The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(36)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“I think,” he said haltingly, “I think both of them were there, with their backs to me, when I walked back downstairs. Why do you ask? How can that matter?”

“It might not,” said Strike. “But can you remember anything at all? Hair or skin color, maybe?”

Looking even more perplexed, Bristow said:

“I’m afraid I didn’t really register. I suppose…” He screwed up his face again in concentration. “I remember he was wearing blue. I mean, if pressed, I’d say he was white. But I couldn’t swear to it.”

“I doubt you’ll have to,” said Strike, “but that’s still a help.”

He pulled out his notebook to remind himself of the questions he had wanted to put to Bristow.

“Oh, yeah. According to her witness statement to the police, Ciara Porter said that Lula had told her she wanted to leave everything to you.”

“Oh,” said Bristow unenthusiastically. “That.”

He began to amble along again, and Strike moved with him.

“One of the detectives in charge of the case told me that Ciara had said that. A Detective Inspector Carver. He was convinced from the first that it was suicide and he appeared to think that this supposed talk with Ciara demonstrated Lula’s intent to take her own life. It seemed a strange line of reasoning to me. Do suicides bother with wills?”

“You think Ciara Porter’s inventing, then?”

“Not inventing,” said Bristow. “Exaggerating, maybe. I think it’s much more likely that Lula said something nice about me, because we’d just made up after our row, and Ciara, in hindsight, assuming that Lula was already contemplating suicide, turned whatever it was into a bequest. She’s quite a—a fluffy sort of girl.”

“A search was made for a will, wasn’t it?”

“Oh yeah, the police looked very thoroughly. We—the family—didn’t think Lula had ever made one; her lawyers didn’t know of one, but naturally a search was made. Nothing was found, and they looked everywhere.”

“Just supposing for a moment that Ciara Porter isn’t misremembering what your sister said, though…”

“But Lula would never have left everything solely to me. Never.”

“Why not?”

“Because that would have explicitly cut out our mother, which would have been immensely hurtful,” said Bristow earnestly. “It isn’t the money—Dad left Mum very well off—it’s more the message that Lula would have been sending, cutting her out like that. Wills can cause all kinds of hurt. I’ve seen it happen countless times.”

“Has your mother made a will?” Strike asked.

Bristow looked startled.

“I—yes, I believe so.”

“May I ask who her legatees are?”

“I haven’t seen it,” said Bristow, a little stiffly. “How is this…?”

“It’s all relevant, John. Ten million quid is a hell of a lot of money.”

Bristow seemed to be trying to decide whether or not Strike was being insensitive, or offensive. Finally he said:

“Given that there is no other family, I would imagine that Tony and I are the main beneficiaries. Possibly one or two charities will be remembered; my mother has always been generous to charities. However, as I’m sure you’ll understand,” pink blotches were rising again up Bristow’s thin neck, “I am in no hurry to find out my mother’s last wishes, given what must happen before they are acted upon.”

“Of course not,” said Strike.

They had reached Bristow’s office, an austere eight-story building entered by a dark archway. Bristow stopped beside the entrance and faced Strike.

“Do you still think I’m deluded?” he asked, as a pair of dark-suited women swept up past them.

“No,” said Strike, honestly enough. “No, I don’t.”

Bristow’s undistinguished countenance brightened a little.

“I’ll be in touch about Somé and Marlene Higson. Oh—and I nearly forgot. Lula’s laptop. I’ve charged it for you, but it’s password-protected. The police people found out the password, and they told my mother, but she can’t remember what it was, and I never knew. Perhaps it was in the police file?” he added hopefully.

“Not as far as I can remember,” said Strike, “but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Where has this been since Lula died?”

“In police custody, and since then, at my mother’s. Nearly all Lula’s things are lying around at Mum’s. She hasn’t worked herself up to making decisions about them.”

Bristow handed Strike the case and bid him farewell; then, with a small bracing movement of his shoulders, he headed up the steps and disappeared through the doors of the family firm.

7

THE FRICTION BETWEEN THE END of Strike’s amputated leg and the prosthesis was becoming more painful with every step as he headed towards Kensington Gore. Sweating a little in his heavy overcoat, while a weak sun made the park shimmer in the distance, Strike asked himself whether the strange suspicion that had him in its grip was anything more than a shadow moving in the depths of a muddy pool: a trick of the light, an illusory effect of the wind-ruffled surface. Had these minute flurries of black silt been flicked up by a slimy tail, or were they nothing but meaningless gusts of algae-fed gas? Could there be something lurking, disguised, buried in the mud, for which other nets had trawled in vain?

Heading for Kensington Tube station, he passed the Queen’s Gate into Hyde Park; ornate, rust-red and embellished with royal insignia. Incurably observant, he noted the sculpture of the doe and fawn on one pillar and the stag on the other. Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed. The same, yet profoundly different…Lula Landry’s laptop banged harder and harder into his leg as his limp worsened.

In his sore, stymied and frustrated state, there was a dull inevitability about Robin’s announcement, when he finally reached the office at ten to five, that she was still unable to penetrate past the telephone receptionist of Freddie Bestigui’s production company; and that she had had no success in finding anyone of the name Onifade with a British Telecom number in the Kilburn area.

“Of course, if she’s Rochelle’s aunt, she could have a different surname, couldn’t she?” Robin pointed out, as she buttoned her coat and prepared to leave.

Strike agreed to it wearily. He had dropped on to the sagging sofa the moment he had come through the office door, something that Robin had never seen him do before. His face was pinched.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. Any sign of Temporary Solutions this afternoon?”

“No,” said Robin, pulling her belt tight. “Perhaps they believed me when I said I was Annabel? I did try and sound Australian.”

He grinned. Robin closed the interim report she had been reading while she waited for Strike to return, set it neatly back on its shelf, bade Strike goodnight and left him sitting there, the laptop lying beside him on the threadbare cushions.

When the sound of Robin’s footsteps was no longer audible, Strike stretched a long arm sideways to lock the glass door; then broke his own weekday ban on smoking in the office. Jamming the lit cigarette between his teeth, he pulled up his trouser leg and unlaced the strap holding the prosthesis to his thigh. Then he unrolled the gel liner from the stump of his leg and examined the end of his amputated tibia.

He was supposed to examine the skin surface for irritation every day. Now he saw that the scar tissue was inflamed and over-warm. There had been various creams and powders back in the bathroom cabinet at Charlotte’s dedicated to the care of this patch of skin, subject as it was these days to forces for which it had not been designed. Perhaps she had thrown the corn powder and Oilatum into one of the still unpacked boxes? But he could not muster the energy to go and find out, nor did he want to refit the prosthesis just yet; and so he sat smoking on the sofa with the lower trouser leg hanging empty towards the floor, lost in thought.

His mind drifted. He thought about families, and names, and about the ways in which his and John Bristow’s childhoods, outwardly so different, had been similar. There were ghostly figures in Strike’s family history, too: his mother’s first husband, for instance, of whom she had rarely spoken, except to say that she had hated being married from the first. Aunt Joan, whose memory had always been sharpest where Leda’s had been most vague, said that the eighteen-year-old Leda had run out on her husband after only two weeks; that her sole motivation in marrying Strike Snr (who, according to Aunt Joan, had arrived in St. Mawes with the fair) had been a new dress, and a change of name. Certainly, Leda had remained more faithful to her unusual married moniker than to any man. She had passed it to her son, who had never met its original owner, long gone before his unconnected birth.

Strike smoked, lost in thought, until the daylight in his office began to soften and dim. Then, at last, he struggled up on his one foot and, using the doorknob and the dado rail on the wall beyond the glass door to steady himself, hopped out to examine the boxes still stacked on the landing outside his office. At the bottom of one of them he found those dermatological products designed to assuage the burning and prickling in the end of his stump, and set to work to try and repair the damage first done by the long walk across London with his kitbag over his shoulder.

It was lighter now than it had been at eight o’clock two weeks ago; still daylight when Strike was seated, for the second time in ten days, in Wong Kei, the tall, white-fronted Chinese restaurant with a window view of an arcade center called Play to Win. It had been extremely painful to reattach the prosthetic leg, and still more to walk down Charing Cross Road on it, but he had disdained the use of the gray metal sticks he had also found in the box, relics of his release from Selly Oak Hospital.

While Strike ate Singapore noodles one-handed, he examined Lula Landry’s laptop, which lay open on the table, beside his beer. The dark pink computer casing was patterned with cherry blossom. It did not occur to Strike that he presented an incongruous appearance to the world as he hunched, large and hairy, over the prettified, pink and palpably feminine device, but the sight had drawn smirks from two of the black-T-shirted waiters.

“How’s tricks, Federico?” asked a pallid, straggly-haired young man at half past eight. The newcomer, who dropped into the seat opposite Strike, wore jeans, a psychedelic T-shirt, Converse sneakers, and a leather bag slung diagonally across his chest.

“Been worse,” grunted Strike. “How’re you? Want a drink?”

“Yeah, I’ll have a lager.”

Strike ordered the drink for his guest, whom he was accustomed, for long-forgotten reasons, to call Spanner. Spanner had a first-class degree in computer science, and was much better paid than his clothing suggested.