Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

“One last thing,” said Strike. “The night that Lula died: after you’d followed your wife down into the lobby, and brought her back upstairs, did you hear anything outside the flat?”

“I thought your whole fucking point is that you can’t hear anything inside my flat with the windows closed?” snapped Bestigui.

“I’m not talking about outside in the street; I’m talking about outside your front door. Tansy might’ve been making too much noise to hear anything, but I’m wondering whether, when the pair of you were in your own hall—perhaps you stayed there, trying to calm her down, once you’d got her inside?—you heard any movement on the other side of the door? Or was Tansy screaming too much?”

“She was making a fuck of a lot of noise,” said Bestigui. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing suspicious. Just Wilson, running past the door.”

“Wilson.”

“Yeah.”

“When was this?”

“When you’re talking about. When we’d got back inside our flat.”

“Immediately after you’d shut the door?”

“Yeah.”

“But Wilson had already run upstairs while you were still in the lobby, hadn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

The crevices in Bestigui’s forehead and around his mouth deepened.

“So when you got to your flat on the first floor, Wilson must’ve been out of sight and earshot already?”

“Yeah…”

“But you heard footsteps on the stairs, immediately after closing your front door?”

Bestigui did not answer. Strike could see him putting it all together in his own mind for the very first time.

“I heard…yeah…footsteps. Running past. On the stairs.”

“Yes,” said Strike. “And could you make out whether there was one set, or two?”

Bestigui frowned, his eyes unfocused, looking beyond the detective into the treacherous past. “There was…one. So I thought it was Wilson. But it couldn’t…Wilson was still up on the third floor, searching her flat…because I heard him coming down again, afterwards…after I’d called the police, I heard him go running past the door…

“I forgot that,” said Bestigui, and for a fraction of a second he seemed almost vulnerable. “I forgot. There was a lot going on. Tansy screaming.”

“And, of course, you were thinking about your own skin,” said Strike briskly, inserting notepad and pen back in his pocket and hoisting himself out of the leather chair. “Well, I won’t keep you; you’ll be wanting to call your lawyer. You’ve been very helpful. I expect we’ll see each other again in court.”

ERIC WARDLE CALLED STRIKE THE following day.

“I phoned Deeby,” he said curtly.

“And?” said Strike, motioning to Robin to pass him pen and paper. They had been sitting together at her desk, enjoying tea and biscuits while discussing the latest death threat from Brian Mathers, in which he promised, not for the first time, to slit open Strike’s guts and piss on his entrails.

“He got sent a customized hoodie by Somé. Handgun in studs on the front and a couple of lines of Deeby’s own lyrics on the back.”

“Just the one?”

“Yeah.”

“What else?” asked Strike.

“He remembers a belt, a beanie hat and a pair of cufflinks.”

“No gloves?”

Wardle paused, perhaps checking his notes.

“No, he didn’t mention gloves.”

“Well, that clears that up,” said Strike.

Wardle said nothing at all. Strike waited for the policeman to either hang up or impart more information.

“The inquest is on Thursday,” said Wardle abruptly. “On Rochelle Onifade.”

“Right,” said Strike.

“You don’t sound that interested.”

“I’m not.”

“I thought you were sure it was murder?”

“I am, but the inquest won’t prove that one way or the other. Any idea when her funeral’s going to be?”

“No,” said Wardle irritably. “What does that matter?”

“I thought I might go.”

“What for?”

“She had an aunt, remember?” said Strike.

Wardle rang off in what Strike suspected was disgust.

Bristow called Strike later that morning with the time and place of Rochelle’s funeral.

“Alison managed to find out all the details,” he told the detective on the telephone. “She’s super-efficient.”

“Clearly,” said Strike.

“I’m going to come. To represent Lula. I ought to have helped Rochelle.”

“I think it was always going to end this way, John. Are you bringing Alison?”

“She says she wants to come,” said Bristow, though he sounded less than enamored of the idea.

“I’ll see you there, then. I’m hoping to speak to Rochelle’s aunt, if she turns up.”

When Strike told Robin that Bristow’s girlfriend had discovered the time and place of the funeral, she appeared put out. She herself had been trying to find out the details at Strike’s request, and seemed to feel that Alison had put one over on her.

“I didn’t realize you were this competitive,” said Strike, amused. “Not to worry. Maybe she had some kind of head start on you.”

“Like what?”

But Strike was looking at her speculatively.

“What?” repeated Robin, a little defensively.

“I want you to come with me to the funeral.”

“Oh,” said Robin. “OK. Why?”

She expected Strike to reply that it would look more natural for them to turn up as a couple, just as it had seemed more natural for him to visit Vashti with a woman in tow. Instead he said:

“There’s something I want you to do for me there.”

Once he had explained, clearly and concisely, what it was that he wanted her to do, Robin looked utterly bewildered.

“But why?”

“I can’t say.”

“Why not?”

“I’d rather not say that, either.”

Robin no longer saw Strike through Matthew’s eyes; no longer wondered whether he was faking, or showing off, or pretending to be cleverer than he was. She did him the credit, now, of discounting the possibility that he was being deliberately mysterious. All the same, she repeated, as though she must have heard him wrongly:

“Brian Mathers.”

“Yeah.”

“The Death Threat Man.”

“Yeah.”

“But,” said Robin, “what on earth can he have to do with Lula Landry’s death?”

“Nothing,” said Strike, honestly enough. “Yet.”

The north London crematorium where Rochelle’s funeral was held three days later was chilly, anonymous and depressing. Everything was smoothly nondenominational; from the dark-wood pews and blank walls, carefully devoid of any religious device; to the abstract-stained glass window, a mosaic of little jewel-bright squares. Sitting on hard wood, while a whiny-voiced minister called Rochelle “Roselle” and the fine rain speckled the gaudy patchwork window above him, Strike understood the appeal of gilded cherubs and plaster saints, of gargoyles and Old Testament angels, of gem-set golden crucifixes; anything that might give an aura of majesty and grandeur, a firm promise of an afterlife, or retrospective worth to a life like Rochelle’s. The dead girl had had her glimpse of earthly paradise: littered with designer goods, and celebrities to sneer at, and handsome drivers to joke with, and the yearning for it had brought her to this: seven mourners, and a minister who did not know her name.

There was a tawdry impersonality about the whole affair; a feeling of faint embarrassment; a painful avoidance of the facts of Rochelle’s life. Nobody seemed to feel that they had the right to sit in the front row. Even the obese black woman wearing thick-lensed glasses and a knitted hat, who Strike assumed was Rochelle’s aunt, had chosen to sit three benches from the front of the crematorium, keeping her distance from the cheap coffin. The balding worker whom Strike had met at the homeless hostel had come, in an open shirt and a leather jacket; behind him was a fresh-faced, neatly suited young Asian man who Strike thought might turn out to be the psychiatrist who had run Rochelle’s outpatient group.