The Cuckoo's Calling

“It could’ve been—” said Wardle.

“It wasn’t a fucking shopping list,” groaned Strike, thumping the desk, “and nobody writes a suicide note eight hours in advance, and then goes dancing. She was writing a bloody will, don’t you get it? She took it into Vashti to get Rochelle to witness it…”

“Bollocks!” said Carver, yet again, but Strike ignored him, addressing Wardle.

“…which fits with her telling Ciara Porter that she was going to leave everything to her brother, doesn’t it? She’d just made it legal. It was on her mind.”

“Why suddenly make a will?”

Strike hesitated and sat back. Carver leered at him.

“Imagination run out?”

Strike let out his breath in a long sigh. An uncomfortable night of alcohol-sodden unconsciousness; last night’s pleasurable excesses; half a cheese and pickle sandwich in twelve hours: he felt hollowed-out, exhausted.

“If I had hard evidence, I’d have brought it to you.”

“The odds of people close to a suicide killing themselves go right up, did you know that? This Raquelle was a depressive. She has a bad day, remembers the way out her mate took, and does a copycat jump. Which leads us right back to you, pal, persecuting people and pushing them…”

“…over the edge, yeah,” said Strike. “People keep saying that. Very poor fucking taste, in the circumstances. What about Tansy Bestigui’s evidence?”

“How many times, Strike? We proved she couldn’t have heard it,” Wardle said. “We proved it beyond doubt.”

“No you didn’t,” said Strike—finally, when he least expected it, losing his temper. “You based your whole case on one almighty fuck-up. If you’d taken Tansy Bestigui seriously, if you’d broken her down and got her to tell you the whole fucking truth, Rochelle Onifade would still be alive.”

Pulsating with rage, Carver kept Strike there for another hour. His last act of contempt was to tell Wardle to make sure he saw “Rokeby Junior” firmly off the premises.

Wardle walked Strike to the front door, not speaking.

“I need you to do something,” said Strike, halting at the exit, beyond which they could see the darkening sky.

“You’ve had enough from me already, mate,” said Wardle, with a wry smile. “I’m gonna be dealing with that,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, towards Carver and his temper, “for days because of you. I told you it was suicide.”

“Wardle, unless someone brings the fucker in, there are two more people in danger of being knocked off.”

“Strike…”

“What if I bring you proof that Tansy Bestigui wasn’t in her flat at all when Lula fell? That she was somewhere she could have heard everything?”

Wardle looked up towards the ceiling, and closed his eyes momentarily.

“If you’ve got proof…”

“I haven’t, but I will have in the next couple of days.”

Two men walked past them, talking, laughing. Wardle shook his head, looking exasperated, and yet he did not turn away.

“If you want something from the police, call Anstis. He’s the one who owes you.”

“Anstis can’t do this for me. I need you to call Deeby Macc.”

“What the fuck?”

“You heard me. He’s not going to take my calls, is he? But he’ll speak to you; you’ve got the authority, and it sounds as though he liked you.”

“You’re telling me Deeby Macc knows where Tansy Bestigui was when Lula Landry died?”

“No, of course he bloody doesn’t, he was in Barrack. I want to know what clothes he got sent on from Kentigern Gardens to Claridges. Specifically, what stuff he got from Guy Somé.”

Strike did not pronounce the name Ghee for Wardle.

“You want…why?”

“Because one of the runners on that CCTV footage was wearing one of Deeby’s sweatshirts.”

Wardle’s expression, arrested for a moment, relapsed into exasperation.

“You see that stuff everywhere,” he said after a moment or two. “That GS stuff. Shell suits. Trackies.”

“This was a customized hoodie, there was only one of them in the world. Call Deeby, and ask him what he got from Somé. That’s all I need. Whose side d’you want to be on if it turns out I’m right, Wardle?”

“Don’t threaten me, Strike…”

“I’m not threatening you. I’m thinking about a multiple murderer who’s walking around out there planning the next one—but if it’s the papers you’re worried about, I don’t think they’re going to go too easy on anyone who clung to the suicide theory once another body surfaced. Call Deeby Macc, Wardle, before someone else gets killed.”

11

“NO,” SAID STRIKE FORCEFULLY, ON the telephone that evening. “This is getting dangerous. Surveillance doesn’t fall within the scope of secretarial duties.”

“Nor did visiting the Malmaison Hotel in Oxford, or SOAS,” Robin pointed out, “but you were happy enough that I did both of them.”

“You’re not following anyone, Robin. I doubt Matthew would be very happy about it, either.”

It was funny, Robin thought, sitting in her dressing gown on her bed, with the phone pressed to her ear, how Strike had retained the name of her fiancé, without ever having met him. In her experience, men did not usually bother to log that kind of information. Matthew frequently forgot people’s names, even that of his newborn niece; but she supposed that Strike must have been trained to recall such details.

“I don’t need Matthew’s permission,” she said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be dangerous; you don’t think Ursula May’s killed anyone…”

(There was an inaudible “do you?” at the end of the sentence.)

“No, but I don’t want anyone to hear I’m taking an interest in her movements. It might make the killer nervous, and I don’t want anyone else thrown from a height.”

Robin could hear her own heart thumping through the thin material of her dressing gown. She knew that he would not tell her who he thought the killer was; she was even a little frightened of knowing, notwithstanding the fact that she could think of nothing else.

It was she who had called Strike. Hours had passed since she had received a text saying that he had been compelled to go with the police to Scotland Yard, and asking her to lock up the office behind her at five. Robin had been worried.

“Call him, then, if it’s going to keep you awake,” Matthew had said; not quite snapping, not quite indicating that he was, without knowing any of the details, firmly on the side of the police.

“Listen, I want you to do something for me,” said Strike. “Call John Bristow first thing tomorrow and tell him about Rochelle.”

“All right,” said Robin, with her eyes on the large stuffed elephant Matthew had given her on their first Valentine’s Day together, eight years previously. The present-giver himself was watching Newsnight in the sitting room. “What are you going to be doing?”

“I’m going to be on my way to Pinewood Studios for a few words with Freddie Bestigui.”

“How?” said Robin. “They won’t let you near him.”

“Yeah, they will,” said Strike.

After Robin had hung up, Strike sat motionless for a while in his dark office. The thought of the semi-digested McDonald’s meal lying inside Rochelle’s bloated corpse had not prevented him consuming two Big Macs, a large box of fries and a McFlurry on the way back from Scotland Yard. Gassy noises from his stomach were now mingling with the muffled thuds of the bass from the 12 Bar Café, which Strike barely noticed these days; the sound might have been his own pulse.

Ciara Porter’s messy, girlish flat, her wide, groaning mouth, the long white legs wrapped tightly around his back, belonged to a life lived long ago. All his thoughts, now, were for squat and graceless Rochelle Onifade. He remembered her talking fast into her phone, not five minutes after she had left him, dressed in exactly the same clothes she had been wearing when they pulled her out of the river.

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He was sure he knew what had happened. Rochelle had called the killer to say that she had just lunched with a private detective; a meeting had been arranged over her glittering pink phone; that night, after a meal or a drink, they had sauntered through the dark towards the river. He thought of Hammersmith Bridge, sage green and gold, in the area where she claimed to have a new flat: a famous suicide spot, with its low sides, and the fast-flowing Thames below. She could not swim. Nighttime: two lovers play-fighting, a car sweeps by, a scream and a splash. Would anyone have seen?

Not if the killer had iron-clad nerves and a liberal dash of luck; and this was a murderer who had already demonstrated plenty of the former, and an unnerving, reckless reliance on the latter. Defending counsel would undoubtedly argue diminished responsibility, because of the vainglorious overreaching that made Strike’s quarry unique in his experience; and perhaps, he thought, there was some pathology there, some categorizable madness, but he was not much interested in the psychology. Like John Bristow, he wanted justice.

In the darkness of his office, his thoughts veered suddenly and unhelpfully back in time, to the most personal death of all; the one that Lucy assumed, quite wrongly, haunted Strike’s every investigation, colored every case; the killing that had fractured his and Lucy’s lives into two epochs, so that everything in their memory was cleaved clearly into that which had happened before their mother died, and that which had happened afterwards. Lucy thought he had run away to join the RMP because of Leda’s death; that he had been driven to it by his unsatisfied belief in his stepfather’s guilt; that every corpse he saw in the course of his professional life must recall their mother to his mind; that every killer he met must seem to be an echo of their stepfather; that he was driven to investigate other deaths in an eternal act of personal exculpation.

But Strike had aspired to this career long before the last needle had entered Leda’s body; long before he had understood that his mother (and every other human) was mortal, and that killings were more than puzzles to be solved. It was Lucy who never forgot, who lived in a swarm of memories like coffin flies; who projected on to any and all unnatural deaths the conflicting emotions aroused in her by their mother’s untimely demise.

Tonight, however, he found himself doing the very thing that Lucy was sure must be habitual: he was remembering Leda and connecting her to this case. Leda Strike, supergroupie. It was how they always captioned her in the most famous photograph of all, and the only one that featured his parents together. There she was, in black and white, with her heart-shaped face, her shining dark hair and her marmoset eyes; and there, separated from each other by an art dealer, an aristocratic playboy (one since dead by his own hand, the other of AIDS) and Carla Astolfi, his father’s second wife, was Jonny Rokeby himself, androgynous and wild: hair nearly as long as Leda’s. Martini glasses and cigarettes, smoke curling out of the model’s mouth, but his mother more stylish than any of them.

Everyone but Strike had seemed to view Leda’s death as the deplorable but unsurprising result of a life lived perilously, beyond societal norms. Even those who had known her best and longest were satisfied that she herself had administered the overdose they found in her body. His mother, by almost unanimous consent, had walked too close to the unsavory edges of life, and it was only to be expected that she would one day topple out of sight and fall to her death, stiff and cold, on a filthy-sheeted bed.

Why she had done it, nobody could quite explain, not even Uncle Ted (silent and shattered, leaning against the kitchen sink) or Aunt Joan (red-eyed but angry at her little kitchen table, with her arms around nineteen-year-old Lucy, who was sobbing into Joan’s shoulder). An overdose had simply seemed consistent with the trend of Leda’s life; with the squats and the musicians and the wild parties; with the squalor of her final relationship and home; with the constant presence of drugs in her vicinity; with her reckless quest for thrills and highs. Strike alone had asked whether anyone had known his mother had taken to shooting up; he alone had seen a distinction between her predilection for cannabis and a sudden liking for heroin; he alone had unanswered questions and saw suspicious circumstances. But he had been a student of twenty, and nobody had listened.

After the trial and the conviction, Strike had packed up and left everything behind: the short-lived burst of press, Aunt Joan’s desperate disappointment at the end of his Oxford career, Charlotte, bereft and incensed by his disappearance and already sleeping with someone new, Lucy’s screams and scenes. With the sole support of Uncle Ted, he had vanished into the army, and refound there the life he had been taught by Leda: constant uprootings, self-reliance and the endless appeal of the new.

Tonight, though, he could not help seeing his mother as a spiritual sister to the beautiful, needy and depressive girl who had broken apart on a frozen road, and to the plain, homeless outsider now lying in the chilly morgue. Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as “tragic,” in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives.

How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.

Nearly all the physical evidence of Lula’s murder had long since been wiped away, trodden underfoot or covered by thickly falling snow; the most persuasive clue Strike had was, after all, that grainy black-and-white footage of two men running away from the scene: a piece of evidence given a cursory check and tossed aside by the police, who were convinced that nobody could have entered the building, that Landry had committed suicide, and that the film showed nothing more than a pair of larcenous loiterers with intent.

Strike roused himself and looked at his watch. It was half past ten, but he was sure the man to whom he wished to speak would be awake. He flicked on his desk lamp, took up his mobile and dialed, this time, a number in Germany.

“Oggy,” bellowed the tinny voice on the other end of the phone. “How the fuck are you?”

“Need a favor, mate.”

And Strike asked Lieutenant Graham Hardacre to give him all the information he could find on one Agyeman of the Royal Engineers, Christian name and rank unknown, but with particular reference to the dates of his tours of duty in Afghanistan.

12

IT WAS ONLY THE SECOND car he had driven since his leg had been blown off. He had tried driving Charlotte’s Lexus, but today, trying not to feel in any way emasculated, he had hired an automatic Honda Civic.

The journey to Iver Heath took under an hour. Entrance into Pinewood Studios was effected by a combination of fast talk, intimidation and the flashing of genuine, though outdated, official documentation; the security guard, initially impassive, was rocked by Strike’s air of easy confidence, by the words “Special Investigation Branch,” by the pass bearing his photograph.

“Have you got an appointment?” he asked Strike, feet above him in the box beside the electric barrier, his hand covering the telephone receiver.

“No.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mr. Evan Duffield,” said Strike, and he saw the security guard scowl as he turned away and muttered into the receiver.

After a minute or so, Strike was given directions and waved through. He followed a gently winding road around the outskirts of the studio building, reflecting again on the convenient uses to which some people’s reputations for chaos and self-destruction could be put.

He parked a few rows behind a chauffeured Mercedes occupying a space with a sign in it reading: PRODUCER FREDDIE BESTIGUI, made his unhurried exit from the car while Bestigui’s driver watched him in the rearview mirror, and proceeded through a glass door that led to a nondescript, institutional set of stairs. A young ma

n was jogging down them, looking like a slightly tidier version of Spanner.

“Where can I find Mr. Freddie Bestigui?” Strike asked him.

“Second floor, first office on the right.”

He was as ugly as his pictures, bull-necked and pockmarked, sitting behind a desk on the far side of a glass partition wall, scowling at his computer monitor. The outer office was busy and cluttered, full of attractive young women at desks; film posters were tacked to pillars and photographs of pets were pinned up beside filming schedules. The pretty girl nearest the door, who was wearing a switchboard microphone in front of her mouth, looked up at Strike and said:

“Hello, can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Bestigui. Not to worry, I’ll see myself in.”

He was inside Bestigui’s office before she could respond.

Bestigui looked up, his eyes tiny between pouches of flesh, black moles sprinkled over the swarthy skin.

“Who are you?”

He was already pushing himself up, thick-fingered hands clutching the edge of his desk.

“I’m Cormoran Strike. I’m a private detective, I’ve been hired…”

“Elena!” Bestigui knocked his coffee over; it was spreading across the polished wood, into all his papers. “Get the fuck out! Out! OUT!”

“…by Lula Landry’s brother, John Bristow—”

“ELENA!”

The pretty, thin girl wearing the headset ran inside and stood fluttering beside Strike, terrified.

“Call security, you dozy little bitch!”

She ran outside. Bestigui, who was five feet six inches at the most, had pushed his way out from behind his desk now; as unafraid of the enormous Strike as a pit bull whose yard has been invaded by a Rottweiler. Elena had left the door open; the inhabitants of the outer office were staring in, frightened, mesmerized.