The Cuckoo's Calling (29 page)

Lechsinka nodded again, her face blank, innocent.

“Then she see me and she shout ‘Go away, go away!’ ”

“Really?”

Lechsinka nodded and continued to put away clothes.

“Where was Mr. Bestigui?”

“Not there.”

“Do you know who she was speaking to? On the phone?”

“No.” But then, a little slyly, she said, “Woman.”

“A woman? How do you know?”

“Shouting, shouting on telephone. I can hear woman.”

“It was a row? An argument? They were yelling at each other? Loud, yeah?”

Strike could hear himself lapsing into the absurd, overdeliberate language of the linguistically challenged Englishman. Lechsinka nodded again as she pulled open drawers in search of the place for the belt, the only item now remaining in her arms. When at last she had coiled it up and put it away, she straightened and walked away from him, into the bedroom. He followed.

While she made the bed and neatened the bedside tables, he established that she had cleaned Lula Landry’s flat last that day, after the model had left to visit her mother. She had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nor had she spotted any blue writing paper, whether written on or blank. Guy Somé’s handbags, and the various items for Deeby Macc, had been delivered to the security desk by the time she had finished, and the last thing she had done at work that day had been to take the designer’s gifts up to Lula’s and Macc’s respective flats.

“And you set the alarms again after putting the things in there?”

“I put alarms, yes.”

“Lula’s?”

“Yes.”

“And one nine six six in Flat Two?”

“Yes.”

“Can you remember what you put away in Deeby Macc’s flat?”

She had to mime some of the items, but she managed to convey that she remembered two tops, a belt, a hat, some gloves and (she made a fiddling mime around her wrists) cufflinks.

After stowing these things in the open shelving area of the walk-in wardrobe, so that Macc could not miss them, she had reset the alarm and gone home.

Strike thanked her very much, and lingered just long enough to admire once more her tightly denimed backside as she straightened the duvet, before rejoining Robin and Wilson in the hall.

As they proceeded up the third flight of stairs, Strike checked Lechsinka’s story with Wilson, who agreed that he had instructed the repairman to set the alarm to 1966, like the front door.

“I jus’ chose a number that’d be easy for Lechsinka to remember, because of the front door. Macc coulda reset it to somethin’ different if he’d wanted.”

“Can you remember what the repairman looked like? You said he was new?”

“Really young guy. Hair to here.”

Wilson indicated the base of his neck.

“White?”

“Yeah, white. Didn’t even look like he was shaving yet.”

They had reached the front door of Flat Three, once the home of Lula Landry. Robin felt a frisson of something—fear, excitement—as Wilson opened the third smoothly painted white front door, with its glassy bullet-sized peephole.

The top flat was architecturally different from the other two: smaller and airier. It had been recently decorated throughout in shades of cream and brown. Guy Somé had told Strike that the flat’s famous previous inhabitant loved color; but it was now as impersonal as any upmarket hotel room. Strike led the way in silence to the sitting room.

The carpet here was not lush and woolen as in Bestigui’s flat, but made of rough sand-colored jute. Strike ran his heel across it; it made no mark or track.

“Was the floor like this when Lula lived here?” he asked Wilson.

“Yeah. She chose it. It was nearly new, so they left it.”

Instead of the regularly spaced long windows of the lower flats, each with three separate small balconies, the penthouse flat boasted a single pair of double doors leading on to one wide balcony. Strike unlocked and opened these doors and stepped outside. Robin did not like watching him do it; after a glance at Wilson’s impassive face, she turned and stared at the cushions and the black-and-white prints, trying not to think about what had happened here three months previously.

Strike was looking down into the street, and Robin might have been surprised to know that his thoughts were not as clinical or dispassionate as she supposed.

He was visualizing someone who had lost control completely; someone running at Landry as she stood, fine-boned and beautiful, in the outfit she had thrown on to meet a much-anticipated guest; a killer lost in rage, half dragging, half pushing her, and finally, with the brute strength of a highly motivated maniac, throwing her. The seconds it took her to fall through the air towards the concrete, smothered in its deceptively soft covering of snow, must have seemed to last an eternity. She had flailed, trying to find handholds in the merciless empty air; and then, without time to make amends, to explain, to bequeath or to apologize, without any of the luxuries permitted those who are given notice of their impending demise, she had broken on the road.

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her. The truth was coming slowly into focus out of the mass of disconnected detail. What he lacked was proof.

His mobile phone rang as he stood there. John Bristow’s name and number were displayed; he took the call.

“Hi, John, thanks for getting back to me.”

“No problem. Any news?” asked the lawyer.

“Maybe. I’ve had an expert look at Lula’s laptop, and he found out a file of photographs had been deleted from it after Lula died. Do you know anything about that?”

His words were met by complete silence. The only reason Strike knew that they had not been cut off was that he could hear a small amount of background noise at Bristow’s end.

At last the lawyer said, in an altered voice:

“They were taken off
after
Lula died?”

“That’s what the expert says.”

Strike watched a car roll slowly down the street below, and pause halfway along. A woman got out, swathed in fur.

“I—I’m sorry,” Bristow said, sounding thoroughly shaken. “I’m just—just shocked. Perhaps the police removed this file?”

“When did you get the laptop back from them?”

“Oh…sometime in February, I suppose, early February.”

“This file was removed on March the seventeenth.”

“But—but this just doesn’t make sense. Nobody knew the password.”

“Well, evidently somebody did. You said the police told your mother what it was.”

“My mother certainly wouldn’t have removed—”

“I’m not suggesting she did. Is there any chance she could have left the laptop open, and running? Or that she gave somebody else the password?”

He thought that Bristow must be in his office. He could hear faint voices in the background, and, distantly, a woman laughing.

“I suppose that’s possible,” said Bristow slowly. “But who would have removed photographs? Unless…but God, that’s horrible…”

“What is?”

“You don’t think one of the nurses could have taken the pictures? To sell to a newspaper? But that’s a dreadful thought…a nurse…”

“All the expert knows is that they were deleted; there’s no evidence that they were copied and stolen. But as you say—anything’s possible.”

“But who else—I mean, naturally I hate to think it could be a nurse, but who else
could
it be? The laptop’s been at my mother’s ever since the police gave it back.”

“John, are you aware of every visitor your mother’s had in the last three months?”

“I think so. I mean, obviously, I can’t be sure…”

“No. Well, there’s the difficulty.”

“But why—why would anyone do this?”

“I can think of a few reasons. It would be a big help if you could ask your mother about this, though, John. Whether she had the laptop running in mid-March. Whether any of her visitors expressed an interest in it.”

“I—I’ll try.” Bristow sounded very stressed, almost tearful. “She’s very, very weak now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Strike, formally. “I’ll be in touch shortly. ’Bye.”

He stepped back from the balcony and closed the doors, then turned to Wilson.

“Derrick, can you show me how you searched this place? What order you looked in the rooms that night?”

Wilson thought for a moment, then said:

“I come in here first. Looked around, seen the doors open. Didn’t touch ’em. Then,” he indicated that they should follow him, “I looked in here…”

Robin, following in the two men’s wake, noticed a subtle change in the way that Strike was talking to the security man. He was asking simple, deft questions, focusing on what Wilson had felt, touched, seen and heard at each step of his way through the flat.

Under Strike’s guidance, Wilson’s body language started to change. He began to enact the way he had held the doorjambs, leaning into rooms, casting a rapid look around. When he crossed to the only bedroom, he did it at a slow-motion run, responding to the spotlight of Strike’s undivided attention; he dropped to his knees to demonstrate how he had looked under the bed, and at Strike’s prompting remembered that a dress had lain crumpled beneath his legs; he led them, face set with concentration, to the bathroom, and showed them how he had swiveled to check behind the door before sprinting (he almost mimed it, arms moving exaggeratedly as he walked) back to the front door.

“And then,” said Strike, opening it and gesturing Wilson through, “you came out…”

“I came out,” agreed Wilson, in his bass voice, “an’ I jabbed the lift button.”

He pretended to do it, and feigned pushing open the doors in his anxiety to see what was inside.

“Nothing—so I started running back down again.”

“What could you hear now?” Strike asked, following him; neither of them were paying any attention to Robin, who closed the flat door behind her.

“Very distant—the Bestiguis yelling—and I turn round this corner and—”

Wilson stopped dead on the stair. Strike, who seemed to have anticipated something like this, stopped too; Robin careered straight into him, with a flustered apology that he cut off with a raised hand, as though, she thought, Wilson was in a trance.

“And I slipped,” said Wilson. He sounded shocked. “I forgot that. I slipped. Here. Backwards. Sat down hard. There was water. Here. Drops. Here.”

He was pointing at the stairs.

“Drops of water,” repeated Strike.

“Yeah.”

“Not snow.”

“No.”

“Not wet footprints.”

“Drops. Big drops. Here. Mi foot skidded and I slipped. And I just got up and kept running.”

“Did you tell the police about the drops of water?”

“No. I forgot. Till now. I forgot.”

Something that had bothered Strike all along had at last been made clear. He let out a great satisfied sigh and grinned. The other two stared.

THE WEEKEND STRETCHED AHEAD, WARM
and empty. Strike sat at his open window again, smoking and watching the hordes of shoppers passing along Denmark Street, the case report open on his lap, the police file on the desk, making a list for himself of points still to be clarified, and sifting the morass of information he had collected.

For a while he contemplated a photograph of the front of number 18 as it had been on the morning after Lula died. There was a small, but to Strike significant, difference between the frontage as it had been then, and as it was now. From time to time he moved to the computer; once to find out the agent who represented Deeby Macc; then to look at the share price for Albris. His notebook lay open beside him at a page full of truncated sentences and questions, all in his dense, spiky handwriting. When his mobile rang, he raised it to his ear without checking who was on the other end.

“Ah, Mr. Strike,” said Peter Gillespie’s voice. “How nice of you to pick up.”

“Oh, hello, Peter,” said Strike. “Got you working weekends now, has he?”

“Some of us have no option but to work at weekends. You haven’t returned any of my weekday phone calls.”

“I’ve been busy. Working.”

“I see. Does that mean we can expect a repayment soon?”

“I expect so.”

“You
expect
so?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “I should be in a position to give you something in the next few weeks.”

“Mr. Strike, your attitude astounds me. You undertook to repay Mr. Rokeby monthly, and you are now in arrears to the tune of—”

“I can’t pay you what I haven’t got. If you hold tight, I should be able to give you all of it back. Maybe even in a oner.”

“I’m afraid that simply isn’t good enough. Unless you bring these repayments up to date—”

“Gillespie,” said Strike, his eyes on the bright sky beyond the window, “we both know old Jonny isn’t going to sue his one-legged war-hero son for repayment of a loan that wouldn’t keep his butler in fucking bath salts. I’ll give him back his money, with interest, within the next couple of months, and he can stick it up his arse and set fire to it, if he likes. Tell him that, from me, and now get off my fucking back.”

Strike hung up, interested to note that he had not really lost his temper at all, but still felt mildly cheerful.

He worked on, in what he had come to think of as Robin’s chair, late into the night. The last thing he did before turning in was to underline, three times, the words “Malmaison Hotel, Oxford” and to circle in heavy ink the name “J. P. Agyeman.”

The country was lumbering towards election day. Strike turned in early on Sunday and watched the day’s gaffes, counterclaims and promises being tabulated on his portable TV. There was an air of joylessness in every news report he watched. The national debt was so huge that it was difficult to comprehend. Cuts were coming, whoever won; deep, painful cuts; and sometimes, with their weasel words, the party leaders reminded Strike of the surgeons who had told him cautiously that he might experience a degree of discomfort; they who would never personally feel the pain that was about to be inflicted.

On Monday morning Strike set out for a rendezvous in Canning Town, where he was to meet Marlene Higson, Lula Landry’s biological mother. The arrangement of this interview had been fraught with difficulty. Bristow’s secretary, Alison, had telephoned Robin with Marlene Higson’s number, and Strike had called her personally. Though clearly disappointed that the stranger on the phone was not a journalist, she had initially expressed herself willing to meet Strike. She had then called the office back, twice: firstly to ask Robin whether the detective would pay her expenses to travel into the center of town, to which a negative answer was given; next, in high dudgeon, to cancel the meeting. A second call from Strike had secured a tentative agreement to meet in her local pub; then an irritable voicemail message cancelled once more.

Strike had then telephoned her for a third time, and told her that he believed his investigation to be in its final phase, after which evidence would be laid to the police, resulting, he had no doubt, in a further explosion of publicity. Now that he came to think about it, he said, if she was unable to help, it might be just as well for her to be protected from another deluge of press inquiry. Marlene Higson had immediately clamored for her right to tell everything she knew, and Strike condescended to meet her, as she had already suggested, in the beer garden of the Ordnance Arms on Monday morning.

He took the train out to Canning Town station. It was overlooked by Canary Wharf, whose sleek, futuristic buildings resembled a series of gleaming metal blocks on the horizon; their size, like that of the national debt, impossible to gauge from such a distance. But a few minutes’ walk later, he was as far from the shining, suited corporate world as it was possible to be. Crammed up alongside dockside developments where many of those financiers lived in neat designer pods, Canning Town exhaled poverty and deprivation. Strike knew it of old, because it had once been home to the old friend who had given him Brett Fearney’s location. Down Barking Road he walked, his back to Canary Wharf, past a building with a sign that advertised “Kills 4 Communities,” at which he frowned for a moment before realizing that somebody had swiped the “S.”

The Ordnance Arms sat beside the English Pawnbroking Company Ltd. It was a large, low-slung, off-white-painted pub. The interior was no-nonsense and utilitarian, with a selection of wooden clocks on a terracotta-colored wall and a lividly patterned piece of red carpet the only gesture to anything as frivolous as decoration. Otherwise, there were two large pool tables, a long and accessible bar and plenty of empty space for milling drinkers. Just now, at eleven in the morning, it was empty except for one little old man in the corner and a cheery serving girl, who addressed her only customer as “Joey” and gave Strike directions through the back.

The beer garden turned out to be the grimmest of concrete backyards, containing bins and a solitary wooden table, at which a woman was sitting on a white plastic chair, with her fat legs crossed and her cigarette held at right angles to her cheek. There was barbed wire on top of the high wall, and a plastic bag had caught in it and was rustling in the breeze. Beyond the wall there rose a vast block of flats, yellow-painted and with evidence of squalor bulging over many of the balconies.

“Mrs. Higson?”

“Call me Marlene, love.”

She looked him up and down, with a slack smile and a knowing gaze. She was wearing a pink Lycra vest top under a zip-up gray hoodie, and leggings that ended inches above her bare gray-white ankles. There were grubby flip-flops on her feet and many gold rings on her fingers; her yellow hair, with its inches of graying brown root, was pulled back into a dirty toweling scrunchie.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“I’ll have a pint of Carling, if you twist my arm.”

The way she bent her body towards him, the way she pushed straw-like strands of hair out of her pouchy eyes, even the way she held her cigarette; all were grotesquely coquettish. Perhaps she knew no other way of relating to anything male. Strike found her simultaneously pathetic and repulsive.

“Shock?” said Marlene Higson, after Strike had bought them both beer, and joined her at the table. “You can say that again, when I’d gave ’er up for lost. It near broke my ’eart when she wen’, but I fort I was giving ’er a better life. I wouldna ’ad the strenf to do it uvverwise. Fort I was giving ’er all the fings I never ’ad. I grew up poor, proper poor. We ’ad nothing. Nothing.”

She looked away from him, drawing hard on her Rothman’s; when her mouth puckered into hard little lines around the cigarette, it looked like a cat’s anus.

“And Dez, me boyfriend, see, wasn’t too keen—you know, with ’er being colored, it were obvious she weren’t ’is. They go darker, see; when she were born, she looked white. But I still never woulda given ’er up if I ’adn’t seen a chance for ’er to get a better life, and I fort, she won’t miss me, she’s too young. I’ve gave ’er a good start, and mebbe, when she’s older, she’ll come and find me. And me dream come true,” she added, with a ghastly show of pathos. “She come’n’ found me.

“I’ll tell you somefing reely strange, right,” she said, without drawing breath. “A man friend of mine says to me, just a week before I got the call from ’er, ‘You know ’oo you look like?’ he says. I says, ‘Dahn be ser silly,’ but he says, ‘Straight up. Across the eyes, and the shape of the eyebrows, y’know?’ ”

She looked hopefully at Strike, who could not bring himself to respond. It seemed impossible that the face of Nefertiti could have sprung from this gray and purple mess.

“You can see it in photos of me when I were younger,” she said, with a hint of pique. “Point is, I fort I was giving her a better life, and then they went an’ give her to those bastards, pardon my language. If I’d’a known, I’d of kept ’er, and I told ’er that. That made ’er cry. I’d of kept her and never let ’er go.

“Oh yeah. She talked to me. It all poured out. She got on all right wiv the father, with S’Ralec. He sounded all right. The mother’s a right mad bitch, though. Oh yeah. Pills. Poppin’ pills. Fackin’ rich bitches takin’ pills f’ their fackin’ nerves. Lula could talk to me, see. Well, it’s a bond, innit. You can’ break it, blood.

“She was scared what that bitch’d do, if she found out Lula was lookin’ for ’er real mum. She was proper worried about what the cow was gonna do when the press found out about me, but there you are, when yore famous like she was, they find out ev’rythin’, don’ they? Oh, the lies they tell, though. Some o’ the things they said abaht me, I’m still thinkin’ o’ suin’.

“What was I sayin’? ’Er mother, yeah. I says to Lula, ‘Why worry, love, sounds to me like you’re better off wivout ’er anyway. Let ’er be pissed off if she don’ want us to see each uvver.’ But she was a good girl, Lula, an’ she kep’ visitin’ ’er, outta duty.

“Anyway, she ’ad ’er own life, she was free to do what she wanted, weren’ she? She ’ad Evan, a man of ’er own. I told ’er I disapproved, mind,” said Marlene Higson, with a pantomime of strictness. “Oh yeah. Drugs, I’ve seen too many go that way. But I ’ave to admit, ’e’s a sweet boy underneath. I ’ave to admit that. He di’n’t have nothin’ to do wiv it. I can tell ya that.”

“Met him, did you?”

“No, but she called ’im once while she was with me and I ’eard them on the phone togevver, and they were a lovely couple. No, I got nuthin’ bad to say about Evan. ’E ’ad nuthin’ to do with it, that’s proved. No, I’ve got nuthin’ bad to say about ’im. As long as ’e’d of gone clean, ’e’d of ’ad my blessing. I said to ’er, ‘Bring ’im along, see wevver I approve,’ but she never. ’E was always busy. ’E’s a lovely-lookin’ boy, under all that ’air,” said Marlene. “You can see it in all ’is photos.”

“Did she talk to you about her neighbors?”

“Oh, that Fred Beastigwee? Yeah, she told me all about ’im, offerin’ ’er parts hin ’is films. I said to ’er, why not? It might be a larf. Even if she ’adn’t liked it, it woulda bin, what, another ’arf mill in the bank?”

Her bloodshot eyes squinted at nothing; she seemed momentarily mesmerized, lost in contemplation of sums so vast and dazzling that they were beyond her ken, like an image of infinity. Merely to speak of them was to taste the power of money, to roll dreams of wealth around her mouth.

“Did you ever hear her talk about Guy Somé?”

“Oh yeah, she liked Gee, ’e was good to ’er. Person’lly, I prefer more classic things. It’s not my kinda style.”

The shocking-pink Lycra, tight on the rolls of fat spilling over the waistband of her leggings, rippled as she leaned forward to tap her cigarette delicately into the ashtray.

“ ‘ ’E’s like a brother to me,’ she sez, an’ I sez, never mind pretend brothers, why don’t we try an’ find my boys togevver? But she weren’t int’rested.”

“Your boys?”

“Me sons, me ovver kids. Yeah, I ’ad two more after ’er: one wiv Dez, an’ then later there wuz another one. Social Services took ’em off me, but I sez to ’er, wiv your money we could find ’em, gimme a bit, not much, I dunno, coupla grand, an’ I’ll try an’ get someone to find ’em, keep it quiet from the press, I’ll ’andle it, I’ll keep you out of it. But she weren’ interested,” repeated Marlene.

“Do you know where your sons are?”

“They took ’em as babies, I dunno where they are now. I was havin’ problems. I ain’t gonna lie to ya, I’ve had a bloody hard life.”

And she told him, at length, about her hard life. It was a sordid story littered with violent men, with addiction and ignorance, neglect and poverty, and an animal instinct for survival that jettisoned babies in its wake, for they demanded skills that Marlene had never developed.

“So you don’t know where your two sons are now?” Strike repeated, twenty minutes later.

“No, how the fuck could I?” said Marlene, who had talked herself into bitterness. “She weren’ int’rested anyway. She already had a white brother, di’n’t she? She wuz after black family. That’s what she reely wanted.”

“Did she ask you about her father?”

“Yeah, an’ I told ’er ev’rything I knew. ’E was an African student. Lived upstairs from me, jus’ along the road ’ere, Barking Road, wiv two others. There’s the bookie’s downstairs now. Very good-looking boy. ’Elped me with me shopping a couple of times.”

To hear Marlene Higson tell it, the courtship had proceeded with an almost Victorian respectability; she and the African student seemed barely to have progressed past handshakes during the first months of their acquaintance.

“And then, ’cos ’e’d ’elped me all them times, one day I asked ’im in, y’know, jus’ as a thank-you, really. I’m not a prejudiced person. Ev’ryone’s the same to me. Fancy a cuppa, I sez, that were all. And then,” said Marlene, harsh reality clanging down amidst the vague impressions of teacups and doilies, “I finds out I’m expecting.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Oh yeah, an’ ’e was full of ’ow ’e was gonna ’elp, an’ shoulder ’is respons’bilities, an’ make sure I wuz all right. An’ then it was the college ’olidays. ’E said ’e was coming back,” said Marlene, contemptuously. “Then ’e ran a mile. Don’t they all? And what was I gonna do, run off to Africa to find ’im?