The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(78)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“I was never even going to say anything to her about Dad and this woman. But then, out of the blue, I get this phone call. Thank Christ I was there, on leave. Only, Lula,” he said her name tentatively, as though he was not sure whether he had the right to it, “said she’d’ve hung up if it’d been my mum. She said she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She sounded all right.”

“I think she was,” said Strike.

“Yeah…but f**k me, it was weird. Would you believe it if some supermodel called you up and told you she was your sister?”

Strike thought of his own bizarre family history.

“Probably,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I suppose. Why would she lie? That’s what I thought, anyway. So I gave her my mobile number and we talked a few times, when she could hook up with her friend Rochelle. She had it all figured out, so the press wouldn’t find out. Suited me. I didn’t want my mother upset.”

Agyeman had pulled out a packet of Lambert and Butler cigarettes and was turning the box nervously in his fingers. They would have been bought cheap, Strike thought, with a small pang of remembrance, at the NAAFI.

“So she phones me up the day before it—it happened,” Jonah continued, “and she was begging me to come over. I’d already told her I couldn’t meet her that leave. Man, the situation was doing my head in. My sister the supermodel. Mum was worried about me leaving for Helmand. I couldn’t spring it on her, that Dad had had another kid. Not then. So I told Lula I couldn’t see her.

“She begged me to meet her before I left. She sounded upset. I said maybe I could get out later, you know, after Mum was in bed. I’d tell her I was going out for a quick drink with a mate or something. She told me to come really late, like at half one.

“So,” said Jonah, scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably, “I went. I was on the corner of her road…and I saw it happen.”

He wiped his hand across his mouth.

“I ran. I just ran. I didn’t know what the hell to think. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to have to explain anything to anyone. I knew she’d had mental problems, and I remembered how upset she’d been on the phone, and I thought, did she lure me here to see her jump?

“I couldn’t sleep. I was glad to leave, to tell you the truth. To get away from all the f**king news coverage.”

The pub buzzed around them, crowded with lunchtime customers.

“I think the reason she wanted to meet you so badly was because of what her mother had just told her,” Strike said. “Lady Bristow had taken a lot of Valium. I’m guessing she wanted to make the girl feel too bad to leave her, so she told Lula what Tony had said about John all those years before: that he pushed his younger brother Charlie into that quarry, and killed him.

“That’s why Lula was in such a state when she left her mother’s flat, and that’s why she kept trying to call her uncle and find out whether there was any truth in the story. And I think she was desperate to see you, because she wanted someone, anyone, she could love and trust. Her mother was difficult and dying, she hated her uncle, and she’d just been told her adoptive brother was a killer. She must have been desperate. And I think she was scared. The day before she died, Bristow had tried to force her to give him money. She must have been wondering what he’d do next.”

The pub clattered and rang with talk and clinking glasses, but Jonah’s voice sounded clearly over all of it.

“I’m glad you broke the bastard’s jaw.”

“And his nose,” said Strike cheerfully. “It’s lucky he’d stuck a knife in me, or I might not have got off with ‘reasonable force.’ ”

“He came armed,” said Jonah thoughtfully.

“ ’Course he did,” said Strike. “I’d had my secretary tip him off, at Rochelle’s funeral, that I was getting death threats from a nutter who wanted to slit me open. That planted the seed in his head. He thought, if it came to it, he’d try and pass off my death as the work of poor old Brian Mathers. Then, presumably, he’d have gone home, doctored his mother’s clock and tried to pull the same trick all over again. He’s not sane. Which isn’t to say he’s not a clever f**ker.”

There seemed little more to say. As they left the pub, Agyeman, who had bought the drinks with nervous insistence, made what might have been a tentative offer of money to Strike, whose impecunious existence had padded out much of the media coverage. Strike cut the offer short, but he was not offended. He could see that the young Sapper was struggling to deal with the idea of his enormous new wealth; that he was buckling under the responsibility of it, the demands it made, the appeals it attracted, the decisions it entailed; that he was much more overawed than glad. There was also, of course, the horrible and ever-present knowledge of how his millions had come to him. Strike guessed that Jonah Agyeman’s thoughts were flitting wildly between his comrades back in Afghanistan, visions of sports cars and of his half-sister lying dead in the snow. Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?

“He won’t get off, will he?” asked Agyeman suddenly, as they were about to part.

“No, of course not,” said Strike. “The papers haven’t got it yet, but the police found Rochelle’s mobile phone in his mother’s safe. He didn’t dare get rid of it. He’d reset the code of the safe so that no one could get in but him: 030483. Easter Sunday, nineteen eighty-three: the day he killed my mate Charlie.”

It was Robin’s last day. Strike had invited her to come with him to meet Jonah Agyeman, whom she had done so much to find, but she had refused. Strike had the feeling that she was deliberately withdrawing from the case, from the work, from him. He had an appointment at the Amputee Center at Queen Mary’s Hospital that afternoon; she would be gone by the time he returned from Roehampton. Matthew was taking her to Yorkshire for the weekend.

As Strike limped back to the office through the continuing chaos of the building work, he wondered whether he would ever see his temporary secretary again after today, and doubted it. Not so very long ago, the impermanence of their arrangement had been the only thing that reconciled him to her presence, but now he knew that he would miss her. She had come with him in the taxi to the hospital, and wrapped her trench coat around his bleeding arm.

The explosion of publicity around Bristow’s arrest had done Strike’s business no harm at all. He might even genuinely need a secretary before long; and indeed, as he made his way painfully up the stairs to his office, he heard Robin’s voice on the telephone.

“…an appointment for Tuesday, I’m afraid, because Mr. Strike’s busy all day Monday…Yes…absolutely…I’ll put you down for eleven o’clock, then. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.”

She swung around on her swivel chair as Strike entered.

“What was Jonah like?” she demanded.

“Nice guy,” said Strike, lowering himself into the collapsed sofa. “Situation’s doing his head in. But the alternative was Bristow winding up with ten mill, so he’ll have to cope.”

“Three prospective clients phoned while you were out,” she said, “but I’m a bit worried about that last one. He could be another journalist. He was much more interested in discussing you than his own problem.”

There had been quite a few such calls. The press had seized with glee upon a story that had angles aplenty, and everything they loved best. Strike himself had featured heavily in the coverage. The photograph they had used most, and he was glad of it, was ten years old and had been taken while he was still a Red Cap; but they had also dug out the picture of the rock star, his wife and the supergroupie.

There had been plenty written about police incompetence; Carver had been snapped hurrying down the street, his jacket flying, the sweat patches just visible on his shirt; but Wardle, handsome Wardle, who had helped Strike bring Bristow in, had so far been treated with indulgence, especially by female journalists. Mostly, however, the news media had feasted all over again on the corpse of Lula Landry; every version of the story sparkling with pictures of the dead model’s flawless face, and her lithe and sculpted body.

Robin was talking; Strike had not been listening, his attention diverted by the throbbing in his arm and leg.

“…a note of all the files and your diary. Because you’ll need someone, now, you know; you’re not going to be able to take care of all this on your own.”

“No,” he agreed, struggling to his feet; he had intended to do this later, at the moment of her departure, but now was as good a moment as any, and it made an excuse to leave the sofa, which was extremely uncomfortable. “Listen, Robin, I haven’t ever said a proper thank-you…”

“Yes you have,” she said hurriedly. “In the cab on the way to the hospital—and anyway, there’s no need. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve loved it, actually.”

He was hobbling away into the inner office, and did not hear the catch in her voice. The present was hidden at the bottom of his kitbag. It was very badly wrapped.

“Here,” he said. “This is for you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Oh,” said Robin, on a strangled note, and Strike was both touched and faintly alarmed to see tears spill down her cheeks. “You didn’t have to…”

“Open it at home,” he said, but too late; the package was literally coming apart in her hands. Something slithered, poison-green, out of the split in the paper, on to the desk in front of her. She gasped.

“You…oh my God, Cormoran…”

She held up the dress she had tried on, and loved, in Vashti, and stared at him over the top of it, pink-faced, her eyes sparkling.

“You can’t afford this!”

“Yeah, I can,” he said, leaning back against the partition wall, because it was marginally more comfortable than sitting on the sofa. “Work’s rolling in now. You’ve been incredible. Your new place is lucky to get you.”

She was frantically mopping her eyes with the sleeves of her shirt. A sob and some incomprehensible words escaped her. She reached blindly for the tissues that she had bought from petty cash, in anticipation of more clients like Mrs. Hook, blew her nose, wiped her eyes and said, with the green dress lying limp and forgotten across her lap:

“I don’t want to go!”

“I can’t afford you, Robin,” he said flatly.

It was not that he had not thought about it; the night before, he had lain awake on the camp bed, running calculations through his mind, trying to come up with an offer that might not seem insulting beside the salary offered by the media consultancy. It was not possible. He could no longer defer payment on the largest of his loans; he was facing an increase in rent and he needed to find somewhere to live other than his office. While his short-term prospects were immeasurably improved, the outlook remained uncertain.