Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

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.”