ursula. “I used her once, before one of the Gorbachev Foundation balls, and afterwards she told ev—”

Ursula stopped abruptly, lowered her glass and picked up her coffee instead. Strike, who despite its undoubted irrelevance to the matter in hand was quite interested to know what Bryony had told everyone, began to speak, but Tansy talked loudly over him.

“Oh, and there was that ghastly girl Lula used to bring around to the flat, too, John, remember?”

She appealed to Bristow again, but he looked blank.

“You know, that ghastly—that rarely awful-colored girl she sometimes dragged back. A kind of hobo person. I mean…she literally smelled. When she’d been in the lift…you could smell it. And she took her into the pool, too. I didn’t think blacks could swim.”

Bristow was blinking rapidly, pink in the face.

“God knows what Lula was doing with her,” said Tansy. “Oh, you must remember, John. She was fat. Scruffy. Looked a bit subnormal.”

“I don’t…” mumbled Bristow.

“Are you talking about Rochelle?” asked Strike.

“Oh, yah, I think that was her name. She was at the funeral, anyway,” said Tansy. “I noticed her. She was sitting right at the back.

“Now, you will remember, won’t you,” she turned the full force of her dark eyes upon Strike, “that this is all entirely off the record. I mean, I cannot afford for Freddie to find out I’m talking to you. I’m not going to go through all that shit with the press again. Bill, please,” she barked at the waiter.

When it arrived, she passed it without comment to Bristow.

As the sisters were preparing to leave, shaking their glossy brown hair back over their shoulders and pulling on expensive jackets, the door of the restaurant opened and a tall, thin, besuited man of around sixty entered, looked around and headed straight for their table. Silver-haired and distinguished-looking, impeccably dressed, there was a certain chilliness about his pale blue eyes. His walk was brisk and purposeful.