The Cuckoo's Calling Page 7

  Robin had been asked to do several things, in the course of her brief temping career, that were outside the terms of a secretarial contract, and had therefore been a little unnerved by Strike’s suggestion of a walk. She was pleased, however, to acquit Strike of any flirtatious intent. The long walk to this spot had been conducted in almost total silence, Strike apparently deep in thought, and occasionally consulting his map.

  Upon their arrival in Alderbrook Road, however, he had said:

  “If you spot anything, or you think of anything I haven’t, tell me, won’t you?”

  This was rather thrilling: Robin prided herself on her observational powers; they were one reason she had secretly cherished the childhood ambition that the large man beside her was living. She looked intelligently up and down the street, and tried to visualize what someone might have been up to, on a snowy night, in sub-zero temperatures, at two in the morning.

  “This way,” said Strike, however, before any insights could occur to her, and they walked off, side by side, along Bellamy Road. It curved gently to the left and continued for some sixty houses, which were almost identical, with their glossy black doors, their short railings either side of clean white steps and their topiary-filled tubs. Here and there were marble lions and brass plaques, giving names and professional credentials; chandeliers glinted from upper windows, and one door stood open to reveal a checkerboard floor, oil paintings in gold frames and a Georgian staircase.

  As he walked, Strike pondered some of the information that Robin had managed to find on the internet that morning. As Strike had suspected, Bristow had not been honest when he asserted that the police had made no effort to trace the Runner and his sidekick. Buried in voluminous and rabid press coverage that survived online were appeals for the men to come forward, but they seemed to have yielded no results.

  Unlike Bristow, Strike did not find any of this suggestive of police incompetence, or of a plausible murder suspect left uninvestigated. The sudden sounding of a car alarm around the time that the two men had fled the area suggested a good reason for their reluctance to talk to the police. Moreover, Strike did not know whether Bristow was familiar with the varying quality of CCTV footage, but he himself had extensive experience of frustrating blurry black-and-white images from which it was impossible to glean a true likeness.

  Strike had also noticed that Bristow had said not a word in person, or in his notes, about the DNA evidence gathered from inside his sister’s flat. He strongly suspected, from the fact that the police had been happy to exclude the Runner and his friend from further inquiries, that no trace of foreign DNA had been found there. However, Strike knew that the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.

  But the Google searches of the morning had suggested a possible explanation for Bristow’s fixation on the Runner. His sister had been researching her biological roots, and had managed to trace her birth mother, who sounded, even when allowance was made for press sensationalism, an unsavory character. Doubtless revelations such as those that Robin had found online would have been unpleasant not just for Landry, but for her whole adoptive family. Was it part of Bristow’s instability (for Strike could not pretend to himself that his client gave the impression of a well-balanced man) that he believed Lula, so fortunate in some ways, had tempted fate? That she had stirred up trouble in trying to plumb the secrets of her origins; that she had woken a demon that had reached out of the distant past, and killed her? Was that why a black man in her vicinity so disturbed him?

  Deeper and deeper into the enclave of the wealthy Strike and Robin walked, until they arrived at the corner of Kentigern Gardens. Like Bellamy Road, it projected an aura of intimidating, self-contained prosperity. The houses here were high Victorian, red brick with stone dressings and heavy pedimented windows on four floors, with their own small stone balconies. White marble porticos framed each entrance, and three white steps led from the pavement to more glossy black front doors. Everything was expensively well maintained, clean and regimented. There were only a few cars parked here; a small sign declared that permits were needed for the privilege.

  No longer set apart by police tape and massing journalists, number 18 had faded back into graceful conformity with its neighbors.

  “The balcony she fell from was on the top floor,” said Strike, “about forty feet up, I’d say.”

  He contemplated the handsome frontage. The balconies on the top three floors, Robin saw, were shallow, with barely standing room between the balustrade and the long windows.

  “The thing is,” Strike told Robin, while he squinted at the balcony high above them, “pushing someone from that height wouldn’t guarantee death.”

  “Oh—but surely?” protested Robin, contemplating the awful drop between top balcony and hard road.

  “You’d be surprised. I spent a month in a bed next to a Welsh bloke who got blown off a building about that height. Smashed his legs and pelvis, lot of internal bleeding, but he’s still with us.”

  Robin glanced at Strike, wondering why he had been in bed for a month; but the detective was oblivious, now scowling at the front door.

  “Keypad,” he muttered, noting the metal square inset with buttons, “and a camera over the door. Bristow didn’t mention a camera. Could be new.”

  He stood for a few minutes testing theories against the intimidating red-brick face of these fantastically expensive fortresses. Why had Lula Landry chosen to live here in the first place? Sedate, traditional, stuffy, Kentigern Gardens was surely the natural domain of a different kind of rich: Russian and Arab oligarchs; corporate giants splitting their time between town and their country estates; wealthy spinsters, slowly decaying amidst their art collections. He found it a strange choice of abode for a girl of twenty-three, who ran, according to every story Robin had read out that morning, with a hip, creative crowd, whose celebrated sense of style owed more to the street than the salon.

  “It looks very well protected, doesn’t it?” said Robin.

  “Yeah, it does. And that’s without the crowd of paparazzi who were standing guard over it that night.”

  Strike leaned back against the black railings of number 23, staring at number 18. The windows of Landry’s former residence were taller than those on the lower floors, and its balcony, unlike the other two, had not been decorated with topiary shrubs. Strike slipped a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered Robin one; she shook her head, surprised, because she had not seen him smoke in the office. Having lit up and inhaled deeply, he said, with his eyes on the front door:

  “Bristow thinks someone got in and out that night, undetected.”

  Robin, who had already decided that the building was impenetrable, thought that Strike was about to pour scorn on the theory, but she was wrong.

  “If they did,” said Strike, eyes still on the door, “it was planned, and planned well. Nobody could’ve got past photographers, a keypad, a security guard and a closed inner door, and out again, on luck alone. Thing is,” he scratched his chin, “that degree of premeditation doesn’t fit with such a slapdash murder.”

  Robin found the choice of adjective callous.

  “Pushing someone over a balcony’s a spur-of-the-moment thing,” said Strike, as though he had felt her inner wince. “Hot blood. Blind temper.”

  He found Robin’s company satisfactory and restful, not only because she was hanging off his every word, and had not troubled to break his silences, but because that little sapphire ring on her third finger was like a neat full stop: this far, and no further. It suited him perfectly. He was free to show off, in a very mild way, which was one of the few pleasures remaining to him.

  “But what if the killer was already inside?”

  “That’s a lot more plausible,” said Strike, and Robin felt very pleased with herself. “And if a killer was already in there, we’ve got the choice between the sec
urity guard himself, one or both of the Bestiguis, or some unknown person who was hiding in the building without anyone’s knowledge. If it was either of the Bestiguis, or Wilson, there’s no getting-in-and-out problem; all they had to do was return to the places they were supposed to be. There was still the risk she could have survived, injured, to tell the tale, but a hot-blooded, unpremeditated crime makes a lot more sense if one of them did it. A row and a blind shove.”

  Strike smoked his cigarette and continued to scrutinize the front of the building, in particular the gap between the windows on the first floor and those on the third. He was thinking primarily about Freddie Bestigui, the film producer. According to what Robin had found on the internet, Bestigui had been in bed asleep when Lula Landry toppled over the balcony two floors above. The fact that it was Bestigui’s own wife who had sounded the alarm, and insisted that the killer was still upstairs while her husband stood beside her, implied that she, at least, did not think him guilty. Nevertheless, Freddie Bestigui had been the man in closest proximity to the dead girl at the time of her death. Laymen, in Strike’s experience, were obsessed with motive: opportunity topped the professional’s list.

  Unwittingly confirming her civilian status, Robin said:

  “But why would someone pick the middle of the night to have an argument with her? Nothing ever came out about her not getting on with her neighbors, did it? And Tansy Bestigui definitely couldn’t have done it, could she? Why would she run downstairs and tell the security guard if she’d just pushed Lula over the balcony?”

  Strike did not answer directly; he seemed to be following his own train of thought, and after a moment or two replied:

  “Bristow’s fixated on the quarter of an hour after his sister went inside, after the photographers had left and the security guard had abandoned the desk because he was ill. That meant the lobby became briefly navigable—but how was anyone outside the building supposed to know that Wilson had left his post? The front door’s not made of glass.”

  “Plus,” interjected Robin intelligently, “they’d have needed to know the key code to open the front door.”

  “People get slack. Unless the security people change it regularly, loads of undesirables could have known that code. Let’s have a look down here.”

  They walked in silence right to the end of Kentigern Gardens, where they found a narrow alleyway which ran, at a slightly oblique angle, along the rear of Landry’s block of houses. Strike was amused to note that the alley was called Serf’s Way. Wide enough to allow a single car to pass, it had plentiful lighting and was devoid of hiding places, with long, high, smooth walls on either side of the cobbled passageway. They came in due course to a pair of large, electrically operated garage doors, with an enormous PRIVATE sign affixed to the wall beside them, which guarded the entrance to the underground cache of parking spaces for the Kentigern Gardeners.

  When he judged that they were roughly level with the back of number 18, Strike made a leap, caught hold of the top of the wall and heaved himself up to look into a long row of small, carefully manicured gardens. Between each patch of smooth and well-tended lawn and the house to which it belonged was a shadowy stairwell to basement level. Anyone wishing to climb the rear of the house would, in Strike’s opinion, require ladders, or a partner to belay him, and some sturdy ropes.

  He let himself slide back down the wall, emitting a stifled grunt of pain as he landed on the prosthetic leg.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, when Robin made a concerned noise; she had noticed the vestige of a limp, and wondered whether he had sprained an ankle.

  The chafing on the end of the stump was not helped by hobbling off over the cobbles. It was much harder, given the rigid construction of his false ankle, to navigate uneven surfaces. Strike asked himself ruefully whether he had really needed to hoist himself up on the wall at all. Robin might be a pretty girl, but she could not hold a candle to the woman he had just left.

  3

  “AND YOU’RE SURE HE’S A detective, are you? Because anyone can do that. Anyone can google people.”

  Matthew was irritable after a long day, a disgruntled client and an unsatisfactory encounter with his new boss. He did not appreciate what struck him as naive and misplaced admiration for another man on the part of his fiancée.

  “He wasn’t googling people,” said Robin. “I was the one doing the googling, while he was working on another case.”

  “Well I don’t like the sound of the set-up. He’s sleeping in his office, Robin; don’t you think there’s something a bit fishy there?”

  “I told you, I think he’s just split up with his partner.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet he has,” said Matthew.

  Robin dropped his plate down on top of her own and stalked off into the kitchen. She was angry at Matthew, and vaguely annoyed with Strike, too. She had enjoyed tracking Lula Landry’s acquaintance across cyberspace that day; but seeing it retrospectively through Matthew’s eyes, it seemed to her that Strike had given her a pointless, time-filling job.

  “Look, I’m not saying anything,” Matthew said, from the kitchen doorway. “I just think he sounds weird. And what’s with the little afternoon walks?”

  “It wasn’t a little afternoon walk, Matt. We went to see the scene of the—we went to see the place where the client thinks something happened.”

  “Robin, there’s no need to make such a bloody mystery about it,” Matthew laughed.

  “I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement,” she snapped over her shoulder. “I can’t tell you about the case.”

  “The case.”

  He gave another short, scoffing laugh.

  Robin strode around the tiny kitchen, putting away ingredients, slamming cupboard doors. After a while, watching her figure as she moved around, Matthew came to feel that he might have been unreasonable. He came up behind her as she was scraping the leftovers into the bin, put his arms around her, buried his face in her neck and cupped and stroked the breast that bore the bruises Strike had accidentally inflicted, and which had irrevocably colored Matthew’s view of the man. He murmured conciliatory phrases into Robin’s honey-colored hair; but she pulled away from him to put the plates into the sink.

  Robin felt as though her own worth had been impugned. Strike had seemed interested in the things she had found online. Strike expressed gratitude for her efficiency and initiative.

  “How many proper interviews have you got next week?” Matthew asked, as she turned on the cold tap.

  “Three,” she shouted over the noise of the gushing water, scrubbing the top plate aggressively.

  She waited until he had walked away into the sitting room before turning off the tap. There was, she noticed, a fragment of frozen pea caught in the setting of her engagement ring.

  4

  STRIKE ARRIVED AT CHARLOTTE’S FLAT at half past nine on Friday morning. This gave her, he reasoned, half an hour to be well clear of the place before he entered it, assuming that she really was intending to leave, rather than lie in wait for him. The grand and gracious white buildings that lined the wide street; the plane trees; the butcher’s shop that might have been stuck in the 1950s; the cafés bustling with the upper middle classes; the sleek restaurants; they had always felt slightly unreal and stagey to Strike. Perhaps he had always known, deep down, that he would not stay, that he did not belong.

  Until the moment he unlocked the front door, he expected her to be there; yet as soon as he stepped over the threshold, he knew that the place was empty. The silence had that slack quality that speaks only of the indifference of uninhabited rooms, and his footsteps sounded alien and overloud as he made his way down the hall.

  Four cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the sitting room, open for him to inspect. Here were his cheap and serviceable belongings, heaped together, like jumble-sale objects. He lifted a few things up to check the deeper levels, but nothing seemed to have been smashed, ripped or covered in paint. Other people his age had houses and washing machines,
cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawn mowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.

  The silent room in which he stood spoke of a confident good taste, with its antique rug and its pale flesh-pink walls; its fine dark-wood furniture and its overflowing bookcases. The only change he spotted since Sunday night stood on the glass end table beside the sofa. On Sunday night there had been a picture of himself and Charlotte, laughing on the beach at St. Mawes. Now a black-and-white studio portrait of Charlotte’s dead father smiled benignly at Strike from the same silver picture frame.

  Over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of an eighteen-year-old Charlotte, in oils. It showed the face of a Florentine angel in a cloud of long dark hair. Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country. From Charlotte he had learned that the kind of money he had never known could coexist with unhappiness and savagery. Her family, for all their gracious manners, their suavity and flair, their erudition and occasional flamboyance, was even madder and stranger than his own. That had been a powerful link between them, when first he and Charlotte had come together.

  A strange stray thought came to him now, as he looked up at that portrait: that this was the reason it had been painted, so that one day, its large hazel-green eyes would watch him leave. Had Charlotte known what it would feel like, to prowl the empty flat under the eyes of her stunning eighteen-year-old self? Had she realized that the painting would do her work better than her physical presence?

  He turned away, striding through the other rooms, but she had left nothing for him to do. Every trace of him, from his tooth floss to his army boots, had been taken and deposited in the boxes. He studied the bedroom with particular attention, and the room looked back at him, with its dark floorboards, white curtains and delicate dressing table, calm and composed. The bed, like the portrait, seemed a living, breathing presence. Remember what happened here, and what can never happen again.