The Cuckoo's Calling (9 page)

“One of the Bestiguis had called them, had they?”

“Yeah. He had. Two uniformed coppers in a panda car.”

“OK,” said Strike. “I want to be clear on this one point: you believed Mrs. Bestigui when she said she’d heard a man up in the top flat?”

“Oh yeah,” said Wilson.

“Why?”

Wilson frowned slightly, thinking, his eyes on the street over Strike’s right shoulder.

“She hadn’t given you any details at this point, had she?” Strike asked. “Nothing about what she’d been doing when she heard this man? Nothing to explain why she was awake at two in the morning?”

“No,” said Wilson. “She never gave me no explanation like that. It was the way she was acting, y’know. Hysterical. Shaking like a wet dog. She kept saying ‘There’s a man up there, he threw her over.’ She was proper scared.

“But there was nobody there; I can swear that to you on the lives of mi kids. The flat was empty, the lift was empty, the stairwell was empty. If he was there, where did he go?”

“The police came,” Strike said, returning mentally to the dark, snowy street, and the broken corpse. “What happened then?”

“When Mrs. Bestigui saw the police car out her window, she came straight back down in her dressing gown, with her husband running after her; she come out into the street, into the snow, and starts bawling at them that there’s a murderer in the building.

“Lights are going on all over the place now. Faces at windows. Half the street’s woken up. People coming out on to the pavements.

“One of the coppers stayed with the body, calling for back-up on his radio, while the other one went with us—me and the Bestiguis—back inside. He told them to go back in their flat and wait, and then he got me to show him the building. We went up to the top floor again; I opened up Lula’s door, showed him the flat, the open window. He checked the place over. I showed him the lift, still on her floor. We went back down the stairs. He asked about the middle flat, so I opened it up with the master key.

“It was dark, and the alarm went off when we went in. Before I could find the light switch or get to the alarm pad, the copper walked straight into the table in the middle of the hall and knocked over this massive vase of roses. Smashed and went everywhere, glass an’ water an’ flowers all over the floor. That caused a loada trouble, later…

“We checked the place. Empty, all the cupboards, every room. The windows were closed and bolted. We went back to the lobby.

“Plainclothes police had arrived by this time. They wanted keys to the basement gym, the pool and the car park. One of ’em went off to take a statement from Mrs. Bestigui, another one was out front, calling for more back-up, because there are more neighbors coming out in the street now, and half of them are talking on the phone while they’re standing there, and some of them are taking pictures. The uniformed coppers are trying to make them go back into their houses. It’s snowing, really heavy snow…

“They got a tent up over the body when forensics arrived. The press arrived round the same time. The police taped off half the street, blocked it off with their cars.”

Strike had cleaned his plate. He shoved it aside, ordered fresh mugs of tea for both of them and took up his pen again.

“How many people work at number eighteen?”

“There’s three guards—me, Colin McLeod an’ Ian Robson. We work in shifts, someone always on duty, round the clock. I shoulda been off that night, but Robson called me roundabout four in the afternoon, said he had this stomach bug, felt really bad with it. So I said I’d stay on, work through the next shift. He’d swapped with me the previous month so I could sort out a bit of fambly business. I owed him.

“So it shouldn’ta been me there,” said Wilson, and for a moment he sat in silence, contemplating the way things should have been.

“The other guards got on OK with Lula, did they?”

“Yeah, they’d tell yuh same as me. Nice girl.”

“Anyone else work there?”

“We gotta couple of Polish cleaners. They both got bad English. You won’t get much outta them.”

Wilson’s testimony, Strike thought, as he scribbled into one of the SIB notebooks he had filched on one of his last visits to Aldershot, was of an unusually high quality: concise, precise and observant. Very few people answered the question they had been posed; even fewer knew how to organize their thoughts so that no follow-up questions were needed to prize information out of them. Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatized memories; he had made himself the confidant of thugs; he had bullied the terrified, baited the dangerous and laid traps for the cunning. None of these skills were required with Wilson, who seemed almost wasted on a pointless trawl through John Bristow’s paranoia.

Nevertheless, Strike had an incurable habit of thoroughness. It would no more have occurred to him to skimp on the interview than to spend the day lying in his underpants on his camp bed, smoking. Both by inclination and by training, because he owed himself respect quite as much as the client, he proceeded with the meticulousness for which, in the army, he had been both feted and detested.

“Can we back up briefly and go through the day preceding her death? What time did you arrive for work?”

“Nine, same as always. Took over from Colin.”

“Do you keep a log of who goes in and out of the building?”

“Yeah, we sign everyone in and out, ’cept residents. There’s a book at the desk.”

“Can you remember who went in and out that day?”

Wilson hesitated.

“John Bristow came to see his sister early that morning, didn’t he?” prompted Strike. “But she’d told you not to let him up?”

“He’s told you that, has he?” asked Wilson, looking faintly relieved. “Yeah, she did. But I felt sorry for the man, y’know? He had a contrac’ to give back to her; he was worried about it, so I let him go up.”

“Had anyone else come into the building that you know of?”

“Yeah, Lechsinka was already there. She’s one of the cleaners. She always arrives at seven; she was mopping the stairwell when I got in. Nobody else came until the guy from the security comp’ny, to service the alarms. We get it done every six months. He musta come around nine forty; something like that.”

“Was this someone you knew, the man from the security firm?”

“No, he was a new guy. Very young. They always send someone diff’rent. Missus Bestigui and Lula were still at home, so I let him into the middle flat, and showed him where the control panel was an’ got him started. Lula went out while I was still in there, showin’ the guy the fuse box an’ the panic buttons.”

“You saw her go out, did you?”

“Yeah, she passed the open door.”

“Did she say hello?”

“No.”

“You said she usually did?”

“I don’t think she noticed me. She looked like she was in a hurry. She was going to see her sick mother.”

“How d’you know, if she didn’t speak to you?”

“Inquest,” said Wilson succinctly. “After I’d shown the security guy where everything was, I went back downstairs, an’ after Missus Bestigui went out, I let him into their flat to check that system too. He didn’t need me tuh stay with him there; the positions of the fuse boxes and panic buttons are the same in all the flats.”

“Where was Mr. Bestigui?”

“He’d already left for work. Eight he leaves, every day.”

Three men in hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets entered the café and sat at a neighboring table, newspapers under their arms, work boots clogged with filth.

“How long would you say you were away from the desk each time you were with the security guy?”

“Mebbe five minutes in the middle flat,” said Wilson. “A minute each for the others.”

“When did the security guy leave?”

“Late morning. I can’t remember exactly.”

“But you’re sure he left?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Anyone else visit?”

“There was a few deliveries, but it was quiet compared to how the rest of the week had been.”

“Earlier in the week had been busy, had it?”

“Yeah, we’d had a lot of coming and going, because of Deeby Macc arriving from LA. People from the production company were in and out of Flat Two, checking the place was set up for him, filling up the fridge and that.”

“Can you remember what deliveries there were that day?”

“Packages for Macc an’ Lula. An’ roses—I helped the guy up with them, because they come in a massive,” Wilson placed his large hands apart to show the size, “a huh-
uge
vase, and we set ’em up on a table in the hallway of Flat Two. That’s the roses that got smashed.”

“You said that caused trouble; what did you mean?”

“Mister Bestigui had sent them to Deeby Macc an’ when he heard they’d been ruined he was pissed off. Shoutin’ like a maniac.”

“When was this?”

“While the police were there. When they were trying to interview his wife.”

“A woman had just fallen to her death past his front windows, and he was upset that someone had wrecked his flowers?”

“Yeah,” said Wilson, with a slight shrug. “He’s like that.”

“Does he know Deeby Macc?”

Wilson shrugged again.

“Did this rapper ever come to the flat?”

Wilson shook his head.

“After we had all this trouble, he went to a hotel.”

“How long were you away from the desk when you helped put the roses in Flat Two?”

“Mebbe five minutes; ten at most. After that, I was on the desk all day.”

“You mentioned packages for Macc and Lula.”

“Yeah, from some designer, but I gave them to Lechsinka to put in the flats. It was clothes for him an’ handbags for her.”

“And as far as you’re aware, everyone who went in that day went out again?”

“Oh yeah,” said Wilson. “All logged in the book at the front desk.”

“How often is the code on the external keypad changed?”

“It’s been changed since she died, because half the Met knew it by the time they were finished,” said Wilson. “But it din change the three months Lula lived there.”

“D’you mind telling me what it was?”

“Nineteen sixty-six,” said Wilson.

“ ‘They think it’s all over’?”

“Yeah,” said Wilson. “McLeod was always bellyaching about it. Wanted it changed.”

“How many people d’you think knew the door code before Lula died?”

“Not that many.”

“Delivery men? Postmen? Bloke who reads the gas meter?”

“People like that are always buzzed in by us, from the desk. The residents don’t normally use the keypad, because we can see them on camera, so we open the door for them. The keypad’s only there in case there’s no one on the desk; sometimes we’d be in the back room, or helping with something upstairs.”

“And the flats all have individual keys?”

“Yeah, and individual alarm systems.”

“Was Lula’s set?”

“No.”

“What about the pool and the gym? Are they alarmed?”

“Jus’ keys. Everyone who lives in the building gets a set of pool and gym keys along with their flat keys. And one key to the door leading to the underground car park. That door’s got an alarm on it.”

“Was it set?”

“Dunno, I wasn’t there when they checked that one. It shoulda been. The guy from the security firm had checked all the alarms that morning.”

“Were all these doors locked that night?”

Wilson hesitated.

“Not all of them. The door to the pool was open.”

“Had anyone used it that day, do you know?”

“I can’t remember anyone using it.”

“So how long had it been open?”

“I dunno. Colin was on the previous night. He shoulda checked it.”

“OK,” said Strike. “You said you thought the man Mrs. Bestigui had heard was Duffield, because you’d heard them arguing previously. When was that?”

“Not long before they split, ’bout two months before she died. She’d thrown him out of her flat and he was hammerin’ on the door and kicking it, trying to break it down, calling her filthy names. I went upstairs to get him out.”

“Did you use force?”

“Didn’t need to. When he saw me coming he picked up his stuff—she’d thrown his jacket and his shoes out after him—and just walked out past me. He was stoned,” said Wilson. “Glassy eyes, y’know. Sweating. Filthy T-shirt with crap all down it. I never knew what the fuck she saw in him.

“And here’s Kieran,” he added, his tone lightening. “Lula’s driver.”

A MAN IN HIS MID-TWENTIES
was edging his way into the tiny café. He was short, slight and extravagantly good-looking.

“Hey, Derrick,” he said, and the driver and security guard exchanged a dap greeting, gripping each other’s hands and bumping knuckles, before Kolovas-Jones took his seat beside Wilson.

A masterpiece produced by an indecipherable cocktail of races, Kolovas-Jones’s skin was an olive-bronze, his cheekbones chiseled, his nose slightly aquiline, his black-lashed eyes a dark hazel, his straight hair slicked back off his face. His startling looks were thrown into relief by the conservative shirt and tie he wore, and his smile was consciously modest, as though he sought to disarm other men, and preempt their resentment.

“Where’sa car?” asked Derrick.

“Electric Lane.” Kolovas-Jones pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “I got maybe twenty minutes. Gotta be back at the West End by four. Howya doing?” he added, holding out his hand to Strike, who shook it. “Kieran Kolovas-Jones. You’re…?”

“Cormoran Strike. Derrick says you’ve got—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I dunno whether it matters, probably not, but the police didn’t give a shit. I just wanna know I’ve told someone, right? I’m not saying it wasn’t suicide, you understand,” he added. “I’m just saying I’d like this thing cleared up. Coffee, please, love,” he added to the middle-aged waitress, who remained impassive, impervious to his charm.

“What’s worrying you?” Strike asked.

“I always drove her, right?” said Kolovas-Jones, launching into his story in a way that told Strike he had rehearsed it. “She always asked for me.”

“Did she have a contract with your company?”

“Yeah. Well…”

“It’s run through the front desk,” said Derrick. “One of the services provided. If anyone wants a car, we call Execars, Kieran’s company.”

“Yeah, but she always asked for me,” Kolovas-Jones reiterated firmly.

“You got on with her, did you?”

“Yeah, we got on good,” said Kolovas-Jones. “We’d got—you know—I’m not saying close—well, close, yeah, kinda. We were friendly; the relationship had gone beyond driver and client, right?”

“Yeah? How far beyond?”

“Nah, nothing like that,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a grin. “Nothing like that.”

But Strike saw that the driver was not at all displeased that the idea had been mooted, that it had been thought plausible.

“I’d been driving her for a year. We talked a lot, y’know. Had a lot in common. Similar backgrounds, y’know?”

“In what way?”

“Mixed race,” said Kolovas-Jones. “And things were a bit dysfunctional in my family, right, so I knew where she was coming from. She didn’t know that many people like her, not once she got famous. Not to talk to properly.”

“Being mixed race was an issue for her, was it?”

“Growing up black in a white family, what d’you think?”

“And you had a similar childhood?”

“Me father’s half West Indian, half Welsh; me mother’s half Scouse, half Greek. Lula usedta say she envied me,” he said, sitting up a little straighter. “She said, ‘You know where you come from, even if it is bloody everywhere.’ And on my birthday, right,” he added, as though he had not yet sufficiently impressed upon Strike something which he felt was important, “she give me this Guy Somé jacket that was worth, like, nine hundred quid.”

Evidently expected to show a reaction, Strike nodded, wondering whether Kolovas-Jones had come along simply to tell somebody how close he had been to Lula Landry. Satisfied, the driver went on:

“So, right, the day she died—day before, I should say—I drove her to her mum’s in the morning, right? And she was not happy. She never liked going to see her mother.”

“Why not?”

“Because that woman’s fucking weird,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I drove them both out for a day, once, I think it was the mother’s birthday. She’s fucking creepy, Lady Yvette.
Darling, my darling
to Lula, every other word. She used to hang off her. Just fucking strange and possessive and over the top, right?

“Anyway, that day, right, her mum had just got out of hospital, so that wasn’t gonna be fun, was it? Lula wasn’t looking forward to seeing her. She was uptight like I hadn’t seen her before.

“And then I told her I couldn’t drive her that night, because I was booked for Deeby Macc, and she wasn’t happy about that, neither.”

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause she liked me driving her, didn’t she?” said Kolovas-Jones, as though Strike was being obtuse. “I used to help her out with the paps and stuff, do a bit of bodyguard stuff to get her in and out of places.”

By the merest flicker of his facial muscles, Wilson managed to convey what he thought of the suggestion that Kolovas-Jones was bodyguard material.

“Couldn’t you have swapped with another driver, and driven her instead of Macc?”

“I coulda, but I didn’t want to,” Kolovas-Jones confessed. “I’m a big Deeby fan. Wanted to meet him. That’s what Lula was pissed off about. Anyway,” he hurried on, “I took her to her mum’s, and waited, and then, this is the bit I wanted to tell you about, right?

“She come out of her mother’s place and she was strange. Not like I’d ever seen her, right? Quiet, really quiet. Like she was in shock or something. Then she asked me for a pen, and she started scribbling something on a bit of blue paper. Wasn’t talking to me. Wasn’t saying anything. Just writing.

“So, I drove her to Vashti, ’cause she was supposedta be meeting her friend there for lunch, right—”

“What’s Vashti? What friend?”

“Vashti—it’s this shop—boutique, they call it. There’s a café in it. Trendy place. And the friend was…” Kolovas-Jones clicked his fingers repeatedly, frowning. “She was that friend she’d made when she was in hospital for her mental problems. What was her fucking name? I used to drive the two of them around. Christ…Ruby? Roxy? Raquelle? Something like that. She was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith. She was homeless.

“Anyway, Lula goes into the shop, right, and she’d told me on the way to her mother’s she was gonna have lunch there, right, but she’s only in there a quarter of an hour or something, then she comes out alone and tells me to drive her home. So that was a bit fucking strange, right? And Raquelle, or whatever her name is—it’ll come back to me—wasn’t with her. We usedta give Raquelle a lift home normally, when they’d been out together. And the blue piece of paper was gone. And Lula never said a word to me all the way back home.”

“Did you mention this blue paper to the police?”

“Yeah. They didn’t think it was worth shit,” said Kolovas-Jones. “Said it was probably a shopping list.”

“Can you remember what it looked like?”

“It was just blue. Like airmail paper.”

He looked down at his watch.

“I gotta go in ten.”

“So that was the last time you ever saw Lula?”

“Yeah, it was.”

He picked at the corner of a fingernail.

“What was your first thought, when you heard she was dead?”

“I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones, chewing at the hangnail he had been picking. “I was fucking shocked. You don’t expect that, do you? Not when you’ve just seen someone hours before. The press were all saying it was Duffield, because they’d had a row in that nightclub and stuff. I thought it might’ve been him, to tell you the truth. Bastard.”

“You knew him, did you?”

“I drove them a coupla times,” said Kolovas-Jones. A flaring of his nostrils, a tightness around the lines of his mouth, together suggested a bad smell.

“What did you think of him?”

“I thought he was a talentless tosser.” With unexpected virtuosity, he suddenly adopted a flat, drawling voice:
“Are we gonna need him later, Lules? He’d better wait, yeah?”
said Kolovas-Jones, crackling with temper. “Never once spoke to me directly. Ignorant, sponging piece of shit.”

Derrick said, sotto voce, “Kieran’s an actor.”

“Just bit parts,” said Kolovas-Jones. “So far.”

And he digressed into a brief exposition of the television dramas in which he had appeared, exhibiting, in Strike’s estimation, a marked desire to be considered more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame. To have had it so often in the back of his car and not yet to have caught it from his passengers must (thought Strike) have been tantalizing and, perhaps, infuriating.

“Kieran auditioned for Freddie Bestigui,” said Wilson. “Didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a lack of enthusiasm that told the outcome plainly.

“How did that come about?” asked Strike.

“Usual way,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a hint of hauteur. “Through my agent.”

“Nothing came of it?”

“They decided to go in another direction,” said Kolovas-Jones. “They wrote out the part.”

“OK, so you picked up Deeby Macc from, where—Heathrow?—that night?”

“Terminal Five, yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, apparently brought back to a sense of mundane reality, and glancing at his watch. “Listen, I’d better get going.”

“All right if I walk you back to the car?” asked Strike.

Wilson showed himself happy to go along too; Strike paid the bill for all three of them and they left. Out on the pavement, Strike offered both his companions cigarettes; Wilson declined, Kolovas-Jones accepted.

A silver Mercedes was parked a short distance away, around the corner in Electric Lane.

“Where did you take Deeby when he arrived?” Strike asked Kolovas-Jones, as they approached the car.

“He wanted a club, so I took him to Barrack.”

“What time did you get him there?”

“I dunno…half eleven? Quarter to twelve? He was wired. Didn’t want to sleep, he said.”

“Why Barrack?”

“Friday night at Barrack’s best hip-hop night in London,” said Kolovas-Jones, on a slight laugh, as though this was common knowledge. “And he musta liked it, ’cause it was gone three by the time he came out again.”

“So did you drive him to Kentigern Gardens and find the police there, or…?”

“I’d already heard on the car radio what had happened,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I told Deeby when he got back to the car. His entourage all started making phone calls, waking up people at the record company, trying to make other arrangements. They got him a suite at Claridges; I drove him there. I didn’t get home till gone five. Switched on the news and watched it all on Sky. Fucking unbelievable.”

“I’ve been wondering who let the paparazzi staking out number eighteen know that Deeby wasn’t going to be there for hours. Someone tipped them off; that’s why they’d left the street before Lula fell.”

“Yeah? I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones.

He increased his pace very slightly, reaching the car ahead of the other two and unlocking it.

“Didn’t Macc have a load of luggage with him? Was it in the car with you?”

“Nah, it’d all been sent ahead by the record company days before. He got off the plane with just a carry-on bag—and about ten security people.”

“So you weren’t the only car sent for him?”

“There were four cars—but Deeby himself was with me.”

“Where did you wait for him, while he was in the nightclub?”

“I just parked the car and waited,” said Kolovas-Jones. “Just off Glasshouse Street.”

“With the other three cars? Were you all together?”

“You don’t find four parking spaces side by side in the middle of London, mate,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I dunno where the others were parked.”

Still holding the driver’s door open, he glanced at Wilson, then back at Strike.

“How’s any of this matter?” he demanded.

“I’m just interested,” said Strike, “in how it works, when you’re with a client.”

“It’s fucking tedious,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a sudden flash of irritation, “that’s what it is. Driving’s mostly waiting around.”

“Have you still got the control for the doors to the underground garage that Lula gave you?” Strike asked.

“What?” said Kolovas-Jones, although Strike would have taken an oath that the driver had heard him. The flicker of animosity was undisguised now, and it seemed to extend not only to Strike, but also to Wilson, who had listened without comment since noting aloud that Kolovas-Jones was an actor.

“Have you still got—”

“Yeah, I’ve still got it. I still drive Mr. Bestigui, don’t I?” said Kolovas-Jones. “Right, I gotta go. See ya, Derrick.”

He threw his half-smoked cigarette into the road and got into the car.

“If you remember anything else,” said Strike, “like the name of the friend Lula was meeting in Vashti, will you give me a call?”

He handed Kolovas-Jones a card. The driver, already pulling on his seat belt, took it without looking at it.

“I’m gonna be late.”

Wilson raised his hand in farewell. Kolovas-Jones slammed the car door, revved the engine and reversed out of the parking space, scowling.

“He’s a bit of a star-fucker,” said Wilson, as the car pulled away. It was a kind of apology for the younger man. “He loved drivin’ her. He tries to drive all the famous ones. He’s been hoping Bestigui’ll cast him in something for two years. He was well pissed off when he didn’t get that part.”

“What was it?”

“Drug dealer. Some film.”

They walked off together in the direction of Brixton underground station, past a gaggle of black schoolgirls in uniforms with blue plaid skirts. One girl’s long beaded hair made Strike think, again, of his sister, Lucy.

“Bestigui’s still living at number eighteen, is he?” asked Strike.

“Oh yeah,” said Wilson.

“What about the other two flats?”

“There’s a Ukrainian commodities broker and his wife renting Flat Two now. Got a Russian interested in Three, but he hasn’t made an offer yet.”

“Is there any chance,” asked Strike, as they were momentarily impeded by a tiny hooded, bearded man like an Old Testament prophet, who stopped in front of them and slowly stuck out his tongue, “that I could come and have a look inside sometime?”

“Yeah, all right,” said Wilson after a pause in which his gaze slid furtively over Strike’s lower legs. “Buzz mi. But it’ll have to be when Bestigui’s out, y’understand. He’s one quarrelsome man, and I need my job.”