Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

From inside the notebook she pulled out a photocopy, and passed it across to Strike.

He saw a black man with a long, high-cheekboned face; close-cropped graying hair and beard and gold-rimmed glasses supported by overlarge ears. He stared at it for several long moments, and when at last he spoke, he said:

“Christ.”

Robin waited, elated.

“Christ,” said Strike again. “When did he die?”

“Five years ago. The secretary got upset talking about it. She said he was so clever, and the nicest, kindest man. A committed Christian.”

“Any family?”

“Yes. He left a widow and a son.”

“A son,” repeated Strike.

“Yes,” said Robin. “He’s in the army.”

“In the army,” said Strike, her deep and doleful echo. “Don’t tell me.”

“He’s in Afghanistan.”

Strike got up and started pacing up and down, the picture of Professor Josiah Agyeman in his hand.

“Didn’t get a regiment, did you? Not that it matters. I can find out,” he said.

“I did ask,” said Robin, consulting her notes, “but I don’t really understand—is there a regiment called the Sappers or some—”

“Royal Engineers,” said Strike. “I can check up on all that.”

He stopped beside Robin’s desk, and stared again at the face of Professor Josiah Agyeman.

“He was from Ghana originally,” she said. “But the family lived in Clerkenwell until he died.”

Strike handed her back the picture.

“Don’t lose that. You’ve done bloody well, Robin.”

“That’s not all,” she said, flushed, excited and trying to keep from smiling. “I took the train out to Oxford in the afternoon, to the Malmaison. Do you know, they’ve made a hotel out of an old prison?”

“Really?” said Strike, sinking back on to the sofa.

“Yes. It’s quite nice, actually. Well, anyway, I thought I’d pretend to be Alison and check whether Tony Landry had left something there or something…”

Strike sipped his tea, thinking that it was highly implausible that a secretary would be dispatched in person for such an inquiry three months after the event.

“Anyway, that was a mistake.”

“Really?” he said, his tone carefully neutral.

“Yes, because Alison actually did go to the Malmaison on the seventh, to try and find Tony Landry. It was incredibly embarrassing, because one of the girls on reception had been there that day, and she remembered her.”

Strike lowered his mug.

“Now that,” he said, “is very interesting indeed.”

“I know,” said Robin excitedly. “So then I had to think really fast.”

“Did you tell them your name was Annabel?”

“No,” she said, on a half-laugh. “I said, well, OK then, I’ll tell the truth, I’m his girlfriend. And I cried a bit.”

“You cried?”

“It wasn’t actually that hard,” said Robin, with an air of surprise. “I got right into character. I said I thought he was having an affair.”

“ Not with Alison? If they’ve seen her, they wouldn’t believe that…”

“No, but I said I didn’t think he’d really been at the hotel at all…Anyway, I made a bit of a scene and the girl who’d spoken to Alison took me aside and tried to calm me down; she said they couldn’t give out information about people without a good reason, they had a policy, blah blah…you know. But just to stop me crying, in the end she told me that he had checked in on the evening of the sixth, and checked out on the morning of the eighth. He made a fuss about being given the wrong newspaper while he was checking out, that’s why she remembered. So he was definitely there. I even asked her a bit, you know, hysterically, how she knew it was him, and she described him to a T. I know what he looks like,” she added, before Strike could ask. “I checked before I left; his picture’s on the Landry, May, Patterson website.”

“You’re brilliant,” said Strike, “and this is all bloody fishy. What did she tell you about Alison?”

“That she arrived and asked to see him, but he wasn’t there. They confirmed that he was staying with them, though. And then she left.”

“Very odd. She should have known he was at the conference; why didn’t she go there first?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did this helpful hotel employee say she’d seen him at any times other than check-in and check-out?”

“No,” said Robin. “But we know he went to the conference, don’t we? I checked that, remember?”

“We know he signed in, and probably picked up a name tag. And then he drove back to Chelsea to see his sister, Lady Bristow. Why?”

“Well…she was ill.”

“Was she? She’d just had an operation that was supposed to cure her.”

“A hysterectomy,” said Robin. “I don’t imagine you’d feel wonderful after that.”

“So we’ve got a man who doesn’t like his sister very much—I’ve had that from his own lips—who believes she’s just had a life-saving operation and knows she’s got two of her children in attendance. Why the urgency to see her?”

“Well,” said Robin, with less certainty, “I suppose…she’d just got out of hospital…”

“Which he presumably knew was going to happen before he drove off to Oxford. So why not stay in town, visit her if he felt that strongly about it, and then head out to the afternoon session of the conference? Why drive fifty-odd miles, stay overnight in this plush prison, go to the conference, sign in and then double back to town?”

“Maybe he got a call saying she was feeling bad, something like that? Maybe John Bristow rang him and asked him to come?”

“Bristow’s never mentioned asking his uncle to drop in. I’d say they were on bad terms at the time. They’re both shifty about that visit of Landry’s. Neither of them likes talking about it.”

Strike stood up and began to walk up and down, limping slightly, barely noticing the pain in his leg.

“No,” he said, “Bristow asking his sister, who by all accounts was the apple of his mother’s eye, to drop by—that makes sense. Asking his mother’s brother, who was out of town and by no means her biggest fan, to make a massive detour to see her…that doesn’t smell right. And now we find out that Alison went looking for Landry at his hotel in Oxford. It was a workday. Was she checking up on him on her own account, or did someone send her?”

The telephone rang. Robin picked up the receiver. To Strike’s surprise, she immediately affected a very stilted Australian accent.

“Oy’m sorry, shiz not here…Naoh…Naoh…I dunnaoh where she iz…Naoh…My nem’s Annabel…”

Strike laughed quietly. Robin threw him a look of mock anguish. After nearly a minute of strangled Australian, she hung up.

“Temporary Solutions,” she said.

“I’m getting through a lot of Annabels. That one sounded more South African than Australian.”

“Now I want to hear what happened to you yesterday,” said Robin, unable to conceal her impatience any longer. “Did you meet Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter?”

Strike told her everything that had happened, omitting only the aftermath of his excursion to Evan Duffield’s flat. He placed particular emphasis on Bryony Radford’s insistence that it was dyslexia that had caused her to listen to Ursula May’s voicemail messages; on Ciara Porter’s continuing assertion that Lula had told her she would leave everything to her brother; on Evan Duffield’s annoyance that Lula had kept checking the time while she was in Uzi; and on the threatening email that Tansy Bestigui had sent her estranged husband.

“So where was Tansy?” asked Robin, who had listened to every word of Strike’s story with gratifying attention. “If we can just find out…”