The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(71)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“I owe you one, Hardy,” he said, putting the notebook away. “Haven’t got a picture, have you?”

“I could email you one.”

Strike gave Hardacre the office email address, and, after routine inquiries about each other’s lives, and mutual expressions of goodwill, terminated the call.

It was five to eleven. Strike waited, phone in hand, in the peaceful, leafy square, while the gamboling children played with their hoops and their beanbags, and a tiny silver plane drew a thick white line across the periwinkle sky. At last, with a small chirrup clearly audible in the quiet street, Bristow’s texted reply arrived:

No chance today. I’ve been forced to go out to Rye. Maybe tomorrow?

Strike sighed.

“Sorry, John,” he muttered, and he climbed the steps and rang Lady Bristow’s doorbell.

The entrance hall, quiet, spacious and sunny, nevertheless had a faintly depressing air of communality that a bucket-shaped vase of dried flowers and a dull green carpet and pale yellow walls, probably chosen for their inoffensiveness, could not dissipate. As at Kentigern Gardens, there was a lift, this one with wooden doors. Strike chose to walk upstairs. The building had a faint shabbiness that in no way diminished its quiet aura of wealth.

The door of the top flat was opened by the smiling West Indian Macmillan nurse who had buzzed him through the front door.

“You’re not Mister Bristow,” she said brightly.

“No, I’m Cormoran Strike. John’s on his way.”

She let him in. Lady Bristow’s hallway was pleasantly cluttered, papered in faded red and covered in watercolors in old gilt frames; an umbrella stand was full of walking sticks, and coats hung on a row of pegs. Strike glanced right, and saw a sliver of the study at the end of the corridor: a heavy wooden desk and a swivel chair with its back to the door.

“Will you wait in the sitting room while I check whether Lady Bristow is ready to see you?”

“Yeah, of course.”

He walked through the door she indicated into a charming room with primrose walls, lined with bookcases bearing photographs. An old-fashioned dial telephone sat on an end table beside a comfortable chintz-covered sofa. Strike checked that the nurse was out of sight before slipping the receiver off the hook and repositioning it, unobtrusively skewed on its rests.

Close by the bay window on a bonheur du jour stood a large photograph, framed in silver, showing the wedding of Sir and Lady Alec Bristow. The groom looked much older than his wife, a rotund, beaming, bearded man; the bride was thin, blonde and pretty in an insipid way. Ostensibly admiring the photograph, Strike stood with his back to the door, and slid open a little drawer in the delicate cherrywood desk. Inside was a supply of fine pale blue writing paper and matching envelopes. He slid the drawer shut again.

“Mister Strike? You can come through.”

Back through the red-papered hall, a short passage, and into a large bedroom, where the dominant colors were duck-egg blue and white, and everywhere gave an impression of elegance and taste. Two doors on the left, both ajar, led to a small en-suite bathroom, and what seemed to be a large walk-in wardrobe. The furniture was delicate and Frenchified; the props of serious illness—the drip on its metal stand, the bedpan lying clean and shiny on a chest of drawers, with an array of medications—were glaring impostors.

The dying woman wore a thick ivory-colored bed jacket and reclined, dwarfed by her carved wooden bed, on many white pillows. No trace of Lady Bristow’s youthful prettiness remained. The raw bones of the skeleton were clearly delineated now, beneath fine skin that was shiny and flaking. Her eyes were sunken, filmy and dim, and her wispy hair, fine as a baby’s, was gray against large expanses of pink scalp. Her emaciated arms lay limp on top of the covers, a catheter protruded. Her death was an almost palpable presence in the room, as though it stood waiting patiently, politely, behind the curtains.

A faint smell of lime blossom pervaded the atmosphere, but did not entirely eclipse that of disinfectant and bodily decay; smells that recalled, to Strike, the hospital where he had lain helpless for months. A second large bay window had been raised a few inches, so that the warm fresh air and the distant cries of the sports-playing children could enter the room. The view was of the topmost branches of the leafy sunlit plane trees.

“Are you the detective?”

Her voice was thin and cracked, her words slightly slurred. Strike, who had wondered whether Bristow had told her the truth about his profession, was glad that she knew.

“Yes, I’m Cormoran Strike.”

“Where’s John?”

“He’s been held up at the office.”

“Again,” she murmured, and then: “Tony works him very hard. It isn’t fair.” She peered at him, blurrily, and indicated a small painted chair with one slightly raised finger. “Do sit down.”

There were chalky white lines around her faded irises. As he sat, Strike noticed two more silver-framed photographs standing on the bedside table. With something akin to an electric shock, he found himself looking into the eyes of ten-year-old Charlie Bristow, chubby-faced, with his slightly mullety haircut: frozen forever in the eighties, his school shirt with its long pointed collar, and the huge knot in his tie. He looked just as he had when he had waved goodbye to his best friend, Cormoran Strike, expecting to meet each other again after Easter.

Beside Charlie’s photograph was a smaller one, of an exquisite little girl with long black ringlets and big brown eyes, in a navy blue school uniform: Lula Landry, aged no more than six.

“Mary,” said Lady Bristow, without raising her voice, and the nurse bustled over. “Could you get Mr. Strike…coffee? Tea?” she asked him, and he was transported back two and a half decades, to Charlie Bristow’s sunlit garden, and the gracious blonde mother, and the iced lemonade.

“A coffee would be great, thank you very much.”

“I do apologize for not making it myself,” said Lady Bristow, as the nurse departed, with heavy footfalls, “but as you can see, I am entirely dependent, now, on the kindness of strangers. Like poor Blanche Dubois.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, as though to concentrate better on some internal pain. He wondered how heavily medicated she was. Beneath the gracious manner, he divined the faintest whiff of something bitter in her words, much as the lime blossom failed to cover the smell of decay, and he wondered at it, considering that Bristow spent most of his time dancing attendance on her.

“Why isn’t John here?” asked Lady Bristow again, with her eyes still shut.

“He’s been held up at the office,” repeated Strike.

“Oh, yes. Yes, you said.”

“Lady Bristow, I’d like to ask you a few questions, and I apologize in advance if they seem over-personal, or distressing.”

“When you have been through what I have,” she said quietly, “nothing much can hurt you anymore. Do call me Yvette.”

“Thank you. Do you mind if I take notes?”

“No, not at all,” she said, and she watched him take out his pen and notebook with a dim show of interest.

“I’d like to start, if you don’t mind, with how Lula came into your family. Did you know anything about her background when you adopted her?”

She looked the very picture of helplessness and passivity lying there with her limp arms on the covers.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t know anything. Alec might have known, but if he did, he never told me.”

“What makes you think your husband knew something?”

“Alec always went into things as deeply as he could,” she said, with a faint, reminiscent smile. “He was a very successful businessman, you know.”

“But he never told you anything about Lula’s first family?”

“Oh no, he wouldn’t have done that.” She seemed to find this a strange suggestion. “I wanted her to be mine, just mine, you see. Alec would have wanted to protect me, if he knew anything. I could not have borne the idea that somebody out there might come and claim her one day. I had already lost Charlie, and I wanted a daughter so badly; the idea of losing her, too…”

The nurse returned bearing a tray with two cups on it and a plate of chocolate bourbons.

“One coffee,” she said cheerfully, placing it beside Strike on the nearer of the bedside tables, “and one camomile tea.”

She bustled out again. Lady Bristow closed her eyes. Strike took a gulp of black coffee and said:

“Lula went looking for her biological parents in the year before she died, didn’t she?”

“That’s right,” said Lady Bristow, with her eyes still closed. “I had just been diagnosed with cancer.”

There was a pause, in which Strike put down his coffee cup with a soft chink, and the distant cheers of the small children in the square outside floated through the open window.

“John and Tony were very, very angry with her,” said Lady Bristow. “They didn’t think she ought to have started trying to find her biological mother, when I was so very ill. The tumor was already advanced when they found it. I had to go straight on to chemotherapy. John was very good; he drove me back and forth to the hospital, and came to stay with me during the worst bits, and even Tony rallied round, but all Lula seemed to care about…” She sighed, and opened her faded eyes, seeking Strike’s face. “Tony always said that she was very spoiled. I daresay it was my fault. I had lost Charlie, you see; I couldn’t do enough for her.”

“Do you know how much Lula managed to find out about her birth family?”

“No, I don’t, I’m afraid. I think she knew how much it upset me. She didn’t tell me a great deal. I know that she found the mother, of course, because there was all the dreadful publicity. She was exactly what Tony had predicted. She hadn’t ever wanted Lula. An awful, awful woman,” whispered Lady Bristow. “But Lula kept seeing her. I was having chemotherapy all through that time. I lost my hair…”

Her voice trailed away. Strike felt, as perhaps she meant him to, like a brute as he pressed on:

“What about her biological father? Did she ever tell you she’d found out anything about him?”

“No,” said Lady Bristow weakly. “I didn’t ask. I had the impression that she had given up on the whole business once she found that horrible mother. I didn’t want to discuss it, any of it. It was too distressing. I think she realized that.”

“She didn’t mention her biological father the last time you saw her?” Strike pressed on.

“Oh no,” she said, in her soft voice. “No. That was not a very long visit, you know. She told me, the moment she arrived, I remember, that she could not stay long. She had to meet her friend Ciara Porter.”