The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(72)
Author: J.K. Rowling

Her sense of ill-usage wafted gently towards him like the smell of the bedridden she exuded: a little fusty, a little overripe. Something about her recalled Rochelle; although they were as different as two women could be, both gave off the resentment of those who feel shortchanged and neglected.

“Can you remember what you and Lula talked about that day?”

“Well, I had been given so many painkillers, you understand. I had had a very serious operation. I can’t remember every detail.”

“But you remember Lula coming to see you?” asked Strike.

“Oh yes,” she said. “She woke me up, I had been sleeping.”

“Can you remember what you talked about?”

“My operation, of course,” she said, with just a touch of asperity. “And then, a little bit, about her big brother.”

“Her big…?”

“Charlie,” said Lady Bristow, pitifully. “I told her about the day he died. I had never really talked to her about it before. The worst, the very worst day of my life.”

Strike could imagine her, prostrate and a little groggy, but no less resentful for all that, holding her unwilling daughter there at her side by talking about her pain, and her dead son.

“How could I have known that that would be the last time I would ever see her?” breathed Lady Bristow. “I didn’t realize that I was about to lose a second child.”

Her bloodshot eyes filled. She blinked, and two fat tears fell down on to her hollow cheeks.

“Could you please look in that drawer,” she whispered, pointing a withered finger at the bedside table, “and get me out my pills?”

Strike slid it open and saw many white boxes inside, of varying types and with various labels upon them.

“Which…?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,” she said.

He took one out; it was clearly labeled Valium. She had enough in there to overdose ten times.

“If you could pop a couple out for me?” she said. “I’ll take them with some tea, if it’s cool enough.”

He handed her her pills and the cup; her hands trembled; he had to support the saucer and he thought, inappropriately, of a priest offering communion.

“Thank you,” she murmured, relaxing back on to her pillows as he replaced her tea on the table, and fixing him with her plaintive eyes. “Didn’t John tell me you knew Charlie?”

“Yes, I did,” said Strike. “I’ve never forgotten him.”

“No, of course not. He was a most lovable child. Everyone always said so. The sweetest boy, the very sweetest I have ever known. I miss him every single day.”

Outside the window, the children shrieked, and the plane trees rustled, and Strike thought of how the room would have looked on a winter morning months ago, when the trees must have been barelimbed, when Lula Landry had sat where he was sitting, with her beautiful eyes perhaps fixed on the picture of dead Charlie while her groggy mother told the horrible story.

“I had never really talked to Lula about it before. The boys had gone out on their bikes. We heard John screaming, and then Tony shouting, shouting…”

Strike’s pen had not made contact with paper yet. He watched the dying woman’s face as she talked.

“Alec wouldn’t let me look, wouldn’t let me anywhere near the quarry. When he told me what had happened, I fainted. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I could not understand how God could have let it happen.

“But since then, I’ve come to think that perhaps I have deserved all of it,” said Lady Bristow distantly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I’ve wondered whether I’m being punished. Because I loved them too much. I spoiled them. I couldn’t say no. Charlie, Alec and Lula. I think it must be punishment, because otherwise it would be too unspeakably cruel, wouldn’t it? To make me go through it again, and again, and again.”

Strike had no answer to give. She invited pity, but he found he could not pity her even as much as, perhaps, she deserved. She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.

“I wanted Lula so much,” said Lady Bristow, “but I don’t think she ever…She was a darling little thing. So beautiful. I would have done anything for that girl. But she didn’t love me the way Charlie and John loved me. Maybe it was too late. Maybe we got her too late.

“John was jealous when she first came to us. He had been devastated about Charlie…but they ended up being very close friends. Very close.”

A tiny frown crumpled the paper-fine skin of her forehead.

“So Tony was quite wrong.”

“What was he wrong about?” asked Strike quietly.

Her fingers twitched upon the covers. She swallowed.

“Tony didn’t think we should have adopted Lula.”

“Why not?” asked Strike.

“Tony never liked any of my children,” said Yvette Bristow. “My brother is a very hard man. Very cold. He said dreadful things after Charlie died. Alec hit him. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true—what Tony said.”

Her milky gaze slid to Strike’s face, and he thought he glimpsed the woman she must have been when she still had her looks: a little clingy, a little childish, prettily dependent, an ultra-feminine creature, protected and petted by Sir Alec, who strove to satisfy her every whim and wish.

“What did Tony say?”

“Horrible things about John and Charlie. Awful things. I don’t,” she said weakly, “want to repeat them. And then he phoned Alec, when he heard that we were adopting a little girl, and told him we ought not to do it. Alec was furious,” she whispered. “He forbade Tony our house.”

“Did you tell Lula about all this when she visited that day?” asked Strike. “About Tony, and the things he said after Charlie died; and when you adopted her?”

She seemed to sense a reproach.

“I can’t remember exactly what I said to her. I had just had a very serious operation. I was a little drowsy from all the drugs. I can’t remember precisely what I said now…”

And then, with an abrupt change of subject:

“That boy reminded me of Charlie. Lula’s boyfriend. The very handsome boy. What is his name?”

“Evan Duffield?”

“That’s right. He came to see me a little while ago, you know. Quite recently. I don’t know exactly…I lose track of time. They give me so many drugs now. But he came to see me. It was so sweet of him. He wanted to talk about Lula.”

Strike remembered Bristow’s assertion that his mother had not known who Duffield was, and he wondered whether Lady Bristow had played this little game with her son; making herself out to be more confused than she really was, to stimulate his protective instincts.

“Charlie would have been handsome like that, if he’d lived. He might have been a singer, or an actor. He loved performing, do you remember? I felt very sorry for that boy Evan. He cried here, with me. He told me that he thought she was meeting another man.”

“What other man was that?”

“The singer,” said Lady Bristow vaguely. “The singer who’d written songs about her. When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel. I felt very sorry for him. He told me he felt guilty. I told him he had nothing to feel guilty about.”

“Why did he say he felt guilty?”

“For not following her into her apartment. For not being there, to stop her dying.”

“If we could just go back for a moment, Yvette, to the day before Lula’s death?”

She looked reproachful.

“I’m afraid I can’t remember anything else. I’ve told you everything I remember. I was just out of hospital. I was not myself. They’d given me so many drugs, for the pain.”

“I understand that. I just wanted to know whether you remember your brother, Tony, visiting you that day?”

There was a pause, and Strike saw something harden in the weak face.

“No, I don’t remember Tony coming,” said Lady Bristow at last. “I know he says he was here, but I don’t remember him coming. Maybe I was asleep.”

“He claims to have been here when Lula was visiting,” said Strike.

Lady Bristow gave the smallest shrug of her fragile shoulders.

“Maybe he was here,” she said, “but I don’t remember it.” And then, her voice rising, “My brother’s being much nicer to me now he knows that I’m dying. He visits a lot now. Always putting down poison about John, of course. He’s always done that. But John has always been very good to me. He has done things for me while I’ve been ill…things no son should have to do. It would have been more appropriate for Lula…but she was a spoiled girl. I loved her, but she could be selfish. Very selfish.”

“So on that last day, the last time you saw Lula—” said Strike, returning doggedly to the main point, but Lady Bristow cut across him.

“After she left, I was very upset,” she said. “Very upset indeed. Talking about Charlie always does that to me. She could see how distressed I was, but she still left to meet her friend. I had to take pills, and I slept. No, I never saw Tony; I didn’t see anyone else. He might say he was here, but I don’t remember anything until John woke me up with a supper tray. John was cross. He told me off.”

“Why was that?”

“He thinks I take too many pills,” said Lady Bristow, like a little girl. “I know he wants the best for me, poor John, but he doesn’t realize…he couldn’t…I’ve had so much pain in my life. He sat with me for a long time that night. We talked about Charlie. We talked into the early hours of the morning. And while we were talking,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, “at the very time we were talking, Lula fell…she fell off the balcony.

“So it was John who had to break the news to me, the next morning. The police had arrived on the doorstep, at the crack of dawn. He came into the bedroom to tell me and…”

She swallowed, and shook her head, limp, barely alive.

“That’s why the cancer came back, I know it. People can only bear so much pain.”

Her voice was becoming more slurred. He wondered how much Valium she had already taken, as she closed her eyes drowsily.

“Yvette, would it be all right if I used your bathroom?” he asked.

She assented with a sleepy nod.

Strike got up, and moved quickly, and surprisingly quietly for a man of his bulk, into the walk-in wardrobe.