The Cuckoo's Calling

By the time she had marched through the usual chaos and debris to Denmark Street, extracted the key from behind the cistern as instructed, and been snubbed yet again by a superior-sounding girl in Freddie Bestigui’s office, Robin was in a thoroughly bad temper.

Though he did not know it, Strike was, at that very moment, passing the scene of the most romantic moments of Robin’s life. The steps below the statue of Eros were swarming with Italian teenagers this morning, as Strike went by on the St. James’s side, heading for Glasshouse Street.

The entrance to Barrack, the nightclub which had so pleased Deeby Macc that he had remained there for hours, fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, was only a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. The facade looked as if it was made out of industrial concrete, and the name was picked out in shining black letters, vertically placed. The club extended up over four floors. As Strike had expected, its doorway was surmounted by CCTV cameras, whose range, he thought, would cover most of the street. He walked around the building, noting the fire exits, and making for himself a rough sketch of the area.

After a second long internet session the previous evening, Strike felt that he had a thorough grasp of the subject of Deeby Macc’s publicly declared interest in Lula Landry. The rapper had mentioned the model in the lyrics of three tracks, on two separate albums; he had also spoken about her in interviews as his ideal woman and soul mate. It was difficult to gauge how seriously Macc intended to be taken when he made these comments; allowance had to be made, in all the print interviews Strike had read, firstly for the rapper’s sense of humor, which was both dry and sly, and secondly for the awe tinged with fear every interviewer seemed to feel when confronted with him.

An ex-gang member who had been imprisoned for gun and drug offenses in his native Los Angeles, Macc was now a multimillionaire, with a number of lucrative businesses aside from his recording career. There was no doubt that the press had become “excited,” to use Robin’s word, when news had leaked out that Macc’s record company had rented him the apartment below Lula’s. There had been much rabid speculation as to what might happen when Deeby Macc found himself a floor away from his supposed dream woman, and how this incendiary new element might affect the volatile relationship between Landry and Duffield. These non-stories had all been peppered with undoubtedly spurious comments from friends of both—“He’s already called her and asked her to dinner,” “She’s preparing a small party for him in her flat when he hits London.” Such speculation had almost eclipsed the flurry of outraged comment from sundry columnists that the twice-convicted Macc, whose music (they said) glorified his criminal past, was entering the country at all.

When he had decided that the streets surrounding Barrack had no more to tell him, Strike continued on foot, making notes of yellow lines in the vicinity, of Friday-night parking restrictions and of those establishments nearby that also had their own security cameras. His notes complete, he felt that he had earned a cup of tea and a bacon roll on expenses, both of which he enjoyed in a small café, while reading an abandoned copy of the Daily Mail.

His mobile rang as he was starting his second cup of tea, halfway through a gleeful account of the Prime Minister’s gaffe in calling an elderly female voter “bigoted” without realizing that his microphone was still turned on.

A week ago, Strike had allowed his unwanted temp’s calls to go to voicemail. Today, he picked up.

“Hi, Robin, how’re you?”

“Fine. I’m just calling to give you your messages.”

“Fire away,” said Strike, as he drew out a pen.

“Alison Cresswell’s just called—John Bristow’s secretary—to say she’s booked a table at Cipriani at one o’clock tomorrow, so that he can introduce you to Tansy Bestigui.”

“Great.”

“I’ve tried Freddie Bestigui’s production company again. They’re getting irritated. They say he’s in LA. I’ve left another request for him to call you.”

“Good.”

“And Peter Gillespie’s telephoned again.”

“Uh huh,” said Strike.

“He says it’s urgent, and could you please get back to him as soon as possible.”

Strike considered asking her to call Gillespie back and tell him to go and fuck himself.

“Yeah, will do. Listen, could you text me the address of the night-club Uzi?”

“Right.”

“And try and find a number for a bloke called Guy Somé? He’s a designer.”

“It’s pronounced ‘ghee,’ ” said Robin.

“What?”

“His Christian name. It’s pronounced the French way: ‘Ghee.’ ”

“Oh, right. Well, could you try and find a contact number for him?”

“Fine,” said Robin.

“Ask him if he’d be prepared to talk to me. Leave a message saying who I am, and who’s hired me.”

“Fine.”

It was borne in on Strike that Robin’s tone was frosty. After a second or two, he thought he might know why.

“By the way, thanks for that text you sent yesterday,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you; it would have looked strange if I’d started texting, where I was. But if you could call Nigel Clements, Duffield’s agent, and ask for an appointment, that would be great too.”

Her animosity fell away at once, as he had meant it to; her voice was many degrees warmer when she spoke again; verging, in fact, on excited.

“But Duffield can’t have had anything to do with it, can he? He had a cast-iron alibi!”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that,” said Strike, deliberately ominous. “And listen, Robin, if another death threat comes in—they usually arrive on Mondays…”

“Yes?” she said eagerly.

“File it,” said Strike.

He could not be sure—it seemed unlikely; she struck him as so prim—but he thought he heard her mutter, “Sod you, then,” as she hung up.

Strike spent the rest of the day engaged in tedious but necessary spadework. When Robin had texted him the address, he visited his second nightclub of the day, this time in South Kensington. The contrast with Barrack was extreme; Uzi’s discreet entrance might have been to a smart private house. There were security cameras over its doors, too. Strike then took a bus to Charles Street, where he was fairly sure Guy Somé lived, and walked what he guessed to be the most direct route between the designer’s address and the house where Landry had died.

His leg was aching badly again by late afternoon, and he stopped for a rest and more sandwiches before setting out for the Feathers, near Scotland Yard, and his appointment with Eric Wardle.

It was another Victorian pub, this time with enormous windows reaching almost from floor to ceiling, looking out on to a great gray 1920s building decorated with statues by Jacob Epstein. The nearest of these sat over the doors, and stared down through the pub windows; a fierce seated deity was being embraced by his infant son, whose body was weirdly twisted back on itself, to show his genitalia. Time had eroded all shock value.

Inside the Feathers, machines were clinking and jingling and flashing primary-colored lights; the wall-mounted plasma TVs, surrounded with padded leather, were showing West Bromwich Albion versus Chelsea with the sound off, while Amy Winehouse throbbed and moaned from hidden speakers. The names of ales were painted on the cream wall above the long bar, which faced a wide dark-wood staircase with curving steps and shining brass handrails, leading up to the first floor.

Strike had to wait to be served, giving him time to look around. The place was full of men, most of whom had military-short hair; but a trio of girls with tangerine tans stood around a high table, throwing back their over-straightened peroxide hair, in their tiny, tight spangled dresses, shifting their weight unnecessarily on their teetering heels. They were pretending not to know that the only solitary drinker, a handsome, boyish man in a leather jacket, who was sitting on a high bar seat beside the nearby window, was examining them, point by point, with a prac

ticed eye. Strike bought himself a pint of Doom Bar and approached their appraiser.

“Cormoran Strike,” he said, reaching Wardle’s table. Wardle had the kind of hair Strike envied in other men; nobody would ever have called Wardle “pubehead.”

“Yeah, I thought it might be you,” said the policeman, shaking hands. “Anstis said you were a big bloke.”

Strike pulled up a bar stool, and Wardle said, without preamble:

“What’ve you got for me, then?”

“There was a fatal stabbing just off Ealing Broadway last month. Guy called Liam Yates? Police informant, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, he got a knife in the neck. But we know who did it,” said Wardle, with a patronizing laugh. “Half the crooks in London know. If that’s your information—”

“Don’t know where he is, though, do you?”

With a quick glance at the determinedly unconscious girls, Wardle slid a notebook out of his pocket.

“Go on.”

“There’s a girl who works in Betbusters on the Hackney Road called Shona Holland. She lives in a rented flat two streets away from the bookie’s. She’s got an unwelcome house guest at the moment called Brett Fearney, who used to beat up her sister. Apparently he’s not the sort of bloke you refuse a favor.”

“Got the full address?” asked Wardle, who was scribbling hard.

“I’ve just given you the name of the tenant and half the postcode. How about trying a bit of detective work?”

“And where did you say you got this?” asked Wardle, still jotting rapidly with the notebook balanced under the table on his knee.

“I didn’t,” replied Strike equably, sipping his beer.

“Got some interesting friends, haven’t you?”

“Very. Now, in a spirit of fair exchange…”

Wardle, replacing his notebook in his pocket, laughed.

“What you’ve just given me might be a crock of shit.”

“It isn’t. Play fair, Wardle.”

The policeman eyed Strike for a moment, apparently torn between amusement and suspicion.

“What are you after, then?”

“I told you on the phone: bit of inside information on Lula Landry.”

“Don’t you read the papers?”

“Inside information, I said. My client thinks there was foul play.”

Wardle’s expression hardened.

“Hooked up with a tabloid, have we?”

“No,” said Strike. “Her brother.”

“John Bristow?”

Wardle took a long pull on his pint, his eyes on the upper thighs of the nearest girl, his wedding ring reflecting red lights from the pinball machine.

“Is he still fixated on the CCTV footage?”

“He mentioned it,” admitted Strike.

“We tried to trace them,” said Wardle, “those two black guys. We put out an appeal. Neither of them turned up. No big surprise—a car alarm went off just about the time they would have been passing it—or trying to get into it. Maserati. Very tasty.”

“Reckon they were nicking cars, do you?”

“I don’t say they went there specifically to nick cars; they might have spotted an opportunity, seeing it parked there—what kind of tosser leaves a Maserati parked on the street? But it was nearly two in the morning, the temperature was below zero, and I can’t think of many innocent reasons why two men would choose to meet at that time, in a Mayfair street where neither of them, as far as we could find out, lived.”

“No idea where they came from, or where they went afterwards?”

“We’re pretty sure the one Bristow’s obsessed with, the one who was walking towards her flat just before she fell, got off the number thirty-eight bus in Wilton Street at a quarter past eleven. There’s no saying what he did before he passed the camera at the end of Bellamy Road an hour and a half later. He tanked back past it about ten minutes after Landry jumped, sprinted up Bellamy Road and most probably turned right down Weldon Street. There’s some footage of a guy more or less meeting his description—tall, black, hoodie, scarf round the face—caught on Theobalds Road about twenty minutes later.”

“He made good time if he got to Theobalds Road in twenty minutes,” commented Strike. “That’s out towards Clerkenwell, isn’t it? Must be two, two and a half miles. And the pavements were frozen.”

“Yeah, well, it might not’ve been him. The footage was shit. Bristow thought it was very suspicious that he had his face covered, but it was minus ten that night, and I was wearing a balaclava to work myself. Anyway, whether he was in Theobalds Road or not, nobody ever came forward to say they’d recognized him.”

“And the other one?”

“Sprinted off down Halliwell Street, about two hundred yards down; no idea where he went after that.”

“Or when he entered the area?”

“Could’ve come from anywhere. We haven’t got any other footage of him.”

“Aren’t there supposed to be ten thousand CCTV cameras in London?”

“They aren’t everywhere yet. Cameras aren’t the answer to our problems, unless they’re maintained and monitored. The one in Garriman Street was out, and there aren’t any in Meadowfield Road or Hartley Street. You’re like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you’ve told the missus you’re at the office and you’re at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone’s trying to force your bathroom window open. Can’t have it both ways.”

“I’m not after it either way,” said Strike. “I’m just asking what you know about Runner Two.”

“Muffled up to the eyeballs, like his mate; all you could see were his hands. If I’d been him, and had a guilty conscience about the Maserati, I’d have holed up in a bar and exited with a bunch of other people; there’s a place called Bojo’s off Halliwell Street he could’ve gone and mingled with the punters. We checked,” Wardle said, forestalling Strike’s question. “Nobody recognized him from the footage.”

They drank for a moment in silence.

“Even if we’d found them,” said Wardle, setting down his glass, “the most we could’ve got from them is an eyewitness account of her jumping. There wasn’t any unexplained DNA in her flat. Nobody had been in that place who shouldn’t have been in there.”

“It isn’t just the CCTV footage that’s giving Bristow ideas,” said Strike. “He’s been seeing a bit of Tansy Bestigui.”

“Don’t talk to me about Tansy fucking Bestigui,” said Wardle irritably.

“I’m going to have to mention her, because my client reckons she’s telling the truth.”

“Still at it, is she? Still hasn’t given it up? I’ll tell you about Mrs. Bestigui, shall I?”

“Go on,” said Strike, one hand wrapped around the beer at his chest.

“Carver and I got to the scene about twenty, twenty-five minutes after Landry hit the road. Uniformed police were already there. Tansy Bestigui was still going strong with the hysterics when we saw her, gibbering and shaking and screaming that there was a murderer in the building.

“Her story was that she got up out of bed around two and went for a pee in the bathroom; she heard shouting from two flats above and saw Landry’s body fall past the window.

“Now, the windows in those flats are triple-glazed or something. They’re designed to keep the heat and the air conditioning in, and the noise of the hoi polloi out. By the time we were interviewing her, the street below was full of panda cars and neighbors, but you’d never have known it from up there except for the flashing blue lights. We could’ve been inside a fucking pyramid for all the noise that got inside that place.

“So I said to her, ‘Are you sure you heard shouting, Mrs. Bestigui? Because this flat seems to be pretty much soundproofed.’

“She wouldn’t back down. Swore she’d heard every word. According to her, Landry screamed something like ‘You’re too late,’ and a man’s voice said, ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ Auditory halluc

inations, they call them,” said Wardle. “You start hearing things when you snort so much coke your brains start dribbling out of your nose.”

He took another long pull on his pint.

“Anyway, we proved beyond doubt she couldn’t have heard it. The Bestiguis moved into a friend’s house the next day to get away from the press, so we put a few blokes in their flat, and a guy up on Landry’s balcony, shouting his head off. The lot on the first floor couldn’t hear a word he was saying, and they were stone-cold sober, and making an effort.

“But while we were proving she was talking shit, Mrs. Bestigui was phoning half of London to tell them she was the sole witness to the murder of Lula Landry. The press were already on to it, because some of the neighbors had heard her screaming about an intruder. Papers had tried and convicted Evan Duffield before we even got back to Mrs. Bestigui.

“We put it to her that we’d now proven she couldn’t have heard what she said she’d heard. Well, she wasn’t ready to admit it had all been in her own head. She’d got a lot riding on it now, with the press swarming outside her front door like she was Lula Landry reborn. So she came back with ‘Oh, didn’t I say? I opened them. Yeah, I opened the windows for a breath of fresh air.’ ”

Wardle gave a scathing laugh.

“Sub-zero outside, and snowing.”

“And she was in her underwear, right?”

“Looking like a rake with two plastic tangerines tied to it,” said Wardle, and the simile came out so easily that Strike was sure he was far from the first to have heard it. “We went ahead and double-checked the new story; we dusted for prints, and right enough, she hadn’t opened the windows. No prints on the latches or anywhere else; the cleaner had done them the morning before Landry died, and hadn’t been in since. As the windows were locked and bolted when we arrived, there’s only one conclusion to be drawn, isn’t there? Mrs. Tansy Bestigui is a fucking liar.”

Wardle drained his glass.

“Have another one,” said Strike, and he headed for the bar without waiting for an answer.

He noticed Wardle’s curious gaze roaming over his lower legs as he returned to the table. Under different circumstances, he might have banged the prosthesis hard against the table leg, and said “It’s this one.” Instead, he set down two fresh pints and some pork scratchings, which to his irritation were served in a small white ramekin, and continued where they had left off.