Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

“So, after she’d found out she could trust you…”

“Yeah, then she bought me the phone.”

There was a missed beat.

“So she cud get in touch wiv me whenever she wanted.”

She swept the sparkling pink Nokia suddenly off the table and stuffed it deep into the pocket of her squashy pink coat.

“I suppose you’ve had to take over the charges yourself now?” Strike asked.

He thought that she was going to tell him to mind his own business, but instead she said:

“ ’Er family ’asn’t noticed they’re still payin’ for it.”

And this thought seemed to give her a slightly malicious pleasure.

“Did Lula buy you that jacket?” Strike asked.

“No,” she snapped, furiously defensive. “I got this myself, I’m working now.”

“Really? Where are you working?”

“Whut’s it to you?” she demanded again.

“I’m showing polite interest.”

A tiny, brief smile touched the wide mouth, and she relented again.

“I’m doing afternoons in a shop up the road from my new place.”

“Are you in another hostel?”

“No,” she said, and he sensed again the digging in, the refusal to go further that he would push at his peril. He changed tack.

“It must have been a shock to you when Lula died, was it?”

“Yeah. It wuz,” she said, thoughtlessly; then, realizing what she had said, she backtracked. “I knew she wuz depressed, but you never ’spect people tuh do that.”

“So you wouldn’t say she was suicidal when you saw her that day?”

“I dunno. I never saw ’er for long enough, did I?”

“Where were you when you heard she’d died?”

“I wuz in the hostel. Loadsa people knew I knew her. Janine woke me up and told me.”

“And your immediate thought was that it was suicide?”

“Yeah. An’ I gotta go now. I gotta go.”

She had made up her mind and he could see that he was not going to be able to stop her. After wriggling back into the ludicrous fur jacket, she hoisted her handbag onto her shoulder.

“Say hullo to Kieran for me.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“See yuh.”

She waddled out of the restaurant without a backward glance.

Strike watched her walk past the window, her head down, her brows knitted, until she passed out of sight. It had stopped raining. Idly he pulled her tray towards him and finished her last few fries.

Then he stood up so abruptly that the baseball-capped girl who had been approaching his table to clear and wipe it jumped back a step with a little cry of surprise. Strike hurried out of the McDonald’s and off up Grantley Road.

Rochelle was standing on the corner, clearly visible in her furry magenta coat, part of a knot of people waiting for the lights to change at a pedestrian crossing. She was gabbling into the pink jeweled Nokia. Strike caught up with her, insinuating himself into the group behind her, making of his bulk a weapon, so that people moved aside to avoid him.

“…wanted to know who she was arrangin’ to meet that night…yeah, an’—”

Rochelle turned her head, watching traffic, and realized that Strike was right behind her. Removing the mobile from her ear, she jabbed at a button, cutting the call.

“What?” she asked him aggressively.

“Who were you calling then?”

“Mind yer own fuckin’ business!” she said furiously. The waiting pedestrians stared. “Are you followin’ me?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Listen.”

The lights changed; they were the only two not to start off over the road, and were jostled by the passing walkers.

“Will you give me your mobile number?”

The implacable bull’s eyes looked back at him, unreadable, bland, secretive.

“Wha’ for?”

“Kieran asked me to get it,” he lied. “I forgot. He thinks you left a pair of sunglasses in his car.”

He did not think she was convinced, but after a moment she dictated a number, which he wrote down on the back of one of his own cards.

“That all?” she asked aggressively, and she proceeded across the road as far as an island, where the lights changed again. Strike limped after her. She looked both angry and perturbed by his continuing presence.

“ What?”

“ I think you know something you’re not telling me, Rochelle.”

She glared at him.

“Take this,” said Strike, pulling a second card out of his overcoat pocket. “If you think of anything you’d like to tell me, call, all right? Call that mobile number.”

She did not answer.

“If Lula was murdered,” said Strike, while the cars whooshed by them, and rain glittered in the gutters at their feet, “and you know something, you could be in danger from the killer too.”

This evoked a tiny, complacent, scathing smile. Rochelle did not think she was in danger. She thought she was safe.

The green man had appeared. Rochelle gave a toss of her dry, wiry hair and moved away across the road, ordinary, squat and plain, still clutching her mobile in one hand and Strike’s card in the other. Strike stood alone on the island, watching her with a feeling of impotence and unease. She might never have sold her story to the newspapers, but he could not believe that she had bought that designer jacket, ugly though he found it, from the proceeds of a job in a shop.

THE JUNCTION OF TOTTENHAM COURT and Charing Cross Roads was still a scene of devastation, with wide gashes in the road, white hardboard tunnels and hard-hatted builders. Strike traversed the narrow walkways barricaded by metal fences, past the rumbling diggers full of rubble, bellowing workmen and more drills, smoking as he walked.

He felt weary and sore; very conscious of the pain in his leg, of his unwashed body, of the greasy food lying heavily in his stomach. On impulse, he took a detour right up Sutton Row, away from the clatter and grind of the roadworks, and called Rochelle. It went to voicemail, but it was her husky voice that answered: she had not given him a fake number. He left no message; he had already said everything he could think of saying; and yet he was worried. He half wished he had followed her, covertly, to find out where she was living.

Back on Charing Cross Road, limping on to the office through the temporary shadow of the pedestrian tunnel, he remembered the way that Robin had woken him up that morning: the tactful knock, the cup of tea, the studied avoidance of the subject of the camp bed. He ought not to have let it happen. There were other routes to intimacy than admiring a woman’s figure in a tight dress. He did not want to explain why he was sleeping at work; he dreaded personal questions. And he had let a situation arise in which she had called him Cormoran and told him to do up his buttons. He ought never to have overslept.

As he climbed the metal stairs, past the closed door of Crowdy Graphics, Strike resolved to treat Robin with a slightly cooler edge of authority for the rest of the day, to counterbalance that glimpse of hairy belly.

The decision was no sooner made than he heard high-pitched laughter, and two female voices talking at the same time, issuing from his own office.

Strike froze, listening, panicking. He had not returned Charlotte’s call. He tried to make out her tone and inflection; it would be like her to come in person and overwhelm his temp with charm, to make of his ally a friend, to saturate his own staff with Charlotte’s version of the truth. The two voices melded in laughter again, and he could not tell whose they were.

“Hi, Stick,” said a cheery voice as he pushed open the glass door.

His sister, Lucy, was sitting on the sagging sofa, with her hands around a mug of coffee, bags from Marks and Spencer and John Lewis heaped all around her.