The Cuckoo's Calling (39 page)

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into Pinewood Studios was effected by a combination of fast talk, intimidation and the flashing of genuine, though outdated, official documentation; the security guard, initially impassive, was rocked by Strike’s air of easy confidence, by the words “Special Investigation Branch,”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 man 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.

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a few weeks, Mr. Bestigui…”

“You are in a shitload of trouble, my friend,” said Bestigui, advancing with a set jaw, his thick shoulders braced.

“…to talk about the night Lula Landry died.”

Two men in white shirts and carrying walkie-talkies were running along the glass wall to Strike’s right; young, fit, tense-looking.

“Get him out of here!” Bestigui roared, pointing at Strike, as the two guards bounced off each other in the doorway, then forced their way inside.

“Specifically,” said Strike, “about the whereabouts of your wife, Tansy, when Lula fell…”

“Get him out of here and call the fucking police! How did he get in here?”

“…because I’ve been shown some photographs that make sense of your wife’s testimony. Get your hands off me,” Strike added to the younger of the guards now tugging his upper arm, “or I’ll knock you through that window.”

The security guard did not let go, but looked towards Bestigui for instructions.

The producer’s bright dark eyes were fixed intently on Strike. He clenched and relaxed his thug’s hands. After several long seconds he said:

“You’re full of shit.”

But he did not instruct the waiting guards to drag Strike from his room.

“The photographer was standing on the pavement opposite your house in the early hours of the eighth of January. The guy who took the pictures doesn’t realize what he’s got. If you don’t want to discuss it, fine; police or press, I don’t care. It’ll come to the same thing in the end.”

Strike took a few steps towards the door; the guards, each of whom was still holding him by the arm, were caught by surprise, and momentarily forced into the absurd position of holding him back.

“Get out,” Bestigui said abruptly to his minions. “I’ll let you know if I need you. Close the door behind you.”

They left. When the door had closed, Bestigui said:

“All right, whatever your fucking name is, you can have five minutes.”

Strike sat down, uninvited, in one of the black leather chairs facing Bestigui’s desk, while the producer returned to his seat behind it, subjecting Strike to a hard, cold glare that was quite unlike the one Strike had received from Bestigui’s estranged wife; this was the intense scrutiny of a professional gambler. Bestigui reached for a packet of cigarillos, pulled a black glass ashtray towards himself and lit up with a gold lighter.

“All right, let’s hear what these alleged photographs show,” he said, squinting through clouds of pungent smoke, the picture of a film mafioso.

“The silhouette,” said Strike, “of a woman crouching on the balcony outside your sitting-room windows. She looks naked, but as you and I know, she was in her underwear.”

Bestigui puffed hard for a few seconds, then removed the cigarillo and said:

“Bullshit. You couldn’t see that from the street. Solid stone bottom of the balcony; from that angle you wouldn’t see anything. You’re taking a punt.”

“The lights were on in your sitting room. You can see her outline through the gaps in the stone. There was room then, of course, because the shrubs weren’t there, were they? People can’t resist fiddling with the scene afterwards, even when they’ve got away with it,” Strike added, conversationally. “You were trying to pretend that there was never any room for anyone to squat on that balcony, weren’t you? But you can’t go back and Photoshop reality. Your wife was perfectly positioned to hear what happened up on the third-floor balcony just before Lula Landry died.

“Here’s what I think happened,” Strike went on, while Bestigui continued to squint through the smoke rising from his cigarillo. “You and your wife had a row while she was undressing for bed. Perhaps you found her stash in the bathroom, or you interrupted her doing a couple of lines. So you decided an appropriate punishment would be to shut her outside on the sub-zero balcony.

“People might ask how a street full of paps didn’t notice a part-naked woman being shoved out on a balcony over their heads, but the snow was falling very thickly, and they’ll have been stamping their feet trying to keep the circulation going, and their attention was focused on the ends of the street, while they were waiting for Lula and Deeby Macc. And Tansy didn’t make any noise, did she? She ducked down and hid; she didn’t want to show herself, half naked, in front of thirty photographers. You might even have shoved her out there at the same time that Lula’s car came round the corner. Nobody would have been looking at your windows if Lula Landry had just appeared in a skimpy little dress.”

“You’re full of shit,” said Bestigui. “You haven’t got any photographs.”

“I never said I had them. I said I’d been shown them.”

Bestigui took the cigarillo from his lips, changed his mind about talking, and replaced it. Strike allowed several moments to elapse, but when it became clear that Bestigui was not going to avail himself of the opportunity to speak, he continued:

“Tansy must’ve started hammering on the window immediately after Landry fell past her. You weren’t expecting your wife to start screaming and banging on the glass, were you? Understandably averse to anyone witnessing your bit of domestic abuse, you opened up. She ran straight past you, screaming her head off, out of the flat, and downstairs to Derrick Wilson.

“At which point you looked down over the balustrade and saw Lula Landry lying dead in the street below.”

Bestigui puffed smoke slowly, without taking his eyes off Strike’s face.

“What you did next might seem quite incriminating to a jury. You didn’t dial 999. You didn’t run after your half-frozen, hysterical wife. You didn’t even—which the jury might find more understandable—run and flush away the coke you knew was lying in open view in the bathroom.

“No, what you did next, before following your wife or calling the police, was to wipe that window clean. There’d be no prints to show that Tansy had placed her hands on the outside of the glass, would there? Your priority was to make sure that nobody could prove you had shoved your wife out on to a balcony in a temperature of minus ten. What with your unsavory reputation for assault and abuse, and the possibility of a lawsuit from a young employee in the air, you weren’t going to hand the press or a prosecutor any additional evidence, were you?

“Once you’d satisfied yourself that you’d removed any trace of her prints from the glass, you ran downstairs and compelled her to return to your flat. In the short time available to you before the police arrived, you bullied her into agreeing not to admit where she’d been when the body fell. I don’t know what you promised her, or threatened her with; but whatever it was, it worked.

“You still didn’t feel completely safe, though, because she was so shocked and distressed you thought she might blurt out the whole story. So you tried to distract the police by ranting about the flowers that had been knocked over in Deeby Macc’s flat, hoping Tansy would pull herself together and stick to the deal.

“Well she has, hasn’t she? God knows how much it’s cost you, but she’s let herself be dragged through the dirt in the press; she’s put up with being called a coke-addled fantasist; she’s stuck to her cock-and-bull story about hearing Landry and the murderer argue, through two floors, and soundproofed glass.

“Once she realizes there’s photographic proof of where she was, though,” said Strike, “I think she’ll be glad to come clean. Your wife might think she loves money more than anything in the world, but her conscience is troubling her. I’m confident she’ll crack pretty fast.”

Bestigui had smoked his cigarillo down to its last few millimeters. Slowly he ground it out in the black glass ashtray. Long seconds passed, and the noise in the outside office filtered through the glass wall beside them: voices, the ringing of a telephone.

Bestigui stood up and lowered Roman blinds of canvas down over the glass partition, so that none of the nervy girls in the office beyond could see in. He sat back down and ran thick fingers thoughtfully over the crumpled terrain of his lower face, glancing at Strike and away again, towards the blank cream canvas he had created. Strike could almost see options occurring to the producer, as though he was riffling a deck of cards.

“The curtains were drawn,” Bestigui said finally. “There wasn’t enough light coming out of the windows to make out a woman hiding on the balcony. Tansy’s not going to change her story.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Strike, stretching out his legs; the prosthesis was still uncomfortable. “When I put it to her that the legal term for what the pair of you have done is ‘conspiring to prevent the course of justice,’ and that a belated show of conscience might keep her out of the nick; when I add in the public sympathy she’s bound to get as the victim of domestic abuse, and the amount of money she’s likely to be offered for exclusive rights to her story; when she realizes she’s going to get her say in court, and that she’ll be believed, and that she’ll be able to bring about the conviction of the man she heard murdering her neighbor—Mr. Bestigui, I don’t think even you’ve got enough money to keep her quiet.”

The coarse skin around Bestigui’s mouth flickered. He picked up his packet of cigarillos but did not extract one. There was a long silence during which he turned the packet between his fingers, round and round.

At last he said:

“I’m admitting nothing. Get out.”

Strike did not move.

“I know you’re keen to phone your lawyer,” he said, “but I think you’re overlooking the silver lining here.”

“I’ve had enough of you. I said, get out.”

“However unpleasant it’s going to be, having to admit to what happened that night, it’s still preferable to becoming the prime suspect in a murder case. It’s going to be about the lesser of evils from here on in. If you cough to what really happened, you’re putting yourself in the clear for the actual murder.”

He had Bestigui’s attention now.

“You couldn’t have done it,” said Strike, “because if you’d been the one who threw Landry off the balcony two floors above, you wouldn’t have been able to let Tansy back inside within seconds of the body falling. I think you shut your wife outside, headed off into the bedroom, got into bed, got comfy—the police said the bed looked disarranged and slept in—and kept an eye on the clock. I don’t think you wanted to fall asleep. If you’d left her too long on that balcony, you’d have been up for manslaughter. No wonder Wilson said she was shaking like a whippet. Probably in the early stages of hypothermia.”

Another silence, except for Bestigui’s fat fingers drumming lightly on the edge of the desk. Strike took out his notebook.

“Are you ready to answer a few questions now?”

“Fuck you!”

The producer was suddenly consumed by the rage he had so far suppressed, his jaw jutting and his shoulders hunched, level with his ears. Strike could imagine him looking thus as he bore down on his emaciated, coked-up wife, hands outstretched.