Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

“Once she realizes there’s photographic proof of where she was, though,” said Strike, “I think she’ll be glad to come clean. Your wife might think she loves money more than anything in the world, but her conscience is troubling her. I’m confident she’ll crack pretty fast.”

Bestigui had smoked his cigarillo down to its last few millimeters. Slowly he ground it out in the black glass ashtray. Long seconds passed, and the noise in the outside office filtered through the glass wall beside them: voices, the ringing of a telephone.

Bestigui stood up and lowered Roman blinds of canvas down over the glass partition, so that none of the nervy girls in the office beyond could see in. He sat back down and ran thick fingers thoughtfully over the crumpled terrain of his lower face, glancing at Strike and away again, towards the blank cream canvas he had created. Strike could almost see options occurring to the producer, as though he was riffling a deck of cards.

“The curtains were drawn,” Bestigui said finally. “There wasn’t enough light coming out of the windows to make out a woman hiding on the balcony. Tansy’s not going to change her story.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Strike, stretching out his legs; the prosthesis was still uncomfortable. “When I put it to her that the legal term for what the pair of you have done is ‘conspiring to prevent the course of justice,’ and that a belated show of conscience might keep her out of the nick; when I add in the public sympathy she’s bound to get as the victim of domestic abuse, and the amount of money she’s likely to be offered for exclusive rights to her story; when she realizes she’s going to get her say in court, and that she’ll be believed, and that she’ll be able to bring about the conviction of the man she heard murdering her neighbor—Mr. Bestigui, I don’t think even you’ve got enough money to keep her quiet.”

The coarse skin around Bestigui’s mouth flickered. He picked up his packet of cigarillos but did not extract one. There was a long silence during which he turned the packet between his fingers, round and round.

At last he said:

“I’m admitting nothing. Get out.”

Strike did not move.

“I know you’re keen to phone your lawyer,” he said, “but I think you’re overlooking the silver lining here.”

“I’ve had enough of you. I said, get out.”

“However unpleasant it’s going to be, having to admit to what happened that night, it’s still preferable to becoming the prime suspect in a murder case. It’s going to be about the lesser of evils from here on in. If you cough to what really happened, you’re putting yourself in the clear for the actual murder.”

He had Bestigui’s attention now.

“You couldn’t have done it,” said Strike, “because if you’d been the one who threw Landry off the balcony two floors above, you wouldn’t have been able to let Tansy back inside within seconds of the body falling. I think you shut your wife outside, headed off into the bedroom, got into bed, got comfy—the police said the bed looked disarranged and slept in—and kept an eye on the clock. I don’t think you wanted to fall asleep. If you’d left her too long on that balcony, you’d have been up for manslaughter. No wonder Wilson said she was shaking like a whippet. Probably in the early stages of hypothermia.”

Another silence, except for Bestigui’s fat fingers drumming lightly on the edge of the desk. Strike took out his notebook.

“Are you ready to answer a few questions now?”

“Fuck you!”

The producer was suddenly consumed by the rage he had so far suppressed, his jaw jutting and his shoulders hunched, level with his ears. Strike could imagine him looking thus as he bore down on his emaciated, coked-up wife, hands outstretched.

“You’re in the shit here,” said Strike calmly, “but it’s entirely up to you how deep you sink. You can deny everything, battle it out with your wife in the court and the papers, end up in jail for perjury and obstructing the police. Or you can start cooperating, right now, and earn Lula’s family’s gratitude and good will. That’d go a long way to demonstrating remorse, and it’ll help when it comes to pleas for clemency. If your information helps catch Lula’s killer, I can’t see you getting much worse than a reprimand from the bench. It’s going to be the police who’ll get the real going-over from the public and the press.”

Bestigui was breathing noisily, but seemed to be pondering Strike’s words. At last he snarled:

“There wasn’t any fucking killer. Wilson never found anyone up there. Landry jumped,” he said, with a small, dismissive jerk of his head. “She was a fucked-up little druggie, like my fucking wife.”

“There was a killer,” said Strike simply, “and you helped him get away with it.”

Something in Strike’s expression stifled Bestigui’s clear urge to jeer. His eyes were slits of onyx as he mulled over what Strike had said.

“I’ve heard you were keen to put Lula in a film?”

Bestigui seemed disconcerted by the change of subject.

“It was just an idea,” he muttered. “She was a flake but she was fucking gorgeous.”

“You fancied getting her and Deeby Macc into a film together?”

“License to print money, those two together.”

“What about this film you’ve been thinking of making since she died—what do they call it, a biopic? I hear Tony Landry wasn’t happy about it?”

To Strike’s surprise, a satyr’s grin impressed itself on Bestigui’s pouchy face.

“Who told you that?”

“Isn’t it true?”

For the first time, Bestigui seemed to feel he had the upper hand in the conversation.

“No, it’s not true. Anthony Landry has given me a pretty broad hint that once Lady Bristow’s dead, he’ll be happy to talk about it.”

“He wasn’t angry, then, when he called you to talk about it?”

“As long as it’s tastefully handled, yadda yadda…”

“D’you know Tony Landry well?”

“I know of him.”

“In what context?”

Bestigui scratched his chin, smiling to himself.

“He’s your wife’s divorce lawyer, of course.”

“For now he is,” said Bestigui.

“You think she’s going to sack him?”

“She might have to,” said Bestigui, and the smile became a self-satisfied leer. “Conflict of interest. We’ll see.”

Strike glanced down at his notebook, considering, with the gifted poker player’s dispassionate calculation of the odds, how much risk there was in pushing this line of questioning to the limit, on no proof.

“Do I take it,” he said, looking back up, “that you’ve told Landry you know he’s sleeping with his business partner’s wife?”

One moment’s stunned surprise, and then Bestigui laughed out loud, a boorish, aggressive blast of glee.

“Know that, do you?”

“How did you find out?”

“I hired one of your lot. I thought Tansy was doing the dirty, but it turned out she was giving alibis to her bloody sister, while Ursula was having it away with Tony Landry. It’ll be a shitload of fun to watch the Mays divorcing. High-powered lawyers on both sides. Old family firm broken up. Cyprian May’s not as limp as he looks. He represented my second wife. I’m going to have a fucking blast watching that one play out. Watching the lawyers screw each other for a change.”

“That’s a nice bit of leverage you’ve got with your wife’s divorce lawyer, then?”

Bestigui smiled nastily through the smoke.

“Neither of them know I know yet. I’ve been waiting for a good moment to tell them.”

But Bestigui seemed to remember, suddenly, that Tansy might now be in possession of an even more powerful weapon in their divorce battle, and the smile faded from his crumpled face, leaving it bitter.