Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

Landry did not look at his nephew, but picked up his knife and fork and took a first bite of his terrine. Strike moved around the table to make room for Bristow to sit down opposite his uncle.

“Have you spoken to Reuben?” Landry asked Bristow coldly, once he had finished his mouthful of terrine.

“Yes. I’ve said I’ll go over this afternoon and take him through all the deposits and drawings.”

“I’ve just been asking your uncle about the morning before Lula died, John. About when he visited your mother’s flat,” said Strike.

Bristow glanced at Landry.

“I’m interested in what was said and done there,” Strike continued, “because, according to the chauffeur who drove her back from her mother’s flat, Lula seemed distressed.”

“Of course she was distressed,” snapped Landry. “Her mother had cancer.”

“The operation she’d just had was supposed to have cured her, wasn’t it?”

“Yvette had just had a hysterectomy. She was in pain. I don’t doubt Lula was disturbed at seeing her mother in that condition.”

“Did you talk much to Lula, when you saw her?”

A minuscule hesitation.

“Just chit-chat.”

“And you two, did you speak to each other?”

Bristow and Landry did not look at each other. A longer pause, of a few seconds, before Bristow said:

“I was working in the home office. I heard Tony come in, heard him speaking to Mum and Lula.”

“You didn’t look in to say hello?” Strike asked Landry.

Landry considered him through slightly boiled-looking eyes, pale between the light lashes.

“You know, nobody here is obliged to answer your questions, Mr. Strike,” said Landry.

“Of course not,” agreed Strike, and he made a small and incomprehensible note in his pad. Bristow was looking at his uncle. Landry seemed to reconsider.

“I could see through the open door of the home study that John was hard at work, and I didn’t want to disturb him. I sat with Yvette in her room for a while, but she was groggy from the painkillers, so I left her with Lula. I knew,” said Landry, with the faintest undertone of spite, “that there was nobody Yvette would prefer to Lula.”

“Lula’s telephone records show that she called your mobile phone repeatedly after she left Lady Bristow’s flat, Mr. Landry.”

Landry flushed.

“Did you speak to her on the phone?”

“No. I had my mobile switched to silent; I was late for the conference.”

“They vibrate, though, don’t they?”

He wondered what it would take to make Landry leave. He was sure that the lawyer was close.

“I glanced at my phone, saw it was Lula and decided it could wait,” he said shortly.

“You didn’t call her back?”

“No.”

“Didn’t she leave any kind of message, to tell you what she wanted to talk about?”

“No.”

“That seems odd, doesn’t it? You’d just seen her at her mother’s, and you say nothing very important passed between you; yet she spent much of the rest of the afternoon trying to contact you. Doesn’t that seem as though she might have had something urgent to say to you? Or that she wanted to continue a conversation you’d been having at the flat?”

“Lula was the kind of girl who would call somebody thirty times in a row, on the flimsiest pretext. She was spoiled. She expected people to jump to attention at the sight of her name.”

Strike glanced at Bristow.

“She was—sometimes—a bit like that,” her brother muttered.

“Do you think your sister was upset purely because your mother was weak from her operation, John?” Strike asked Bristow. “Her driver, Kieran Kolovas-Jones, is emphatic that she came away from the flat in a dramatically altered mood.”

Before Bristow could answer, Landry, abandoning his food, stood up and began to put on his overcoat.

“Is Kolovas-Jones that strange-looking colored boy?” he asked, looking down at Strike and Bristow. “The one who wanted Lula to get him modeling and acting work?”

“He’s an actor, yeah,” said Strike.

“Yes. On Yvette’s birthday, the last before she became ill, I had a problem with my car. Lula and that man called by to give me a lift to the birthday dinner. Kolovas-Jones spent most of the journey badgering Lula to use her influence with Freddie Bestigui to get him an audition. Quite an encroaching young man. Very familiar in his manner. Of course,” he added, “the less I knew about my adopted niece’s love life, the better, as far as I was concerned.”

Landry threw a ten-pound note down on the table.

“I’ll expect you back at the office soon, John.”

He stood in clear expectation of a response, but Bristow was not paying attention. He was staring, wide-eyed, at the picture on the news story that Strike had been reading when Landry arrived; it showed a young black soldier in the uniform of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.

“What? Yes. I’ll be straight back,” he told his uncle distractedly, who was looking at him coldly. “Sorry,” Bristow added to Strike, as Landry walked away. “It’s just that Wilson—Derrick Wilson, you know, the security guard—he’s got a nephew out in Afghanistan. For a moment, God forbid…but it’s not him. Wrong name. Dreadful, this war, isn’t it? And is it worth this loss of life?”

Strike shifted the weight off his prosthesis—the trudge across the park had not helped the soreness in his leg—and made a noncommittal noise.

“Let’s walk back,” said Bristow, when they had finished eating. “I fancy some fresh air.”

Bristow chose the most direct route, which involved navigating stretches of lawn that Strike would not have chosen to walk, on his own, because it demanded much more energy than tarmac. As they passed the memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales, whispering, tinkling and gushing along its long channel of Cornish granite, Bristow suddenly announced, as though Strike had asked:

“Tony’s never liked me much. He preferred Charlie. People said that Charlie looked like Tony did, when he was a boy.”

“I can’t say he spoke about Charlie with much fondness before you arrived, and he doesn’t seem to have had much time for Lula, either.”

“Didn’t he give you his views on heredity?”

“By implication.”

“No, well, he’s not usually shy about them. It made an extra bond between Lula and me, the fact that Uncle Tony considered us a pair of sow’s ears. It was worse for Lula; at least my biological parents must have been white. Tony’s not what you’d call unprejudiced. We had a Pakistani trainee last year; she was one of the best we’ve ever had, but Tony drove her out.”

“What made you go and work with him?”

“They made me a good offer. It’s the family firm; my grandfather started it, not that that was an inducement. No one wants to be accused of nepotism. But it’s one of the top family law firms in London, and it made my mother happy to think I was following in her father’s footsteps. Did he have a go at my father?”

“Not really. He hinted that Sir Alec might have greased some palms to get Lula.”

“Really?” Bristow sounded surprised. “I don’t think that’s true. Lula was in care. I’m sure the usual procedures were followed.”

There was a short silence, after which Bristow said, a little timidly:

“You, ah, don’t look very much like your father.”

It was the first time that he had acknowledged openly that he might have been sidetracked on to Wikipedia while researching private detectives.

“No,” agreed Strike. “I’m the spitting image of my Uncle Ted.”

“I gather that you and your father aren’t—ah—I mean, you don’t use his name?”