The Cuckoo's Calling

“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.

&nb

sp; “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.

The space was lined with mahogany doors that reached to the ceiling. Strike opened one of the doors and glanced inside, at overstuffed railings of dresses and coats, with a shelf of bags and hats above, breathing in the musty smell of old shoes and fabric which, in spite of the evident costliness of the contents, evoked an old charity shop. Silently he opened and closed door after door, until, on the fourth attempt, he saw a cluster of clearly brand-new handbags, each of a different color, that had been squeezed on to the high shelf.

He took down the blue one, shop-new and shiny. Here was the GS logo, and the silk lining that was zipped into the bag. He ran his fingers around it, into every corner, then replaced it deftly on the shelf.

He selected the white bag next: the lining was patterned with a stylized African print. Again he ran his fingers all around the interior. Then he unzipped the lining.

It came out, just as Ciara had described, like a metal-edged scarf, exposing the rough interior of the white leather. Nothing was visible inside until he looked more closely, and then he saw the line of pale blue running down the side of the stiff rectangular cloth-covered board holding the base of the bag in shape. He lifted up the board and saw, beneath it, a folded piece of pale blue paper, scribbled all over in an untidy hand.

Strike replaced the bag swiftly on the shelf with the lining bundled inside, and took from an inside pocket of his jacket a clear plastic bag, into which he inserted the pale blue paper, shaken open but unread. He closed the mahogany door and continued to open others. Behind the penultimate door was a safe, operated by a digital keypad.

Strike took a second plastic bag from inside his jacket, slid it over his hand and began to press keys, but before he had completed his trial, he heard movement outside. Hastily thrusting the crumpled bag back into a pocket, he closed the wardrobe door as quietly as possible and walked back into the bedroom, to find the Macmillan nurse bending over Yvette Bristow. She looked around when she heard him.

“Wrong door,” said Strike. “I thought it was the bathroom.”

He went into the small en-suite, and here, with the door closed, before flushing the toilet and turning on the taps for the nurse’s benefit, he read the last will and testament of Lula Landry, scribbled on her mother’s writing paper and witnessed by Rochelle Onifade.

Yvette Bristow was still lying with her eyes closed when he returned to the bedroom.

“She’s asleep,” said the nurse, gently. “She does this a lot.”

“Yes,” said Strike, the blood pounding in his ears. “Please tell her I said goodbye, when she wakes up. I’m going to have to leave now.”

They walked together down the comfortable passageway.

“Lady Bristow seems very ill,” Strike commented.

“Oh yes, she is,” said the nurse. “She could die any time now. She’s very poorly.”

“I think I might have left my…” said Strike vaguely, wandering left into the yellow sitting room he had first visited, leaning over the sofa to block the nurse’s view and carefully replacing the telephone receiver he had taken off the hook.

“Yes, here it is,” he said, pretending to palm something small and put it in his pocket. “Well, thanks very much for the coffee.”

With his hand on the door, he turned to look at her.

“Her Valium addiction’s as bad as ever, then?” he said.

Unsuspicious, trusting, the nurse smiled a tolerant smile.

“Yes, it is, but it can’t hurt her now. Mind you,” she said, “I’d give those doctors a piece of my mind. She’s had three of them giving her prescriptions for years, from the labels on the boxes.”

“Very unprofessional,” said Strike. “Thanks again for the coffee. Goodbye.”

He jogged down the stairs, his mobile already out of his pocket, so exhilarated that he did not concentrate on where he was going, so that he took a corner on the stair and let out a bellow of pain as the prosthetic foot slipped on the edge; his knee twisted and he fell, hard and heavy, down six stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom with an excruciating, fiery pain in both the joint and the end of his stump, as though it was freshly severed, as though the scar tissue was still healing.

“Fuck. Fuck!”

“Are you all right?” shouted the Macmillan nurse, gazing down at him over the banisters, her face comically inverted.

“I’m fine—fine!” he shouted back. “Slipped! Don’t worry! Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he moaned under his breath, as he pulled himself back to his feet on the newel post, scared to put his full weight on the prosthesis.

He limped downstairs, leaning on the banisters as much as possible; half hopped across the lobby floor and hung on the heavy front door as he maneuvered himself out on to the front steps.

The sporting children were receding in a distant crocodile, pale and navy blue, winding their way back to their school and lunch. Strike stood leaning against warm brick, cursing himself fluently and wondering what damage he had done. The pain was excruciating, and the skin that had already been irritated felt as though it had been torn; it burned beneath the gel pad that was supposed to protect it, and the idea of walking all the way to the underground was miserably unappealing.

He sat down on the top step and phoned a taxi, after which he made a further series of calls, firstly to Robin, then to Wardle, then to the offices of Landry, May, Patterson.

The black cab swung around the corner. For the very first time, it occurred to Strike how like miniature hearses they were, these stately black vehicles, as he hoisted himself upright and limped, in escalating pain, down to the pavement.

Part Five

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.

Lucky is he who has been able to understand the causes of things

Virgil, Georgics, Book 2

1

“I’D HAVE THOUGHT,” SAID

ERIC Wardle slowly, looking down at the will in its plastic pocket, “you’d have wanted to show this to your client first.”

“I would, but he’s in Rye,” said Strike, “and this is urgent. I’ve told you, I’m trying to prevent two more murders. We’re dealing with a maniac here, Wardle.”

He was sweating with pain. Even as he sat here, in the sunlit window of the Feathers, urging the policeman to action, Strike was wondering whether he might have dislocated his knee or fractured the small amount of tibia left to him in the fall down Yvette Bristow’s stairwell. He had not wanted to start fiddling with his leg in the taxi, which was now waiting for him at the curb outside. The meter was eating steadily away at the advance Bristow had paid him, of which he would never receive another installment, for today would see an arrest, if only Wardle would rouse himself.

“I grant you, this might show motive…”

“Might?” repeated Strike. “Might? Ten million might constitute a motive? For fuck’s—”

“…but I need evidence that’ll stand up in court, and you haven’t brought me any of that.”

“I’ve just told you where you can find it! Have I been wrong yet? I told you it was a fucking will, and there,” Strike jabbed the plastic sleeve, “it fucking is. Get a warrant!”

Wardle rubbed the side of his handsome face as though he had toothache, frowning at the will.

“Jesus Christ,” said Strike, “how many more times? Tansy Bestigui was on the balcony, she heard Landry say ‘I’ve already done it’…”

“You put yourself on very thin ice there, mate,” said Wardle. “Defense makes mincemeat of lying to suspects. When Bestigui finds out there aren’t any photos, he’s going to deny everything.”

“Let him. She won’t. She’s ripe to tell anyway. But if you’re too much of a pussy to do anything about this, Wardle,” said Strike, who could feel cold sweat on his back and a fiery pain in what remained of his right leg, “and anyone else who was close to Landry turns up dead, I’m gonna go straight to the fucking press. I’ll tell them I gave you every bit of information I had, and that you had every fucking chance to bring this killer in. I’ll make up my fee in selling the rights to my story, and you can pass that message on to Carver for me.