The Cuckoo's Calling

He smiled at her genuine anxiety that he would have to pay money he could not afford. He had been intending to ask her to telephone the office of Freddie Bestigui again, and to begin a search through online telephone directories for Rochelle Onifade’s Kilburn-based aunt. Instead he said:

“OK, we’ll vacate the premises. I was going to check out a place called Vashti this morning, before I meet Bristow. Maybe it’d look more natural if we both went.”

“Vashti? The boutique?” said Robin, at once.

“Yeah. You know it, do you?”

It was Robin’s turn to smile. She had read about it in magazines: it epitomized London glamour to her; a place where fashion editors found items of fabulous clothing to show their readers, pieces that would have cost Robin six months’ salary.

“I know of it,” she said.

He took down her trench coat and handed it to her.

“We’ll pretend you’re my sister, Annabel. You can be helping me pick out a present for my wife.”

“What’s the death-threat man’s problem?” asked Robin, as they sat side by side on the Tube. “Who is he?”

She had suppressed her curiosity about Jonny Rokeby, and about the dark beauty who had fled Strike’s building on her first day at work, and the camp bed they never mentioned; but she was surely entitled to ask questions about the death threats. It was she, after all, who had so far slit open three pink envelopes, and read the unpleasant and violent outpourings scrawled between gamboling kittens. Strike never even looked at them.

“He’s called Brian Mathers,” said Strike. “He came to see me last June because he thought his wife was sleeping around. He wanted her followed, so I put her under surveillance for a month. Very ordinary woman: plain, frumpy, bad perm; worked in the accounts department of a big carpet warehouse. Spent her weekdays in a poky little office with three female colleagues, went to bingo every Thursday, did the weekly shop on Fridays at Tesco, and on Saturdays went to the local Rotary Club with her husband.”

“When did he think she was sleeping around?” asked Robin.

Their pale reflections were swaying in the opaque black window; drained of color in the harsh overhead light, Robin looked older, yet ethereal, and Strike craggier, uglier.

“Thursday nights.”

“And was she?”

“No, she really was going to bingo with her friend Maggie, but all four Thursdays that I watched her, she made herself deliberately late home. She drove around a little bit after she’d left Maggie. One night she went into a pub and had a tomato juice on her own, sitting in a corner looking timid. Another night she waited in her car at the end of their street for forty-five minutes before driving around the corner.”

“Why?” asked Robin, as the train rattled loudly through a lengthy tunnel.

“Well that’s the question, isn’t it? Proving something? Trying to get him worked up? Taunting him? Punishing him? Trying to inject a bit of excitement into their dull marriage? Every Thursday, just a bit of unexplained time.

“He’s a twitchy bugger, and he’d swallowed the bait all right. It was driving him mad. He was sure she was meeting a lover once a week, that her friend Maggie was covering for her. He’d tried following her himself, but he was convinced that she went to bingo on those occasions because she knew he was watching.”

“So you told him the truth?”

“Yeah, I did. He didn’t believe me. He got very worked up and started shouting and screaming about everyone being in a conspiracy against him. Refused to pay my bill.

“I was worried he was going to end up doing her an injury, which was where I made my big mistake. I phoned her and told her he’d paid me to watch her, that I knew what she was doing, and that her husband was heading for breaking point. For her own sake, she ought to be careful how far she pushed him. She didn’t say a word, just hung up on me.

“Well, he was checking her mobile regularly. He saw my number, and drew the obvious conclusion.”

“That you’d told her he was having her watched?”

“No, that I had been seduced by her charms and was her new lover.”

Robin clapped her hands over her mouth. Strike laughed.

“Are your clients usually a bit mad?” asked Robin, when she had freed her mouth again.

“He is, but they’re usually just stressed.”

“I was thinking about John Bristow,” Robin said hesitantly. “His girlfriend thinks he’s deluded. And you thought he might be a bit…you know…didn’t you?” she asked. “We heard,” she added, a little shamefacedly, “through the door. The bit about ‘armchair psychologists.’ ”

“Right,” said Strike. “Well…I might have changed my mind.”

“What do you mean?” asked Robin, her clear gray-blue eyes wide. The train was jolting to a halt; figures were flashing past the windows, becoming less blurred with every second. “Do you—are you saying he’s not—that he might be right—that there really was a…?”

“This is our stop.”

The white-painted boutique they sought stood on some of the most expensive acreage in London, in Conduit Street, close to the junction with New Bond Street. To Strike, its colorful windows displayed a multitudinous mess of life’s unnecessities. Here were beaded cushions and scented candles in silver pots; slivers of artistically draped chiffon; gaudy kaftans worn by faceless mannequins; bulky handbags of an ostentatious ugliness; all spread against a pop-art backdrop, in a gaudy celebration of consumerism he found irritating to retina and spirit. He could imagine Tansy Bestigui and Ursula May in here, examining price tags with expert eyes, selecting four-figure bags of alligator skin with a pleasureless determination to get their money’s worth out of their loveless marriages.

Beside him, Robin too was staring at the window display, but only dimly registering what she was looking at. A job offer had been made to her that morning, by telephone, while Strike was smoking downstairs, just before Temporary Solutions had called. Every time she contemplated the offer, which she would have to accept or decline within the next two days, she felt a jab of some intense emotion to the stomach that she was trying to persuade herself was pleasure, but increasingly suspected was dread.

She ought to take it. There was much in its favor. It paid exactly what she and Matthew had agreed she ought to aim for. The offices were smart and well placed for the West End. She and Matthew would be able to lunch together. The employment market was sluggish. She should be delighted.

“How did the interview go on Friday?” asked Strike, squinting at a sequined coat he found obscenely unattractive.

“Quite well, I think,” said Robin vaguely.

She recalled the excitement she had felt mere moments ago when Strike had hinted that there might, after all, have been a killer. Was he serious? Robin noted that he was now staring hard at this massive assemblage of fripperies as though they might be able to tell him something important, and this was surely (for a moment she saw with Matthew’s eyes, and thought in Matthew’s voice) a pose adopted for effect, or show. Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things.

Robin reflected that if she took the human resources job, she might never know (unless she saw it, one day, on the news) how this investigation turned out. To prove, to solve, to catch, to protect: these were things worth doing; important and fascinating. Robin knew that Matthew thought her somehow childish and naive for feeling this way, but she could not help herself.

Strike had turned his back on Vashti, and was looking at something in New Bond Street. His gaze, Robin saw, was fixed on the red letter box standing outside Russell and Bromley, its dark rectangular mouth leering at them across the road.

“OK, let’s go,” said Strike, turning back to her. “Don’t forget, you’re my sister and we’re shopping for my wife.”

“But what are we trying to find out?”

?

??What Lula Landry and her friend Rochelle Onifade got up to in there, on the day before Landry died. They met here, for fifteen minutes, then parted. I’m not hopeful; it’s three months ago, and they might not have noticed anything. Worth a try, though.”

The ground floor of Vashti was devoted to clothing; a sign pointing up the wooden stairs indicated that a café and “lifestyle” were housed above. A few women were browsing the shining steel clothes racks; all of them thin and tanned, with long, clean, freshly blow-dried hair. The assistants were an eclectic bunch; their clothing eccentric, their hairstyles outré. One of them was wearing a tutu and fishnets; she was arranging a display of hats.

To Strike’s surprise, Robin marched boldly over to this girl.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “There’s a fabulous sequined coat in your middle window. I wonder whether I could try it on?”

The assistant had a mass of fluffy white hair the texture of cotton candy, gaudily painted eyes and no eyebrows.

“Yeah, no probs,” she said.

As it turned out, however, she had lied: retrieving the coat from the window was distinctly problematic. It needed to be taken off the mannequin that was wearing it, and disentangled from its electronic tag; ten minutes later, the coat had still not emerged, and the original assistant had called two of her colleagues into the window display to help her. Robin, meanwhile, was drifting around without talking to Strike, picking out an assortment of dresses and belts. By the time the sequined coat was carried out from the window, all three assistants involved in its retrieval seemed somehow invested in its future, and all accompanied Robin towards the changing room, one volunteering to help her carry the pile of extras she had chosen, the other two bearing the coat.

The curtained changing rooms consisted of ironwork frames draped with thick cream silk, like tents. As he positioned himself close enough to listen to what went on inside, Strike felt that he was only now starting to appreciate the full range of his temporary secretary’s talents.

Robin had taken over ten thousand pounds’ worth of goods into the changing room with her, of which the sequined coat cost half. She would never have had the nerve to do this under normal circumstances, but something had got into her this morning: recklessness and bravado; she was proving something to herself, to Matthew, and even to Strike. The three assistants fussed around her, hanging up dresses and smoothing out the heavy folds of the coat, and Robin felt no shame that she could not have afforded even the cheapest of the belts now draped over the arm of the redhead with tattoos up both arms, and that none of the girls would ever receive the commission for which they were, undoubtedly, vying. She even allowed the assistant with pink hair to go and find a gold jacket she assured Robin would suit her admirably, and go wonderfully well with the green dress she had picked out.

Robin was taller than any of the shop girls, and when she had swapped her trench coat for the sequined one, they cooed and gasped.

“I must show my brother,” she told them, after surveying her reflection with a critical eye. “It isn’t for me, you see, it’s for his wife.”

And she strode back out through the changing-room curtains with the three assistants hovering behind her. The rich girls over by the clothing rack all turned to stare at Robin through narrow eyes as she asked boldly:

“What do you think?”

Strike had to admit that the coat he had thought so vile looked better on Robin than on the mannequin. She twirled on the spot for him, and the thing glittered like a lizard’s skin.

“It’s all right,” he said, masculinely cautious, and the assistants smiled indulgently. “Yeah, it’s quite nice. How much is it?”

“Not that much, by your standards,” said Robin, with an arch look at her handmaidens. “Sandra would love this, though,” she said firmly to Strike, who, caught off guard, grinned. “And it is her fortieth.”

“She could wear it with anything,” the cotton candy girl assured Strike eagerly. “So versatile.”

“OK, I’ll try that Cavalli dress,” said Robin blithely, turning back to the changing room.

“Sandra told me to come with him,” she told the three assistants, as they helped her out of the coat, and unzipped the dress to which she had pointed. “To make sure he doesn’t make another stupid mistake. He bought her the world’s ugliest earrings for her thirtieth; they cost an arm and a leg and she’s never had them out of the safe.”

Robin did not know where the invention was coming from; she felt inspired. Stepping out of her jumper and skirt, she began to wriggle into a clinging poison-green dress. Sandra was becoming real to her as she talked: a little spoiled, somewhat bored, confiding in her sister-in-law over wine that her brother (a banker, Robin thought, though Strike did not really look like her idea of a banker) had no taste at all.

“So she said to me, take him to Vashti and get him to crack open his wallet. Oh yes, this is nice.”

It was more than nice. Robin stared at her own reflection; she had never worn anything so beautiful in her life. The green dress was magically constructed to shrink her waist to nothingness, to carve her figure into flowing curves, to elongate her pale neck. She was a serpentine goddess in glittering viridian, and the assistants were all murmuring and gasping their appreciation.

“How much?” Robin asked the redhead.

“Two thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine,” said the girl.

“Nothing to him,” said Robin airily, striding out through the curtains to show Strike, whom they found examining a pile of gloves on a circular table.

His only comment on the green dress was “Yeah.” He had barely looked at her.

“Well, maybe it’s not Sandra’s color,” said Robin, with a sudden feeling of embarrassment; Strike was not, after all, her brother or her boyfriend; she had perhaps taken invention too far, parading in front of him in a skintight dress. She retreated into the changing room.

Stripped again to bra and pants she said:

“The last time Sandra was here, Lula Landry was in your café. Sandra said she was gorgeous in the flesh. Even better than in pictures.”

“Oh yeah, she was,” agreed the pink-haired girl, who was clutching to her chest the gold jacket she had fetched. “She used to be in here all the time, we used to see her every week. Do you want to try this?”

“She was in here the day before she died,” said the cotton candy–haired girl, helping Robin to wriggle into the gold jacket. “In this changing room, actually in this one.”

“Really?” said Robin.

“It’s not going to close over the bust, but it looks great open,” said the redhead.

“No, that’s no good, Sandra’s a bit bigger than me, if anything,” said Robin, ruthlessly sacrificing her fictional sister-in-law’s figure. “I’ll try that black dress. Did you say Lula Landry was here actually the day before she died?”

“Oh yeah,” said the girl with pink hair. “It was so sad, really so sad. You heard her, didn’t you, Mel?”

The tattooed redhead, who was holding up a black dress with lace inserts, made an indeterminate noise. Watching her in the mirror, Robin saw no eagerness to talk about what she had, whether deliberately or accidentally, overheard.

“She was speaking to Duffield, wasn’t she, Mel?” prompted the chatty pink-haired girl.

Robin saw Mel frown. Tattoos notwithstanding, Robin had the impression that Mel might well be the other two girls’ senior. She seemed to feel that discretion about what took place in these cream silk tents was part of her job, whereas the other two bubbled with the desire to recount gossip, particularly to a woman who seemed so eager to spend her rich brother’s money.

“It must be impossible not to hear what goes on in these—these tent things,” Robin commented, a little breathlessly, as she was inched into the lacy black dress by the combined efforts of the three assistants.

Mel unbent slightly.

“Yeah, it is. And people just come in here and start mouthing off about whatever they fancy.

You can’t help overhearing stuff through this,” she said, pointing towards the stiff curtain of raw silk.

Now heavily constricted in a lace-and-leather straitjacket, Robin gasped:

“You’d think Lula Landry would be a bit more careful, with the press following her around wherever she went.”

“Yeah,” said the redhead. “You would. I mean, I’d never pass on anything I heard, but some people might.”

Disregarding the fact that she had evidently shared whatever she’d heard with her colleagues, Robin expressed appreciation for this rare sense of decency.

“I suppose you had to tell the police, though?” she said, pulling the dress straight and bracing herself for the raising of the zip.

“The police never came here,” said the girl with cotton candy hair, regret in her voice. “I said Mel should have gone and told them what she’d heard, but she didn’t want to.”

“It wasn’t anything,” said Mel, quickly. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. I mean, he wasn’t there, was he? That was proven.”

Strike had moved as close as he dared to the silk curtain, without arousing suspicious looks from the customers and remaining assistants.

Inside the changing cubicle, the pink-haired girl was heaving on the zip. Slowly Robin’s ribcage was compressed by a hidden boned corset. The listening Strike was disconcerted that her next question was almost a groan.

“D’you mean that Evan Duffield wasn’t at her flat when she died?”

“Yeah,” said Mel. “So it didn’t matter what she was saying to him earlier, did it? He wasn’t there.”

The four women considered Robin’s reflection for a moment.

“I don’t think,” said Robin, observing the way that two thirds of her breasts were squashed flat by the straining material, while the upper slopes overflowed the neckline, “Sandra’s going to fit into this. But don’t you think,” she said, breathing more freely as the cotton candy–haired girl unzipped her, “you ought to have told the police what she said, and let them decide whether it was important?”

“I said that, Mel, didn’t I?” crowed the pink-haired girl. “I told her that.”