Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

“So, anyway, I told Lula how groggy and sore Mum was feeling, and she said she might look in on her later. I left; I nipped into my office to get some files from Alison, because I wanted to work from Mum’s flat that day and keep her company. I next saw Lula at Mum’s, mid-morning. She sat with Mum for a while in the bedroom until my uncle arrived to visit, and then nipped into the study where I was working, to say goodbye. She hugged me before she…”

Bristow’s voice cracked, and he stared down into his lap.

“More coffee?” Strike suggested. Bristow shook his bowed head. To give him a moment to pull himself together, Strike picked up the tray and headed for the outer office.

Bristow’s girlfriend looked up from her newspaper, scowling, when Strike appeared. “Aren’t you finished?” she asked.

“Evidently not,” said Strike, with no attempt at a smile. She glared at him while he addressed Robin.

“Could I get another cup of coffee, er…?”

Robin stood up and took the tray from him in silence.

“John needs to be back in the office at half past ten,” Alison informed Strike, in a slightly louder voice. “We’ll need to be off in ten minutes at the most.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Strike assured her blandly, before returning to the inner office, where Bristow was sitting as though in prayer, his head bowed over his clasped hands.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, as Strike sat back down. “It’s still difficult talking about it.”

“No problem,” said Strike, picking up his notebook again. “So Lula came to see your mother? What time was that?”

“Elevenish. It all came out at the inquest, what she did after that. She got her driver to take her to some boutique that she liked, and then she went back to her flat. She had an appointment at home with a makeup artist she knew, and her friend Ciara Porter joined her there. You’ll have seen Ciara Porter, she’s a model. Very blonde. They were photographed together as angels, you probably saw it: naked except for handbags and wings. Somé used the picture in his advertising campaign after Lula died. People said it was tasteless.

“So Lula and Ciara spent the afternoon together at Lula’s flat, and then they left to go out to dinner, where they met up with Duffield and some other people. The whole group went on to Uzi, the nightclub, and they were there until past midnight.

“Then Duffield and Lula argued. Lots of people saw it happen. He manhandled her a bit, tried to make her stay, but she left the club alone. Everyone thought he’d done it, afterwards, but he turned out to have a cast-iron alibi.”

“Cleared on the evidence of his drug dealer, wasn’t he?” asked Strike, still writing.

“Yes, exactly. So—so Lula arrived back at her flat around twenty past one. She was photographed going inside. You probably remember that picture. It was everywhere afterwards.”

Strike remembered: one of the world’s most photographed women, head bowed, shoulders hunched, eyes heavy and arms folded tightly around her torso, twisting her face away from the photographers. Once the verdict of suicide had been clearly established, it had taken on a macabre aspect: the rich and beautiful young woman, less than an hour from her death, attempting to conceal her wretchedness from the lenses she had courted, and which had so adored her.

“Were there usually photographers outside her door?”

“Yes, especially if they knew she was with Duffield, or they wanted to get a shot of her coming home drunk. But they weren’t only there for her that night. An American rapper was supposed to be arriving to stay in the same building that evening; Deeby Macc’s his name. His record company had rented the apartment beneath hers. In the event he never stayed there, because with the police all over the building it was easier for him to go to a hotel. But the photographers who had chased Lula’s car when she left Uzi joined the ones who were waiting for Macc outside the flats, so that made quite a crowd of them around the entrance of the building, though they all drifted away not long after she’d gone inside. Somehow they got a tip-off that Macc wouldn’t be there for hours.

“It was a bitterly cold night. Snowing. Below freezing. So the street was empty when she fell.”

Bristow blinked and took another sip of cold coffee, and Strike thought about the paparazzi who had left before Lula Landry fell from her balcony. Imagine, he thought, what a shot of Landry diving to her death would have gone for; enough to retire on, perhaps.

“John, your girlfriend says you need to be somewhere at half past ten.”

“What?”

Bristow seemed to return to himself. He checked the expensive watch and gasped.

“Good God, I had no idea I’d been here so long. What—what happens now?” he asked, looking slightly bewildered. “You’ll read my notes?”

“Yeah, of course,” Strike assured him, “and I’ll call you in a couple of days when I’ve done some preliminary work. I expect I’ll have a lot more questions then.”

“All right,” said Bristow, getting dazedly to his feet. “Here—take my card. And how would you like me to pay?”

“A month’s fee in advance will be great,” said Strike. Quashing feeble stirrings of shame, and remembering that Bristow himself had offered a double fee, he named an exorbitant amount, and to his delight Bristow did not quibble, nor ask whether he accepted credit cards nor even promise to drop the money in later, but drew out a real check-book and a pen.

“If, say, a quarter of it could be in cash,” Strike added, chancing his luck; and was staggered for the second time that morning when Bristow said, “I did wonder whether you’d prefer…” and counted out a pile of fifties in addition to the check.

They emerged into the outer office at the very moment that Robin was about to enter with Strike’s fresh coffee. Bristow’s girlfriend stood up when the door opened, and folded her newspaper with the air of one who had been kept waiting too long. She was almost as tall as Bristow, large-framed, with a surly expression and big, mannish hands.

“So you’ve agreed to do it, have you?” she asked Strike. He had the impression that she thought he was taking advantage of her rich boyfriend. Very possibly she was right.

“Yes, John’s hired me,” he replied.

“Oh well,” she said, ungraciously. “You’re pleased, I expect, John.”

The lawyer smiled at her, and she sighed and patted his arm, like a tolerant but slightly exasperated mother to a child. John Bristow raised his hand in a salute, then followed his girlfriend out of the room, and their footsteps clanged away down the metal stairs.

STRIKE TURNED TO ROBIN, WHO had sat back down at the computer. His coffee was sitting beside the piles of neatly sorted mail lined up on the desk beside her.

“Thanks,” he said, taking a sip, “and for the note. Why are you a temp?”

“What d’you mean?” she asked, looking suspicious.

“You can spell and punctuate. You catch on quick. You show initiative—where did the cups and the tray come from? The coffee and biscuits?”

“I borrowed them all from Mr. Crowdy. I told him we’d return them by lunchtime.”

“Mr. who?”

Mr. Crowdy, the man downstairs. The graphic designer.”

“And he just let you have them?”

“Yes,” she said, a little defensively. “I thought, having offered the client coffee, we ought to provide it.”

Her use of the plural pronoun was like a gentle pat to his morale.

“Well, that was efficiency way beyond anything Temporary Solutions has sent here before, take it from me. Sorry I kept calling you Sandra; she was the last girl. What’s your real name?”