Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

“You’ve had enough from me already, mate,” said Wardle, with a wry smile. “I’m gonna be dealing with that,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, towards Carver and his temper, “for days because of you. I told you it was suicide.”

“Wardle, unless someone brings the fucker in, there are two more people in danger of being knocked off.”

“Strike…”

“What if I bring you proof that Tansy Bestigui wasn’t in her flat at all when Lula fell? That she was somewhere she could have heard everything?”

Wardle looked up towards the ceiling, and closed his eyes momentarily.

“If you’ve got proof…”

“I haven’t, but I will have in the next couple of days.”

Two men walked past them, talking, laughing. Wardle shook his head, looking exasperated, and yet he did not turn away.

“If you want something from the police, call Anstis. He’s the one who owes you.”

“Anstis can’t do this for me. I need you to call Deeby Macc.”

“What the fuck?”

“You heard me. He’s not going to take my calls, is he? But he’ll speak to you; you’ve got the authority, and it sounds as though he liked you.”

“You’re telling me Deeby Macc knows where Tansy Bestigui was when Lula Landry died?”

“No, of course he bloody doesn’t, he was in Barrack. I want to know what clothes he got sent on from Kentigern Gardens to Claridges. Specifically, what stuff he got from Guy Somé.”

Strike did not pronounce the name Ghee for Wardle.

“You want…why?”

“Because one of the runners on that CCTV footage was wearing one of Deeby’s sweatshirts.”

Wardle’s expression, arrested for a moment, relapsed into exasperation.

“You see that stuff everywhere,” he said after a moment or two. “That GS stuff. Shell suits. Trackies.”

“This was a customized hoodie, there was only one of them in the world. Call Deeby, and ask him what he got from Somé. That’s all I need. Whose side d’you want to be on if it turns out I’m right, Wardle?”

“Don’t threaten me, Strike…”

“I’m not threatening you. I’m thinking about a multiple murderer who’s walking around out there planning the next one—but if it’s the papers you’re worried about, I don’t think they’re going to go too easy on anyone who clung to the suicide theory once another body surfaced. Call Deeby Macc, Wardle, before someone else gets killed.”

“NO,” SAID STRIKE FORCEFULLY, ON the telephone that evening. “This is getting dangerous. Surveillance doesn’t fall within the scope of secretarial duties.”

“Nor did visiting the Malmaison Hotel in Oxford, or SOAS,” Robin pointed out, “but you were happy enough that I did both of them.”

“You’re not following anyone, Robin. I doubt Matthew would be very happy about it, either.”

It was funny, Robin thought, sitting in her dressing gown on her bed, with the phone pressed to her ear, how Strike had retained the name of her fiancé, without ever having met him. In her experience, men did not usually bother to log that kind of information. Matthew frequently forgot people’s names, even that of his newborn niece; but she supposed that Strike must have been trained to recall such details.

“I don’t need Matthew’s permission,” she said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be dangerous; you don’t think Ursula May ’s killed anyone…”

(There was an inaudible “ do you?” at the end of the sentence.)

“No, but I don’t want anyone to hear I’m taking an interest in her movements. It might make the killer nervous, and I don’t want anyone else thrown from a height.”

Robin could hear her own heart thumping through the thin material of her dressing gown. She knew that he would not tell her who he thought the killer was; she was even a little frightened of knowing, notwithstanding the fact that she could think of nothing else.

It was she who had called Strike. Hours had passed since she had received a text saying that he had been compelled to go with the police to Scotland Yard, and asking her to lock up the office behind her at five. Robin had been worried.

“Call him, then, if it’s going to keep you awake,” Matthew had said; not quite snapping, not quite indicating that he was, without knowing any of the details, firmly on the side of the police.

“Listen, I want you to do something for me,” said Strike. “Call John Bristow first thing tomorrow and tell him about Rochelle.”

“All right,” said Robin, with her eyes on the large stuffed elephant Matthew had given her on their first Valentine’s Day together, eight years previously. The present-giver himself was watching Newsnight in the sitting room. “What are you going to be doing?”

“I’m going to be on my way to Pinewood Studios for a few words with Freddie Bestigui.”

“How?” said Robin. “They won’t let you near him.”

“Yeah, they will,” said Strike.

After Robin had hung up, Strike sat motionless for a while in his dark office. The thought of the semi-digested McDonald’s meal lying inside Rochelle’s bloated corpse had not prevented him consuming two Big Macs, a large box of fries and a McFlurry on the way back from Scotland Yard. Gassy noises from his stomach were now mingling with the muffled thuds of the bass from the 12 Bar Café, which Strike barely noticed these days; the sound might have been his own pulse.

Ciara Porter’s messy, girlish flat, her wide, groaning mouth, the long white legs wrapped tightly around his back, belonged to a life lived long ago. All his thoughts, now, were for squat and graceless Rochelle Onifade. He remembered her talking fast into her phone, not five minutes after she had left him, dressed in exactly the same clothes she had been wearing when they pulled her out of the river.

He was sure he knew what had happened. Rochelle had called the killer to say that she had just lunched with a private detective; a meeting had been arranged over her glittering pink phone; that night, after a meal or a drink, they had sauntered through the dark towards the river. He thought of Hammersmith Bridge, sage green and gold, in the area where she claimed to have a new flat: a famous suicide spot, with its low sides, and the fast-flowing Thames below. She could not swim. Nighttime: two lovers play-fighting, a car sweeps by, a scream and a splash. Would anyone have seen?

Not if the killer had iron-clad nerves and a liberal dash of luck; and this was a murderer who had already demonstrated plenty of the former, and an unnerving, reckless reliance on the latter. Defending counsel would undoubtedly argue diminished responsibility, because of the vainglorious overreaching that made Strike’s quarry unique in his experience; and perhaps, he thought, there was some pathology there, some categorizable madness, but he was not much interested in the psychology. Like John Bristow, he wanted justice.

In the darkness of his office, his thoughts veered suddenly and unhelpfully back in time, to the most personal death of all; the one that Lucy assumed, quite wrongly, haunted Strike’s every investigation, colored every case; the killing that had fractured his and Lucy’s lives into two epochs, so that everything in their memory was cleaved clearly into that which had happened before their mother died, and that which had happened afterwards. Lucy thought he had run away to join the RMP because of Leda’s death; that he had been driven to it by his unsatisfied belief in his stepfather’s guilt; that every corpse he saw in the course of his professional life must recall their mother to his mind; that every killer he met must seem to be an echo of their stepfather; that he was driven to investigate other deaths in an eternal act of personal exculpation.