The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(63)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“Maybe he got a call saying she was feeling bad, something like that? Maybe John Bristow rang him and asked him to come?”

“Bristow’s never mentioned asking his uncle to drop in. I’d say they were on bad terms at the time. They’re both shifty about that visit of Landry’s. Neither of them likes talking about it.”

Strike stood up and began to walk up and down, limping slightly, barely noticing the pain in his leg.

“No,” he said, “Bristow asking his sister, who by all accounts was the apple of his mother’s eye, to drop by—that makes sense. Asking his mother’s brother, who was out of town and by no means her biggest fan, to make a massive detour to see her…that doesn’t smell right. And now we find out that Alison went looking for Landry at his hotel in Oxford. It was a workday. Was she checking up on him on her own account, or did someone send her?”

The telephone rang. Robin picked up the receiver. To Strike’s surprise, she immediately affected a very stilted Australian accent.

“Oy’m sorry, shiz not here…Naoh…Naoh…I dunnaoh where she iz…Naoh…My nem’s Annabel…”

Strike laughed quietly. Robin threw him a look of mock anguish. After nearly a minute of strangled Australian, she hung up.

“Temporary Solutions,” she said.

“I’m getting through a lot of Annabels. That one sounded more South African than Australian.”

“Now I want to hear what happened to you yesterday,” said Robin, unable to conceal her impatience any longer. “Did you meet Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter?”

Strike told her everything that had happened, omitting only the aftermath of his excursion to Evan Duffield’s flat. He placed particular emphasis on Bryony Radford’s insistence that it was dyslexia that had caused her to listen to Ursula May’s voicemail messages; on Ciara Porter’s continuing assertion that Lula had told her she would leave everything to her brother; on Evan Duffield’s annoyance that Lula had kept checking the time while she was in Uzi; and on the threatening email that Tansy Bestigui had sent her estranged husband.

“So where was Tansy?” asked Robin, who had listened to every word of Strike’s story with gratifying attention. “If we can just find out…”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I know where she was,” said Strike. “It’s getting her to admit it, when it might blow her chances of a multimillion-pound settlement from Freddie, that’s going to be the difficult bit. You’ll be able to work it out too, if you just look through the police photographs again.”

“But…”

“Have a look at the pictures of the front of the building on the morning Lula died, and then think about how it was when we saw it. It’ll be good for your detective training.”

Robin experienced a great surge of excitement and happiness, immediately tempered by a cold pang of regret, because she would soon be leaving for human resources.

“I need to change,” said Strike, standing up. “Please will you try Freddie Bestigui again for me?”

He disappeared into the inner room, closed the door behind him and swapped his lucky suit (as he thought he might henceforth call it) for an old and comfortable shirt, and a roomier pair of trousers. When he passed Robin’s desk on the way to the bathroom, she was on the telephone, wearing that expression of disinterested attentiveness that betokens a person on hold. Strike cleaned his teeth in the cracked basin, reflecting on how much easier life with Robin would be, now that he had tacitly admitted that he lived in the office, and returned to find her off the telephone and looking exasperated.

“I don’t think they’re even bothering to take my messages now,” she told Strike. “They say he’s out at Pinewood Studios and can’t be disturbed.”

“Ah well, at least we know he’s back in the country,” said Strike.

He took the interim report out of the filing cabinet, sank back down on the sofa and began to add his notes of yesterday’s conversations, in silence. Robin watched out of the corner of her eye, fascinated by the meticulousness with which Strike tabulated his findings, making a precise record of how, where and from whom he had gained each piece of information.

“I suppose,” she asked, after a long stretch of silence, during which she had divided her time between covert observation of Strike at work, and examination of a photograph of the front of number 18, Kentigern Gardens on Google Earth, “you have to be very careful, in case you forget anything?”

“It’s not only that,” said Strike, still writing, and not looking up. “You don’t want to give defending counsel any footholds.”

He spoke so calmly, so reasonably that Robin considered the implication of his words for several moments, in case she could have misunderstood.

“You mean…in general?” she said at last. “On principle?”

“No,” said Strike, continuing his report. “I mean that I specifically do not want to allow the defending counsel in the trial of the person who killed Lula Landry to get off because he was able to show that I can’t keep records properly, thereby calling into question my reliability as a witness.”

Strike was showing off again, and he knew it; but he could not help himself. He was, as he put it to himself, on a roll. Some might have questioned the taste of finding amusement in the midst of a murder inquiry, but he had found humor in darker places.

“Couldn’t nip out for some sandwiches, Robin, could you?” he added, just so that he could glance up at her satisfyingly astonished expression.

He finished his notes during her absence, and was just about to call an old colleague in Germany when Robin burst back in, holding two packs of sandwiches and a newspaper.

“Your picture’s on the front of the Standard,” she panted.

“What?”

It was a photograph of Ciara following Duffield into his flat. Ciara looked stunning; for half a second Strike was transported back to half past two that morning, when she had lain, white and nak*d, beneath him, that long silky hair spread on the pillow like a mermaid’s as she whispered and moaned.

Strike refocused: he was half cropped out of the picture; one arm raised to keep the paparazzi at bay.

“That’s all right,” he told Robin with a shrug, handing her back the paper. “They think I was the minder.”

“It says,” said Robin, turning to the inside page, “that she left Duffield’s with her security guard at two.”

“There you go, then.”

Robin stared at him. His account of the night had terminated with himself, Duffield and Ciara at Duffield’s flat. She had been so interested in the various pieces of evidence he had laid out before her, she had forgotten to wonder where he had slept. She had assumed that he had left the model and the actor together.

He had arrived at the office still wearing the clothes in the photograph.

She turned away, reading the story on page two. The clear implication of the piece was that Ciara and Duffield had enjoyed an amorous encounter while the supposed minder waited in the hall.

“Is she stunning-looking in person?” asked Robin with an unconvincing casualness as she folded the Standard.

“Yeah, she is,” said Strike, and he wondered whether it was his imagination that the three syllables sounded like a boast. “D’you want cheese and pickle, or egg mayonnaise?”

Robin made her selection at random and returned to her desk chair to eat. Her new hypothesis about Strike’s overnight whereabouts had eclipsed even her excitement over the progress of the case. It was going to be difficult to reconcile her view of him as a blighted romantic with the fact that he had just (it seemed incredible, and yet she had heard his pathetic attempt to conceal his pride) slept with a supermodel.

The telephone rang again. Strike, whose mouth was full of bread and cheese, raised a hand to forestall Robin, swallowed, and answered it himself.

“Cormoran Strike.”

“Strike, it’s Wardle.”

“Hi, Wardle; how’s it going?”

“Not so good, actually. We’ve just fished a body out of the Thames with your card on it. Wondered what you could tell us about it.”

10

IT WAS THE FIRST TAXI that Strike had felt justified in taking since the day he had moved his belongings out of Charlotte’s flat. He watched the charges mount with detachment, as the cab rolled towards Wapping. The taxi driver was determined to tell him why Gordon Brown was a f**king disgrace. Strike sat in silence for the entire trip.

This would not be the first morgue Strike had visited, and far from the first corpse he had viewed. He had become almost immune to the despoliation of gunshot wounds; bodies ripped, torn and shattered, innards revealed like the contents of a butcher’s shop, shining and bloody. Strike had never been squeamish; even the most mutilated corpses, cold and white in their freezer drawers, became sanitized and standardized to a man with his job. It was the bodies he had seen in the raw, unprocessed and unprotected by officialdom and procedure, that rose again and crawled through his dreams. His mother in the funeral parlor, in her favorite floor-length bell-sleeved dress, gaunt yet young, with no needle marks on view. Sergeant Gary Topley lying in the blood-spattered dust of that Afghanistan road, his face unscathed, but with no body below the upper ribs. As Strike had lain in the hot dirt, he had tried not to look at Gary’s empty face, afraid to glance down and see how much of his own body was missing…but he had slid so swiftly into the maw of oblivion that he did not find out until he woke up in the field hospital…

An Impressionist print hung on the bare brick walls of the small anteroom to the morgue. Strike fixed his gaze on it, wondering where he had seen it before, and finally remembering that it hung over the mantelpiece at Lucy and Greg’s.

“Mr. Strike?” said the gray-haired mortician, peering around the inner door, in white coat and latex gloves. “Come on in.”

They were almost always cheerful, pleasant men, these curators of corpses. Strike followed the mortician into the chilly glare of the large, windowless inner room, with its great steel freezer doors all along the right-hand wall. The gently sloping tiled floor ran down to a central drain; the lights were dazzling. Every noise echoed off the hard and shiny surfaces, so that it sounded as though a small group of men was marching into the room.

A metal trolley stood ready in front of one of the freezer doors, and beside it were the two CID officers, Wardle and Carver. The former greeted Strike with a nod and a muttered greeting; the latter, paunchy and mottle-faced, with suit shoulders covered in dandruff, merely grunted.

The mortician wrenched down the thick metal arm on the freezer door. The tops of three anonymous heads were revealed, stacked one above the other, each draped in a white sheet worn limp and fine through repeated washings. The mortician checked the tag pinned to the cloth covering the central head; it bore no name, only the previous day’s scribbled date. He slid the body out smoothly on its long-runnered tray and deposited it efficiently on to the waiting trolley. Strike noticed Carver’s jaw working as he stepped back, giving the mortician room to wheel the trolley clear of the freezer door. With a clunk and a slam, the remaining corpses vanished from view.