Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

“I’m thinking what a tit you’re going to look when this interview gets reported in the press.”

“Don’t you dare fucking threaten me with the press, dickhead.”

Carver’s blunt, wide face was clenched; his glaring blue eyes vivid in the purple-red face.

“You’re in a heap of trouble here, pal, and a famous dad, a peg leg and a good war aren’t going to get you out of it. How do we know you didn’t scare the poor bitch into fucking jumping? Mentally ill, wasn’t she? How do we know you didn’t make her think she’d done something wrong? You were the last person to see her alive, pal. I wouldn’t like to be sitting where you are now.”

“Rochelle crossed Grantley Road and walked away from me, as alive as you are. You’ll find someone who saw her after she left me. Nobody’s going to forget that coat.”

Wardle pushed himself off the filing cabinets, dragged a hard plastic chair over to the desk and sat down.

“Let’s have it, then,” he told Strike. “Your theory.”

“She was blackmailing Lula Landry’s killer.”

“Piss off,” snapped Carver, and Wardle snorted in slightly stagey amusement.

“The day before she died,” said Strike, “Landry met Rochelle for fifteen minutes in that shop in Notting Hill. She dragged Rochelle straight into a changing cubicle, where she made a telephone call begging somebody to meet her at her flat in the early hours of the following morning. That call was overheard by an assistant at the shop; she was in the next cubicle; they’re separated by a curtain. Girl called Mel, red hair and tattoos.”

“People will spout any amount of shit when there’s a celebrity involved,” said Carver.

“If Landry phoned anyone from that cubicle,” said Wardle, “it was Duffield, or her uncle. Her phone records show they were the only people she called, all afternoon.”

“Why did she want Rochelle there when she made the call?” asked Strike. “Why drag her friend into the cubicle with her?”

“Women do that stuff,” said Carver. “They piss in herds, too.”

“Use your fucking intelligence: she was making the call on Rochelle’s phone,” said Strike, exasperated. “She’d tested everyone she knew to try and see who was talking to the press about her. Rochelle was the only one who kept her mouth shut. She established that the girl was trustworthy, bought her a mobile, registered it in Rochelle’s name but took care of all the charges. She’d had her own phone hacked, hadn’t she? She was getting paranoid about people listening in and reporting on her, so she bought a Nokia and registered it to somebody else, to give herself a totally secure means of communication when she wanted it.

“I grant you, that doesn’t necessarily rule out her uncle, or Duffield, because calling them on the alternative number might have been a signal they’d organized between them. Alternatively, she was using Rochelle’s number to speak to somebody else; someone she didn’t want the press to know about. I’ve got Rochelle’s mobile number. Find out what network she was with and you’ll be able to check all this. The unit itself is a crystal-covered pink Nokia, but you won’t find that.”

“Yeah, because it’s at the bottom of the Thames,” said Wardle.

“Course it isn’t,” said Strike. “The killer’s got it. He’ll have got it off her before he threw her into the river.”

“Fuck off!” jeered Carver, and Wardle, who had seemed interested against his better judgment, shook his head.

“Why did Landry want Rochelle there when she made the call?” Strike repeated. “Why not make it from the car? Why, when Rochelle was homeless, and virtually destitute, did she never sell her story on Landry? They’d have given her a great wad for it. Why didn’t she cash in, once Landry was dead, and couldn’t be hurt?”

“Decency?” suggested Wardle.

“Yeah, that’s one possibility,” said Strike. “The other’s that she was making enough by blackmailing the killer.”

“ Boll-ocks,” moaned Carver.

“Yeah? That Muppet coat she was pulled up wearing cost one and a half grand.”

A tiny pause.

“Landry probably gave it to her,” said Wardle.

“If she did, she managed to buy her something that wasn’t in the shops back in January.”

“Landry was a model, she had inside contacts—fuck this shit,” snapped Carver, as though he had irritated himself.

“Why,” said Strike, leaning forwards on his arms into the miasma of body odor that surrounded Carver, “did Lula Landry make a detour to that shop for fifteen minutes?”

“She was in a hurry.”

“Why go at all?”

“She didn’t want to let the girl down.”

“She got Rochelle to come right across town—this penniless, homeless girl, the girl she usually gave a lift home afterwards, in her chauffeur-driven car—dragged her into a cubicle, and then walked out fifteen minutes later, leaving her to make her own way home.”

“She was a spoiled bitch.”

“If she was, why turn up at all? Because it was worth it, for some purpose of her own. And if she wasn’t a spoiled bitch, she must have been in some kind of emotional state that made her act out of character. There’s a living witness to the fact that Lula begged somebody, over the phone, to come and see her, at her flat, sometime after one in the morning. There’s also that piece of blue paper she had before she went into Vashti, and which nobody’s admitting to having seen since. What did she do with it? Why was she writing in the back of the car, before she saw Rochelle?”

“It could’ve been—” said Wardle.

“It wasn’t a fucking shopping list,” groaned Strike, thumping the desk, “and nobody writes a suicide note eight hours in advance, and then goes dancing. She was writing a bloody will, don’t you get it? She took it into Vashti to get Rochelle to witness it…”

“Bollocks!” said Carver, yet again, but Strike ignored him, addressing Wardle.

“…which fits with her telling Ciara Porter that she was going to leave everything to her brother, doesn’t it? She’d just made it legal. It was on her mind.”

“Why suddenly make a will?”

Strike hesitated and sat back. Carver leered at him.

“Imagination run out?”

Strike let out his breath in a long sigh. An uncomfortable night of alcohol-sodden unconsciousness; last night’s pleasurable excesses; half a cheese and pickle sandwich in twelve hours: he felt hollowed-out, exhausted.

“If I had hard evidence, I’d have brought it to you.”

“The odds of people close to a suicide killing themselves go right up, did you know that? This Raquelle was a depressive. She has a bad day, remembers the way out her mate took, and does a copycat jump. Which leads us right back to you, pal, persecuting people and pushing them…”

“…over the edge, yeah,” said Strike. “People keep saying that. Very poor fucking taste, in the circumstances. What about Tansy Bestigui’s evidence?”

“How many times, Strike? We proved she couldn’t have heard it,” Wardle said. “We proved it beyond doubt.”

“No you didn’t,” said Strike—finally, when he least expected it, losing his temper. “You based your whole case on one almighty fuck-up. If you’d taken Tansy Bestigui seriously, if you’d broken her down and got her to tell you the whole fucking truth, Rochelle Onifade would still be alive.”

Pulsating with rage, Carver kept Strike there for another hour. His last act of contempt was to tell Wardle to make sure he saw “Rokeby Junior” firmly off the premises.

Wardle walked Strike to the front door, not speaking.

“I need you to do something,” said Strike, halting at the exit, beyond which they could see the darkening sky.