The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(34)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“He told me Sir Alec Bristow wasn’t his natural father, if that’s what you mean.”

If Landry was disappointed not to be first with the information, he rallied at once.

“Yvette and Alec adopted the two boys, but she had no idea how to manage them. She is, quite simply, an atrocious mother. No control, no discipline; complete overindulgence and a point-blank refusal to see what is under her nose. I don’t say it was all down to her parenting—who knows what the genetic influences were—but John was whiny, histrionic and clingy and Charlie was completely delinquent, with the result—”

Landry stopped talking abruptly, patches of color high in his cheeks.

“With the result that he rode over the edge of a quarry?” Strike suggested.

He had said it to watch Landry’s reaction, and was not disappointed. He had the impression of a tunnel contracting, a distant door closing: a shutting down.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. And it was a bit late, then, for Yvette to start screaming and clawing at Alec, and passing out cold on the floor. If she’d had an iota of control, the boy wouldn’t have set out expressly to defy her. I was there,” said Landry, stonily. “On a weekend visit. Easter Sunday. I had been for a walk down to the village, and I came back to find them all looking for him. I headed straight for the quarry. I knew, you see. It was the place he’d been forbidden to go—so there he was.”

“You found the body, did you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That must have been highly distressing.”

“Yes,” said Landry, his lips barely moving. “It was.”

“And it was after Charlie died, wasn’t it, that your sister and Sir Alec adopted Lula?”

“Which was probably the single most stupid thing Alec Bristow ever agreed to,” said Landry. “Yvette had already proven herself a disastrous mother; was she likely to be any more successful while in a state of abandoned grief? Of course, she’d always wanted a daughter, a baby to dress in pink, and Alec thought it would make her happy. He always gave Yvette anything she wanted. He was besotted with her from the moment she joined his typing pool, and he was an unvarnished East Ender. Yvette has always had a predilection for a bit of rough.”

Strike wondered what the real source of Landry’s anger could be.

“You don’t get along with your sister, Mr. Landry?” asked Strike.

“We get along perfectly well; it is simply that I am not blind to what Yvette is, Mr. Strike, nor how much of her misfortune is her own damn fault.”

“Was it difficult for them to get approved for another adoption after Charlie died?” asked Strike.

“I daresay it would have been, if Alec hadn’t been a multimillionaire,” snorted Landry. “I know the authorities were concerned about Yvette’s mental health, and they were both a bit long in the tooth by then. It’s a great pity that they weren’t turned down. But Alec was a man of infinite resourcefulness and he had all sorts of strange contacts from his barrow-boy days. I don’t know the details, but I’d be prepared to bet money changed hands somewhere. Even so, he couldn’t manage a Caucasian. He brought another child of completely unknown provenance into the family, to be raised by a depressed and hysterical woman of no judgment. It was hardly a surprise to me that the result was catastrophic. Lula was as unstable as John and as wild as Charlie, and Yvette had just as little idea how to manage her.”

Scribbling away for Landry’s benefit, Strike wondered whether his belief in genetic predetermination accounted for some of Bristow’s preoccupation with Lula’s black relatives. Doubtless Bristow had been privy to his uncle’s views through the years; children absorbed the views of their relatives at some deep, visceral level. He, Strike, had known in his bones, long before the words had ever been said in front of him, that his mother was not like other mothers, that there was (if he believed in the unspoken code that bound the rest of the adults around him) something shameful about her.

“You saw Lula the day she died, I think?” Strike said.

Landry’s eyelashes were so fair they looked silver.

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah…” Strike flicked back through his notebook ostentatiously, coming to a halt at an entirely blank page. “…you met her at your sister’s flat, didn’t you? When Lula called in to see Lady Bristow?”

“Who told you that? John?”

“It’s all in the police file. Isn’t it true?”

“Yes, it’s perfectly true, but I can’t see how it’s relevant to anything we’ve been discussing.”

“I’m sorry; when you arrived, you said you’d been expecting to hear from me. I got the impression you were happy to answer questions.”

Landry had the air of a man who has found himself unexpectedly snookered.

“I have nothing to add to the statement I gave to the police,” he said at last.

“Which is,” said Strike, leafing backwards through blank pages, “that you dropped in to visit your sister that morning, where you met your niece, and that you then drove to Oxford to attend a conference on international developments in family law?”

Landry was chewing on air again.

“That’s correct,” he said.

“What time would you say you arrived at your sister’s flat?”

“It must have been about ten,” said Landry, after a short pause.

“And you stayed how long?”

“Half an hour, perhaps. Maybe longer. I really can’t remember.”

“And you drove directly from there to the conference in Oxford?”

Over Landry’s shoulder, Strike saw John Bristow questioning a waitress; he appeared out of breath and a little disheveled, as though he had been running. A rectangular leather case dangled from his hand. He glanced around, panting slightly, and when he spotted the back of Landry’s head, Strike thought that he looked frightened.

6

“JOHN,” SAID STRIKE, AS HIS client approached them.

“Hi, Cormoran.”

Landry did not look at his nephew, but picked up his knife and fork and took a first bite of his terrine. Strike moved around the table to make room for Bristow to sit down opposite his uncle.

“Have you spoken to Reuben?” Landry asked Bristow coldly, once he had finished his mouthful of terrine.

“Yes. I’ve said I’ll go over this afternoon and take him through all the deposits and drawings.”

“I’ve just been asking your uncle about the morning before Lula died, John. About when he visited your mother’s flat,” said Strike.

Bristow glanced at Landry.

“I’m interested in what was said and done there,” Strike continued, “because, according to the chauffeur who drove her back from her mother’s flat, Lula seemed distressed.”

“Of course she was distressed,” snapped Landry. “Her mother had cancer.”

“The operation she’d just had was supposed to have cured her, wasn’t it?”

“Yvette had just had a hysterectomy. She was in pain. I don’t doubt Lula was disturbed at seeing her mother in that condition.”

“Did you talk much to Lula, when you saw her?”

A minuscule hesitation.

“Just chit-chat.”

“And you two, did you speak to each other?”

Bristow and Landry did not look at each other. A longer pause, of a few seconds, before Bristow said:

“I was working in the home office. I heard Tony come in, heard him speaking to Mum and Lula.”

“You didn’t look in to say hello?” Strike asked Landry.

Landry considered him through slightly boiled-looking eyes, pale between the light lashes.

“You know, nobody here is obliged to answer your questions, Mr. Strike,” said Landry.

“Of course not,” agreed Strike, and he made a small and incomprehensible note in his pad. Bristow was looking at his uncle. Landry seemed to reconsider.

“I could see through the open door of the home study that John was hard at work, and I didn’t want to disturb him. I sat with Yvette in her room for a while, but she was groggy from the painkillers, so I left her with Lula. I knew,” said Landry, with the faintest undertone of spite, “that there was nobody Yvette would prefer to Lula.”

“Lula’s telephone records show that she called your mobile phone repeatedly after she left Lady Bristow’s flat, Mr. Landry.”

Landry flushed.

“Did you speak to her on the phone?”

“No. I had my mobile switched to silent; I was late for the conference.”

“They vibrate, though, don’t they?”

He wondered what it would take to make Landry leave. He was sure that the lawyer was close.

“I glanced at my phone, saw it was Lula and decided it could wait,” he said shortly.

“You didn’t call her back?”

“No.”

“Didn’t she leave any kind of message, to tell you what she wanted to talk about?”

“No.”

“That seems odd, doesn’t it? You’d just seen her at her mother’s, and you say nothing very important passed between you; yet she spent much of the rest of the afternoon trying to contact you. Doesn’t that seem as though she might have had something urgent to say to you? Or that she wanted to continue a conversation you’d been having at the flat?”

“Lula was the kind of girl who would call somebody thirty times in a row, on the flimsiest pretext. She was spoiled. She expected people to jump to attention at the sight of her name.”

Strike glanced at Bristow.

“She was—sometimes—a bit like that,” her brother muttered.

“Do you think your sister was upset purely because your mother was weak from her operation, John?” Strike asked Bristow. “Her driver, Kieran Kolovas-Jones, is emphatic that she came away from the flat in a dramatically altered mood.”

Before Bristow could answer, Landry, abandoning his food, stood up and began to put on his overcoat.

“Is Kolovas-Jones that strange-looking colored boy?” he asked, looking down at Strike and Bristow. “The one who wanted Lula to get him modeling and acting work?”

“He’s an actor, yeah,” said Strike.

“Yes. On Yvette’s birthday, the last before she became ill, I had a problem with my car. Lula and that man called by to give me a lift to the birthday dinner. Kolovas-Jones spent most of the journey badgering Lula to use her influence with Freddie Bestigui to get him an audition. Quite an encroaching young man. Very familiar in his manner. Of course,” he added, “the less I knew about my adopted niece’s love life, the better, as far as I was concerned.”