Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

“Did you go into the changing room with her?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened in the changing room?” prompted Strike.

Her eyes reminded him of those of a bull he had once come face to face with as a small boy: deep-set, deceptively stoic, unfathomable.

“She put on the dress,” said Rochelle.

“She didn’t do anything else? Didn’t call anyone?”

“No. Well, yeah. She mighta.”

“D’you know who she called?”

“I can’t remember.”

She drank, obscuring her face again with the paper cup.

“Was it Evan Duffield?”

“It mighta bin.”

“Can you remember what she said?”

“No.”

“One of the shop assistants overheard her, while she was on the phone. She seemed to be making an appointment to meet someone at her flat much later. In the early hours of the morning, the girl thought.”

“Yeah?”

“So that doesn’t seem like it could have been Duffield, does it, seeing as she already had an arrangement to meet him at Uzi?”

“Know a lot, don’t you?” she said.

“Everyone knows they met at Uzi that night,” said Strike. “It was in all the papers.”

The dilating or contracting of Rochelle’s pupils would be almost impossible to see, because of the virtually black irises surrounding them.

“Yeah, I s’pose,” she conceded.

“Was it Deeby Macc?”

“No!” She yelped it on a laugh. “She din’ know his number.”

“Famous people can nearly always get each other’s numbers,” said Strike.

Rochelle’s expression clouded. She glanced down at the blank screen on her gaudy pink mobile.

“I don’ think she had his,” she said.

“But you heard her trying to make an arrangement to meet someone in the small hours?”

“No,” said Rochelle, avoiding his eyes, swilling the dregs of her coffee around the paper cup. “I can’ remember nuthin’ like that.”

“You understand how important this could be?” said Strike, careful to keep his tone unthreatening. “If Lula made an arrangement to meet someone at the time she died? The police never knew about this, did they? You never told them?”

“I gotta go,” she said, throwing down the last morsel of cookie, grabbing the strap of her cheap handbag and glaring at him.

Strike said:

“It’s nearly lunchtime. Can I buy you anything else?”

“No.”

But she did not move. He wondered how poor she was, whether she ate regularly or not. There was something about her, beneath the surliness, that he found touching: a fierce pride, a vulnerability.

“Yeah, all right then,” she said, dropping her handbag and slumping back on to the hard chair. “I’ll have a Big Mac.”

He was afraid she might leave while he was at the counter, but when he returned with two trays, she was still there; she even thanked him grudgingly.

Strike tried a different tack.

“You know Kieran quite well, do you?” he asked, pursuing the glow that had illuminated her at the mention of his name.

“Yeah,” she said, self-consciously. “I met him a lot with ’er. ’E wuz always driving ’er.”

“He says that Lula was writing something in the back of the car, before she arrived at Vashti. Did she show you, or give you, anything she’d written?”

“No,” she said. She crammed fries into her mouth and then said, “I ain’t seen nuthin like that. Why, what was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it were a shopping list or something?”

“Yeah, that’s what the police thought. You’re sure you didn’t notice her carrying a bit of paper, a letter, an envelope?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Kieran know you’re meeting me?” asked Rochelle.

“Yeah, I told him you were on my list. He told me you used to live at St. Elmo’s.”

This seemed to please her.

“Where are you living now?”

“What’s it to you?” she demanded, suddenly fierce.

“It’s nothing to me. I’m just making polite conversation.”

This drew a small snort from Rochelle.

“I got my own place in Hammersmith now.”

She chewed for a while and then, for the first time, proffered unsolicited information.

“We usedta listen to Deeby Macc in his car. Me, Kieran and Lula.”

And she began to rap:

No hydroquinone, black to the backbone,

Takin’ Deeby lightly, better buy an early tombstone,

I’m drivin’ my Ferrari—fuck Johari—got my head on straight

Nothin’ talks like money talks—I’m shoutin’ at ya, Mister Jake.

She looked proud, as though she had put him firmly in his place, with no retort possible.

“Tha’s from ‘Hydroquinone,’ ” she said. “On Jake On My Jack.”

“What’s hydroquinone?” Strike asked.

“Skin light’ner. We usedta rap that with the car windows down,” said Rochelle. A warm, reminiscent smile lit her face out of plainness.

“Lula was looking forward to meeting Deeby Macc, then, was she?”

“Yeah, she wuz,” said Rochelle. “She knew ’e liked ’er, she wuz pleased with herself about that. Kieran wuz proper excited an’ all, he kep’ askin’ Lula to introduce him. He wanted to meet Deeby.”

Her smile faded; she picked morosely at her burger, then said:

“Is that all you wanna know, then? ’Cause I gotta go.”

She began wolfing the remnants of her meal, cramming food into her mouth.

“Lula must have taken you to a lot of places, did she?”

“Yeah,” said Rochelle, her mouth full of burger.

“Did you go to Uzi with her?”

“Yeah. Once.”

She swallowed, and began to talk about the other places she had seen during the early phase of her friendship with Lula, which (in spite of Rochelle’s determined attempts to repudiate any suggestion that she had been dazzled by the lifestyle of a multimillionairess) had all the romance of a fairy tale. Lula had snatched Rochelle away from the bleak world of her hostel and group therapy and swept her, once a week, into a whirl of expensive fun. Strike noted how very little Rochelle had told him about Lula the person, as opposed to Lula the holder of the magic plastic cards that bought handbags, jackets and jewelry, and the necessary means by which Kieran appeared regularly, like a genie, to whisk Rochelle away from her hostel. She described, in loving detail, the presents Lula had bought her, shops to which Lula had taken her, restaurants and bars to which they had gone together, places lined with celebrities. None of these, however, seemed to have impressed Rochelle in the slightest; for every name she mentioned there was a deprecating remark:

“ ’E wuz a dick.” “She’s plastic all over.” “They ain’t nuthing special.”

“Did you meet Evan Duffield?” Strike asked.

“ ’Im.” The monosyllable was heavy with contempt. “ ’E’s a twat.”

“Is he?”

“Yeah, ’e is. Ask Kieran.”

She gave the impression that she and Kieran stood together, sane, dispassionate observers of the idiots populating Lula’s world.

“In what way was he a twat?”

“ ’E treated ’er like shit.”

“Like how?”

“Sold stories,” said Rochelle, reaching for the last of her fries. “One time she tested ev’ryone. Told us all a diff’rent story to see which ones got in the papers. I wuz the only one who kep’ their mouf shut, ev’ryone else blabbed.”

“Who’d she test?”

“Ciara Porter. ’Im, Duffield. That Guy Summy,” Rochelle pronounced his first name to rhyme with “die,” “but then she reckoned it wasn’t ’im. Made excuses for ’im. But ’e used ’er as much as anyone.”

“In what way?”

“He di’n’t want ’er to work for anyone else. Wanted ’er to do it all for ’is company, get ’im all the publicity.”