Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

“Hadn’t he expressed doubts about the suicide theory to you?”

“He’d expressed shock, naturally, like all of us, but I certainly don’t recall any suggestion of murder.”

“Are you close to your nephew, Mr. Landry?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“It might explain why he didn’t tell you what he was thinking.”

“John and I have a perfectly amicable working relationship.”

“‘Working relationship’?”

“Yes, Mr. Strike: we work together. Do we live in each other’s pockets outside the office? No. But we are both involved in caring for my sister—Lady Bristow, John’s mother, who is now a terminal case. Our out-of-hours conversations usually concern Yvette.”

“John strikes me as a dutiful son.”

“Yvette’s all he has left now, and the fact that she’s dying isn’t helping his mental condition either.”

“She’s hardly all he’s got left. There’s Alison, isn’t there?”

“I am not aware that that is a very serious relationship.”

“Perhaps one of John’s motives, in employing me, is a desire to give his mother the truth before she dies?”

“The truth won’t help Yvette. Nobody enjoys accepting that they have reaped what they have sown.”

Strike said nothing. As he had expected, the lawyer could not resist the temptation to clarify, and after a moment he continued:

“Yvette has always been morbidly maternal. She adores babies.” He spoke as though this was faintly disgusting, a kind of perversion. “She would have been one of those embarrassing women who have twenty children if she could have found a man of sufficient virility. Thank God Alec was sterile—or hasn’t John mentioned that?”

“He told me Sir Alec Bristow wasn’t his natural father, if that’s what you mean.”

If Landry was disappointed not to be first with the information, he rallied at once.

“Yvette and Alec adopted the two boys, but she had no idea how to manage them. She is, quite simply, an atrocious mother. No control, no discipline; complete overindulgence and a point-blank refusal to see what is under her nose. I don’t say it was all down to her parenting—who knows what the genetic influences were—but John was whiny, histrionic and clingy and Charlie was completely delinquent, with the result—”

Landry stopped talking abruptly, patches of color high in his cheeks.

“With the result that he rode over the edge of a quarry?” Strike suggested.

He had said it to watch Landry’s reaction, and was not disappointed. He had the impression of a tunnel contracting, a distant door closing: a shutting down.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. And it was a bit late, then, for Yvette to start screaming and clawing at Alec, and passing out cold on the floor. If she’d had an iota of control, the boy wouldn’t have set out expressly to defy her. I was there,” said Landry, stonily. “On a weekend visit. Easter Sunday. I had been for a walk down to the village, and I came back to find them all looking for him. I headed straight for the quarry. I knew, you see. It was the place he’d been forbidden to go—so there he was.”

“You found the body, did you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That must have been highly distressing.”

“Yes,” said Landry, his lips barely moving. “It was.”

“And it was after Charlie died, wasn’t it, that your sister and Sir Alec adopted Lula?”

“Which was probably the single most stupid thing Alec Bristow ever agreed to,” said Landry. “Yvette had already proven herself a disastrous mother; was she likely to be any more successful while in a state of abandoned grief? Of course, she’d always wanted a daughter, a baby to dress in pink, and Alec thought it would make her happy. He always gave Yvette anything she wanted. He was besotted with her from the moment she joined his typing pool, and he was an unvarnished East Ender. Yvette has always had a predilection for a bit of rough.”

Strike wondered what the real source of Landry’s anger could be.

“You don’t get along with your sister, Mr. Landry?” asked Strike.

“We get along perfectly well; it is simply that I am not blind to what Yvette is, Mr. Strike, nor how much of her misfortune is her own damn fault.”

“Was it difficult for them to get approved for another adoption after Charlie died?” asked Strike.

“I daresay it would have been, if Alec hadn’t been a multimillionaire,” snorted Landry. “I know the authorities were concerned about Yvette’s mental health, and they were both a bit long in the tooth by then. It’s a great pity that they weren’t turned down. But Alec was a man of infinite resourcefulness and he had all sorts of strange contacts from his barrow-boy days. I don’t know the details, but I’d be prepared to bet money changed hands somewhere. Even so, he couldn’t manage a Caucasian. He brought another child of completely unknown provenance into the family, to be raised by a depressed and hysterical woman of no judgment. It was hardly a surprise to me that the result was catastrophic. Lula was as unstable as John and as wild as Charlie, and Yvette had just as little idea how to manage her.”

Scribbling away for Landry’s benefit, Strike wondered whether his belief in genetic predetermination accounted for some of Bristow’s preoccupation with Lula’s black relatives. Doubtless Bristow had been privy to his uncle’s views through the years; children absorbed the views of their relatives at some deep, visceral level. He, Strike, had known in his bones, long before the words had ever been said in front of him, that his mother was not like other mothers, that there was (if he believed in the unspoken code that bound the rest of the adults around him) something shameful about her.

“You saw Lula the day she died, I think?” Strike said.

Landry’s eyelashes were so fair they looked silver.

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah…” Strike flicked back through his notebook ostentatiously, coming to a halt at an entirely blank page. “…you met her at your sister’s flat, didn’t you? When Lula called in to see Lady Bristow?”

“Who told you that? John?”

“It’s all in the police file. Isn’t it true?”

“Yes, it’s perfectly true, but I can’t see how it’s relevant to anything we’ve been discussing.”

“I’m sorry; when you arrived, you said you’d been expecting to hear from me. I got the impression you were happy to answer questions.”

Landry had the air of a man who has found himself unexpectedly snookered.

“I have nothing to add to the statement I gave to the police,” he said at last.

“Which is,” said Strike, leafing backwards through blank pages, “that you dropped in to visit your sister that morning, where you met your niece, and that you then drove to Oxford to attend a conference on international developments in family law?”

Landry was chewing on air again.

“That’s correct,” he said.

“What time would you say you arrived at your sister’s flat?”

“It must have been about ten,” said Landry, after a short pause.

“And you stayed how long?”

“Half an hour, perhaps. Maybe longer. I really can’t remember.”

“And you drove directly from there to the conference in Oxford?”

Over Landry’s shoulder, Strike saw John Bristow questioning a waitress; he appeared out of breath and a little disheveled, as though he had been running. A rectangular leather case dangled from his hand. He glanced around, panting slightly, and when he spotted the back of Landry’s head, Strike thought that he looked frightened.

“JOHN,” SAID STRIKE, AS HIS client approached them.

“Hi, Cormoran.”