The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(43)
Author: J.K. Rowling

She was represented elsewhere; everywhere. There on the left, among a group of models all wearing transparent shifts in rainbow colors; further along, in profile, with gold leaf on her lips and eyelids. Had she learned how to compose her face into its most photogenic arrangement, to project emotion so beautifully? Or had she simply been a pellucid surface through which her feelings naturally shone?

“Park your arse anywhere,” said Somé, dropping into a seat behind a dark wood and steel desk covered in sketches; Strike pulled up a chair composed of a single length of contorted perspex. There was a T-shirt lying on the desk, which carried a picture of Princess Diana as a garish Mexican Madonna, glittering with bits of glass and beads, and complete with a flaming scarlet heart of shining satin, on which an embroidered crown was perched lopsided.

“You like?” said Somé, noticing the direction of Strike’s gaze.

“Oh yeah,” lied Strike.

“Sold out nearly everywhere; bad-taste letters from Catholics; Joe Mancura wore one on Jools Holland. I’m thinking of doing William as Christ on a long-sleeve for winter. Or Harry, do you think, with an AK47 to hide his cock?”

Strike smiled vaguely. Somé crossed his legs with a little more flourish than was strictly necessary and said, with startling bravado:

“So, the Accountant thinks Cuckoo might’ve been killed? I always called Lula ‘Cuckoo,’ ” he added, unnecessarily.

“Yeah. John Bristow’s a lawyer, though.”

“I know he is, but Cuckoo and I always called him the Accountant. Well, I did, and Cuckoo sometimes joined in, if she was feeling wicked. He was forever nosing into her percentages and trying to wring every last cent out of everyone. I suppose he’s paying you the detective equivalent of the minimum wage?”

“He’s paying me a double wage, actually.”

“Oh. Well he’s probably a bit more generous now he’s got Cuckoo’s money to play with.”

Somé chewed on a fingernail, and Strike was reminded of Kieran Kolovas-Jones; the designer and driver were similar in build, too, small but well proportioned.

“All right, I’m being a bitch,” said Somé, taking his nail out of his mouth. “I never liked John Bristow. He was always on Cuckoo’s case about something. Get a life. Get out of the closet. Have you heard him rhapsodizing about his mummy? Have you met his girlfriend? Talk about a beard: I think she’s got one.”

He rattled out the words in one nervy, spiteful stream, pausing to open a hidden drawer in the desk, from which he took out a packet of menthol cigarettes. Strike had already noticed that Somé’s nails were bitten to their quicks.

“Her family was the whole reason she was so f**ked up. I used to tell her, ‘Drop them, sweetie, move on.’ But she wouldn’t. That was Cuckoo for you, always flogging a dead horse.”

He offered Strike one of the pure white cigarettes, which the detective declined, before lighting one with an engraved Zippo. As he flipped the lid of the lighter shut, Somé said:

“I wish I’d thought of calling in a private detective. It never occurred to me. I’m glad someone’s done it. I just cannot believe she committed suicide. My therapist says that’s denial. I’m having therapy twice a week, not that it makes any f**king difference. I’d be snaffling Valium like Lady Bristow if I could still design when I’m on it, but I tried it the week after Cuckoo died and I was like a zombie. I suppose it got me through the funeral.”

Jingling and rattling from the spiral staircase announced the reappearance of Trudie, who emerged through the floor in jerky stages. She laid upon the desk a black lacquered tray, on which stood two silver filigree Russian tea glasses, in each of which was a pale green steaming concoction with wilted leaves floating in it. There was also a plate of wafer-thin biscuits that looked as though they might be made of charcoal. Strike remembered his pie and mash and his mahogany-colored tea at the Phoenix with nostalgia.

“Thanks, Trudie. And get me an ashtray, darling.”

The girl hesitated, clearly on the verge of protesting.

“Just do it,” snarled Somé. “I’m the f**king boss, I’ll burn the building down if I want to. Pull the f**king batteries out of the fire alarms. But get the ashtray first.

“The alarm went off last week, and set off all the sprinklers downstairs,” Somé explained to Strike. “So now the backers don’t want anyone smoking in the building. They can stick that one right up their tight little bumholes.”

He inhaled deeply, then exhaled through his nostrils.

“Don’t you ask questions? Or do you just sit there looking scary until someone blurts out a confession?”

“We can do questions,” said Strike, pulling out his notebook and pen. “You were abroad when Lula died, weren’t you?”

“I’d just got back, a couple of hours before.” Somé’s fingers twitched a little on the cigarette. “I’d been in Tokyo, hardly any sleep for eight days. Touched down at Heathrow at about ten thirty with the most f**king appalling jet lag. I can’t sleep on planes. I wanna be awake if I’m going to crash.”

“How did you get home from the airport?”

“Cab. Elsa had f**ked up my car booking. There should’ve been a driver there to meet me.”

“Who’s Elsa?”

“The girl I sacked for f**king up my car booking. It was the last thing I f**king wanted, to have to find a cab at that time of night.”

“Do you live alone?”

“No. By midnight I was tucked up in bed with Viktor and Rolf. My cats,” he added with a flicker of a grin. “I took an Ambien, slept for a few hours, then woke up at five in the morning. I switched on Sky News from the bed, and there was a man in a horrible sheepskin hat, standing in the snow in Cuckoo’s street, saying she was dead. The ticker-tape across the bottom of the screen was saying it too.”

Somé inhaled heavily on the cigarette, and white smoke curled out of his mouth with his next words.

“I nearly f**king died. I thought I was still asleep, or that I’d woken up in the wrong f**king dimension or something…I started calling everyone…Ciara, Bryony…all their phones were engaged. And all the time I was watching the screen, thinking they’d flash up something saying there had been a mistake, that it wasn’t her. I kept praying it was the bag lady. Rochelle.”

He paused, as though he expected some comment from Strike. The latter, who had been making notes as Somé spoke, asked, still writing:

“You know Rochelle, do you?”

“Yeah. Cuckoo brought her in here once. In it for all she could get.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She hated Cuckoo. Jealous as fuck; I could see it, even if Cuckoo couldn’t. She was in it for the freebies, she didn’t give a monkey’s whether Cuckoo lived or died. Lucky for her, as it turned out…

“So, the longer I watched the news, I knew there wasn’t a mistake. I fell a-f**king-part.”

His fingers trembled a little on the snow-white stick he was sucking.

“They said that a neighbor had overheard an argument; so of course I thought it was Duffield. I thought Duffield had knocked her through the window. I was all set to tell the pigs what a cunt he is; I was ready to stand in the dock and testify to the f**ker’s character. And if this ash falls off my cigarette,” he continued in precisely the same tone, “I will fire that little bitch.”

As though she had heard him, Trudie’s rapid footfalls grew louder and louder until she emerged again into the room, breathing heavily and clutching a heavy glass ashtray.

“Thank you,” said Somé, with a pointed inflection, as she placed it in front of him and scurried back downstairs.

“Why did you think it was Duffield?” asked Strike, once he judged Trudie to be safely out of earshot.

“Who else would Cuckoo have let in at two in the morning?”

“How well do you know him?”

“Well enough, little piss ant that he is.” Somé picked up his mint tea. “Why do women do it? Cuckoo, too…she wasn’t stupid—actually, she was razor-sharp—so what did she see in Evan Duffield? I’ll tell you,” he said, without pausing for an answer. “It’s that wounded-poet crap, that soul-pain shit, that too-much-of-a-tortured-genius-to-wash bollocks. Brush your teeth, you little bastard. You’re not f**king Byron.”

He slammed his glass down and cupped his right elbow in his left hand, steadying his forearm and continuing to draw heavily on the cigarette.

“No man would put up with the likes of Duffield. Only women. Maternal instinct gone warped, if you ask me.”

“You think he had it in him to kill her, do you?”

“Of course I do,” said Somé dismissively. “Of course he has. All of us have got it in us, somewhere, to kill, so why would Duffield be any exception? He’s got the mentality of a vicious twelve-year-old. I can imagine him in one of his rages, having a tantrum and then just—”

With his cigarette-free hand he made a violent shoving movement.

“I saw him shouting at her once. At my after-show party, last year. I got in between them; I told him to have a go at me instead. I might be a little poof,” Somé said, the round-cheeked face set, “but I’d back myself against that drugged-up f**k any day. He was a tit at the funeral, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Lurching around, off his face. No f**king respect. I was full of tranks myself or I’d’ve told him what I thought of him. Pretending to be devastated, hypocritical little shit.”

“You never thought it was suicide?”

Somé’s strange, bulging eyes bored into Strike.

“Never. Duffield says he was at his dealer’s, disguised as a wolf. What kind of f**king alibi is that? I hope you’re checking him out. I hope you’re not dazzled by his f**king celebrity, like the police.”

Strike remembered Wardle’s comments on Duffield.

“I don’t think they found Duffield dazzling.”

“They’ve got more taste than I credited them with, then,” said Somé.

“Why are you so sure it wasn’t suicide? Lula had had mental health problems, hadn’t she?”

“Yeah, but we had a pact, like Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. We’d sworn that if either of us was thinking seriously of killing themselves, we’d call the other. She would’ve called me.”

“When did you last hear from her?”

“She phoned me on the Wednesday, while I was still in Tokyo,” said Somé. “Silly cow always forgot it was eight hours ahead; I had my phone on mute at two in the morning, so I didn’t pick up; but she left a message, and she was not suicidal. Listen to this.”