The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(32)
Author: J.K. Rowling

Robin was taller than any of the shop girls, and when she had swapped her trench coat for the sequined one, they cooed and gasped.

“I must show my brother,” she told them, after surveying her reflection with a critical eye. “It isn’t for me, you see, it’s for his wife.”

And she strode back out through the changing-room curtains with the three assistants hovering behind her. The rich girls over by the clothing rack all turned to stare at Robin through narrow eyes as she asked boldly:

“What do you think?”

Strike had to admit that the coat he had thought so vile looked better on Robin than on the mannequin. She twirled on the spot for him, and the thing glittered like a lizard’s skin.

“It’s all right,” he said, masculinely cautious, and the assistants smiled indulgently. “Yeah, it’s quite nice. How much is it?”

“Not that much, by your standards,” said Robin, with an arch look at her handmaidens. “Sandra would love this, though,” she said firmly to Strike, who, caught off guard, grinned. “And it is her fortieth.”

“She could wear it with anything,” the cotton candy girl assured Strike eagerly. “So versatile.”

“OK, I’ll try that Cavalli dress,” said Robin blithely, turning back to the changing room.

“Sandra told me to come with him,” she told the three assistants, as they helped her out of the coat, and unzipped the dress to which she had pointed. “To make sure he doesn’t make another stupid mistake. He bought her the world’s ugliest earrings for her thirtieth; they cost an arm and a leg and she’s never had them out of the safe.”

Robin did not know where the invention was coming from; she felt inspired. Stepping out of her jumper and skirt, she began to wriggle into a clinging poison-green dress. Sandra was becoming real to her as she talked: a little spoiled, somewhat bored, confiding in her sister-in-law over wine that her brother (a banker, Robin thought, though Strike did not really look like her idea of a banker) had no taste at all.

“So she said to me, take him to Vashti and get him to crack open his wallet. Oh yes, this is nice.”

It was more than nice. Robin stared at her own reflection; she had never worn anything so beautiful in her life. The green dress was magically constructed to shrink her waist to nothingness, to carve her figure into flowing curves, to elongate her pale neck. She was a serpentine goddess in glittering viridian, and the assistants were all murmuring and gasping their appreciation.

“How much?” Robin asked the redhead.

“Two thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine,” said the girl.

“Nothing to him,” said Robin airily, striding out through the curtains to show Strike, whom they found examining a pile of gloves on a circular table.

His only comment on the green dress was “Yeah.” He had barely looked at her.

“Well, maybe it’s not Sandra’s color,” said Robin, with a sudden feeling of embarrassment; Strike was not, after all, her brother or her boyfriend; she had perhaps taken invention too far, parading in front of him in a skintight dress. She retreated into the changing room.

Stripped again to bra and pants she said:

“The last time Sandra was here, Lula Landry was in your café. Sandra said she was gorgeous in the flesh. Even better than in pictures.”

“Oh yeah, she was,” agreed the pink-haired girl, who was clutching to her chest the gold jacket she had fetched. “She used to be in here all the time, we used to see her every week. Do you want to try this?”

“She was in here the day before she died,” said the cotton candy–haired girl, helping Robin to wriggle into the gold jacket. “In this changing room, actually in this one.”

“Really?” said Robin.

“It’s not going to close over the bust, but it looks great open,” said the redhead.

“No, that’s no good, Sandra’s a bit bigger than me, if anything,” said Robin, ruthlessly sacrificing her fictional sister-in-law’s figure. “I’ll try that black dress. Did you say Lula Landry was here actually the day before she died?”

“Oh yeah,” said the girl with pink hair. “It was so sad, really so sad. You heard her, didn’t you, Mel?”

The tattooed redhead, who was holding up a black dress with lace inserts, made an indeterminate noise. Watching her in the mirror, Robin saw no eagerness to talk about what she had, whether deliberately or accidentally, overheard.

“She was speaking to Duffield, wasn’t she, Mel?” prompted the chatty pink-haired girl.

Robin saw Mel frown. Tattoos notwithstanding, Robin had the impression that Mel might well be the other two girls’ senior. She seemed to feel that discretion about what took place in these cream silk tents was part of her job, whereas the other two bubbled with the desire to recount gossip, particularly to a woman who seemed so eager to spend her rich brother’s money.

“It must be impossible not to hear what goes on in these—these tent things,” Robin commented, a little breathlessly, as she was inched into the lacy black dress by the combined efforts of the three assistants.

Mel unbent slightly.

“Yeah, it is. And people just come in here and start mouthing off about whatever they fancy. You can’t help overhearing stuff through this,” she said, pointing towards the stiff curtain of raw silk.

Now heavily constricted in a lace-and-leather straitjacket, Robin gasped:

“You’d think Lula Landry would be a bit more careful, with the press following her around wherever she went.”

“Yeah,” said the redhead. “You would. I mean, I’d never pass on anything I heard, but some people might.”

Disregarding the fact that she had evidently shared whatever she’d heard with her colleagues, Robin expressed appreciation for this rare sense of decency.

“I suppose you had to tell the police, though?” she said, pulling the dress straight and bracing herself for the raising of the zip.

“The police never came here,” said the girl with cotton candy hair, regret in her voice. “I said Mel should have gone and told them what she’d heard, but she didn’t want to.”

“It wasn’t anything,” said Mel, quickly. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. I mean, he wasn’t there, was he? That was proven.”

Strike had moved as close as he dared to the silk curtain, without arousing suspicious looks from the customers and remaining assistants.

Inside the changing cubicle, the pink-haired girl was heaving on the zip. Slowly Robin’s ribcage was compressed by a hidden boned corset. The listening Strike was disconcerted that her next question was almost a groan.

“D’you mean that Evan Duffield wasn’t at her flat when she died?”

“Yeah,” said Mel. “So it didn’t matter what she was saying to him earlier, did it? He wasn’t there.”

The four women considered Robin’s reflection for a moment.

“I don’t think,” said Robin, observing the way that two thirds of her br**sts were squashed flat by the straining material, while the upper slopes overflowed the neckline, “Sandra’s going to fit into this. But don’t you think,” she said, breathing more freely as the cotton candy–haired girl unzipped her, “you ought to have told the police what she said, and let them decide whether it was important?”

“I said that, Mel, didn’t I?” crowed the pink-haired girl. “I told her that.”

Mel was immediately on the defensive.

“But he wasn’t there! He never went to her flat! He must’ve been saying he had something on and he didn’t want to see her, because she was going, ‘Come after, then, I’ll wait up, it don’t matter. I probably won’t be home till one anyway. Please come, please.’ Like, begging him. Anyway, she had her friend in the cubicle with her. Her friend heard everything; she would’ve told the police, wouldn’t she?”

Robin was pulling on the glittering coat again, for something to do. Almost as an afterthought, as she twisted and turned in front of the mirror, she asked:

“And it was definitely Evan Duffield she was talking to, was it?”

“Of course it was,” said Mel, as though Robin had insulted her intelligence. “Who else would she’ve been asking round to her place in the early hours? She sounded desperate to see him.”

“God, his eyes,” said the girl with the cotton candy hair. “He is so gorgeous. And massive charisma in person. He came in here with her once. God, he’s sexy.”

Ten minutes later, Robin having modeled a further two outfits for Strike, and agreed with him in front of the assistants that the sequined coat was the best of the bunch, they decided (with the assistants’ agreement) that she ought to bring Sandra in to have a look at it the following day before they committed themselves. Strike reserved the five-thousand-pound coat under the name of Andrew Atkinson, gave an invented mobile phone number and left the boutique with Robin in a shower of friendly good wishes, as though they had already spent the money.

They walked fifty yards in silence, and Strike had lit up a cigarette before he said:

“Very, very impressive.”

Robin glowed with pride.

5

STRIKE AND ROBIN PARTED AT New Bond Street station. Robin took the underground back to the office to call BestFilms, look through online telephone directories for Rochelle Onifade’s aunt, and evade Temporary Solutions (“Keep the door locked” was Strike’s advice).

Strike bought himself a newspaper and caught the underground to Knightsbridge, then walked, having plenty of time to spare, to the Serpentine Bar and Kitchen, which Bristow had chosen for their lunch appointment.

The trip took him across Hyde Park, down leafy walkways and across the sandy bridle path of Rotten Row. He had jotted down the bare bones of the girl called Mel’s evidence on the Tube, and now, in the sun-dappled greenery, his mind drifted, lingering on the memory of Robin as she had looked in the clinging green dress.

He had disconcerted her by his reaction, he knew that; but there had been a weird intimacy about the moment, and intimacy was precisely what he wanted least at the moment, most especially with Robin, bright, professional and considerate as she was. He enjoyed her company and he appreciated the way that she respected his privacy, keeping her curiosity in check. God knew, thought Strike, moving over to avoid a cyclist, he had come across that particular quality rarely enough in life, particularly from women. Yet the fact that he would, quite soon, be free of Robin was an inextricable part of his enjoyment of her presence; the fact that she was going to move on imposed, like her engagement ring, a happy boundary. He liked Robin; he was grateful to her; he was even (after this morning) impressed by her; but, having normal sight and an unimpaired libido, he was also reminded every day she bent over the computer monitor that she was a very sexy girl. Not beautiful; nothing like Charlotte; but attractive, nonetheless. That fact had never been so crudely presented to him as when she walked out of the changing room in the clinging green dress, and in consequence he had literally averted his eyes. He acquitted her of any deliberate provocation, but he was realistic, all the same, about the precarious balance that must be maintained for his own sanity. She was the only human with whom he was in regular contact, and he did not underestimate his current susceptibility; he had also gathered, from certain evasions and hesitations, that her fiancé disliked the fact that she had left the temping agency for this ad hoc agreement. It was safest all round not to let the burgeoning friendship become too warm; best not to admire openly the sight of her figure draped in jersey.