The Cuckoo's Calling (14 page)

“Wasn’t a long interview, seeing as he’d only just got off a plane and never set foot inside Kentigern Gardens. Routine. I got him to sign his latest CD for me at the end,” Wardle added, as though he could not help himself. “That brought the house down, he loved it. The missus wanted to put it on eBay, but I’m keeping…”

Wardle stopped talking with an air of having given away a little more than he had intended. Amused, Strike helped himself to a handful of pork scratchings.

“What about Evan Duffield?”

“Him,” said Wardle. The stardust that had sparkled over the policeman’s account of Deeby Macc was gone; the policeman was scowling. “Little junkie shit. He pissed us around from start to finish. He went straight into rehab the day after she died.”

“I saw. Where?”

“Priory, where else? Fucking rest cure.”

“So when did you interview him?”

“Next day, but we had to find him first; his people were being as obstructive as possible. Same story as Bestigui, wasn’t it? They didn’t want us to know what he’d really been doing. My missus,” said Wardle, scowling even harder, “thinks he’s sexy. You married?”

“No,” said Strike.

“Anstis told me you left the army to get married to some woman who looks like a supermodel.”

“What was Duffield’s story, once you got to him?”

“They’d had a big bust-up in the club, Uzi. Plenty of witnesses to that. She left, and his story was that he followed her, about five minutes later, wearing this fucking wolf mask. It covers the whole head. Lifelike, hairy thing. He told us he’d got it from a fashion shoot.”

Wardle’s expression was eloquent of contempt.

“He liked putting this thing on to get in and out of places, to piss off the paparazzi. So, after Landry left Uzi, he got in his car—he had a driver outside, waiting for him—and went to Kentigern Gardens. Driver confirmed all that. Yeah, all right,” Wardle corrected himself impatiently, “he confirmed that he drove a man in a wolf’s head, who he assumed was Duffield as he was of Duffield’s height and build, and wearing what looked like Duffield’s clothes, and speaking in Duffield’s voice, to Kentigern Gardens.”

“But he didn’t take the wolf head off on the journey?”

“It’s only about fifteen minutes to her flat from Uzi. No, he didn’t take it off. He’s a childish little prick.

“So then, by Duffield’s own account, he saw the paps outside her flat and decided not to go in after all. He told the driver to take him off to Soho, where he let him out. Duffield walked round the corner to his dealer’s flat in d’Arblay Street, where he shot up.”

“Still wearing the wolf’s head?”

“No, he took it off there,” said Wardle. “The dealer, name of Whycliff, is an ex-public schoolboy with a habit way worse than Duffield’s. He gave a full statement agreeing that Duffield had come round at about half past two. It was only the pair of them there, and yeah, I’d take long odds that Whycliff would lie for Duffield, but a woman on the ground floor heard the doorbell ring and says she saw Duffield on the stair.

“Anyway, Duffield left Whycliff’s around four, with the bloody wolf’s head back on, and rambled off towards the place where he thought his car and driver were waiting; except that the driver was gone. The driver claimed a misunderstanding. He thought Duffield was an arsehole; he made that clear when we took his statement. Duffield wasn’t paying him; the car was on Landry’s account.

“So then Duffield, who’s got no money on him, walks all the way to Ciara Porter’s place in Notting Hill. We found a few people who’d seen a man wearing a wolf’s head strolling along relevant streets, and there’s footage of him cadging a free box of matches from a woman in an all-night garage.”

“Can you make out his face?”

“No, because he only shoved the wolf head up to speak to her, and all you can see is its snout. She said it was Duffield, though.

“He got to Porter’s around half four. She let him sleep on the sofa, and about an hour later she got the news about Landry being dead, and woke him up to tell him. Cue histrionics and rehab.”

“You checked for a suicide note?” asked Strike.

“Yeah. There was nothing in the flat, nothing on her laptop, but that wasn’t a surprise. She did it on the spur of the moment, didn’t she? She was bipolar, she’d just argued with that little tosser and it pushed her over—well, you know what I mean.”

Wardle checked his watch, and drained the last of his pint.

“I’m gonna have to go. The wife’ll be pissed off, I told her I’d only be half an hour.”

The over-tanned girls had left without either man noticing. Out on the pavement, both lit up cigarettes.

“I hate this fucking smoking ban,” said Wardle, zipping his leather jacket up to the neck.

“Have we got a deal, then?” asked Strike.

Cigarette between his lips, Wardle pulled on a pair of gloves.

“I dunno about that.”

“C’mon, Wardle,” said Strike, handing the policeman a card, which Wardle accepted as though it were a joke item. “I’ve given you Brett Fearney.”

Wardle laughed outright.

“Not yet you haven’t.”

He slipped Strike’s card into a pocket, inhaled, blew smoke skywards, then shot the larger man a look compounded of curiosity and appraisal.

“Yeah, all right. If we get Fearney, you can have the file.”

“EVAN DUFFIELD’S AGENT SAYS HIS
client isn’t taking any further calls or giving any interviews about Lula Landry,” said Robin next morning. “I did make it clear that you’re not a journalist, but he was adamant. And the people in Guy Somé’s office are ruder than Freddie Bestigui’s. You’d think I was trying to get an audience with the Pope.”

“OK,” said Strike. “I’ll see whether I can get at him through Bristow.”

It was the first time that Robin had seen Strike in a suit. He looked, she thought, like a rugby player en route to an international: large, conventionally smart in his dark jacket and subdued tie. He was on his knees, searching through one of the cardboard boxes he had brought from Charlotte’s flat. Robin was averting her gaze from his boxed-up possessions. They were still avoiding any mention of the fact that Strike was living in his office.

“Aha,” he said, finally locating, from amid a pile of his mail, a bright blue envelope: the invitation to his nephew’s party. “Bollocks,” he added, on opening it.

“What’s the matter?”

“It doesn’t say how old he is,” said Strike. “My nephew.”

Robin was curious about Strike’s relations with his family. As she had never been officially informed, however, that Strike had numerous half-brothers and -sisters, a famous father and a mildly infamous mother, she bit back all questions and continued to open the day’s paltry mail.

Strike got up off the floor, replaced the cardboard box in a corner of the inner office and returned to Robin.

“What’s that?” he asked, seeing a sheet of photocopied newsprint on the desk.

“I kept it for you,” she said diffidently. “You said you were glad you’d seen that story about Evan Duffield…I thought you might be interested in this, if you haven’t already seen it.”

It was a neatly clipped article about film producer Freddie Bestigui, taken from the previous day’s
Evening Standard.

“Excellent; I’ll read that on the way to lunch with his wife.”

“Soon to be ex,” said Robin. “It’s all in that article. He’s not very lucky in love, Mr. Bestigui.”

“From what Wardle told me, he’s not a very lovable man,” said Strike.

“How did you get that policeman to talk to you?” Robin said, unable to hold back her curiosity on this point. She was desperate to learn more about the process and progress of the investigation.

“We’ve got a mutual friend,” said Strike. “Bloke I knew in Afghanistan; Met officer in the TA.”

“You were in Afghanistan?”

“Yeah.” Strike was pulling on his overcoat, the folded article on Freddie Bestigui and the invitation to Jack’s party between his teeth.

“What were you doing in Afghanistan?”

“Investigating a Killed In Action,” said Strike. “Military police.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

Military police did not tally with Matthew’s impression of a charlatan, or a waster.

“Why did you leave?”

“Injured,” said Strike.

He had described that injury to Wilson in the starkest of terms, but he was wary of being equally frank with Robin. He could imagine her shocked expression, and he stood in no need of her sympathy.

“Don’t forget to call Peter Gillespie,” Robin reminded him, as he headed out of the door.

Strike read the photocopied article as he rode the Tube to Bond Street. Freddie Bestigui had inherited his first fortune from a father who had made a great deal of money in haulage; he had made his second by producing highly commercial films that serious critics treated with derision. The producer was currently going to court to refute claims, by two newspapers, that he had behaved with gross impropriety towards a young female employee, whose silence he had subsequently bought. The accusations, carefully hedged around with many “alleged”s and “reported”s, included aggressive sexual advances and a degree of physical bullying. They had been made “by a source close to the alleged victim,” the girl herself having refused either to press charges or to speak to the press. The fact that Freddie was currently divorcing his latest wife, Tansy, was mentioned in the concluding paragraph, which ended with a reminder that the unhappy couple had been in the building on the night that Lula Landry took her own life. The reader was left with the odd impression that the Bestiguis’ mutual unhappiness might have influenced Landry in her decision to jump.

Strike had never moved in the kinds of circles that dined at Cipriani. It was only as he walked up Davies Street, the sun warm on his back and imparting a ruddy glow to the red-brick building ahead, that he thought how odd it would be, yet not unlikely, if he ran into one of his half-siblings there. Restaurants like Cipriani were part of the regular lives of Strike’s father’s legitimate children. He had last heard from three of them while in Selly Oak Hospital, undergoing physiotherapy. Gabi and Danni had jointly sent flowers; Al had visited once, laughing too loudly and scared of looking at the lower end of the bed. Afterwards, Charlotte had imitated Al braying and wincing. She was a good mimic. Nobody ever expected a girl that beautiful to be funny, yet she was.

The interior of the restaurant had an art deco feeling, the bar and chairs of mellow polished wood, with pale yellow tablecloths on the circular tables and white-jacketed, bow-tied waiters and waitresses. Strike spotted his client immediately among the clattering, jabbering diners, sitting at a table set for four and talking, to Strike’s surprise, to two women instead of one, both with long, glossy brown hair. Bristow’s rabbity face was full of the desire to please, or perhaps placate.

The lawyer jumped up to greet Strike when he saw him, and introduced Tansy Bestigui, who held out a thin, cool hand, but did not smile, and her sister, Ursula May, who did not hold out a hand at all. While the preliminaries of ordering drinks and handing around menus were navigated, Bristow nervous and over-talkative throughout, the sisters subjected Strike to the kind of brazenly critical stares that only people of a certain class feel entitled to give.

They were both as pristine and polished as life-size dolls recently removed from their cellophane boxes; rich-girl thin, almost hipless in their tight jeans, with tanned faces that had a waxy sheen especially noticeable on their foreheads, their long, gleaming dark manes with center partings, the ends trimmed with spirit-level exactitude.

When Strike finally chose to look up from his menu, Tansy said, without preamble:

“Are you really” (she pronounced it “rarely”) “Jonny Rokeby’s son?”

“So the DNA test said,” he replied.

She seemed uncertain whether he was being funny or rude. Her dark eyes were fractionally too close together, and the Botox and fillers could not smooth away the petulance in her expression.

“Listen, I’ve just been telling John,” she said curtly. “I’m not going public again, OK? I’m perfectly happy to tell you what I heard, because I’d love you to prove I was right, but you mustn’t tell anyone I’ve talked to you.”

The unbuttoned neck of her thin silk shirt revealed an expanse of butterscotch skin stretched over her bony sternum, giving an unattractively knobbly effect; yet two full, firm breasts jutted from her narrow ribcage, as though they had been borrowed for the day from a fuller-figured friend. “We could have met somewhere more discreet,” commented Strike.

“No, it’s fine, because nobody here will know who you are. You don’t look anything like your father, do you? I met him at Elton’s last summer. Freddie knows him. D’you see much of Jonny?”

“I’ve met him twice,” said Strike.

“Oh,” said Tansy.

The monosyllable contained equal parts of surprise and disdain.

Charlotte had had friends like this; sleek-haired, expensively educated and clothed, all of them appalled by her strange yen for the enormous, battered-looking Strike. He had come up against them for years, by phone and in person, with their clipped vowels and their stockbroker husbands, and the brittle toughness Charlotte had never been able to fake.

“I don’t think she should be talking to you at all,” said Ursula abruptly. Her tone and expression would have been appropriate had Strike been a waiter who had just thrown aside his apron and joined them, uninvited, at the table. “I think you’re making a big mistake, Tanz.”

Bristow said: “Ursula, Tansy simply—”

“It’s up to me what I do,” Tansy snapped at her sister, as though Bristow had not spoken, as though his chair was empty. “I’m only going to say what I heard, that’s all. It’s all off the record; John’s agreed to that.”

Evidently she too viewed Strike as domestic class. He was irked not only by their tone, but also by the fact that Bristow was giving witnesses assurances without his say-so. How could Tansy’s evidence, which could have come from nobody but her, be kept off the record?

For a few moments all four of them ran their eyes over the culinary options in silence. Ursula was the first to put down her menu. She had already finished a glass of wine. She helped herself to another, and glanced restlessly around the restaurant, her eyes lingering for a second on a blonde minor royal, before passing on.

“This place used to be full of the most fabulous people, even at lunchtime. Cyprian only ever wants to go to bloody Wiltons, with all the other stiffs in suits…”

“Is Cyprian your husband, Mrs. May?” asked Strike.

He guessed that it would needle her if he crossed what she evidently saw as an invisible line between them; she did not think that sitting at a table with her gave him a right to her conversation. She scowled, and Bristow rushed to fill the uncomfortable pause.

“Yes, Ursula’s married to Cyprian May, one of our senior partners.”

“So I’m getting the family discount on my divorce,” said Tansy, with a slightly bitter smile.

“And her ex will go absolutely ballistic if she starts dragging the press back into their lives,” Ursula said, her dark eyes boring into Strike’s. “They’re trying to thrash out a settlement. It could seriously prejudice her alimony if that all kicks off again. So you’d better be discreet.”

With a bland smile, Strike turned to Tansy:

“You had a connection with Lula Landry, then, Mrs. Bestigui? Your brother-in-law works with John?”

“It never came up,” she said, looking bored.

The waiter returned to take their orders. When he had left, Strike took out his notebook and pen.

“What are you doing with those?” demanded Tansy, in a sudden panic. “I don’t want anything written down! John?” she appealed to Bristow, who turned to Strike with a flustered and apologetic expression.

“D’you think you could just listen, Cormoran, and, ah, skip the note-taking?”

“No problem,” said Strike easily, removing his mobile phone from his pocket and replacing the notebook and pen. “Mrs. Bestigui—”

“You can call me Tansy,” she said, as though this concession made up for her objections to the notebook.

“Thanks very much,” said Strike, with the merest trace of irony. “How well did you know Lula?”

“Oh, hardly at all. She was only there for three months. It was just ‘Hi’ and ‘Nice day.’ She wasn’t interested in us, we weren’t nearly hip enough for her. It was a bore, to be honest, having her there. Paps outside the front door all the time. I had to put on makeup even to go to the gym.”

“Isn’t there a gym in the building?” asked Strike.

“I do Pilates with Lindsey Parr,” said Tansy, irritably. “You sound like Freddie; he was always complaining that I didn’t use the facilities at the flat.”

“And how well did Freddie know Lula?”

“Hardly at all, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. He had some idea about luring her into acting; he kept trying to invite her downstairs. She never came, though. And he followed her to Dickie Carbury’s house, the weekend before she died, while I was away with Ursula.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Bristow, looking startled.

Strike noticed Ursula’s quick smirk at her sister. He had the impression that she had been looking for an exchange of complicit glances, but Tansy did not oblige.

“I didn’t know until later,” Tansy told Bristow. “Yah, Freddie cadged an invitation from Dickie; there was a whole group of them there: Lula, Evan Duffield, Ciara Porter, all that tabloidy, druggie, trendy gang. Freddie must have stuck out like a sore thumb. I know he’s not much older than Dickie, but he looks ancient,” she added spitefully.

“What did your husband tell you about the weekend?”

“Nothing. I only found out he’d been there weeks later, because Dickie let it slip. I’m sure Freddie went to try and make up to Lula, though.”

“Do you mean,” asked Strike, “that he was interested in Lula sexually, or…?”

“Oh yah, I’m sure he was; he’s always liked dark girls better than blondes. What he really loves, though, is getting a bit of celebrity meat into his films. He drives directors mad, trying to crowbar in celebrities, to get a bit of extra press. I’ll bet he was hoping to get her signed up for a film, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Tansy added, with unexpected shrewdness, “if he had something planned around her and Deeby Macc. Imagine the press, with the fuss there was already about the two of them. Freddie’s got a genius for that stuff. He loves publicity for his films as much as he hates it for himself.”

“Does he know Deeby Macc?”

“Not unless they’ve met since we separated. He hadn’t met Macc before Lula died. God, he was thrilled that Macc was coming to stay in the building; he started talking about casting him the moment he heard.”

“Casting him as what?”

“I don’t know,” she said irritably. “Anything. Macc’s got a huge following; Freddie wasn’t going to pass that chance up. He’d probably have had a part written specially for him if he’d been interested. Oh, he would have been all over him. Telling him all about his pretend black grandmother.” Tansy’s voice was contemptuous. “That’s what he always does when he meets famous black people: tells them he’s a quarter Malay. Yeah,
whatever,
Freddie.”

“Isn’t he a quarter Malay?” asked Strike.

She gave a snide little laugh.

“I don’t know; I never met any of Freddie’s grandparents, did I? He’s about a hundred years old. I know he’ll say anything if he thinks there’s money in it.”