The Cuckoo's Calling

1

“‘WITH ALL THE GALLONS OF NEWSPRINT and hours of televised talk that have been poured forth on the subject of Lula Landry’s death, rarely has the question been asked: why do we care?

“‘She was beautiful, of course, and beautiful girls have been helping to shift newspapers ever since Dana Gibson cross-hatched lazy-lidded sirens for the New Yorker.

“‘She was black, too, or rather, a delicious shade of café au lait, and this, we were constantly told, represented progression within an industry concerned merely with surfaces. (I am dubious: could it not be that, this season, café au lait was the “in” shade? Have we seen a sudden influx of black women into the industry in Landry’s wake? Have our notions of female beauty been revolutionized by her success? Are black Barbies now outselling white?)

“‘The family and friends of the flesh-and-blood Landry will be distraught, of course, and have my profound sympathy. We, however, the reading, watching public, have no personal grief to justify our excesses. Young women die, every day, in “tragic” (which is to say, unnatural) circumstances: in car crashes, from overdoses, and, occasionally, because they attempted to starve themselves into conformity with the body shape sported by Landry and her ilk. Do we spare any of these dead girls more than a passing thought, as we turn the page, and obscure their ordinary faces?’ ”

Robin paused to take a sip of coffee and clear her throat.

“So far, so sanctimonious,” muttered Strike.

He was sitting at the end of Robin’s desk, pasting photographs into an open folder, numbering each one, and writing a description of the subject of each in an index at the back. Robin continued where she had left off, reading from her computer monitor.

“‘Our disproportionate interest, even grief, bears examination. Right up until the moment that Landry took her fatal dive, it is a fair bet that tens of thousands of women would have changed places with her. Sobbing young girls laid flowers beneath the balcony of Landry’s £4.5 million penthouse flat after her crushed body was cleared away. Has even one aspiring model been deterred in her pursuit of tabloid fame by the rise and brutal fall of Lula Landry?’ ”

“Get on with it,” said Strike. “Her, not you,” he added hastily. “It’s a woman writing, right?”

“Yes, a Melanie Telford,” said Robin, scrolling back to the top of the screen to reveal the head shot of a jowly middle-aged blonde. “Do you want me to skip the rest?”

“No, no, keep going.”

Robin cleared her throat once more and continued.

“‘The answer, surely, is no.’ That’s the bit about aspiring models being deterred.”

“Yeah, got that.”

“Right, well…‘A hundred years after Emmeline Pankhurst, a generation of pubescent females seeks nothing better than to be reduced to the status of a cut-out paper doll, a flat avatar whose fictionalized adventures mask such disturbance and distress that she threw herself from a third-story window. Appearance is all: the designer Guy Somé was quick to inform the press that she jumped wearing one of his dresses, which sold out in the twenty-four hours after her death. What better advert could there be than that Lula Landry chose to meet her maker in Somé?

“‘No, it is not the young woman whose loss we bemoan, for she was no more real to most of us than the Gibson girls who dripped from Dana’s pen. What we mourn is the physical image flickering across a multitude of red-tops and celeb mags; an image that sold us clothes and handbags and a notion of celebrity that, in her demise, proved to be empty and transient as a soap bubble. What we actually miss, were we honest enough to admit it, are the entertaining antics of that paper-thin good-time girl, whose strip-cartoon existence of drug abuse, riotous living, fancy clothes and dangerous on-off boyfriend we can no longer enjoy.

“‘Landry’s funeral was covered as lavishly as any celebrity wedding in the tawdry magazines who feed on the famous, and whose publishers will surely mourn her demise longer than most. We were permitted glimpses of various celebrities in tears, but her family were given the tiniest picture of all; they were a surprisingly unphotogenic lot, you see.

“‘Yet the account of one mourner genuinely touched me. In response to the inquiry of a man who she may not have realized was a reporter, she revealed that she had met Landry at a treatment facility, and that they had become friends. She had taken her place in a rear pew to say farewell, and slipped as quietly away again. She has not sold her story, unlike so many others who consorted with Landry in life. It may tell us something touching about the real Lula Landry, that she inspired genuine affection in an ordinary girl. As for the rest of us—’ ”

“Doesn’t she give this ordinary girl from the treatment facility a name?” interrupted Strike.

Robin scanned the story silently.

“No.”

Strike scratched his imperfectly shaven chin.

“Bristow didn’t mention any friend from a treatment facility.”

“D’you think she could be important?” asked Robin eagerly, turning in her swivel chair to look at him.

“It could be interesting to talk to someone who knew Landry from therapy, instead of nightclubs.”

Strike had only asked Robin to look up Landry’s connections on the internet because he had nothing else for her to do. She had already telephoned Derrick Wilson, the security guard, and arranged a meeting with Strike on Friday morning at the Phoenix Café in Brixton. The day’s post had comprised two circulars and a final demand; there had been no calls, and she had already organized everything in the office that could be alphabetized, stacked or arranged according to type and color.

Inspired by her Google proficiency of the previous day, therefore, he had set her this fairly pointless task. For the past hour or so she had been reading out odd snippets and articles about Landry and her associates, while Strike put into order a stack of receipts, telephone bills and photographs relating to his only other current case.

“Shall I see whether I can find out more about that girl, then?” asked Robin.

“Yeah,” said Strike absently, examining a photograph of a stocky, balding man in a suit and a very ripe-looking redhead in tight jeans. The besuited man was Mr. Geoffrey Hook; the redhead, however, bore no resemblance to Mrs. Hook, who, prior to Bristow’s arrival in his office, had been Strike’s only client. Strike stuck the photograph into Mrs. Hook’s file and labeled it No. 12, while Robin turned back to the computer.

For a few moments there was silence, except for the flick of photographs and the tapping of Robin’s short nails against the keys. The door into the inner office behind Strike was closed to conceal the camp bed and other signs of habitation, and the air was heavy with the scent of artificial limes, due to Strike’s liberal use of cheap air-freshener before Robin had arrived. Lest she perceive any tinge of sexual interest in his decision to sit at the other end of her desk, he had pretended to notice her engagement ring for the first time before sitting down, then made polite, studiously impersonal conversation about her fiancé for five minutes. He learned that he was a newly qualified accountant called Matthew; that it was to live with Matthew that Robin had moved to London from Yorkshire the previous month, and that the temping was a stopgap measure before finding a permanent job.

“D’you think she could be in one of these pictures?” Robin asked, after a while. “The girl from the treatment center?”

She had brought up a screen full of identically sized photographs, each showing one or more people dressed in dark clothes, all heading from left to right, making for the funeral. Crash barriers and the blurred faces of a crowd formed the backdrop to each picture.

Most striking of all was the picture of a very tall, pale girl with golden hair drawn back into a ponytail, on whose head was perched a confection of black net and feathers. Strike recognized her, because everyone knew who she was: Ciara Porter, the model with whom Lula had spent much of her last day on earth; the friend with whom Landry had been photographed for one of the most famous shots of her career. Porter looked beautiful and somber as she walked towards Lula’s funeral service. She seemed to have attended alone, because there was no disembodied hand supporting her thin arm or resting on her long back.

Next to Porter’s picture was that of a couple captioned Film producer Freddie Bestigui and wife Tansy. Bestigui was built like a bull, with short legs, a broad barrel chest and a thick neck. His hair was gray and brush-cut; his face a crumpled mass of folds, bags and moles, out of which his fleshy nose protruded like a tumor. Nevertheless, he cut an imposing figure in his expensive black overcoat, with his skeletal young wife on his arm. Almost nothing could be discerned of Tansy’s true appearance, behind the upturned fur of her coat collar and the enormous round sunglasses.

Last in this top row of photographs was Guy Somé, fashion designer. He was a thin black man who was wearing a midnight-blue frock coat of exaggerated cut. His face was bowed and his expression indiscernible, due to the way the light fell on his dark head, though three large diamond earrings in the lobe facing the camera had caught the flashes and glittered like stars. Like Porter, he appeared to have arrived unaccompanied, although a small group of mourners, unworthy of their own legends, had been captured within the frame of his picture.

Strike drew his chair nearer to the screen, though still keeping more than an arm’s length between himself and Robin. One of the unidentified faces, half severed by the edge of the picture, was John Bristow, recognizable by the short upper lip and the hamsterish teeth. He had his arm around a stricken-looking older woman with white hair; her face was gaunt and ghastly, the nakedness of her grief touching. Behind this pair was a tall, haughty-looking man who gave the impression of deploring the surroundings in which he found himself.

“I can’t see anyone who might be this ordinary girl,” said Robin, moving the screen down to scrutinize more pictures of famous and beautiful people looking sad and serious. “Oh, look…Evan Duffield.”

He was dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans and a military-style black overcoat. His hair, too, was black; his face all sharp planes and hollows; icy blue eyes stared directly into the camera lens. Though taller than both of them, he looked fragile compared to the companions flanking him: a large man in a suit and an anxious-looking older woman, whose mouth was open and who was making a gesture as though to clear a path ahead of them. The threesome reminded Strike of parents steering a sick child away from a party. Strike noticed that, in spite of Duffield’s air of disorientation and distress, he had made a good job of applying his eyeliner.

“Look at those flowers!”

Duffield slid up into the top of the screen and vanished: Robin had paused on the photograph of an enormous wreath in the shape of what Strike took, initially, to be a heart, before realizing it represented two curved angel wings, composed of white roses. An inset photograph showed a close-up of the attached card.

“‘Rest in peace, Angel Lula. Deeby Macc,’ ” Robin read aloud.

“Deeby Macc? The rapper? So they knew each other, did they?”

“No, I don’t think so; but there was that whole thing about him renting a flat in her building; she’d been mentioned in a couple of his songs, hadn’t she? The press were all excited about him staying there…”

“You’re well informed on the subject.”

“Oh, you know, just magazines,” said Robin vaguely, scrolling back through the funeral photographs.

“What kind of name is ‘Deeby’?” Strike wondered aloud.

“It comes from his initials. It’s ‘D. B.’ really,” she enunciated clearly. “His real name’s Daryl Brandon Macdonald.”

“A rap fan, are you?”

“No,” said Robin, still intent on the screen. “I just remember things like that.”

She clicked off the images she was perusing and began tapping away on the keyboard again. Strike returned to his photographs. The next showed Mr. Geoffrey Hook kissing his ginger-haired companion, hand palpating one large, canvas-covered buttock, outside Ealing Broadway Tube station.

“Here’s a bit of film on YouTube, look,” said Robin. “Deeby Macc talking about Lula after she died.”

“Let’s see it,” said Strike, rolling his chair forwards a couple of feet and then, on second thought, back one.

The grainy little video, three inches by four, jerked into life. A large black man wearing some kind of hooded top with a fist picked out in studs on the chest sat in a black leather chair, facing an unseen interviewer. His hair was closely shaven and he wore sunglasses.

“…Lula Landry’s suicide?” said the interviewer, who was English.

“That was fucked-up, man, that was fucked-up,” replied Deeby, running his hand over his smooth head. His voice was soft, deep and hoarse, with the very faintest trace of a lisp. “That’s what they do to success: they hunt you down, they tear you down. That’s what envy does, my friend. The motherfuckin’ press chased her out that window. Let her rest in peace, I say. She’s getting peace right now.”

“Pretty shocking welcome to London for you,” said the interviewer, “with her, y’know, like, falling past your window?”

Deeby Macc did not answer at once. He sat very still, staring at the interviewer through his opaque lenses. Then he said:

“I wasn’t there, or you got someone who says I was?”

The interviewer’s yelp of nervous, hastily stifled laughter jarred.

“God, no, not at all—not…”

Deeby turned his head and addressed someone standing off-camera.

“Think I oughta’ve brought my lawyers?”

The interviewer brayed with sycophantic laughter. Deeby looked back at him, still unsmiling.

“Deeby Macc,” said the breathless interviewer, “thank you very much for your time.”

An outstretched white hand slid forwards on to the screen; Deeby raised his own in a fist. The white hand reconstituted itself, and they bumped knuckles. Somebody off-screen laughed derisively. The video ended.

“‘The motherfuckin’ press chased her out that window,’ ” Strike repeated, rolling his chair back to its original position. “Interesting point of view.”

He felt his mobile phone vibrate in his trouser pocket, and drew it out. The sight of Charlotte’s name attached to a new text caused a surge of adrenalin through his body, as though he had just sighted a crouching beast of prey.

I will be out on Friday morning between 9 and 12 if you want to collect your things.

“What?” He had the impression that Robin had just spoken.

“I said, there’s a horrible piece here about her birth mother.”

“OK. Read it out.”

He slid his mobile back into his pocket. As he bent his large head again over Mrs. Hook’s file, his thoughts seemed to reverberate as though a gong had been struck inside his skull.

Charlotte was behaving with sinister reasonableness; feigning adult calm. She had taken their endlessly elaborate duel to a new level, never before reached or tested: “Now let’s do it like grown-ups.” Perhaps a knife would plunge between his shoulder blades as he walked through the front door of her flat; perhaps he would walk into the bedroom to discover her corpse, wrists slit, lying in a puddle of congealing blood in front of the fireplace.

Robin’s voice was like the background drone of a vacuum cleaner. With an effort, he refocused his attention.

“‘…sold the romantic story of her liaison with a young black man to as many tabloid journalists as were prepared to pay. There is nothing romantic, however, about Marlene Higson’s story as it is remembered by her old neighbors.

“‘ “She was turning tricks,” says Vivian Cranfield, who lived in the flat above Higson’s at the time she fell pregnant with Landry. “There were men coming in and out of her place every hour of the day and night. She never knew who that baby’s father was, it could have been any of them. She never wanted the baby. I can still remember her out in the hall, crying, on her own, while her mum was busy with a punter. Tiny little thing in her nappy, hardly walking…someone must have called Social Services, and not before time. Best thing that ever happened to that girl, getting adopted.”

“‘The truth will, no doubt, shock Landry, who has talked at length in the press about her reunion with her long-lost birth mother…’—this was written,” explained Robin, “before Lula died.”

“Yeah,” said Strike, closing the folder abruptly. “D’ you fancy a walk?”

2

THE CAMERAS LOOKED LIKE MALEVOLENT shoeboxes atop their pole, each with a single blank, black eye. They pointed in opposite directions, staring the length of Alderbrook Road, which bustled with pedestrians and traffic. Both pavements were crammed with shops, bars and cafés. Double-deckers rumbled up and down bus lanes.

“This is where Bristow’s Runner was caught on film,” observed Strike, turning his back on Alderbrook Road to look up the much quieter Bellamy Road, which led, lined with tall and palatial houses, into the residential heart of Mayfair. “He passed here twelve minutes after she fell…this’d be the quickest route from Kentigern Gardens. Night buses run here. Best bet to pick up a taxi. Not that that’d be a smart move if you’d just murdered a woman.”

He buried himself again in an extremely battered A–Z. Strike did not seem worried that anyone might mistake him for a tourist. No doubt, thought Robin, it would not matter if they did, given his size.

Robin had been asked to do several things, in the course of her brief temping career, that were outside the terms of a secretarial contract, and had therefore been a little unnerved by Strike’s suggestion of a walk. She was pleased, however, to acquit Strike of any flirtatious intent. The long walk to this spot had been conducted in almost total silence, Strike apparently deep in thought, and occasionally consulting his map.

Upon their arrival in Alderbrook Road, however, he had said:

“If you spot anything, or you think of anything I haven’t, tell me, won’t you?”

This was rather thrilling: Robin prided herself on her observational powers; they were one reason she had secretly cherished the childhood ambition that the large man beside her was living. She looked intelligently up and down the street, and tried to visualize what someone might have been up to, on a snowy night, in sub-zero temperatures, at two in the morning.

“This way,” said Strike, however, before any insights could occur to her, and they walked off, side by side, along Bellamy Road. It curved gently to the left and continued for some sixty houses, which were almost identical, with their glossy black doors, their short railings either side of clean white steps and their topiary-filled tubs. Here and there were marble lions and brass plaques, giving names and professional credentials; chandeliers glinted from upper windows, and one door stood open to reveal a checkerboard floor, oil paintings in gold frames and a Georgian staircase.

As he walked, Strike pondered some of the information that Robin had managed to find on the internet that morning. As Strike had suspected, Bristow had not been honest when he asserted that the police had made no effort to trace the Runner and his sidekick. Buried in voluminous and rabid press coverage that survived online were appeals for the men to come forward, but they seemed to have yielded no results.

Unlike Bristow, Strike did not find any of this suggestive of police incompetence, or of a plausible murder suspect left uninvestigated. The sudden sounding of a car alarm around the time that the two men had fled the area suggested a good reason for their reluctance to talk to the police. Moreover, Strike did not know whether Bristow was familiar with the varying quality of CCTV footage, but he himself had extensive experience of frustrating blurry black-and-white images from which it was impossible to glean a true likeness.

Strike had also noticed that Bristow had said not a word in person, or in his notes, about the DNA evidence gathered from inside his sister’s flat. He strongly suspected, from the fact that the police had been happy to exclude the Runner and his friend from further inquiries, that no trace of foreign DNA had been found there. However, Strike knew that the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.

But the Google searches of the morning had suggested a possible explanation for Bristow’s fixation on the Runner. His sister had been researching her biological roots, and had managed to trace her birth mother, who sounded, even when allowance was made for press sensationalism, an unsavory character. Doubtless revelations such as those that Robin had found online would have been unpleasant not just for Landry, but for her whole adoptive family. Was it part of Bristow’s instability (for Strike could not pretend to himself that his client gave the impression of a well-balanced man) that he believed Lula, so fortunate in some ways, had tempted fate? That she had stirred up trouble in trying to plumb the secrets of her origins; that she had woken a demon that had reached out of the distant past, and killed her? Was that why a black man in her vicinity so disturbed him?

Deeper and deeper into the enclave of the wealthy Strike and Robin walked, until they arrived at the corner of Kentigern Gardens. Like Bellamy Road, it projected an aura of intimidating, self-contained prosperity. The houses here were high Victorian, red brick with stone dressings and heavy pedimented windows on four floors, with their own small stone balconies. White marble porticos framed each entrance, and three white steps led from the pavement to more glossy black front doors. Everything was expensively well maintained, clean and regimented. There were only a few cars parked here; a small sign declared that permits were needed for the privilege.

No longer set apart by police tape and massing journalists, number 18 had faded back into graceful conformity with its neighbors.

“The balcony she fell from was on the top floor,” said Strike, “about forty feet up, I’d say.”

He contemplated the handsome frontage. The balconies on the top three floors, Robin saw, were shallow, with barely standing room between the balustrade and the long windows.

“The thing is,” Strike told Robin, while he squinted at the balcony high above them, “pushing someone from that height wouldn’t guarantee death.”

“Oh—but surely?” protested Robin, contemplating the awful drop between top balcony and hard road.

“You’d be surprised. I spent a month in a bed next to a Welsh bloke who got blown off a building about that height. Smashed his legs and pelvis, lot of internal bleeding, but he’s still with us.”

Robin glanced at Strike, wondering why he had been in bed for a month; but the detective was oblivious, now scowling at the front door.

“Keypad,” he muttered, noting the metal square inset with buttons, “and a camera over the door. Bristow didn’t mention a camera. Could be new.”

He stood for a few minutes testing theories against the intimidating red-brick face of these fantastically expensive fortresses. Why had Lula Landry chosen to live here in the first place? Sedate, traditional, stuffy, Kentigern Gardens was surely the natural domain of a different kind of rich: Russian and Arab oligarchs; corporate giants splitting their time between town and their country estates; wealthy spinsters, slowly decaying amidst their art collections. He found it a strange choice of abode for a girl of twenty-three, who ran, according to every story Robin had read out that morning, with a hip, creative crowd, whose celebrated sense of style owed more to the street than the salon.

“It looks very well protected, doesn’t it?” said Robin.

“Yeah, it does. And that’s without the crowd of paparazzi who were standing guard over it that night.”

Strike leaned back against the black railings of number 23, staring at number 18. The windows of Landry’s former residence were taller than those on the lower floors, and its balcony, unlike the other two, had not been decorated with topiary shrubs. Strike slipped a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered Robin one; she shook her head, surprised, because she had not seen him smoke in the office. Having lit up and inhaled deeply, he said, with his eyes on the front door:

“Bristow thinks someone got in and out that night, undetected.”

Robin, who had already decided that the building was impenetrable, thought that Strike was about to pour scorn on the theory, but she was wrong.

“If they did,” said Strike, eyes still on the door, “it was planned, and planned well. Nobody could’ve got past photographers, a keypad, a security guard and a closed inner door, and out again, on luck alone. Thing is,” he scratched his chin, “that degree of premeditation doesn’t fit with such a slapdash murder.”

Robin found the choice of adjective callous.

“Pushing someone over a balcony’s a spur-of-the-moment thing,” said Strike, as though he had felt her inner wince. “Hot blood. Blind temper.”

He found Robin’s company satisfactory and restful, not only because she was hanging off his every word, and had not troubled to break his silences, but because that little sapphire ring on her third finger was like a neat full stop: this far, and no further. It suited him perfectly. He was free to show off, in a very mild way, which was one of the few pleasures remaining to him.

“But what if the killer was already inside?”

“That’s a lot more plausible,” said Strike, and Robin felt very pleased with herself. “And if a killer was already in there, we’ve got the choice between the security guard himself, one or both of the Bestiguis, or some unknown person who was hiding in the building without anyone’s knowledge. If it was either of the Bestiguis, or Wilson, there’s no getting-in-and-out problem; all they had to do was return to the places they were supposed to be. There was still the risk she could have survived, injured, to tell the tale, but a hot-blooded, unpremeditated crime makes a lot more sense if one of them did it. A row and a blind shove.”

Strike smoked his cigarette and continued to scrutinize the front of the building, in particular the gap between the windows on the first floor and those on the third. He was thinking primarily about Freddie Bestigui, the film producer. According to what Robin had found on the internet, Bestigui had been in bed asleep when Lula Landry toppled over the balcony two floors above. The fact that it was Bestigui’s own wife who had sounded the alarm, and insisted that the killer was still upstairs while her husband stood beside her, implied that she, at least, did not think him guilty. Nevertheless, Freddie Bestigui had been the man in closest proximity to the dead girl at the time of her death. Laymen, in Strike’s experience, were obsessed with motive: opportunity topped the professional’s list.

Unwittingly confirming her civilian status, Robin said:

“But why would someone pick the middle of the night to have an argument with her? Nothing ever came out about her not getting on with her neighbors, did it? And Tansy Bestigui definitely couldn’t have done it, could she? Why would she run downstairs and tell the security guard if she’d just pushed Lula over the balcony?”

Strike did not answer directly; he seemed to be following his own train of thought, and after a moment or two replied:

“Bristow’s fixated on the quarter of an hour after his sister went inside, after the photographers had left and the security guard had abandoned the desk because he was ill. That meant the lobby became briefly navigable—but how was anyone outside the building supposed to know that Wilson had left his post? The front door’s not made of glass.”

“Plus,” interjected Robin intelligently, “they’d have needed to know the key code to open the front door.”

“People get slack. Unless the security people change it regularly, loads of undesirables could have known that code. Let’s have a look down here.”

They walked in silence right to the end of Kentigern Gardens, where they found a narrow alleyway which ran, at a slightly oblique angle, along the rear of Landry’s block of houses. Strike was amused to note that the alley was called Serf’s Way. Wide enough to allow a single car to pass, it had plentiful lighting and was devoid of hiding places, with long, high, smooth walls on either side of the cobbled passageway. They came in due course to a pair of large, electrically operated garage doors, with an enormous PRIVATE sign affixed to the wall beside them, which guarded the entrance to the underground cache of parking spaces for the Kentigern Gardeners.

When he judged that they were roughly level with the back of number 18, Strike made a leap, caught hold of the top of the wall and heaved himself up to look into a long row of small, carefully manicured gardens. Between each patch of smooth and well-tended lawn and the house to which it belonged was a shadowy stairwell to basement level. Anyone wishing to climb the rear of the house would, in Strike’s opinion, require ladders, or a partner to belay him, and some sturdy ropes.

He let himself slide back down the wall, emitting a stifled grunt of pain as he landed on the prosthetic leg.

“It’s nothing,” he said, when Robin made a concerned noise; she had noticed the vestige of a limp, and wondered whether he had sprained an ankle.

The chafing on the end of the stump was not helped by hobbling off over the cobbles. It was much harder, given the rigid construction of his false ankle, to navigate uneven surfaces. Strike asked himself ruefully whether he had really needed to hoist himself up on the wall at all. Robin might be a pretty girl, but she could not hold a candle to the woman he had just left.

3

“AND YOU’RE SURE HE’S A detective, are you? Because anyone can do that. Anyone can google people.”

Matthew was irritable after a long day, a disgruntled client and an unsatisfactory encounter with his new boss. He did not appreciate what struck him as naive and misplaced admiration for another man on the part of his fiancée.

“He wasn’t googling people,” said Robin. “I was the one doing the googling, while he was working on another case.”

“Well I don’t like the sound of the set-up. He’s sleeping in his office, Robin; don’t you think there’s something a bit fishy there?”

“I told you, I think he’s just split up with his partner.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet he has,” said Matthew.

Robin dropped his plate down on top of her own and stalked off into the kitchen. She was angry at Matthew, and vaguely annoyed with Strike, too. She had enjoyed tracking Lula Landry’s acquaintance across cyberspace that day; but seeing it retrospectively through Matthew’s eyes, it seemed to her that Strike had given her a pointless, time-filling job.

“Look, I’m not saying anything,” Matthew said, from the kitchen doorway. “I just think he sounds weird. And what’s with the little afternoon walks?”

“It wasn’t a little afternoon walk, Matt. We went to see the scene of the—we went to see the place where the client thinks something happened.”

“Robin, there’s no need to make such a bloody mystery about it,” Matthew laughed.

“I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement,” she snapped over her shoulder. “I can’t tell you about the case.”

“The case.”

He gave another short, scoffing laugh.

Robin strode around the tiny kitchen, putting away ingredients, slamming cupboard doors. After a while, watching her figure as she moved around, Matthew came to feel that he might have been unreasonable. He came up behind her as she was scraping the leftovers into the bin, put his arms around her, buried his face in her neck and cupped and stroked the breast that bore the bruises Strike had accidentally inflicted, and which had irrevocably colored Matthew’s view of the man. He murmured conciliatory phrases into Robin’s honey-colored hair; but she pulled away from him to put the plates into the sink.

Robin felt as though her own worth had been impugned. Strike had seemed interested in the things she had found online. Strike expressed gratitude for her efficiency and initiative.

“How many proper interviews have you got next week?” Matthew asked, as she turned on the cold tap.

“Three,” she shouted over the noise of the gushing water, scrubbing the top plate aggressively.

She waited until he had walked away into the sitting room before turning off the tap. There was, she noticed, a fragment of frozen pea caught in the setting of her engagement ring.

4

STRIKE ARRIVED AT CHARLOTTE’S FLAT at half past nine on Friday morning. This gave her, he reasoned, half an hour to be well clear of the place before he entered it, assuming that she really was intending to leave, rather than lie in wait for him. The grand and gracious white buildings that lined the wide street; the plane trees; the butcher’s shop that might have been stuck in the 1950s; the cafés bustling with the upper middle classes; the sleek restaurants; they had always felt slightly unreal and stagey to Strike. Perhaps he had always known, deep down, that he would not stay, that he did not belong.

Until the moment he unlocked the front door, he expected her to be there; yet as soon as he stepped over the threshold, he knew that the place was empty. The silence had that slack quality that speaks only of the indifference of uninhabited rooms, and his footsteps sounded alien and overloud as he made his way down the hall.

Four cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the sitting room, open for him to inspect. Here were his cheap and serviceable belongings, heaped together, like jumble-sale objects. He lifted a few things up to check the deeper levels, but nothing seemed to have been smashed, ripped or covered in paint. Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawn mowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.

The silent room in which he stood spoke of a confident good taste, with its antique rug and its pale flesh-pink walls; its fine dark-wood furniture and its overflowing bookcases. The only change he spotted since Sunday night stood on the glass end table beside the sofa. On Sunday night there had been a picture of himself and Charlotte, laughing on the beach at St. Mawes. Now a black-and-white studio portrait of Charlotte’s dead father smiled benignly at Strike from the same silver picture frame.

Over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of an eighteen-year-old Charlotte, in oils. It showed the face of a Florentine angel in a cloud of long dark hair. Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country. From Charlotte he had learned that the kind of money he had never known could coexist with unhappiness and savagery. Her family, for all their gracious manners, their suavity and flair, their erudition and occasional flamboyance, was even madder and stranger than his own. That had been a powerful link between them, when first he and Charlotte had come together.

A strange stray thought came to him now, as he looked up at that portrait: that this was the reason it had been painted, so that one day, its large hazel-green eyes would watch him leave. Had Charlotte known what it would feel like, to prowl the empty flat under the eyes of her stunning eighteen-year-old self? Had she realized that the painting would do her work better than her physical presence?

He turned away, striding through the other rooms, but she had left nothing for him to do. Every trace of him, from his tooth floss to his army boots, had been taken and deposited in the boxes. He studied the bedroom with particular attention, and the room looked back at him, with its dark floorboards, white curtains and delicate dressing table, calm and composed. The bed, like the portrait, seemed a living, breathing presence. Remember what happened here, and what can never happen again.

He carried the four boxes one by one out on to the doorstep, on the last trip coming face to face with the smirking next-door neighbor, who was locking his own front door. He wore rugby shirts with the collars turned up, and always brayed with panting laughter at Charlotte’s lightest witticisms.

“Having a clear-out?” he asked.

Strike shut Charlotte’s door firmly on him.

He slid the door keys off his key ring in front of the hall mirror, and laid them carefully on the half-moon table, next to the bowl of potpourri. Strike’s face in the glass was creviced and dirty-looking; his right eye still puffy; yellow and mauve. A voice from seventeen years before came to him in the silence: “How the fuck did a pube-headed trog like you ever pull that, Strike?” And it seemed incredible that he ever had, as he stood there in the hall he would never see again.

One last moment of madness, the space between heartbeats, like the one that had sent him hurtling after her five days previously: he would stay here, after all, waiting for her to return; then cupping her perfect face in his hands and saying “Let’s try again.”

But they had already tried, again and again and again, and always, when the first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.

He closed the front door behind him for the last time. The braying neighbor had vanished. Strike lifted the four boxes down the steps on to the pavement, and waited to hail a black cab.

5

STRIKE HAD TOLD ROBIN THAT he would be late into the office on her last morning. He had given her the spare key, and told her to let herself in.

She had been very slightly hurt by his casual use of the word “last.” It told her that however well they had got along, albeit in a guarded and professional way; however much more organized his office was, and how much cleaner the horrible washroom outside the glass door; however much better the bell downstairs looked, without that scrappy piece of paper taped beneath it, but a neatly typed name in the clear plastic holder (it had taken her half an hour, and cost her two broken nails, to prize the cover off); however efficient she had been at taking messages, however intelligently she had discussed the almost certainly nonexistent killer of Lula Landry, Strike had been counting down the days until he could get rid of her.

That he could not afford a temporary secretary was perfectly obvious. He had only two clients; he seemed (as Matthew kept mentioning, as though sleeping in an office was a mark of terrible depravity) to be homeless; Robin saw, of course, that from Strike’s point of view it made no sense to keep her on. But she was not looking forward to Monday. There would be a strange new office (Temporary Solutions had already telephoned through the address); a neat, bright, bustling place, no doubt, full of gossipy women as most of these offices were, all engaged in activities that meant less than nothing to her. Robin might not believe in a murderer; she knew that Strike did not believe either; but the process of proving one nonexistent fascinated her.

Robin had found the whole week more exciting than she would ever have confessed to Matthew. All of it, even calling Freddie Bestigui’s production company, BestFilms, twice a day, and receiving repeated refusals to her requests to be put through to the film producer, had given her a sense of importance she had rarely experienced during her working life. Robin was fascinated by the interior workings of other people’s minds: she had been halfway through a psychology degree when an unforeseen incident had finished her university career.

Half past ten, and Strike had still not returned to the office, but a large woman wearing a nervous smile, an orange coat and a purple knitted beret had arrived. This was Mrs. Hook, a name familiar to Robin because it was that of Strike’s only other client. Robin installed Mrs. Hook on the sagging sofa beside her own desk, and fetched her a cup of tea. (Acting on Robin’s awkward description of the lascivious Mr. Crowdy downstairs, Strike had bought cheap cups and a box of their own tea bags.)

“I know I’m early,” said Mrs. Hook, for the third time, taking ineffectual little sips of boiling tea. “I haven’t seen you before, are you new?”

“I’m temporary,” said Robin.

“As I expect you’ve guessed, it’s my husband,” said Mrs. Hook, not listening. “I suppose you see women like me all the time, don’t you? Wanting to know the worst. I dithered for ages and ages. But it’s best to know, isn’t it? Best to know. I thought Cormoran would be here. Is he out on another case?”

“That’s right,” said Robin, who suspected that Strike was actually doing something related to his mysterious personal life; there had been a caginess about him as he had told her he would be late.

“Do you know who his father is?” asked Mrs. Hook.

“No, I don’t,” said Robin, thinking that they were talking about the poor woman’s husband.

“Jonny Rokeby,” said Mrs. Hook, with a kind of dramatic relish.

“Jonny Roke—”

Robin caught her breath, realizing simultaneously that Mrs. Hook meant Strike, and that Strike’s massive frame was looming up outside the glass door. She could see that he was carrying something very large.

“Just one moment, Mrs. Hook,” she said.

“What?” asked Strike, peering around the edge of the cardboard box, as Robin darted out of the glass door and closed it behind her.

“Mrs. Hook’s here,” she whispered.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. She’s an hour early.”

“I know. I thought you might want to, um, organize your office a bit before you take her in there.”

Strike eased the cardboard box on to the metal floor.

“I’ve got to bring these in off the street,” he said.

“I’ll help,” offered Robin.

“No, you go and make polite conversation. She’s taking a pottery class and she thinks her husband’s sleeping with his accountant.”

Strike limped off down the stairs, leaving the box beside the glass door.

Jonny Rokeby; could it be true?

“He’s on his way, just coming,” Robin told Mrs. Hook brightly, resettling herself at her desk. “Mr. Strike told me you do pottery. I’ve always wanted to try…”

For five minutes, Robin barely listened to the exploits of the pottery class, and the sweetly understanding young man who taught them. Then the glass door opened and Strike entered, unencumbered by boxes and smiling politely at Mrs. Hook, who jumped up to greet him.

“Oh, Cormoran, your eye!” she said. “Has somebody punched you?”

“No,” said Strike. “If you’ll give me a moment, Mrs. Hook, I’ll get out your file.”

“I know I’m early, Cormoran, and I’m awfully sorry…I couldn’t sleep at all last night…”

“Let me take your cup, Mrs. Hook,” said Robin, and she successfully distracted the client from glimpsing, in the seconds it took Strike to slip through the inner door, the camp bed, the sleeping bag and the kettle.

A few minutes later, Strike re-emerged on a waft of artificial limes, and Mrs. Hook vanished, with a terrified look at Robin, into his office. The door closed behind them.

Robin sat down at her desk again. She had already opened the morning’s post. She swung side to side on her swivel chair; then she moved to the computer and casually brought up Wikipedia. Then, with a disengaged air, as though she was unaware of what her fingers were up to, she typed in the two names: Rokeby Strike.

The entry appeared at once, headed by a black-and-white photograph of an instantly recognizable man, famous for four decades. He had a narrow Harlequin’s face and wild eyes, which were easy to caricature, the left one slightly off-kilter due to a weak divergent squint; his mouth was wide open, sweat pouring down his face, hair flying as he bellowed into a microphone.

Jonathan Leonard “Jonny” Rokeby, b. August 1st 1948, is the lead singer of 70s rock band The Deadbeats, member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, multi–Grammy Award winner…

Strike looked nothing like him; the only slight resemblance was in the inequality of the eyes, which in Strike was, after all, a transient condition.

Down the entry Robin scrolled:

…multi-platinum album Hold It Back in 1975. A record-breaking tour of America was interrupted by a drugs bust in LA and the arrest of new guitarist David Carr, with whom…

until she reached Personal Life:

Rokeby has been married three times: to art-school girlfriend Shirley Mullens (1969–1973), with whom he has one daughter, Maimie; to model, actress and human rights activist Carla Astolfi (1975–1979), with whom he has two daughters, television presenter Gabriella Rokeby and jewelry designer Daniella Rokeby, and (1981–present) to film producer Jenny Graham, with whom he has two sons, Edward and Al. Rokeby also has a daughter, Prudence Donleavy, from his relationship with the actress Lindsey Fanthrope, and a son, Cormoran, with 1970s supergroupie Leda Strike.

A piercing scream rose in the inner office behind Robin. She jumped to her feet, her chair skittering away from her on its wheels. The scream became louder and shriller. Robin ran across the office to pull open the inner door.

Mrs. Hook, divested of orange coat and purple beret, and wearing what looked like a flowery pottery smock over jeans, had thrown herself on Strike’s chest and was punching it, all the while making a noise like a boiling kettle. On and on the one-note scream went, until it seemed that she must draw breath or suffocate.

“Mrs. Hook!” cried Robin, and she seized the woman’s flabby upper arms from behind, attempting to relieve Strike of the responsibility of fending her off. Mrs. Hook, however, was much more powerful than she looked; though she paused to breathe, she continued to punch Strike until, having no choice, he caught both her wrists and held them in midair.

At this, Mrs. Hook twisted free of his loose grip and flung herself on Robin instead, howling like a dog.

Patting the sobbing woman on the back, Robin maneuvered her, by minuscule increments, back into the outer office.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Hook, it’s all right,” she said soothingly, lowering her into the sofa. “Let me get you a cup of tea. It’s all right.”

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Hook,” said Strike formally, from the doorway into his office. “It’s never easy to get news like this.”

“I th-thought it was Valerie,” whimpered Mrs. Hook, her disheveled head in her hands, rocking backwards and forwards on the groaning sofa. “I th-thought it was Valerie, n-not my own—n-not my own sister.”

“I’ll get tea!” whispered Robin, appalled.

She was almost out of the door with the kettle when she remembered that she had left Jonny Rokeby’s life story up on the computer monitor. It would look too odd to dart back to switch it off in the middle of this crisis, so she hurried out of the room, hoping that Strike would be too busy with Mrs. Hook to notice.

It took a further forty minutes for Mrs. Hook to drink her second cup of tea and sob her way through half the toilet roll Robin had liberated from the bathroom on the landing. At last she left, clutching the folder full of incriminating photographs, and the index detailing the time and place of their creation, her breast heaving, still mopping her eyes.

Strike waited until she was clear of the end of the street, then went out, humming cheerfully, to buy sandwiches for himself and Robin, which they enjoyed together at her desk. It was the friendliest gesture that he had made during their week together, and Robin was sure that this was because he knew that he would soon be free of her.

“You know I’m going out this afternoon to interview Derrick Wilson?” he asked.

“The security guard who had diarrhea,” said Robin. “Yes.”

“You’ll be gone when I get back, so I’ll sign your time sheet before I go. And listen, thanks for…”

Strike nodded at the now empty sofa.

“Oh, no problem. Poor woman.”

“Yeah. She’s got the good on him anyway. And,” he continued, “thanks for everything you’ve done this week.”

“It’s my job,” said Robin lightly.

“If I could afford a secretary…but I expect you’ll end up pulling down a serious salary as some fat cat’s PA.”

Robin felt obscurely offended.

“That’s not the kind of job I want,” she said.

There was a slightly strained silence.

Strike was undergoing a small internal struggle. The prospect of Robin’s desk being empty next week was a gloomy one; he found her company pleasantly undemanding, and her efficiency refreshing; but it would surely be pathetic, not to mention profligate, to pay for companionship, as though he were some rich, sickly Victorian magnate? Temporary Solutions were rapacious in their demand for commission; Robin was a luxury he could not afford. The fact that she had not questioned him about his father (for Strike had noticed Jonny Rokeby’s Wikipedia entry on the computer monitor) had impressed him further in her favor, for this showed unusual restraint, and was a standard by which he often judged new acquaintances. But it could make no difference to the cold practicalities of the situation: she had to go.

And yet he was close to feeling about her as he had felt towards a grass snake that he had succeeded in trapping in Trevaylor Woods when he was eleven, and about which he had had a long, pleading argument with his Auntie Joan: “Please let me keep it…please…”

“I’d better get going,” he said, after he had signed her time sheet, and thrown his sandwich wrappers and his empty water bottle into the bin underneath her desk. “Thanks for everything, Robin. Good luck with the job hunt.”

He took down his overcoat, and left through the glass door.

At the top of the stairs, on the precise spot where he had both nearly killed and then saved her, he came to a halt. Instinct was clawing at him like an importuning dog.

The glass door banged open behind him and he turned. Robin was pink in the face.

“Look,” she said. “We could come to a private arrangement. We could cut out Temporary Solutions, and you could pay me directly.”

He hesitated.

“They don’t like that, temping agencies. You’ll be drummed out of the service.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve got three interviews for permanent jobs next week. If you’d be OK about me taking time off to go to them—”

“Yeah, no problem,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Well then, I could stay for another week or two.”

A pause. Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.

“Yeah…all right. Well, in that case, will you try Freddie Bestigui again?”

“Yes, of course,” said Robin, masking her glee under a show of calm efficiency.

“I’ll see you Monday afternoon, then.”

It was the first grin he had ever dared give her. He supposed he ought to be annoyed with himself, and yet Strike stepped out into the cool early afternoon with no feeling of regret, but rather a curious sense of renewed optimism.

6

STRIKE HAD ONCE TRIED TO count the number of schools he had attended in his youth, and had reached the figure of seventeen with the suspicion that he had forgotten a couple. He did not include the brief period of supposed home schooling which had taken place during the two months he had lived with his mother and half-sister in a squat in Atlantic Road in Brixton. His mother’s then boyfriend, a white Rastafarian musician who had rechristened himself Shumba, felt that the school system reinforced patriarchal and materialistic values with which his common-law stepchildren ought not to be tainted. The principal lesson that Strike had learned during his two months of home-based education was that cannabis, even if administered spiritually, could render the taker both dull and paranoid.

He took an unnecessary detour through Brixton Market on the way to the café where he was meeting Derrick Wilson. The fishy smell of the covered arcades; the colorful open faces of the supermarkets, teeming with unfamiliar fruit and vegetables from Africa and the West Indies; the halal butchers and the hairdressers, with large pictures of ornate braids and curls, and rows and rows of white polystyrene heads bearing wigs in the windows: all of it took Strike back twenty-six years, to the months he had spent wandering the Brixton streets with Lucy, his young half-sister, while his mother and Shumba lay dozily on dirty cushions back at the squat, vaguely discussing the important spiritual concepts in which the children ought to be instructed.

Seven-year-old Lucy had yearned for hair like the West Indian girls. On the long drive back to St. Mawes that had terminated their Brixton life, she had expressed a fervent desire for beaded braids from the back seat of Uncle Ted and Aunt Joan’s Morris Minor. Strike remembered Aunt Joan’s calm agreement that the style was very pretty, a frown line between her eyebrows reflected in the rearview mirror. Joan had tried, with diminishing success through the years, not to disparage their mother in front of the children. Strike had never discovered how Uncle Ted had found out where they were living; all he knew was that he and Lucy had let themselves into the squat one afternoon to find their mother’s enormous brother standing in the middle of the room, threatening Shumba with a bloody nose. Within two days, he and Lucy were back in St. Mawes, at the primary school they attended intermittently for years, taking up with old friends as though they had not left, and swiftly losing the accents they had adopted for camouflage, wherever Leda had last taken them.

He had not needed the directions Derrick Wilson had given Robin, because he knew the Phoenix Café on Coldharbour Lane of old. Occasionally Shumba and his mother had taken them there: a tiny, brown-painted, shed-like place where you could (if not a vegetarian, like Shumba and his mother) eat large and delicious cooked breakfasts, with eggs and bacon piled high, and mugs of tea the color of teak. It was almost exactly as he remembered: cozy, snug and dingy, its mirrored walls reflecting tables of mock-wood Formica, stained floor tiles of dark red and white, and a tapioca-colored ceiling covered in molded wallpaper. The squat middle-aged waitress had short straightened hair and dangling orange plastic earrings; she moved aside to let Strike past the counter.

A heavily built West Indian man was sitting alone at one table, reading a copy of the Sun, under a plastic clock that bore the legend Pukka Pies.

“Derrick?”

“Yeah…you Strike?”

Strike shook Wilson’s big, dry hand, and sat down. He estimated Wilson to be almost as tall as himself when standing. Muscle as well as fat swelled the sleeves of the security guard’s sweatshirt; his hair was close-cropped and he was clean-shaven, with fine almond-shaped eyes. Strike ordered pie and mash off the scrawled menu board on the back wall, pleased to reflect that he could charge the £4.75 to expenses.

“Yeah, the pie ’n’ mash is good here,” said Wilson.

A faint Caribbean lilt lifted his London accent. His voice was deep, calm and measured. Strike thought that he would be a reassuring presence in a security guard’s uniform.

“Thanks for meeting me, I appreciate it. John Bristow’s not happy with the results of the inquest on his sister. He’s hired me to take another look at the evidence.”

“Yeah,” said Wilson, “I know.”

“How much did he give you to talk to me?” Strike asked casually.

Wilson blinked, then gave a slightly guilty, deep-throated chuckle.

“Pony,” he said. “But if it makes the man feel better, yuh know? It won’t change nuthin’. She killed huhself. But ask your questions. I don’t mind.”

He closed the Sun. The front page bore a picture of Gordon Brown looking baggy-eyed and exhausted.

“You’ll have gone over everything with the police,” said Strike, opening his notebook and setting it down beside his plate, “but it would be good to hear, first hand, what happened that night.”

“Yeah, no problem. An’ Kieran Kolovas-Jones might be comin’,” Wilson added.

He seemed to expect Strike to know who this was.

“Who?” asked Strike.

“Kieran Kolovas-Jones. He was Lula’s regular driver. He wants to talk to you too.”

“OK, great,” said Strike. “When will he be here?”

“I dunno. He’s on a job. He’ll come if he can.”

The waitress put a mug of tea in front of Strike, who thanked her and clicked out the nib of his pen. Before he could ask anything, Wilson said:

“You’re ex-milit’ry, Mister Bristow said.”

“Yeah,” said Strike.

“Mi nephew’s in Afghanistan,” said Wilson, sipping his tea. “Helmand Province.”

“What regiment?”

“Signals,” said Wilson.

“How long’s he been out there?”

“Four month. His mother’s not sleeping,” said Wilson. “How come you left?”

“Got my leg blown off,” said Strike, with an honesty that was not habitual.

It was only part of the truth, but the easiest part to communicate to a stranger. He could have stayed; they had been keen to keep him; but the loss of his calf and foot had merely precipitated a decision he had felt stealing towards him in the past couple of years. He knew that his personal tipping point was drawing nearer; that moment by which, unless he left, he would find it too onerous to go, to readjust to civilian life. The army shaped you, almost imperceptibly, with the years; wore you into a surface conformity that made it easier to be swept along by the tidal force of military life. Strike had never become entirely submerged, and had chosen to go before that happened. Even so, he remembered the SIB with a fondness that was unaffected by the loss of half a limb. He would have been glad to remember Charlotte with the same uncomplicated affection.

Wilson acknowledged Strike’s explanation with a slow nod of the head.

“Tough,” he said, in his deep voice.

“I got off light compared with some.”

“Yeah. Guy in mi nephew’s platoon got blown up two weeks ago.”

Wilson sipped his tea.

“How did you get on with Lula Landry?” Strike asked, pen poised. “Did you see a lot of her?”

“Just in and out past the desk. She always said hullo and please and thank you, which is more’n a whole lotta these rich fuckers manage,” said Wilson laconically. “Longest chat we ever had was about Jamaica. She was thinking of doing a job over there; asking me where tuh stay, what’s it like. And I got her autograph for mi nephew, Jason, for his birthday. Got her to sign a card, sent it outta Afghanistan. Just three weeks before she died. She asked after Jason by name every time I saw her after that, and I liked the girl for that, y’know? I been knocking around the security game forra long time. There’s people who’d expect you to take a bullet for them and they don’t bother rememb’ring yuh name. Yeah, she was all right.”

Strike’s pie and mash arrived, steaming hot. The two men accorded it a moment’s respectful silence as they contemplated the heaped plate. Mouth watering, Strike picked up his knife and fork and said:

“Can you talk me through what happened the night Lula died? She went out, what time?”

The security guard scratched his forearm thoughtfully, pushing up the sleeve of his sweatshirt; Strike saw tattoos there, crosses and initials.

“Musta bin just gone seven that evening. She was with her friend Ciara Porter. I remember, as they were going out the door, Mr. Bestigui come in. I remember that, because he said something to Lula. I didn’t hear what it was. She didn’t like it, though. I could tell by the look on her face.”

“What kind of look?”

“Offended,” said Wilson, the answer ready. “So then I seen the two of them on the monitor, Lula and Porter, getting in their car. We gotta camera over the door, see. It’s linked to a monitor on the desk, so we can see who’s buzzing to get in.”

“Does it record footage? Can I see a tape?”

Wilson shook his head.

“Mr. Bestigui didn’t want nothing like that on the door. No recording devices. He was the first to buy a flat, before they were all finished, so he had input into the arrangements.”

“The camera’s just a high-tech peephole, then?”

Wilson nodded. There was a fine scar running from just beneath his left eye to the middle of his cheekbone.

“Yeah. So I seen the girls get into their car. Kieran, guy who’s coming to meet us here, wasn’t driving her that night. He was supposedta be picking up Deeby Macc.”

“Who was her chauffeur that night?”

“Guy called Mick, from Execars. She’d had him before. I seen all the photographers crowdin’ round the car as it pulled away. They’d been sniffin’ around all week, because they knew she was back with Evan Duffield.”

“What did Bestigui do, once Lula and Ciara had left?”

“He collected his post from me and went up the stairs to his flat.”

Strike was putting down his fork with every mouthful, to make notes.

“Anyone go in or out after that?”

“Yeah, the caterers—they’d been up at the Bestiguis’ because they were having guests that night. An American couple arrived just after eight and went up to Flat One, and nobody come in or out till they left again, near midnight. Didn’t see no one else till Lula come home, round half past one.

“I heard the paps shouting her name outside. Big crowd by that time. A bunch of them had followed her from the nightclub, and there was a load waiting there already, looking out for Deeby Macc. He was supposedta be getting there round half twelve. Lula pressed the bell and I buzzed her in.”

“She didn’t punch the code into the keypad?”

“Not with them all around her; she wanted to get in quick. They were yelling, pressing in on her.”

“Couldn’t she have gone in through the underground car park and avoided them?”

“Yeah, she did that sometimes when Kieran was with her, ’cause she’d given him a control for the electric doors to the garage. But Mick didn’t have one, so it had to be the front.

“I said good morning, and I asked about the snow, ’cause she had some in her hair; she was shivering, wearin’ a skimpy little dress. She said it was way below freezing, something like that. Then she said, ‘I wish they’d fuck off. Are they gonna stay there all night?’ ’Bout the paps. I told her they were still waiting for Deeby Macc; he was late. She looked pissed off. Then she got in the lift and went up to her flat.”

“She looked pissed off?”

“Yeah, really pissed off.”

“Suicidal pissed off?”

“No,” said Wilson. “Angry pissed off.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then,” said Wilson, “I had to go into the back room. My guts were starting to feel really bad. I needed the bathroom. Urgent, yuh know. I’d caught what Robson had. He was off sick with his belly. I was away maybe fifteen minutes. No choice. Never had the shits like it.

“I was still in the can when the bawling started. No,” he corrected himself, “first thing I heard was a bang. Big bang in the distance. I realized later, that must’ve been the body—Lula, I mean—falling.

“Then the bawlin’ started, getting louder, coming down the stairs. So I pull up my pants and go running out into the lobby, and there’s Mrs. Bestigui, shaking and screaming and acting like one mad bitch in her underwear. She says Lula’s dead, that she’s been pushed off her balcony by a man in her flat.

“I tell her to stay where she is and I run out the front door. And there she was. Lyin’ in the middle of the road, face down in the snow.”

Wilson swigged his tea, and continued to cradle the mug in his large hand as he said:

“Half her head was caved in. Blood in the snow. I could tell her neck was broken. And there was—yeah.”

The sweet and unmistakable smell of human brains seemed to fill Strike’s nostrils. He had smelled it many times. You never forgot.

“I ran back inside,” resumed Wilson. “Both the Bestiguis were in the lobby; he was tryin’ to get her back upstairs, inna some clothes, and she was still bawling. I told them to call the police and to keep an eye on the lift, in case he tried to come down that way.

“I grabbed the master key out the back room and I ran upstairs. No one on the stairwell. I unlocked the door of Lula’s flat—”

“Didn’t you think of taking anything with you, to defend yourself?” Strike interrupted. “If you thought there was someone in there? Someone who’d just killed a woman?”

There was a long pause, the longest so far.

“Didn’t think I’d need nothing,” said Wilson. “Thought I could take him, no problem.”

“Take who?”

“Duffield,” said Wilson quietly. “I thought Duffield was up there.”

“Why?”

“I thought he musta come in while I was in the bathroom. He knew the key code. I thought he musta gone upstairs and she’d let him in. I’d heard them rowing before. I’d heard him angry. Yeah. I thought he’d pushed her.

“But when I got up to the flat, it was empty. I looked in every room and there was no one there. I opened the wardrobes, even, but nothing.

“The windows in the lounge was wide open. It was below freezing that night. I didn’t close them, I didn’t touch nothing. I come out and pressed the button on the lift. The doors opened straight away; it was still at her floor. It was empty.

“I ran back downstairs. The Bestiguis were in their flat when I passed their door; I could hear them; she was still bawling and he was still shouting at her. I didn’t know whether they’d called the police yet. I grabbed my mobile off the security desk and I went back out the front door, back to Lula, because—well, I didn’t like to leave her lying there alone. I was gonna call the police from the street, make sure they were coming. But I heard the siren before I’d even pressed nine. They were there quick.”

“One of the Bestiguis had called them, had they?”

“Yeah. He had. Two uniformed coppers in a panda car.”

“OK,” said Strike. “I want to be clear on this one point: you believed Mrs. Bestigui when she said she’d heard a man up in the top flat?”

“Oh yeah,” said Wilson.

“Why?”

Wilson frowned slightly, thinking, his eyes on the street over Strike’s right shoulder.

“She hadn’t given you any details at this point, had she?” Strike asked. “Nothing about what she’d been doing when she heard this man? Nothing to explain why she was awake at two in the morning?”

“No,” said Wilson. “She never gave me no explanation like that. It was the way she was acting, y’know. Hysterical. Shaking like a wet dog. She kept saying ‘There’s a man up there, he threw her over.’ She was proper scared.

“But there was nobody there; I can swear that to you on the lives of mi kids. The flat was empty, the lift was empty, the stairwell was empty. If he was there, where did he go?”

“The police came,” Strike said, returning mentally to the dark, snowy street, and the broken corpse. “What happened then?”

“When Mrs. Bestigui saw the police car out her window, she came straight back down in her dressing gown, with her husband running after her; she come out into the street, into the snow, and starts bawling at them that there’s a murderer in the building.

“Lights are going on all over the place now. Faces at windows. Half the street’s woken up. People coming out on to the pavements.

“One of the coppers stayed with the body, calling for back-up on his radio, while the other one went with us—me and the Bestiguis—back inside. He told them to go back in their flat and wait, and then he got me to show him the building. We went up to the top floor again; I opened up Lula’s door, showed him the flat, the open window. He checked the place over. I showed him the lift, still on her floor. We went back down the stairs. He asked about the middle flat, so I opened it up with the master key.

“It was dark, and the alarm went off when we went in. Before I could find the light switch or get to the alarm pad, the copper walked straight into the table in the middle of the hall and knocked over this massive vase of roses. Smashed and went everywhere, glass an’ water an’ flowers all over the floor. That caused a loada trouble, later…

“We checked the place. Empty, all the cupboards, every room. The windows were closed and bolted. We went back to the lobby.

“Plainclothes police had arrived by this time. They wanted keys to the basement gym, the pool and the car park. One of ’em went off to take a statement from Mrs. Bestigui, another one was out front, calling for more back-up, because there are more neighbors coming out in the street now, and half of them are talking on the phone while they’re standing there, and some of them are taking pictures. The uniformed coppers are trying to make them go back into their houses. It’s snowing, really heavy snow…

“They got a tent up over the body when forensics arrived. The press arrived round the same time. The police taped off half the street, blocked it off with their cars.”

Strike had cleaned his plate. He shoved it aside, ordered fresh mugs of tea for both of them and took up his pen again.

“How many people work at number eighteen?”

“There’s three guards—me, Colin McLeod an’ Ian Robson. We work in shifts, someone always on duty, round the clock. I shoulda been off that night, but Robson called me roundabout four in the afternoon, said he had this stomach bug, felt really bad with it. So I said I’d stay on, work through the next shift. He’d swapped with me the previous month so I could sort out a bit of fambly business. I owed him.

“So it shouldn’ta been me there,” said Wilson, and for a moment he sat in silence, contemplating the way things should have been.

“The other guards got on OK with Lula, did they?”

“Yeah, they’d tell yuh same as me. Nice girl.”

“Anyone else work there?”

“We gotta couple of Polish cleaners. They both got bad English. You won’t get much outta them.”

Wilson’s testimony, Strike thought, as he scribbled into one of the SIB notebooks he had filched on one of his last visits to Aldershot, was of an unusually high quality: concise, precise and observant. Very few people answered the question they had been posed; even fewer knew how to organize their thoughts so that no follow-up questions were needed to prize information out of them. Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatized memories; he had made himself the confidant of thugs; he had bullied the terrified, baited the dangerous and laid traps for the cunning. None of these skills were required with Wilson, who seemed almost wasted on a pointless trawl through John Bristow’s paranoia.

Nevertheless, Strike had an incurable habit of thoroughness. It would no more have occurred to him to skimp on the interview than to spend the day lying in his underpants on his camp bed, smoking. Both by inclination and by training, because he owed himself respect quite as much as the client, he proceeded with the meticulousness for which, in the army, he had been both feted and detested.

“Can we back up briefly and go through the day preceding her death? What time did you arrive for work?”

“Nine, same as always. Took over from Colin.”

“Do you keep a log of who goes in and out of the building?”

“Yeah, we sign everyone in and out, ’cept residents. There’s a book at the desk.”

“Can you remember who went in and out that day?”

Wilson hesitated.

“John Bristow came to see his sister early that morning, didn’t he?” prompted Strike. “But she’d told you not to let him up?”

“He’s told you that, has he?” asked Wilson, looking faintly relieved. “Yeah, she did. But I felt sorry for the man, y’know? He had a contrac’ to give back to her; he was worried about it, so I let him go up.”

“Had anyone else come into the building that you know of?”

“Yeah, Lechsinka was already there. She’s one of the cleaners. She always arrives at seven; she was mopping the stairwell when I got in. Nobody else came until the guy from the security comp’ny, to service the alarms. We get it done every six months. He musta come around nine forty; something like that.”

“Was this someone you knew, the man from the security firm?”

“No, he was a new guy. Very young. They always send someone diff’rent. Missus Bestigui and Lula were still at home, so I let him into the middle flat, and showed him where the control panel was an’ got him started. Lula went out while I was still in there, showin’ the guy the fuse box an’ the panic buttons.”

“You saw her go out, did you?”

“Yeah, she passed the open door.”

“Did she say hello?”

“No.”

“You said she usually did?”

“I don’t think she noticed me. She looked like she was in a hurry. She was going to see her sick mother.”

“How d’you know, if she didn’t speak to you?”

“Inquest,” said Wilson succinctly. “After I’d shown the security guy where everything was, I went back downstairs, an’ after Missus Bestigui went out, I let him into their flat to check that system too. He didn’t need me tuh stay with him there; the positions of the fuse boxes and panic buttons are the same in all the flats.”

“Where was Mr. Bestigui?”

“He’d already left for work. Eight he leaves, every day.”

Three men in hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets entered the café and sat at a neighboring table, newspapers under their arms, work boots clogged with filth.

“How long would you say you were away from the desk each time you were with the security guy?”

“Mebbe five minutes in the middle flat,” said Wilson. “A minute each for the others.”

“When did the security guy leave?”

“Late morning. I can’t remember exactly.”

“But you’re sure he left?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Anyone else visit?”

“There was a few deliveries, but it was quiet compared to how the rest of the week had been.”

“Earlier in the week had been busy, had it?”

“Yeah, we’d had a lot of coming and going, because of Deeby Macc arriving from LA. People from the production company were in and out of Flat Two, checking the place was set up for him, filling up the fridge and that.”

“Can you remember what deliveries there were that day?”

“Packages for Macc an’ Lula. An’ roses—I helped the guy up with them, because they come in a massive,” Wilson placed his large hands apart to show the size, “a huh-uge vase, and we set ’em up on a table in the hallway of Flat Two. That’s the roses that got smashed.”

“You said that caused trouble; what did you mean?”

“Mister Bestigui had sent them to Deeby Macc an’ when he heard they’d been ruined he was pissed off. Shoutin’ like a maniac.”

“When was this?”

“While the police were there. When they were trying to interview his wife.”

“A woman had just fallen to her death past his front windows, and he was upset that someone had wrecked his flowers?”

“Yeah,” said Wilson, with a slight shrug. “He’s like that.”

“Does he know Deeby Macc?”

Wilson shrugged again.

“Did this rapper ever come to the flat?”

Wilson shook his head.

“After we had all this trouble, he went to a hotel.”

“How long were you away from the desk when you helped put the roses in Flat Two?”

“Mebbe five minutes; ten at most. After that, I was on the desk all day.”

“You mentioned packages for Macc and Lula.”

“Yeah, from some designer, but I gave them to Lechsinka to put in the flats. It was clothes for him an’ handbags for her.”

“And as far as you’re aware, everyone who went in that day went out again?”

“Oh yeah,” said Wilson. “All logged in the book at the front desk.”

“How often is the code on the external keypad changed?”

“It’s been changed since she died, because half the Met knew it by the time they were finished,” said Wilson. “But it din change the three months Lula lived there.”

“D’you mind telling me what it was?”

“Nineteen sixty-six,” said Wilson.

“‘They think it’s all over’?”

“Yeah,” said Wilson. “McLeod was always bellyaching about it. Wanted it changed.”

“How many people d’you think knew the door code before Lula died?”

“Not that many.”

“Delivery men? Postmen? Bloke who reads the gas meter?”

“People like that are always buzzed in by us, from the desk. The residents don’t normally use the keypad, because we can see them on camera, so we open the door for them. The keypad’s only there in case there’s no one on the desk; sometimes we’d be in the back room, or helping with something upstairs.”

“And the flats all have individual keys?”

“Yeah, and individual alarm systems.”

“Was Lula’s set?”

“No.”

“What about the pool and the gym? Are they alarmed?”

“Jus’ keys. Everyone who lives in the building gets a set of pool and gym keys along with their flat keys. And one key to the door leading to the underground car park. That door’s got an alarm on it.”

“Was it set?”

“Dunno, I wasn’t there when they checked that one. It shoulda been. The guy from the security firm had checked all the alarms that morning.”

“Were all these doors locked that night?”

Wilson hesitated.

“Not all of them. The door to the pool was open.”

“Had anyone used it that day, do you know?”

“I can’t remember anyone using it.”

“So how long had it been open?”

“I dunno. Colin was on the previous night. He shoulda checked it.”

“OK,” said Strike. “You said you thought the man Mrs. Bestigui had heard was Duffield, because you’d heard them arguing previously. When was that?”

“Not long before they split, ’bout two months before she died. She’d thrown him out of her flat and he was hammerin’ on the door and kicking it, trying to break it down, calling her filthy names. I went upstairs to get him out.”

“Did you use force?”

“Didn’t need to. When he saw me coming he picked up his stuff—she’d thrown his jacket and his shoes out after him—and just walked out past me. He was stoned,” said Wilson. “Glassy eyes, y’know. Sweating. Filthy T-shirt with crap all down it. I never knew what the fuck she saw in him.

“And here’s Kieran,” he added, his tone lightening. “Lula’s driver.”

7

A MAN IN HIS MID-TWENTIES was edging his way into the tiny café. He was short, slight and extravagantly good-looking.

“Hey, Derrick,” he said, and the driver and security guard exchanged a dap greeting, gripping each other’s hands and bumping knuckles, before Kolovas-Jones took his seat beside Wilson.

A masterpiece produced by an indecipherable cocktail of races, Kolovas-Jones’s skin was an olive-bronze, his cheekbones chiseled, his nose slightly aquiline, his black-lashed eyes a dark hazel, his straight hair slicked back off his face. His startling looks were thrown into relief by the conservative shirt and tie he wore, and his smile was consciously modest, as though he sought to disarm other men, and preempt their resentment.

“Where’sa car?” asked Derrick.

“Electric Lane.” Kolovas-Jones pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “I got maybe twenty minutes. Gotta be back at the West End by four. Howya doing?” he added, holding out his hand to Strike, who shook it. “Kieran Kolovas-Jones. You’re…?”

“Cormoran Strike. Derrick says you’ve got—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I dunno whether it matters, probably not, but the police didn’t give a shit. I just wanna know I’ve told someone, right? I’m not saying it wasn’t suicide, you understand,” he added. “I’m just saying I’d like this thing cleared up. Coffee, please, love,” he added to the middle-aged waitress, who remained impassive, impervious to his charm.

“What’s worrying you?” Strike asked.

“I always drove her, right?” said Kolovas-Jones, launching into his story in a way that told Strike he had rehearsed it. “She always asked for me.”

“Did she have a contract with your company?”

“Yeah. Well…”

“It’s run through the front desk,” said Derrick. “One of the services provided. If anyone wants a car, we call Execars, Kieran’s company.”

“Yeah, but she always asked for me,” Kolovas-Jones reiterated firmly.

“You got on with her, did you?”

“Yeah, we got on good,” said Kolovas-Jones. “We’d got—you know—I’m not saying close—well, close, yeah, kinda. We were friendly; the relationship had gone beyond driver and client, right?”

“Yeah? How far beyond?”

“Nah, nothing like that,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a grin. “Nothing like that.”

But Strike saw that the driver was not at all displeased that the idea had been mooted, that it had been thought plausible.

“I’d been driving her for a year. We talked a lot, y’know. Had a lot in common. Similar backgrounds, y’know?”

“In what way?”

“Mixed race,” said Kolovas-Jones. “And things were a bit dysfunctional in my family, right, so I knew where she was coming from. She didn’t know that many people like her, not once she got famous. Not to talk to properly.”

“Being mixed race was an issue for her, was it?”

“Growing up black in a white family, what d’you think?”

“And you had a similar childhood?”

“Me father’s half West Indian, half Welsh; me mother’s half Scouse, half Greek. Lula usedta say she envied me,” he said, sitting up a little straighter. “She said, ‘You know where you come from, even if it is bloody everywhere.’ And on my birthday, right,” he added, as though he had not yet sufficiently impressed upon Strike something which he felt was important, “she give me this Guy Somé jacket that was worth, like, nine hundred quid.”

Evidently expected to show a reaction, Strike nodded, wondering whether Kolovas-Jones had come along simply to tell somebody how close he had been to Lula Landry. Satisfied, the driver went on:

“So, right, the day she died—day before, I should say—I drove her to her mum’s in the morning, right? And she was not happy. She never liked going to see her mother.”

“Why not?”

“Because that woman’s fucking weird,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I drove them both out for a day, once, I think it was the mother’s birthday. She’s fucking creepy, Lady Yvette. Darling, my darling to Lula, every other word. She used to hang off her. Just fucking strange and possessive and over the top, right?

“Anyway, that day, right, her mum had just got out of hospital, so that wasn’t gonna be fun, was it? Lula wasn’t looking forward to seeing her. She was uptight like I hadn’t seen her before.

“And then I told her I couldn’t drive her that night, because I was booked for Deeby Macc, and she wasn’t happy about that, neither.”

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause she liked me driving her, didn’t she?” said Kolovas-Jones, as though Strike was being obtuse. “I used to help her out with the paps and stuff, do a bit of bodyguard stuff to get her in and out of places.”

By the merest flicker of his facial muscles, Wilson managed to convey what he thought of the suggestion that Kolovas-Jones was bodyguard material.

“Couldn’t you have swapped with another driver, and driven her instead of Macc?”

“I coulda, but I didn’t want to,” Kolovas-Jones confessed. “I’m a big Deeby fan. Wanted to meet him. That’s what Lula was pissed off about. Anyway,” he hurried on, “I took her to her mum’s, and waited, and then, this is the bit I wanted to tell you about, right?

“She come out of her mother’s place and she was strange. Not like I’d ever seen her, right? Quiet, really quiet. Like she was in shock or something. Then she asked me for a pen, and she started scribbling something on a bit of blue paper. Wasn’t talking to me. Wasn’t saying anything. Just writing.

“So, I drove her to Vashti, ’cause she was supposedta be meeting her friend there for lunch, right—”

“What’s Vashti? What friend?”

“Vashti—it’s this shop—boutique, they call it. There’s a café in it. Trendy place. And the friend was…” Kolovas-Jones clicked his fingers repeatedly, frowning. “She was that friend she’d made when she was in hospital for her mental problems. What was her fucking name? I used to drive the two of them around. Christ…Ruby? Roxy? Raquelle? Something like that. She was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith. She was homeless.

“Anyway, Lula goes into the shop, right, and she’d told me on the way to her mother’s she was gonna have lunch there, right, but she’s only in there a quarter of an hour or something, then she comes out alone and tells me to drive her home. So that was a bit fucking strange, right? And Raquelle, or whatever her name is—it’ll come back to me—wasn’t with her. We usedta give Raquelle a lift home normally, when they’d been out together. And the blue piece of paper was gone. And Lula never said a word to me all the way back home.”

“Did you mention this blue paper to the police?”

“Yeah. They didn’t think it was worth shit,” said Kolovas-Jones. “Said it was probably a shopping list.”

“Can you remember what it looked like?”

“It was just blue. Like airmail paper.”

He looked down at his watch.

“I gotta go in ten.”

“So that was the last time you ever saw Lula?”

“Yeah, it was.”

He picked at the corner of a fingernail.

“What was your first thought, when you heard she was dead?”

“I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones, chewing at the hangnail he had been picking. “I was fucking shocked. You don’t expect that, do you? Not when you’ve just seen someone hours before. The press were all saying it was Duffield, because they’d had a row in that nightclub and stuff. I thought it might’ve been him, to tell you the truth. Bastard.”

“You knew him, did you?”

“I drove them a coupla times,” said Kolovas-Jones. A flaring of his nostrils, a tightness around the lines of his mouth, together suggested a bad smell.

“What did you think of him?”

“I thought he was a talentless tosser.” With unexpected virtuosity, he suddenly adopted a flat, drawling voice: “Are we gonna need him later, Lules? He’d better wait, yeah?” said Kolovas-Jones, crackling with temper. “Never once spoke to me directly. Ignorant, sponging piece of shit.”

Derrick said, sotto voce, “Kieran’s an actor.”

“Just bit parts,” said Kolovas-Jones. “So far.”

And he digressed into a brief exposition of the television dramas in which he had appeared, exhibiting, in Strike’s estimation, a marked desire to be considered more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame. To have had it so often in the back of his car and not yet to have caught it from his passengers must (thought Strike) have been tantalizing and, perhaps, infuriating.

“Kieran auditioned for Freddie Bestigui,” said Wilson. “Didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a lack of enthusiasm that told the outcome plainly.

“How did that come about?” asked Strike.

“Usual way,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a hint of hauteur. “Through my agent.”

“Nothing came of it?”

“They decided to go in another direction,” said Kolovas-Jones. “They wrote out the part.”

“OK, so you picked up Deeby Macc from, where—Heathrow?—that night?”

“Terminal Five, yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, apparently brought back to a sense of mundane reality, and glancing at his watch. “Listen, I’d better get going.”

“All right if I walk you back to the car?” asked Strike.

Wilson showed himself happy to go along too; Strike paid the bill for all three of them and they left. Out on the pavement, Strike offered both his companions cigarettes; Wilson declined, Kolovas-Jones accepted.

A silver Mercedes was parked a short distance away, around the corner in Electric Lane.

“Where did you take Deeby when he arrived?” Strike asked Kolovas-Jones, as they approached the car.

“He wanted a club, so I took him to Barrack.”

“What time did you get him there?”

“I dunno…half eleven? Quarter to twelve? He was wired. Didn’t want to sleep, he said.”

“Why Barrack?”

“Friday night at Barrack’s best hip-hop night in London,” said Kolovas-Jones, on a slight laugh, as though this was common knowledge. “And he musta liked it, ’cause it was gone three by the time he came out again.”

“So did you drive him to Kentigern Gardens and find the police there, or…?”

“I’d already heard on the car radio what had happened,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I told Deeby when he got back to the car. His entourage all started making phone calls, waking up people at the record company, trying to make other arrangements. They got him a suite at Claridges; I drove him there. I didn’t get home till gone five. Switched on the news and watched it all on Sky. Fucking unbelievable.”

“I’ve been wondering who let the paparazzi staking out number eighteen know that Deeby wasn’t going to be there for hours. Someone tipped them off; that’s why they’d left the street before Lula fell.”

“Yeah? I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones.

He increased his pace very slightly, reaching the car ahead of the other two and unlocking it.

“Didn’t Macc have a load of luggage with him? Was it in the car with you?”

“Nah, it’d all been sent ahead by the record company days before. He got off the plane with just a carry-on bag—and about ten security people.”

“So you weren’t the only car sent for him?”

“There were four cars—but Deeby himself was with me.”

“Where did you wait for him, while he was in the nightclub?”

“I just parked the car and waited,” said Kolovas-Jones. “Just off Glasshouse Street.”

“With the other three cars? Were you all together?”

“You don’t find four parking spaces side by side in the middle of London, mate,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I dunno where the others were parked.”

Still holding the driver’s door open, he glanced at Wilson, then back at Strike.

“How’s any of this matter?” he demanded.

“I’m just interested,” said Strike, “in how it works, when you’re with a client.”

“It’s fucking tedious,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a sudden flash of irritation, “that’s what it is. Driving’s mostly waiting around.”

“Have you still got the control for the doors to the underground garage that Lula gave you?” Strike asked.

“What?” said Kolovas-Jones, although Strike would have taken an oath that the driver had heard him. The flicker of animosity was undisguised now, and it seemed to extend not only to Strike, but also to Wilson, who had listened without comment since noting aloud that Kolovas-Jones was an actor.

“Have you still got—”

“Yeah, I’ve still got it. I still drive Mr. Bestigui, don’t I?” said Kolovas-Jones. “Right, I gotta go. See ya, Derrick.”

He threw his half-smoked cigarette into the road and got into the car.

“If you remember anything else,” said Strike, “like the name of the friend Lula was meeting in Vashti, will you give me a call?”

He handed Kolovas-Jones a card. The driver, already pulling on his seat belt, took it without looking at it.

“I’m gonna be late.”

Wilson raised his hand in farewell. Kolovas-Jones slammed the car door, revved the engine and reversed out of the parking space, scowling.

“He’s a bit of a star-fucker,” said Wilson, as the car pulled away. It was a kind of apology for the younger man. “He loved drivin’ her. He tries to drive all the famous ones. He’s been hoping Bestigui’ll cast him in something for two years. He was well pissed off when he didn’t get that part.”

“What was it?”

“Drug dealer. Some film.”

They walked off together in the direction of Brixton underground station, past a gaggle of black schoolgirls in uniforms with blue plaid skirts. One girl’s long beaded hair made Strike think, again, of his sister, Lucy.

“Bestigui’s still living at number eighteen, is he?” asked Strike.

“Oh yeah,” said Wilson.

“What about the other two flats?”

“There’s a Ukrainian commodities broker and his wife renting Flat Two now. Got a Russian interested in Three, but he hasn’t made an offer yet.”

“Is there any chance,” asked Strike, as they were momentarily impeded by a tiny hooded, bearded man like an Old Testament prophet, who stopped in front of them and slowly stuck out his tongue, “that I could come and have a look inside sometime?”

“Yeah, all right,” said Wilson after a pause in which his gaze slid furtively over Strike’s lower legs. “Buzz mi. But it’ll have to be when Bestigui’s out, y’understand. He’s one quarrelsome man, and I need my job.”

8

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE WOULD be sharing his office again on Monday added piquancy to Strike’s weekend solitude, rendering it less irksome, more valuable. The camp bed could stay out; the door between inner and outer offices could remain open; he was able to attend to bodily functions without fear of causing offense. Sick of the smell of artificial limes, he managed to force open the painted-shut window behind his desk, which allowed a cold, clean breeze to wipe the fusty corners of the two small rooms. Avoiding every CD, every track, that transported him back to those excruciating, exhilarating periods he had shared with Charlotte, he selected Tom Waits to play loudly on the small CD player he had thought he would never see again, and which he had found at the bottom of one of the boxes he had brought from Charlotte’s. He busied himself setting up his portable television, with its paltry indoor aerial; he loaded his worn clothes into a black bin bag and walked to a launderette half a mile away; back at the office, he hung up his shirts and underwear on a rope he slung across one side of the inner office, then watched the three o’clock match between Arsenal and Spurs.

Through all these mundane acts, he felt as though he was accompanied by the specter that had haunted him during his months in hospital. It lurked in the corners of his shabby office; he could hear it whispering to him whenever his attention on the task in hand grew slack. It urged him to consider how far he had fallen; his age; his penury; his shattered love life; his homelessness. Thirty-five, it whispered, and nothing to show for all your years of graft except a few cardboard boxes and a massive debt. The specter directed his eyes to cans of beer in the supermarket, where he bought more Pot Noodles; it mocked him as he ironed shirts on the floor. As the day wore on, it jeered at him for his self-imposed habit of smoking outside in the street, as though he were still in the army, as though this petty self-discipline could impose form and order on the amorphous, disastrous present. He began to smoke at his desk, with the butts mounting in a cheap tin ashtray he had swiped, long ago, from a bar in Germany.

But he had a job, he kept reminding himself; a paid job. Arsenal beat Spurs, and Strike was cheered; he turned off the television and, defying the specter, moved straight to his desk and resumed work.

At liberty, now, to collect and collate evidence in whatever way he chose, Strike continued to conform to the protocols of the Criminal Procedure and Investigation Act. The fact that he believed himself to be hunting a figment of John Bristow’s disturbed imagination made no difference to the thoroughness and accuracy with which he now wrote up the notes he had made during his interviews with Bristow, Wilson and Kolovas-Jones.

Lucy telephoned him at six in the evening, while he was hard at work. Though his sister was younger than Strike by two years, she seemed to feel herself older. Weighed down, young, by a mortgage, a stolid husband, three children and an onerous job, Lucy seemed to crave responsibility, as though she could never have enough anchors. Strike had always suspected that she wanted to prove to herself and the world that she was nothing like their fly-by-night mother, who had dragged the two of them all over the country, from school to school, house to squat to camp, in pursuit of the next enthusiasm or man. Lucy was the only one of his eight half-siblings with whom Strike had shared a childhood; he was fonder of her than of almost anyone else in his life, and yet their interactions were often unsatisfactory, laden with familiar anxieties and arguments. Lucy could not disguise the fact that her brother worried and disappointed her. In consequence, Strike was less inclined to be honest with her about his present situation than he would have been with many a friend.

“Yeah, it’s going great,” he told her, smoking at the open window, watching people drift in and out of the shops below. “Business has doubled lately.”

“Where are you? I can hear traffic.”

“At the office. I’ve got paperwork to do.”

“On Saturday? How does Charlotte feel about that?”

“She’s away; she’s gone to visit her mother.”

“How are things going between you?”

“Great,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. How’s Greg?”

She gave him a brief precis of her husband’s workload, then returned to the attack.

“Is Gillespie still on your back for repayment?”

“No.”

“Because you know what, Stick”—the childhood nickname boded ill: she was trying to soften him up—“I’ve been looking into this, and you could apply to the British Legion for—”

“Fucking hell, Lucy,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“What?”

The hurt and indignation in her voice were only too familiar: he closed his eyes.

“I don’t need help from the British Legion, Luce, all right?”

“There’s no need to be so proud…”

“How are the boys?”

“They’re fine. Look, Stick, I just think it’s outrageous that Rokeby’s getting his lawyer to hassle you, when he’s never given you a penny in his life. He ought to have made it a gift, seeing what you’ve been through and how much he’s—”

“Business is good. I’m going to pay off the loan,” said Strike. A teenaged couple on the corner of the street were having an argument.

“Are you sure everything’s all right between you and Charlotte? Why’s she visiting her mother? I thought they hated each other?”

“They’re getting on better these days,” he said, as the teenage girl gesticulated wildly, stamped her foot and walked away.

“Have you bought her a ring yet?” asked Lucy.

“I thought you wanted me to get Gillespie off my back?”

“Is she all right about not having a ring?”

“She’s been great about it,” said Strike. “She says she doesn’t want one; she wants me to put all my money into the business.”

“Really?” said Lucy. She always seemed to think that she made a good job of dissimulating her deep dislike of Charlotte. “Are you going to come to Jack’s birthday party?”

“When is it?”

“I sent you an invitation over a week ago, Stick!”

He wondered whether Charlotte had slipped it into one of the boxes he had left unpacked on the landing, not having room for all his possessions in the office.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” he said; there was little he wanted to do less.

The call terminated, he returned to his computer and continued work. His notes from the Wilson and Kolovas-Jones interviews were soon completed, but a sense of frustration persisted. This was the first case that he had taken since leaving the army that required more than surveillance work, and it might have been designed to remind him daily that he had been stripped of all power and authority. Film producer Freddie Bestigui, the man who had been in closest proximity to Lula Landry at the time of her death, remained unreachable behind his faceless minions, and, in spite of John Bristow’s confident assertion that he would be able to persuade her to talk to Strike, there was not yet a secured interview with Tansy Bestigui.

With a faint sense of impotence, and with almost as much contempt for the occupation as Robin’s fiancé felt for it, Strike fought off his lowering sense of gloom by resorting to more internet searches connected with the case. He found Kieran Kolovas-Jones online: the driver had been telling the truth about the episode of The Bill in which he had had two lines (Gang Member Two…Kieran Kolovas-Jones). He had a theatrical agent, too, whose website featured a small photograph of Kieran, and a short list of credits including walk-on parts in East Enders and Casualty. Kieran’s photograph on the Execars home page was much larger. Here, he stood alone in a peaked hat and uniform, looking like a film star, evidently the handsomest driver on their books.

Evening shaded into night beyond the windows; while Tom Waits growled and moaned from the portable CD player in the corner, Strike chased the shadow of Lula Landry across cyberspace, occasionally adding to the notes he had already taken while speaking to Bristow, Wilson and Kolovas-Jones.

He could find no Facebook page for Landry, nor did she ever seem to have joined Twitter. Her refusal to feed her fans’ ravenous appetite for personal information seemed to have inspired others to fill the void. There were countless websites dedicated to the reproduction of her pictures, and to obsessive commentary on her life. If half of the information here was factual, Bristow had given Strike but a partial and sanitized version of his sister’s drive towards self-destruction, a tendency which seemed to have revealed itself first in early adolescence, when her adoptive father, Sir Alec Bristow, a genial-looking bearded man who had founded his own electronics company, Albris, had dropped dead of a heart attack. Lula had subsequently run away from two schools, and been expelled from a third, all of them expensive private establishments. She had slit her own wrist and been found in a pool of blood by a dormitory friend; she had lived rough, and been tracked to a squat by the police. A fan site called LulaMyInspirationForeva.com, run by a person of unknown sex, asserted that the model had briefly supported herself, during this time, as a prostitute.

Then had come sectioning under the Mental Health Act, the secure ward for young people with severe illnesses, and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Barely a year later, while shopping in a clothing store on Oxford Street with her mother, there had come the fairy-tale approach from a scout for a modeling agency.

Landry’s early photographs showed a sixteen-year-old with the face of Nefertiti, who managed to project to the lens an extraordinary combination of worldliness and vulnerability, with long thin legs like a giraffe’s and a jagged scar running down the inside of her left arm that fashion editors seemed to have found an interesting adjunct to her spectacular face, for it was sometimes given prominence in photographs. Lula’s extreme beauty was on the very edge of absurdity, and the charm for which she was celebrated (in both newspaper obituaries and hysterical blogs) sat alongside a reputation for sudden outbursts of temper and a dangerously short fuse. Press and public seemed to have both loved her, and loved loathing her. One female journalist found her “strangely sweet, possessed of an unexpected naiveté”; another, “at bottom, a calculating little diva, shrewd and tough.”

At nine o’clock Strike walked to Chinatown and bought himself a meal; then he returned to the office, swapped Tom Waits for Elbow, and searched out online accounts of Evan Duffield, the man who, by common consent, even that of Bristow, had not killed his girlfriend.

Until Kieran Kolovas-Jones had displayed professional jealousy, Strike could not have said why Duffield was famous. He now discovered that Duffield had been elevated from obscurity by his participation in a critically acclaimed independent film, in which he had played a character indistinguishable from himself: a heroin-addicted musician stealing to support his habit.

Duffield’s band had released a well-reviewed album on the back of their lead singer’s newfound fame, and split up in considerable acrimony around the time that he had met Lula. Like his girlfriend, Duffield was extraordinarily photogenic, even in the unretouched long-lens photographs of him sloping along a street in filthy clothes, even in those shots (and there were several) where he was lunging in fury at photographers. The conjunction of these two damaged and beautiful people seemed to have supercharged the fascination with both; each reflecting more interest on to the other, which rebounded on themselves; it was a kind of perpetual motion.

The death of his girlfriend had fixed Duffield more securely than ever in that firmament of the idolized, the vilified, the deified. A certain darkness, a fatalism, hung around him; both his most fervent admirers and his detractors seemed to take pleasure in the idea that he had one booted foot in the afterworld already; that there was an inevitability about his descent into despair and oblivion. He seemed to make a veritable parade of his frailties, and Strike lingered for some minutes over another of those tiny, jerky YouTube videos, in which Duffield, patently stoned, talked on and on, in the voice Kolovas-Jones had so accurately parodied, about dying being no more than checking out of the party, and making a confused case for there being little need to cry if you had to leave early.

On the night that Lula had died, according to a multitude of sources, Duffield had left the nightclub shortly after his girlfriend, wearing—and Strike found it hard to see this as anything other than deliberate showmanship—a wolf’s mask. His account of what he had got up to for the rest of the night might not have satisfied online conspiracy theorists, but the police seemed to have been convinced that he had had nothing to do with subsequent events at Kentigern Gardens.

Strike followed the speculative train of his own thoughts over the rough terrain of news sites and blogs. Here and there he stumbled upon pockets of feverish speculation, of theories about Landry’s death that mentioned clues the police had failed to follow up, and which seemed to have fed Bristow’s own conviction that there had been a murderer. LulaMyInspirationForeva had a long list of Unanswered Questions, which included, at number five, “Who called off the paps before she fell?”; at number nine, “Why did the men with the covered faces runnin away from her flat at 2 a.m. never come forward? Where are they and who wer they?”; and at number thirteen, “Why was luLa wearing a different outfit to the one she came home in when she fell off the balcony?”

Midnight found Strike drinking a can of lager and reading about the posthumous controversy that Bristow had mentioned, of which he had been vaguely aware while it unfolded, without being very interested. A furor had sprung up, a week after the inquest had returned a verdict of suicide, around the advertising shot for the wares of designer Guy Somé. It featured two models posing in a dirty alleyway, naked except for strategically placed handbags, scarves and jewels. Landry was perched on a dustbin, Ciara Porter sprawled on the ground. Both wore huge curving angel’s wings: Porter’s a swan-like white; Landry’s a greenish black fading to glossy bronze.

Strike stared at the picture for minutes, trying to analyze precisely why the dead girl’s face drew the eye so irresistibly, how she managed to dominate the picture. Somehow she made the incongruity, the staginess of it, believable; she really did look as though she had been slung from heaven because she was too venal, because she so coveted the accessories she was clutching to herself. Ciara Porter, in all her alabaster beauty, became nothing but a counterpoint; in her pallor and her passivity, she looked like a statue.

The designer, Guy Somé, had drawn much criticism upon himself, some of it vicious, for choosing to use the picture. Many people felt that he was capitalizing on Landry’s recent death, and sneered at the professions of deep affection for Landry that Somé’s spokesman made on his behalf. LulaMyInspirationForeva, however, asserted that Lula would have wanted the picture to be used; that she and Guy Somé had been bosom friends: Lula loved guy like a brother and would want him to pay this final tribute to her work and her beauty. This is an iconic shot that will live forever and will continue to keep Lula alive in the memories of we who loved her.

Strike drank the last of his lager and contemplated the final four words of this sentence. He had never been able to understand the assumption of intimacy fans felt with those they had never met. People had sometimes referred to his father as “Old Jonny” in his presence, beaming, as if they were talking about a mutual friend, repeating well-worn press stories and anecdotes as though they had been personally involved. A man in a pub in Trescothick had once said to Strike: “Fuck, I know your old man better than you do!” because he was able to name the session musician who had played on the Deadbeats’ biggest album, and whose tooth Rokeby had famously broken when he slapped the end of his saxophone in anger.

It was one in the morning. Strike had become almost deaf to the constant muffled thuds of the bass guitar from two floors below, and to the occasional creaks and hisses from the attic flat above, where the bar manager enjoyed luxuries like showers and home-cooked food. Tired, but not yet ready to climb into his sleeping bag, he managed to discover Guy Somé’s approximate address by further perusal of the internet, and noted the close proximity of Charles Street to Kentigern Gardens. Then he typed in the web address www.arrse.co.uk, like a man turning automatically into his local after a long shift at work.

He had not visited the Army Rumor Service site since Charlotte had found him, months previously, browsing it on his computer, and had reacted the way other women might had they found their partners viewing online porn. There had been a row, generated by what she took to be his hankering for his old life and his dissatisfaction with the new.

Here was the army mindset in its every particular, written in the language he too could speak fluently. Here were the acronyms he had known by heart; the jokes impenetrable to outsiders; every concern of service life, from the father whose son was being bullied at his school in Cyprus, to retrospective abuse of the Prime Minister’s performance at the Chilcot Inquiry. Strike wandered from post to post, occasionally snorting in amusement, yet aware all the time that he was lowering his resistance to the specter he could feel, now, breathing on the back of his neck.

This had been his world and he had been happy there. For all the inconveniences and hardships of military life, for all that he had emerged from the army minus half his leg, he did not regret a day of the time he had spent serving. And yet, he had not been of these people, even while among them. He had been a monkey, and then a suit, feared and disliked about equally by the average squaddie.

If ever the SIB talk to you, you should say “No comment, I want a lawyer.” Alternatively, a simple “Thank you for noticing me” will suffice.

Strike gave a final grunt of laughter, and then, abruptly, shut down the site and turned off the computer. He was so tired that the removal of his prosthesis took twice the time it usually did.

9

ON SUNDAY MORNING, WHICH WAS fine, Strike headed back to the ULU to shower. Once again, by consciously filling out his own bulk and allowing his features to slide, as they did naturally, into a scowl, he made himself sufficiently intimidating to repel challenges as he marched, eyes down, past the desk. He hung around the changing rooms, waiting for a quiet moment so that he would not have to shower in full view of any of the changing students, for the sight of his false leg was a distinguishing feature he did not want to impress on anybody’s memory.

Clean and shaven, he caught the Tube to Hammersmith Broadway, enjoying the tentative sunshine gleaming through the glass-covered shopping precinct through which he emerged on to the street. The distant shops on King Street were heaving with people; it might have been a Saturday. This was a bustling and essentially soulless commercial center, and yet Strike knew it to be a bare ten minutes’ walk to a sleepy, countrified stretch of the Thames embankment.

While he walked, traffic rumbling past him, he remembered Sundays in Cornwall in his childhood, when everything closed down except the church and the beach. Sunday had had a particular flavor in those days; an echoing, whispering quiet, the gentle chink of china and the smell of gravy, the TV as dull as the empty high street, and the relentless rush of the waves on the beach when he and Lucy had run down on to the shingle, forced back on to primitive resources.

His mother had once said to him: “If Joan’s right, and I end up in hell, it’ll be eternal Sunday in bloody St. Mawes.”

Strike, who was heading away from the commercial center towards the Thames, phoned his client as he walked.

“John Bristow?”

“Yeah, sorry to disturb you at the weekend, John…”

“Cormoran?” said Bristow, immediately friendly. “Not a problem, not a problem at all! How did it go with Wilson?”

“Very good, very useful, thanks. I wanted to know whether you can help me find a friend of Lula’s. It’s a girl she met in therapy. Her Christian name begins with an R—something like Rachel or Raquelle—and she was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith when Lula died. Does that ring any bells?”

There was a moment’s silence. When Bristow spoke again, the disappointment in his voice verged on annoyance.

“What do you want to speak to her for? Tansy’s quite clear that the voice she heard from upstairs was male.”

“I’m not interested in this girl as a suspect, but as a witness. Lula had an appointment to meet her at a shop, Vashti, right after she saw you at your mother’s flat.”

“Yeah, I know; that came out at the inquest. I mean—well, of course, you know your job, but—I don’t really see how she would know anything about what happened that night. Listen—wait a moment, Cormoran…I’m at my mother’s and there are other people here…need to find a quieter spot…”

Strike heard the sounds of movement, a murmured “Excuse me,” and Bristow came back on the line.

“Sorry, I didn’t want to say all this in front of the nurse. Actually, I thought, when you rang, you might be someone else calling up to talk to me about Duffield. Everybody I know has rung to tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“You obviously don’t read the News of the World. It’s all there, complete with pictures: Duffield turned up to visit my mother yesterday, out of the blue. Photographers outside the house; it caused a lot of inconvenience and upset with the neighbors. I was out with Alison, or I’d never have let him in.”

“What did he want?”

“Good question. Tony, my uncle, thinks it was money—but Tony usually thinks people are after money; anyway, I’ve got power of attorney, so there was nothing doing there. God knows why he came. The one small mercy is that Mum doesn’t seem to have realized who he is. She’s on immensely strong painkillers.”

“How did the press find out he was coming?”

“That,” said Bristow, “is an excellent question. Tony thinks he phoned them himself.”

“How is your mother?”

“Poorly, very poorly. They say she could hang on for weeks, or—or it could happen at any moment.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Strike. He raised his voice as he passed underneath a flyover, across which traffic was moving noisily. “Well, if you do happen to remember the name of Lula’s Vashti friend…”

“I’m afraid I still don’t really understand why you’re so interested in her.”

“Lula made this girl travel all the way from Hammersmith to Notting Hill, spent fifteen minutes with her and then walked out. Why didn’t she stay? Why meet for such a short space of time? Did they argue? Anything out of the ordinary that happens around a sudden death could be relevant.”

“I see,” said Bristow hesitantly. “But…well, that sort of behavior wasn’t really out of the ordinary for Lula. I did tell you that she could be a bit…a bit selfish. It would be like her to think that a token appearance would keep the girl happy. She often had these brief enthusiasms for people, you know, and then dropped them.”

His disappointment at Strike’s chosen line of inquiry was so evident that the detective felt it might be politic to slip in a little covert justification of the immense fee his client was paying.

“The other reason I was calling was to let you know that tomorrow evening I’m meeting one of the CID officers who covered the case. Eric Wardle. I’m hoping to get hold of the police file.”

“Fantastic!” Bristow sounded impressed. “That’s quick work!”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got good contacts in the Met.”

“Then you’ll be able to get some answers about the Runner! You’ve read my notes?”

“Yeah, very useful,” said Strike.

“And I’m trying to fix up a lunch with Tansy Bestigui this week, so you can meet her and hear her testimony first hand. I’ll ring your secretary, shall I?”

“Great.”

There was this to be said for having an underworked secretary he could not afford, Strike thought, once he had rung off: it gave a professional impression.

St. Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless turned out to be situated right behind the noisy concrete flyover. A plain, ill-proportioned and contemporaneous cousin of Lula’s Mayfair house, red brick with humbler, grubby white facings; no stone steps, no garden, no elegant neighbors, but a chipped door opening directly on to the street, peeling paint on the window ledges and a forlorn air. The utilitarian modern world had encroached until it sat huddled and miserable, out of synch with its surroundings, the flyover a mere twenty yards away, so that the upper windows looked directly out upon the concrete barriers and the endlessly passing cars. An unmistakably institutional flavor was given by the large silver buzzer and speaker beside the door, and the unapologetically ugly black camera, with its dangling wires, that hung from the lintel in a wire cage.

An emaciated young girl with a sore at the corner of her mouth stood smoking outside the front door, wearing a dirty man’s jumper that swamped her. She was leaning up against the wall, staring blankly towards the commercial center barely five minutes’ walk away, and when Strike pressed the buzzer for admission to the hostel, she gave him a look of deep calculation, apparently assessing his potentialities.

A small, fusty, grimy-floored lobby with shabby wooden paneling lay just inside the door. Two locked glass-paneled doors stood to left and right, affording him glimpses of a bare hall and a depressed-looking side room with a table full of leaflets, an old dartboard and a wall liberally peppered with holes. Straight ahead was a kiosk-like front desk, protected by another metal grille.

A gum-chewing woman behind the desk was reading a newspaper. She seemed suspicious and ill-disposed when Strike asked whether he could speak to a girl whose name was something like Rachel, and who had been a friend of Lula Landry’s.

“You a journalist?”

“No, I’m not; I’m a friend of a friend.”

“Should know her name, then, shouldn’t you?”

“Rachel? Raquelle? Something like that.”

A balding man strode into the kiosk behind the suspicious woman.

“I’m a private detective,” said Strike, raising his voice, and the bald man looked around, interested. “Here’s my card. I’ve been hired by Lula Landry’s brother, and I need to talk to—”

“Oh, you looking for Rochelle?” asked the bald man, approaching the grille. “She’s not here, pal. She left.”

His colleague, evincing some irritation at his willingness to talk to Strike, ceded her place at the counter and vanished from sight.

“When was this?”

“It’d be weeks now. Coupla months, even.”

“Any idea where she went?”

“No idea, mate. Probably sleeping rough again. She’s come and gone a good few times. She’s a difficult character. Mental health problems. Carrianne might know something though, hang on. Carrianne! Hey! Carrianne!”

The bloodless young girl with the scabbed lip came in out of the sunshine, her eyes narrowed.

“Wha’?”

“Rochelle, have you seen her?”

“Why would I wanna see that fuckin’ bitch?”

“So you haven’t seen her?” asked the bald man.

“No. Gorra fag?”

Strike gave her one; she put it behind her ear.

“She’s still round ’ere somewhere. Janine said she seen ’er,” said Carrianne. “Rochelle reckoned she’d gorra flat or some’t. Lying fuckin’ bitch. An’ Lula Landry left her ev’rything. Not. Whadd’ya want Rochelle for?” she asked Strike, and it was clear that she was wondering whether there was money in it, and whether she might do instead.

“Just to ask some questions.”

“Warrabout?”

“Lula Landry.”

“Oh,” said Carrianne, and her card-counting eyes flickered. “They weren’t such big fuckin’ mates. You don’t wanna believe everything Rochelle says, the lying bitch.”

“What did she lie about?” asked Strike.

“Fuckin’ everything. I reckon she stole half the stuff she pretended Landry bought ’er.”

“Come on, Carrianne,” said the bald man gently. “They were friends,” he told Strike. “Landry used to come and pick her up in her car. It caused,” he said, with a glance at Carrianne, “a bit of tension.”

“Not from me it fuckin’ didn’t,” snapped Carrianne. “I thought Landry was a fuckin’ jumped-up bitch. She weren’t even that good-lookin’.”

“Rochelle told me she’s got an aunt in Kilburn,” said the bald man.

“She dun gerron with ’er, though,” said the girl.

“Have you got a name or an address for the aunt?” asked Strike, but both shook their heads. “What’s Rochelle’s surname?”

“I don’t know; do you, Carrianne? We often know people just by their Christian names,” he told Strike.

There was little more to be gleaned from them. Rochelle had last stayed at the hostel more than two months previously. The bald man knew that she had attended an outpatients’ clinic at St. Thomas’s for a while, though he had no idea whether she still went.

“She’s had psychotic episodes. She’s on a lot of medication.”

“She didn’t give a shit when Lula died,” said Carrianne, suddenly. “She didn’t give a flying fuck.”

Both men looked at her. She shrugged, as one who has simply expressed an unpalatable truth.

“Listen, if Rochelle turns up again, will you give her my details and ask her to call me?”

Strike gave both of them cards, which they examined with interest. While their attention was thus engaged, he deftly twitched the gum-chewing woman’s News of the World out of the small opening at the bottom of the grille and stowed it under his arm. He then bade them both a cheerful goodbye, and left.

It was a warm spring afternoon. Strike strode on down towards Hammersmith Bridge, its pale sage-green paint and ornate gilding picturesque in the sun. A single swan bobbed along the Thames beside the far bank. The offices and shops seemed a hundred miles away. Turning right, he headed along the walkway beside the river wall and a line of low, riverside terraced buildings, some balconied or draped in wisteria.

Strike bought himself a pint in the Blue Anchor, and sat outside on a wooden bench with his face to the water and his back to the royal-blue and white frontage. Lighting a cigarette, he turned to page four of the paper, where a color photograph of Evan Duffield (head bowed, large bunch of white flowers in his hand, black coat flapping behind him) was surmounted by the headline: DUFFIELD’S DEATHBED VISIT TO LULA MOTHER.

The story was anodyne, really nothing more than an extended caption to the picture. The eyeliner and the flapping greatcoat, the slightly haunted, spaced-out expression, recalled Duffield’s appearance as he had headed towards his late girlfriend’s funeral. He was described, in the few lines of type below, as “troubled actor-musician Evan Duffield.”

Strike’s mobile vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out. He had received a text message from an unfamiliar number.

News of the World page four Evan Duffield. Robin.

He grinned at the small screen before slipping the phone back in his pocket. The sun was warm on his head and shoulders. Seagulls cawed, wheeling overhead, and Strike, happily aware that he was due nowhere, and expected by no one, settled to read the paper from cover to cover on the sunny bench.

10

ROBIN STOOD SWAYING WITH THE REST of the tightly packed commuters on a northbound Bakerloo Tube train, everyone wearing the tense and doleful expressions appropriate to a Monday morning. She felt the phone in her coat pocket buzz, and extricated it with difficulty, her elbow pressing unpleasantly into some unspecified flabby portion of a suited, bad-breathed man beside her. When she saw that the message was from Strike, she felt momentarily excited, nearly as excited as she had been to see Duffield in the paper yesterday. Then she scrolled down, and read:

Out. Key behind cistern of toilet. Strike.

She did not force the phone back into her pocket, but continued to clutch it as the train rattled on through dark tunnels, and she tried not to breathe in the flabby man’s halitosis. She was disgruntled. The previous day, she and Matthew had eaten lunch, in company with two university friends of Matthew’s, at his favorite gastropub, the Windmill on the Common. When Robin had spotted the picture of Evan Duffield in an open copy of the News of the World at a nearby table, she had made a breathless excuse, right in the middle of one of Matthew’s stories, and hurried outside to text Strike.

Matthew had said, later, that she had shown bad manners, and even worse not to explain what she was up to, in favor of maintaining that ludicrous air of mystery.

Robin gripped the hand strap tightly, and as the train slowed, and her heavy neighbor leaned into her, she felt both a little foolish, and resentful towards the two men, most particularly the detective, who was evidently uninterested in the unusual movements of Lula Landry’s ex-boyfriend.

By the time she had marched through the usual chaos and debris to Denmark Street, extracted the key from behind the cistern as instructed, and been snubbed yet again by a superior-sounding girl in Freddie Bestigui’s office, Robin was in a thoroughly bad temper.

Though he did not know it, Strike was, at that very moment, passing the scene of the most romantic moments of Robin’s life. The steps below the statue of Eros were swarming with Italian teenagers this morning, as Strike went by on the St. James’s side, heading for Glasshouse Street.

The entrance to Barrack, the nightclub which had so pleased Deeby Macc that he had remained there for hours, fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, was only a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. The facade looked as if it was made out of industrial concrete, and the name was picked out in shining black letters, vertically placed. The club extended up over four floors. As Strike had expected, its doorway was surmounted by CCTV cameras, whose range, he thought, would cover most of the street. He walked around the building, noting the fire exits, and making for himself a rough sketch of the area.

After a second long internet session the previous evening, Strike felt that he had a thorough grasp of the subject of Deeby Macc’s publicly declared interest in Lula Landry. The rapper had mentioned the model in the lyrics of three tracks, on two separate albums; he had also spoken about her in interviews as his ideal woman and soul mate. It was difficult to gauge how seriously Macc intended to be taken when he made these comments; allowance had to be made, in all the print interviews Strike had read, firstly for the rapper’s sense of humor, which was both dry and sly, and secondly for the awe tinged with fear every interviewer seemed to feel when confronted with him.

An ex-gang member who had been imprisoned for gun and drug offenses in his native Los Angeles, Macc was now a multimillionaire, with a number of lucrative businesses aside from his recording career. There was no doubt that the press had become “excited,” to use Robin’s word, when news had leaked out that Macc’s record company had rented him the apartment below Lula’s. There had been much rabid speculation as to what might happen when Deeby Macc found himself a floor away from his supposed dream woman, and how this incendiary new element might affect the volatile relationship between Landry and Duffield. These non-stories had all been peppered with undoubtedly spurious comments from friends of both—“He’s already called her and asked her to dinner,” “She’s preparing a small party for him in her flat when he hits London.” Such speculation had almost eclipsed the flurry of outraged comment from sundry columnists that the twice-convicted Macc, whose music (they said) glorified his criminal past, was entering the country at all.

When he had decided that the streets surrounding Barrack had no more to tell him, Strike continued on foot, making notes of yellow lines in the vicinity, of Friday-night parking restrictions and of those establishments nearby that also had their own security cameras. His notes complete, he felt that he had earned a cup of tea and a bacon roll on expenses, both of which he enjoyed in a small café, while reading an abandoned copy of the Daily Mail.

His mobile rang as he was starting his second cup of tea, halfway through a gleeful account of the Prime Minister’s gaffe in calling an elderly female voter “bigoted” without realizing that his microphone was still turned on.

A week ago, Strike had allowed his unwanted temp’s calls to go to voicemail. Today, he picked up.

“Hi, Robin, how’re you?”

“Fine. I’m just calling to give you your messages.”

“Fire away,” said Strike, as he drew out a pen.

“Alison Cresswell’s just called—John Bristow’s secretary—to say she’s booked a table at Cipriani at one o’clock tomorrow, so that he can introduce you to Tansy Bestigui.”

“Great.”

“I’ve tried Freddie Bestigui’s production company again. They’re getting irritated. They say he’s in LA. I’ve left another request for him to call you.”

“Good.”

“And Peter Gillespie’s telephoned again.”

“Uh huh,” said Strike.

“He says it’s urgent, and could you please get back to him as soon as possible.”

Strike considered asking her to call Gillespie back and tell him to go and fuck himself.

“Yeah, will do. Listen, could you text me the address of the night-club Uzi?”

“Right.”

“And try and find a number for a bloke called Guy Somé? He’s a designer.”

“It’s pronounced ‘ghee,’ ” said Robin.

“What?”

“His Christian name. It’s pronounced the French way: ‘Ghee.’ ”

“Oh, right. Well, could you try and find a contact number for him?”

“Fine,” said Robin.

“Ask him if he’d be prepared to talk to me. Leave a message saying who I am, and who’s hired me.”

“Fine.”

It was borne in on Strike that Robin’s tone was frosty. After a second or two, he thought he might know why.

“By the way, thanks for that text you sent yesterday,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you; it would have looked strange if I’d started texting, where I was. But if you could call Nigel Clements, Duffield’s agent, and ask for an appointment, that would be great too.”

Her animosity fell away at once, as he had meant it to; her voice was many degrees warmer when she spoke again; verging, in fact, on excited.

“But Duffield can’t have had anything to do with it, can he? He had a cast-iron alibi!”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that,” said Strike, deliberately ominous. “And listen, Robin, if another death threat comes in—they usually arrive on Mondays…”

“Yes?” she said eagerly.

“File it,” said Strike.

He could not be sure—it seemed unlikely; she struck him as so prim—but he thought he heard her mutter, “Sod you, then,” as she hung up.

Strike spent the rest of the day engaged in tedious but necessary spadework. When Robin had texted him the address, he visited his second nightclub of the day, this time in South Kensington. The contrast with Barrack was extreme; Uzi’s discreet entrance might have been to a smart private house. There were security cameras over its doors, too. Strike then took a bus to Charles Street, where he was fairly sure Guy Somé lived, and walked what he guessed to be the most direct route between the designer’s address and the house where Landry had died.

His leg was aching badly again by late afternoon, and he stopped for a rest and more sandwiches before setting out for the Feathers, near Scotland Yard, and his appointment with Eric Wardle.

It was another Victorian pub, this time with enormous windows reaching almost from floor to ceiling, looking out on to a great gray 1920s building decorated with statues by Jacob Epstein. The nearest of these sat over the doors, and stared down through the pub windows; a fierce seated deity was being embraced by his infant son, whose body was weirdly twisted back on itself, to show his genitalia. Time had eroded all shock value.

Inside the Feathers, machines were clinking and jingling and flashing primary-colored lights; the wall-mounted plasma TVs, surrounded with padded leather, were showing West Bromwich Albion versus Chelsea with the sound off, while Amy Winehouse throbbed and moaned from hidden speakers. The names of ales were painted on the cream wall above the long bar, which faced a wide dark-wood staircase with curving steps and shining brass handrails, leading up to the first floor.

Strike had to wait to be served, giving him time to look around. The place was full of men, most of whom had military-short hair; but a trio of girls with tangerine tans stood around a high table, throwing back their over-straightened peroxide hair, in their tiny, tight spangled dresses, shifting their weight unnecessarily on their teetering heels. They were pretending not to know that the only solitary drinker, a handsome, boyish man in a leather jacket, who was sitting on a high bar seat beside the nearby window, was examining them, point by point, with a practiced eye. Strike bought himself a pint of Doom Bar and approached their appraiser.

“Cormoran Strike,” he said, reaching Wardle’s table. Wardle had the kind of hair Strike envied in other men; nobody would ever have called Wardle “pubehead.”

“Yeah, I thought it might be you,” said the policeman, shaking hands. “Anstis said you were a big bloke.”

Strike pulled up a bar stool, and Wardle said, without preamble:

“What’ve you got for me, then?”

“There was a fatal stabbing just off Ealing Broadway last month. Guy called Liam Yates? Police informant, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, he got a knife in the neck. But we know who did it,” said Wardle, with a patronizing laugh. “Half the crooks in London know. If that’s your information—”

“Don’t know where he is, though, do you?”

With a quick glance at the determinedly unconscious girls, Wardle slid a notebook out of his pocket.

“Go on.”

“There’s a girl who works in Betbusters on the Hackney Road called Shona Holland. She lives in a rented flat two streets away from the bookie’s. She’s got an unwelcome house guest at the moment called Brett Fearney, who used to beat up her sister. Apparently he’s not the sort of bloke you refuse a favor.”

“Got the full address?” asked Wardle, who was scribbling hard.

“I’ve just given you the name of the tenant and half the postcode. How about trying a bit of detective work?”

“And where did you say you got this?” asked Wardle, still jotting rapidly with the notebook balanced under the table on his knee.

“I didn’t,” replied Strike equably, sipping his beer.

“Got some interesting friends, haven’t you?”

“Very. Now, in a spirit of fair exchange…”

Wardle, replacing his notebook in his pocket, laughed.

“What you’ve just given me might be a crock of shit.”

“It isn’t. Play fair, Wardle.”

The policeman eyed Strike for a moment, apparently torn between amusement and suspicion.

“What are you after, then?”

“I told you on the phone: bit of inside information on Lula Landry.”

“Don’t you read the papers?”

“Inside information, I said. My client thinks there was foul play.”

Wardle’s expression hardened.

“Hooked up with a tabloid, have we?”

“No,” said Strike. “Her brother.”

“John Bristow?”

Wardle took a long pull on his pint, his eyes on the upper thighs of the nearest girl, his wedding ring reflecting red lights from the pinball machine.

“Is he still fixated on the CCTV footage?”

“He mentioned it,” admitted Strike.

“We tried to trace them,” said Wardle, “those two black guys. We put out an appeal. Neither of them turned up. No big surprise—a car alarm went off just about the time they would have been passing it—or trying to get into it. Maserati. Very tasty.”

“Reckon they were nicking cars, do you?”

“I don’t say they went there specifically to nick cars; they might have spotted an opportunity, seeing it parked there—what kind of tosser leaves a Maserati parked on the street? But it was nearly two in the morning, the temperature was below zero, and I can’t think of many innocent reasons why two men would choose to meet at that time, in a Mayfair street where neither of them, as far as we could find out, lived.”

“No idea where they came from, or where they went afterwards?”

“We’re pretty sure the one Bristow’s obsessed with, the one who was walking towards her flat just before she fell, got off the number thirty-eight bus in Wilton Street at a quarter past eleven. There’s no saying what he did before he passed the camera at the end of Bellamy Road an hour and a half later. He tanked back past it about ten minutes after Landry jumped, sprinted up Bellamy Road and most probably turned right down Weldon Street. There’s some footage of a guy more or less meeting his description—tall, black, hoodie, scarf round the face—caught on Theobalds Road about twenty minutes later.”

“He made good time if he got to Theobalds Road in twenty minutes,” commented Strike. “That’s out towards Clerkenwell, isn’t it? Must be two, two and a half miles. And the pavements were frozen.”

“Yeah, well, it might not’ve been him. The footage was shit. Bristow thought it was very suspicious that he had his face covered, but it was minus ten that night, and I was wearing a balaclava to work myself. Anyway, whether he was in Theobalds Road or not, nobody ever came forward to say they’d recognized him.”

“And the other one?”

“Sprinted off down Halliwell Street, about two hundred yards down; no idea where he went after that.”

“Or when he entered the area?”

“Could’ve come from anywhere. We haven’t got any other footage of him.”

“Aren’t there supposed to be ten thousand CCTV cameras in London?”

“They aren’t everywhere yet. Cameras aren’t the answer to our problems, unless they’re maintained and monitored. The one in Garriman Street was out, and there aren’t any in Meadowfield Road or Hartley Street. You’re like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you’ve told the missus you’re at the office and you’re at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone’s trying to force your bathroom window open. Can’t have it both ways.”

“I’m not after it either way,” said Strike. “I’m just asking what you know about Runner Two.”

“Muffled up to the eyeballs, like his mate; all you could see were his hands. If I’d been him, and had a guilty conscience about the Maserati, I’d have holed up in a bar and exited with a bunch of other people; there’s a place called Bojo’s off Halliwell Street he could’ve gone and mingled with the punters. We checked,” Wardle said, forestalling Strike’s question. “Nobody recognized him from the footage.”

They drank for a moment in silence.

“Even if we’d found them,” said Wardle, setting down his glass, “the most we could’ve got from them is an eyewitness account of her jumping. There wasn’t any unexplained DNA in her flat. Nobody had been in that place who shouldn’t have been in there.”

“It isn’t just the CCTV footage that’s giving Bristow ideas,” said Strike. “He’s been seeing a bit of Tansy Bestigui.”

“Don’t talk to me about Tansy fucking Bestigui,” said Wardle irritably.

“I’m going to have to mention her, because my client reckons she’s telling the truth.”

“Still at it, is she? Still hasn’t given it up? I’ll tell you about Mrs. Bestigui, shall I?”

“Go on,” said Strike, one hand wrapped around the beer at his chest.

“Carver and I got to the scene about twenty, twenty-five minutes after Landry hit the road. Uniformed police were already there. Tansy Bestigui was still going strong with the hysterics when we saw her, gibbering and shaking and screaming that there was a murderer in the building.

“Her story was that she got up out of bed around two and went for a pee in the bathroom; she heard shouting from two flats above and saw Landry’s body fall past the window.

“Now, the windows in those flats are triple-glazed or something. They’re designed to keep the heat and the air conditioning in, and the noise of the hoi polloi out. By the time we were interviewing her, the street below was full of panda cars and neighbors, but you’d never have known it from up there except for the flashing blue lights. We could’ve been inside a fucking pyramid for all the noise that got inside that place.

“So I said to her, ‘Are you sure you heard shouting, Mrs. Bestigui? Because this flat seems to be pretty much soundproofed.’

“She wouldn’t back down. Swore she’d heard every word. According to her, Landry screamed something like ‘You’re too late,’ and a man’s voice said, ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ Auditory hallucinations, they call them,” said Wardle. “You start hearing things when you snort so much coke your brains start dribbling out of your nose.”

He took another long pull on his pint.

“Anyway, we proved beyond doubt she couldn’t have heard it. The Bestiguis moved into a friend’s house the next day to get away from the press, so we put a few blokes in their flat, and a guy up on Landry’s balcony, shouting his head off. The lot on the first floor couldn’t hear a word he was saying, and they were stone-cold sober, and making an effort.

“But while we were proving she was talking shit, Mrs. Bestigui was phoning half of London to tell them she was the sole witness to the murder of Lula Landry. The press were already on to it, because some of the neighbors had heard her screaming about an intruder. Papers had tried and convicted Evan Duffield before we even got back to Mrs. Bestigui.

“We put it to her that we’d now proven she couldn’t have heard what she said she’d heard. Well, she wasn’t ready to admit it had all been in her own head. She’d got a lot riding on it now, with the press swarming outside her front door like she was Lula Landry reborn. So she came back with ‘Oh, didn’t I say? I opened them. Yeah, I opened the windows for a breath of fresh air.’ ”

Wardle gave a scathing laugh.

“Sub-zero outside, and snowing.”

“And she was in her underwear, right?”

“Looking like a rake with two plastic tangerines tied to it,” said Wardle, and the simile came out so easily that Strike was sure he was far from the first to have heard it. “We went ahead and double-checked the new story; we dusted for prints, and right enough, she hadn’t opened the windows. No prints on the latches or anywhere else; the cleaner had done them the morning before Landry died, and hadn’t been in since. As the windows were locked and bolted when we arrived, there’s only one conclusion to be drawn, isn’t there? Mrs. Tansy Bestigui is a fucking liar.”

Wardle drained his glass.

“Have another one,” said Strike, and he headed for the bar without waiting for an answer.

He noticed Wardle’s curious gaze roaming over his lower legs as he returned to the table. Under different circumstances, he might have banged the prosthesis hard against the table leg, and said “It’s this one.” Instead, he set down two fresh pints and some pork scratchings, which to his irritation were served in a small white ramekin, and continued where they had left off.

“Tansy Bestigui definitely witnessed Landry falling past the window, though, didn’t she? Because Wilson reckons he heard the body fall right before Mrs. Bestigui started screaming.”

“Maybe she saw it, but she wasn’t having a pee. She was doing a couple of lines of charlie in the bathroom. We found it there, cut and ready for her.”

“Left some, had she?”

“Yeah. Presumably the body falling past the window put her off.”

“The window’s visible from the bathroom?”

“Yeah. Well, just.”

“You got there pretty quickly, didn’t you?”

“Uniformed lot were there in about eight minutes, and Carver and I were there in about twenty.” Wardle lifted his glass, as though to toast the force’s efficiency.

“I’ve spoken to Wilson, the security guard,” said Strike.

“Yeah? He didn’t do bad,” said Wardle, with a trace of condescension. “It wasn’t his fault he had the runs. But he didn’t touch anything, and he did a proper search right after she’d jumped. Yeah, he did all right.”

“He and his colleagues were a bit lazy on the door codes.”

“People always are. Too many pin numbers and passwords to remember. Know the feeling.”

“Bristow’s interested in the possibilities of the quarter of an hour when Wilson was in the bog.”

“We were, too, for about five minutes, before we’d satisfied ourselves that Mrs. Bestigui was a publicity-mad cokehead.”

“Wilson mentioned that the pool was unlocked.”

“Can he explain how a murderer got into the pool area, or back to it, without walking right past him? A fucking pool,” said Wardle, “nearly as big as the one I’ve got at my gym, and all for the use of three fucking people. A gym on the ground floor behind the security desk. Underground fucking parking. Flats done up with marble and shit like…like a fucking five-star hotel.”

The policeman sat shaking his head very slowly over the unequal distribution of wealth.

“Different world,” he said.

“I’m interested in the middle flat,” said Strike.

“Deeby Macc’s?” said Wardle, and Strike was surprised to see a grin of genuine warmth spread across the policeman’s face. “What about it?”

“Did you go in there?”

“I had a look, but Bryant had already searched it. Empty. Windows bolted, alarm set and working properly.”

“Is Bryant the one who knocked into the table and smashed a big floral arrangement?”

Wardle snorted.

“Heard about that, did you? Mr. Bestigui wasn’t too chuffed about it. Oh yeah. Two hundred white roses in a crystal vase the size of a dustbin. Apparently he’d read that Macc asks for white roses in his rider. His rider,” Wardle said, as though Strike’s silence implied an ignorance of what the term meant. “Stuff they ask for in their dressing rooms. I’d’ve thought you’d know about this stuff.”

Strike ignored the insinuation. He had hoped for better from Anstis.

“Ever find out why Bestigui wanted Macc to have roses?”

“Just schmoozing, isn’t it? Probably wanted to put Macc in a film. He was fucked off to the back teeth when he heard Bryant had ruined them. Yelling the place down when he found out.”

“Anyone find it strange that he was upset about a bunch of flowers, when his neighbor’s lying in the street with her head smashed in?”

“He’s one obnoxious fucker, Bestigui,” said Wardle, with feeling. “Used to people jumping to attention when he speaks. He tried treating all of us like staff, till he realized that wasn’t clever.

“But the shouting wasn’t really about the flowers. He was trying to drown out his wife, give her a chance to pull herself together. He kept forcing his way in between her and anyone who wanted to question her. Big guy as well, old Freddie.”

“What was he worried about?”

“That the longer she bawled and shook like a frozen whippet, the more bloody obvious it became that she’d been doing coke. He must’ve known it was lying around somewhere in the flat. He can’t have been delighted to have the Met come bursting in. So he tried to distract everyone with a tantrum about his five-hundred-quid floral arrangement.

“I read somewhere that he’s divorcing her. I’m not surprised. He’s used to the press tiptoeing around him, because he’s such a litigious bastard; he can’t have enjoyed all the attention he got after Tansy shot her mouth off. The press made hay while they could. Rehashed old stories about him throwing plates at underlings. Punches in meetings. They say he paid his last wife a massive lump sum to stop her talking about his sex life in court. He’s pretty well known as a prize shit.”

“You didn’t fancy him as a suspect?”

“Oh, we fancied him a lot; he was on the spot and he’s got a rep for violence. It never looked likely, though. If his wife knew that he’d done it, or that he’d been out of the flat at the moment Landry fell, I’m betting she’d have told us so: she was out of control when we got there. But she said he’d been in bed, and the bedclothes were disarranged and looked slept in.

“Plus, if he’d managed to sneak out of the flat without her realizing it, and gone up to Landry’s place, we’re left with the problem of how he got past Wilson. He can’t have taken the lift, so he’d have passed Wilson in the stairwell, coming down.”

“So the timings rule him out?”

Wardle hesitated.

“Well, it’s just possible. Just, assuming Bestigui can move a damn sight faster than most men of his age and weight, and that he started running the moment he pushed her over. But there’s still the fact that we didn’t find his DNA anywhere in the flat, the question of how he got out of the flat without his wife knowing he’d gone, and the small matter of why Landry would have let him in. All her friends agreed she didn’t like him. Anyway,” Wardle finished the dregs of his pint, “Bestigui’s the kind of man who’d hire a killer if he wanted someone taken care of. He wouldn’t sully his own hands.”

“Another one?”

Wardle checked his watch.

“My shout,” he said, and he ambled up to the bar. The three young women standing around the high table fell silent, watching him greedily. Wardle threw them a smirk as he walked back past with his drinks, and they glanced over at him as he resumed the bar stool beside Strike.

“How d’you think Wilson shapes up as a possible killer?” Strike asked the policeman.

“Badly,” said Wardle. “He couldn’t have got up and down quickly enough to meet Tansy Bestigui on the ground floor. Mind you, his CV’s a crock of shit. He was employed on the basis of being ex-police, and he was never in the force.”

“Interesting. Where was he?”

“He’s been knocking around the security world for years. He admitted he’d lied to get his first job, about ten years ago, and he’d just kept it on his CV.”

“He seems to have liked Landry.”

“Yeah. He’s older than he looks,” said Wardle, inconsequentially. “He’s a grandfather. They don’t show age like us, do they, Afro-Caribbeans? I wouldn’t’ve put him as any older than you.” Strike wondered idly how old Wardle thought he was.

“You got forensics to check out her flat?”

“Oh yeah,” said Wardle, “but that was purely because the higher-ups wanted to put the thing beyond reasonable doubt. We knew within the first twenty-four hours it had to be suicide. We went the extra mile, though, with the whole fucking world watching.”

He spoke with poorly disguised pride.

“The cleaner had been through the whole place that morning—sexy Polish girl, crap English, but bloody thorough with a duster—so the day’s prints stood out good and clear. Nothing unusual.”

“Wilson’s prints were in there, presumably, because he searched the place after she fell?”

“Yeah, but nowhere suspicious.”

“So as far as you’re concerned, there were only three people in the whole building when she fell. Deeby Macc should have been there, but…”

“…he went straight from the airport to a nightclub, yeah,” said Wardle. Again, a broad and apparently involuntary grin illuminated his face. “I interviewed Deeby at Claridges the day after she died. Massive bloke. Like you,” he said, with a glance at Strike’s bulky torso, “only fit.” Strike took the hit without demur. “Proper ex-gangster. He’s been in and out of the nick in LA. He nearly didn’t get a visa to get into the UK.

“He had an entourage with him,” said Wardle. “All hanging around the room, rings on every finger, tattoos on their necks. He was the biggest, though. One scary fucker Deeby’d be, if you met him down an alleyway. Politer than Bestigui by ten fucking miles. Asked me how the hell I could do my job without a gun.”

The policeman was beaming. Strike could not help drawing the conclusion that Eric Wardle, CID, was, in this case, as starstruck as Kieran Kolovas-Jones.

“Wasn’t a long interview, seeing as he’d only just got off a plane and never set foot inside Kentigern Gardens. Routine. I got him to sign his latest CD for me at the end,” Wardle added, as though he could not help himself. “That brought the house down, he loved it. The missus wanted to put it on eBay, but I’m keeping…”

Wardle stopped talking with an air of having given away a little more than he had intended. Amused, Strike helped himself to a handful of pork scratchings.

“What about Evan Duffield?”

“Him,” said Wardle. The stardust that had sparkled over the policeman’s account of Deeby Macc was gone; the policeman was scowling. “Little junkie shit. He pissed us around from start to finish. He went straight into rehab the day after she died.”

“I saw. Where?”

“Priory, where else? Fucking rest cure.”

“So when did you interview him?”

“Next day, but we had to find him first; his people were being as obstructive as possible. Same story as Bestigui, wasn’t it? They didn’t want us to know what he’d really been doing. My missus,” said Wardle, scowling even harder, “thinks he’s sexy. You married?”

“No,” said Strike.

“Anstis told me you left the army to get married to some woman who looks like a supermodel.”

“What was Duffield’s story, once you got to him?”

“They’d had a big bust-up in the club, Uzi. Plenty of witnesses to that. She left, and his story was that he followed her, about five minutes later, wearing this fucking wolf mask. It covers the whole head. Lifelike, hairy thing. He told us he’d got it from a fashion shoot.”

Wardle’s expression was eloquent of contempt.

“He liked putting this thing on to get in and out of places, to piss off the paparazzi. So, after Landry left Uzi, he got in his car—he had a driver outside, waiting for him—and went to Kentigern Gardens. Driver confirmed all that. Yeah, all right,” Wardle corrected himself impatiently, “he confirmed that he drove a man in a wolf’s head, who he assumed was Duffield as he was of Duffield’s height and build, and wearing what looked like Duffield’s clothes, and speaking in Duffield’s voice, to Kentigern Gardens.”

“But he didn’t take the wolf head off on the journey?”

“It’s only about fifteen minutes to her flat from Uzi. No, he didn’t take it off. He’s a childish little prick.

“So then, by Duffield’s own account, he saw the paps outside her flat and decided not to go in after all. He told the driver to take him off to Soho, where he let him out. Duffield walked round the corner to his dealer’s flat in d’Arblay Street, where he shot up.”

“Still wearing the wolf’s head?”

“No, he took it off there,” said Wardle. “The dealer, name of Whycliff, is an ex-public schoolboy with a habit way worse than Duffield’s. He gave a full statement agreeing that Duffield had come round at about half past two. It was only the pair of them there, and yeah, I’d take long odds that Whycliff would lie for Duffield, but a woman on the ground floor heard the doorbell ring and says she saw Duffield on the stair.

“Anyway, Duffield left Whycliff’s around four, with the bloody wolf’s head back on, and rambled off towards the place where he thought his car and driver were waiting; except that the driver was gone. The driver claimed a misunderstanding. He thought Duffield was an arsehole; he made that clear when we took his statement. Duffield wasn’t paying him; the car was on Landry’s account.

“So then Duffield, who’s got no money on him, walks all the way to Ciara Porter’s place in Notting Hill. We found a few people who’d seen a man wearing a wolf’s head strolling along relevant streets, and there’s footage of him cadging a free box of matches from a woman in an all-night garage.”

“Can you make out his face?”

“No, because he only shoved the wolf head up to speak to her, and all you can see is its snout. She said it was Duffield, though.

“He got to Porter’s around half four. She let him sleep on the sofa, and about an hour later she got the news about Landry being dead, and woke him up to tell him. Cue histrionics and rehab.”

“You checked for a suicide note?” asked Strike.

“Yeah. There was nothing in the flat, nothing on her laptop, but that wasn’t a surprise. She did it on the spur of the moment, didn’t she? She was bipolar, she’d just argued with that little tosser and it pushed her over—well, you know what I mean.”

Wardle checked his watch, and drained the last of his pint.

“I’m gonna have to go. The wife’ll be pissed off, I told her I’d only be half an hour.”

The over-tanned girls had left without either man noticing. Out on the pavement, both lit up cigarettes.

“I hate this fucking smoking ban,” said Wardle, zipping his leather jacket up to the neck.

“Have we got a deal, then?” asked Strike.

Cigarette between his lips, Wardle pulled on a pair of gloves.

“I dunno about that.”

“C’mon, Wardle,” said Strike, handing the policeman a card, which Wardle accepted as though it were a joke item. “I’ve given you Brett Fearney.”

Wardle laughed outright.

“Not yet you haven’t.”

He slipped Strike’s card into a pocket, inhaled, blew smoke skywards, then shot the larger man a look compounded of curiosity and appraisal.

“Yeah, all right. If we get Fearney, you can have the file.”

11

“EVAN DUFFIELD’S AGENT SAYS HIS client isn’t taking any further calls or giving any interviews about Lula Landry,” said Robin next morning. “I did make it clear that you’re not a journalist, but he was adamant. And the people in Guy Somé’s office are ruder than Freddie Bestigui’s. You’d think I was trying to get an audience with the Pope.”

“OK,” said Strike. “I’ll see whether I can get at him through Bristow.”

It was the first time that Robin had seen Strike in a suit. He looked, she thought, like a rugby player en route to an international: large, conventionally smart in his dark jacket and subdued tie. He was on his knees, searching through one of the cardboard boxes he had brought from Charlotte’s flat. Robin was averting her gaze from his boxed-up possessions. They were still avoiding any mention of the fact that Strike was living in his office.

“Aha,” he said, finally locating, from amid a pile of his mail, a bright blue envelope: the invitation to his nephew’s party. “Bollocks,” he added, on opening it.

“What’s the matter?”

“It doesn’t say how old he is,” said Strike. “My nephew.”

Robin was curious about Strike’s relations with his family. As she had never been officially informed, however, that Strike had numerous half-brothers and -sisters, a famous father and a mildly infamous mother, she bit back all questions and continued to open the day’s paltry mail.

Strike got up off the floor, replaced the cardboard box in a corner of the inner office and returned to Robin.

“What’s that?” he asked, seeing a sheet of photocopied newsprint on the desk.

“I kept it for you,” she said diffidently. “You said you were glad you’d seen that story about Evan Duffield…I thought you might be interested in this, if you haven’t already seen it.”

It was a neatly clipped article about film producer Freddie Bestigui, taken from the previous day’s Evening Standard.

“Excellent; I’ll read that on the way to lunch with his wife.”

“Soon to be ex,” said Robin. “It’s all in that article. He’s not very lucky in love, Mr. Bestigui.”

“From what Wardle told me, he’s not a very lovable man,” said Strike.

“How did you get that policeman to talk to you?” Robin said, unable to hold back her curiosity on this point. She was desperate to learn more about the process and progress of the investigation.

“We’ve got a mutual friend,” said Strike. “Bloke I knew in Afghanistan; Met officer in the TA.”

“You were in Afghanistan?”

“Yeah.” Strike was pulling on his overcoat, the folded article on Freddie Bestigui and the invitation to Jack’s party between his teeth.

“What were you doing in Afghanistan?”

“Investigating a Killed In Action,” said Strike. “Military police.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

Military police did not tally with Matthew’s impression of a charlatan, or a waster.

“Why did you leave?”

“Injured,” said Strike.

He had described that injury to Wilson in the starkest of terms, but he was wary of being equally frank with Robin. He could imagine her shocked expression, and he stood in no need of her sympathy.

“Don’t forget to call Peter Gillespie,” Robin reminded him, as he headed out of the door.

Strike read the photocopied article as he rode the Tube to Bond Street. Freddie Bestigui had inherited his first fortune from a father who had made a great deal of money in haulage; he had made his second by producing highly commercial films that serious critics treated with derision. The producer was currently going to court to refute claims, by two newspapers, that he had behaved with gross impropriety towards a young female employee, whose silence he had subsequently bought. The accusations, carefully hedged around with many “alleged”s and “reported”s, included aggressive sexual advances and a degree of physical bullying. They had been made “by a source close to the alleged victim,” the girl herself having refused either to press charges or to speak to the press. The fact that Freddie was currently divorcing his latest wife, Tansy, was mentioned in the concluding paragraph, which ended with a reminder that the unhappy couple had been in the building on the night that Lula Landry took her own life. The reader was left with the odd impression that the Bestiguis’ mutual unhappiness might have influenced Landry in her decision to jump.

Strike had never moved in the kinds of circles that dined at Cipriani. It was only as he walked up Davies Street, the sun warm on his back and imparting a ruddy glow to the red-brick building ahead, that he thought how odd it would be, yet not unlikely, if he ran into one of his half-siblings there. Restaurants like Cipriani were part of the regular lives of Strike’s father’s legitimate children. He had last heard from three of them while in Selly Oak Hospital, undergoing physiotherapy. Gabi and Danni had jointly sent flowers; Al had visited once, laughing too loudly and scared of looking at the lower end of the bed. Afterwards, Charlotte had imitated Al braying and wincing. She was a good mimic. Nobody ever expected a girl that beautiful to be funny, yet she was.

The interior of the restaurant had an art deco feeling, the bar and chairs of mellow polished wood, with pale yellow tablecloths on the circular tables and white-jacketed, bow-tied waiters and waitresses. Strike spotted his client immediately among the clattering, jabbering diners, sitting at a table set for four and talking, to Strike’s surprise, to two women instead of one, both with long, glossy brown hair. Bristow’s rabbity face was full of the desire to please, or perhaps placate.

The lawyer jumped up to greet Strike when he saw him, and introduced Tansy Bestigui, who held out a thin, cool hand, but did not smile, and her sister, Ursula May, who did not hold out a hand at all. While the preliminaries of ordering drinks and handing around menus were navigated, Bristow nervous and over-talkative throughout, the sisters subjected Strike to the kind of brazenly critical stares that only people of a certain class feel entitled to give.

They were both as pristine and polished as life-size dolls recently removed from their cellophane boxes; rich-girl thin, almost hipless in their tight jeans, with tanned faces that had a waxy sheen especially noticeable on their foreheads, their long, gleaming dark manes with center partings, the ends trimmed with spirit-level exactitude.

When Strike finally chose to look up from his menu, Tansy said, without preamble:

“Are you really” (she pronounced it “rarely”) “Jonny Rokeby’s son?”

“So the DNA test said,” he replied.

She seemed uncertain whether he was being funny or rude. Her dark eyes were fractionally too close together, and the Botox and fillers could not smooth away the petulance in her expression.

“Listen, I’ve just been telling John,” she said curtly. “I’m not going public again, OK? I’m perfectly happy to tell you what I heard, because I’d love you to prove I was right, but you mustn’t tell anyone I’ve talked to you.”

The unbuttoned neck of her thin silk shirt revealed an expanse of butterscotch skin stretched over her bony sternum, giving an unattractively knobbly effect; yet two full, firm breasts jutted from her narrow ribcage, as though they had been borrowed for the day from a fuller-figured friend. “We could have met somewhere more discreet,” commented Strike.

“No, it’s fine, because nobody here will know who you are. You don’t look anything like your father, do you? I met him at Elton’s last summer. Freddie knows him. D’you see much of Jonny?”

“I’ve met him twice,” said Strike.

“Oh,” said Tansy.

The monosyllable contained equal parts of surprise and disdain.

Charlotte had had friends like this; sleek-haired, expensively educated and clothed, all of them appalled by her strange yen for the enormous, battered-looking Strike. He had come up against them for years, by phone and in person, with their clipped vowels and their stockbroker husbands, and the brittle toughness Charlotte had never been able to fake.

“I don’t think she should be talking to you at all,” said Ursula abruptly. Her tone and expression would have been appropriate had Strike been a waiter who had just thrown aside his apron and joined them, uninvited, at the table. “I think you’re making a big mistake, Tanz.”

Bristow said: “Ursula, Tansy simply—”

“It’s up to me what I do,” Tansy snapped at her sister, as though Bristow had not spoken, as though his chair was empty. “I’m only going to say what I heard, that’s all. It’s all off the record; John’s agreed to that.”

Evidently she too viewed Strike as domestic class. He was irked not only by their tone, but also by the fact that Bristow was giving witnesses assurances without his say-so. How could Tansy’s evidence, which could have come from nobody but her, be kept off the record?

For a few moments all four of them ran their eyes over the culinary options in silence. Ursula was the first to put down her menu. She had already finished a glass of wine. She helped herself to another, and glanced restlessly around the restaurant, her eyes lingering for a second on a blonde minor royal, before passing on.

“This place used to be full of the most fabulous people, even at lunchtime. Cyprian only ever wants to go to bloody Wiltons, with all the other stiffs in suits…”

“Is Cyprian your husband, Mrs. May?” asked Strike.

He guessed that it would needle her if he crossed what she evidently saw as an invisible line between them; she did not think that sitting at a table with her gave him a right to her conversation. She scowled, and Bristow rushed to fill the uncomfortable pause.

“Yes, Ursula’s married to Cyprian May, one of our senior partners.”

“So I’m getting the family discount on my divorce,” said Tansy, with a slightly bitter smile.

“And her ex will go absolutely ballistic if she starts dragging the press back into their lives,” Ursula said, her dark eyes boring into Strike’s. “They’re trying to thrash out a settlement. It could seriously prejudice her alimony if that all kicks off again. So you’d better be discreet.”

With a bland smile, Strike turned to Tansy:

“You had a connection with Lula Landry, then, Mrs. Bestigui? Your brother-in-law works with John?”

“It never came up,” she said, looking bored.

The waiter returned to take their orders. When he had left, Strike took out his notebook and pen.

“What are you doing with those?” demanded Tansy, in a sudden panic. “I don’t want anything written down! John?” she appealed to Bristow, who turned to Strike with a flustered and apologetic expression.

“D’you think you could just listen, Cormoran, and, ah, skip the note-taking?”

“No problem,” said Strike easily, removing his mobile phone from his pocket and replacing the notebook and pen. “Mrs. Bestigui—”

“You can call me Tansy,” she said, as though this concession made up for her objections to the notebook.

“Thanks very much,” said Strike, with the merest trace of irony. “How well did you know Lula?”

“Oh, hardly at all. She was only there for three months. It was just ‘Hi’ and ‘Nice day.’ She wasn’t interested in us, we weren’t nearly hip enough for her. It was a bore, to be honest, having her there. Paps outside the front door all the time. I had to put on makeup even to go to the gym.”

“Isn’t there a gym in the building?” asked Strike.

“I do Pilates with Lindsey Parr,” said Tansy, irritably. “You sound like Freddie; he was always complaining that I didn’t use the facilities at the flat.”

“And how well did Freddie know Lula?”

“Hardly at all, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. He had some idea about luring her into acting; he kept trying to invite her downstairs. She never came, though. And he followed her to Dickie Carbury’s house, the weekend before she died, while I was away with Ursula.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Bristow, looking startled.

Strike noticed Ursula’s quick smirk at her sister. He had the impression that she had been looking for an exchange of complicit glances, but Tansy did not oblige.

“I didn’t know until later,” Tansy told Bristow. “Yah, Freddie cadged an invitation from Dickie; there was a whole group of them there: Lula, Evan Duffield, Ciara Porter, all that tabloidy, druggie, trendy gang. Freddie must have stuck out like a sore thumb. I know he’s not much older than Dickie, but he looks ancient,” she added spitefully.

“What did your husband tell you about the weekend?”

“Nothing. I only found out he’d been there weeks later, because Dickie let it slip. I’m sure Freddie went to try and make up to Lula, though.”

“Do you mean,” asked Strike, “that he was interested in Lula sexually, or…?”

“Oh yah, I’m sure he was; he’s always liked dark girls better than blondes. What he really loves, though, is getting a bit of celebrity meat into his films. He drives directors mad, trying to crowbar in celebrities, to get a bit of extra press. I’ll bet he was hoping to get her signed up for a film, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Tansy added, with unexpected shrewdness, “if he had something planned around her and Deeby Macc. Imagine the press, with the fuss there was already about the two of them. Freddie’s got a genius for that stuff. He loves publicity for his films as much as he hates it for himself.”

“Does he know Deeby Macc?”

“Not unless they’ve met since we separated. He hadn’t met Macc before Lula died. God, he was thrilled that Macc was coming to stay in the building; he started talking about casting him the moment he heard.”

“Casting him as what?”

“I don’t know,” she said irritably. “Anything. Macc’s got a huge following; Freddie wasn’t going to pass that chance up. He’d probably have had a part written specially for him if he’d been interested. Oh, he would have been all over him. Telling him all about his pretend black grandmother.” Tansy’s voice was contemptuous. “That’s what he always does when he meets famous black people: tells them he’s a quarter Malay. Yeah, whatever, Freddie.”

“Isn’t he a quarter Malay?” asked Strike.

She gave a snide little laugh.

“I don’t know; I never met any of Freddie’s grandparents, did I? He’s about a hundred years old. I know he’ll say anything if he thinks there’s money in it.”

“Did anything ever come of these plans to get Lula and Macc into his films, as far as you’re aware?”

“Well, I’m sure Lula was flattered to be asked; most of these model girls are dying to prove they can do something other than stare into a camera, but she never signed up to anything, did she, John?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Bristow. “Although…but that was something different,” he mumbled, turning blotchily pink again. He hesitated, then, responding to Strike’s interrogative gaze, he said:

“Mr. Bestigui visited my mother a couple of weeks ago, out of the blue. She’s exceptionally poorly, and…well, I wouldn’t want to…”

His glance at Tansy was uncomfortable.

“Say what you like, I don’t care,” she said, with what seemed like genuine indifference.

Bristow made the strange jutting and sucking movement that temporarily hid the hamsterish teeth.

“Well, he wanted to talk to my mother about a film of Lula’s life. He, ah, framed his visit as something considerate and sensitive. Asking for her family’s blessing, official sanction, you know. Lula dead barely three months…Mum was distressed beyond measure. Unfortunately, I was not there when he called,” said Bristow, and his tone implied that he was generally to be found standing guard over his mother. “I wish, in a way, I had been. I wish I’d heard him out. I mean, if he’s got researchers working on Lula’s life story, much as I deplore the idea, he might know something, mightn’t he?”

“What kind of thing?” asked Strike.

“I don’t know. Something about her early life, perhaps? Before she came to us?”

The waiter arrived to place starters in front of them all. Strike waited until he had gone, and then asked Bristow:

“Have you tried to speak to Mr. Bestigui yourself, and find out whether he knew anything about Lula that the family didn’t?”

“That’s just what’s so difficult,” said Bristow. “When Tony—my uncle—heard what had happened, he contacted Mr. Bestigui to protest about him badgering my mother, and from what I’ve heard, there was a very heated argument. I don’t think Mr. Bestigui would welcome further contact from the family. Of course, the situation’s further complicated by the fact that Tansy is using our firm for the divorce. I mean, there’s nothing in that—we’re one of the top family law firms, and with Ursula being married to Cyprian, naturally she would come to us…But I’m sure it won’t have made Mr. Bestigui feel any more kindly towards us.”

Though he had kept his gaze on the lawyer all the time that Bristow was talking, Strike’s peripheral vision was excellent. Ursula had thrown another tiny smirk in her sister’s direction. He wondered what was amusing her. Doubtless her improved mood was not hindered by the fact that she was now on her fourth glass of wine.

Strike finished his starter and turned to Tansy, who was pushing her virtually untouched food around her plate.

“How long had you and your husband been at number eighteen before Lula moved in?”

“About a year.”

“Was there anyone in the middle flat when she arrived?”

“Yah,” said Tansy. “There was an American couple there with their little boy for six months, but they went back to the States not long after she arrived. After that, the property company couldn’t get anyone interested at all. The recession, you know? They cost an arm and a leg, those flats. So it was empty until the record company rented it for Deeby Macc.”

Both she and Ursula were distracted by the sight of a woman passing the table in what, to Strike, appeared to be a crocheted coat of lurid design.

“That’s a Daumier-Cross coat,” said Ursula, her eyes slightly narrowed over her wineglass. “There’s a waiting list of, like, six months…”

“It’s Pansy Marks-Dillon,” said Tansy. “Easy to be on the best-dressed list if your husband’s got fifty mill. Freddie’s the cheapest rich man in the world; I had to hide new stuff from him, or pretend it was fake. He could be such a bore sometimes.”

“You always look wonderful,” said Bristow, pink in the face.

“You’re sweet,” said Tansy Bestigui in a bored voice.

The waiter arrived to clear away their plates.

“What were you saying?” she asked Strike. “Oh, yah, the flats. Deeby Macc coming…except he didn’t. Freddie was furious he never got there, because he’d put roses in his flat. Freddie is such a cheap bastard.”

“How well do you know Derrick Wilson?” Strike asked.

She blinked.

“Well—he’s the security guard; I don’t know him, do I? He seemed all right. Freddie always said he was the best of the bunch.”

“Really? Why was that?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know, you’d have to ask Freddie. And good luck with that,” she added, with a little laugh. “Freddie’ll talk to you when hell freezes over.”

“Tansy,” said Bristow, leaning in a little, “why don’t you just tell Cormoran what you actually heard that night?”

Strike would have preferred Bristow not to intervene.

“Well,” said Tansy. “It was getting on for two in the morning, and I wanted a drink of water.”

Her tone was flat and expressionless. Strike noticed that, even in this small beginning, she had altered the story she had told the police.

“So I went to the bathroom to get one, and as I was heading back across the sitting room, towards the bedroom, I heard shouting. She—Lula—was saying, ‘It’s too late, I’ve already done it,’ and then a man said, ‘You’re a lying fucking bitch,’ and then—and then he threw her over. I actually saw her fall.”

And Tansy made a tiny jerky movement with her hands that Strike understood to indicate flailing.

Bristow set down his glass, looking nauseated. Their main courses arrived. Ursula drank more wine. Neither Tansy nor Bristow touched their food. Strike picked up his fork and began to eat, trying not to look as though he was enjoying his puntarelle with anchovies.

“I screamed,” whispered Tansy. “I couldn’t stop screaming. I ran out of the flat, past Freddie, and downstairs. I just wanted to tell security that there was a man up there, so they could get him.

“Wilson came dashing out of the room behind the desk. I told him what had happened and he went straight out on to the street to see her, instead of running upstairs. Bloody fool. If only he’d gone upstairs first, he might have caught him! Then Freddie came down after me, and started trying to make me go back to our flat, because I wasn’t dressed.

“Then Wilson came back, and told us she was dead, and told Freddie to call the police. Freddie virtually dragged me back upstairs—I was completely hysterical—and he dialed 999 from our sitting room. And then the police came. And nobody believed a single word I said.”

She sipped her wine again, set down the glass and said quietly:

“If Freddie knew I was talking to you, he’d go ape.”

“But you’re quite sure, aren’t you, Tansy,” Bristow interjected, “that you heard a man up there?”

“Yah, of course I am,” said Tansy. “I’ve just said, haven’t I? There was definitely someone there.”

Bristow’s mobile rang.

“Excuse me,” he muttered. “Alison…yes?” he said, picking up.

Strike could hear the secretary’s deep voice, without being able to make out the words.

“Excuse me just a moment,” Bristow said, looking harried, and he left the table.

A look of malicious amusement appeared on both sisters’ smooth, polished faces. They glanced at each other again; then, somewhat to his surprise, Ursula asked Strike:

“Have you met Alison?”

“Briefly.”

“You know they’re together?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a bit pathetic, actually,” said Tansy. “She’s with John, but she’s actually obsessed with Tony. Have you met Tony?”

“No,” said Strike.

“He’s one of the senior partners. John’s uncle, you know?”

“Yes.”

“Very attractive. He wouldn’t go for Alison in a million years. I suppose she’s settled for John as consolation prize.”

The thought of Alison’s doomed infatuation seemed to afford the sisters great satisfaction.

“This is all common gossip at the office, is it?” asked Strike.

“Oh, yah,” said Ursula, with relish. “Cyprian says she’s absolutely embarrassing. Like a puppy dog around Tony.”

Her antipathy towards Strike seemed to have evaporated. He was not surprised; he had met the phenomenon many times. People liked to talk; there were very few exceptions; the question was how you made them do it. Some, and Ursula was evidently one of them, were amenable to alcohol; others liked a spotlight; and then there were those who merely needed proximity to another conscious human being. A subsection of humanity would become loquacious only on one favorite subject: it might be their own innocence, or somebody else’s guilt; it might be their collection of pre-war biscuit tins; or it might, as in the case of Ursula May, be the hopeless passion of a plain secretary.

Ursula was watching Bristow through the window; he was standing on the pavement, talking hard into his mobile as he paced up and down. Her tongue properly loosened now, she said:

“I bet I know what that’s about. Conway Oates’s executors are making a fuss about how the firm handled his affairs. He was the American financier, you know? Cyprian and Tony are in a real bait about it, making John fly around trying to smooth things over. John always gets the shitty end of the stick.”

Her tone was more scathing than sympathetic.

Bristow returned to the table, looking flustered.

“Sorry, sorry, Alison just wanted to give me some messages,” he said.

The waiter came to collect their plates. Strike was the only one who had cleared his. When the waiter was out of earshot, Strike said:

“Tansy, the police disregarded your evidence because they didn’t think you could have heard what you claimed to have heard.”

“Well they were wrong, weren’t they?” she snapped, her good humor gone in a trice. “I did hear it.”

“Through a closed window?”

“It was open,” she said, meeting none of her companions’ eyes. “It was stuffy, I opened one of the windows on the way to get water.”

Strike was sure that pressing her on the point would only lead to her refusing to answer any other questions.

“They also allege that you’d taken cocaine.”

Tansy made a little noise of impatience, a soft “cuh.”

“Look,” she said, “I had some earlier, during dinner, OK, and they found it in the bathroom when they looked around the flat. The fucking boredom of the Dunnes. Anyone would have done a couple of lines to get through Benjy Dunne’s bloody anecdotes. But I didn’t imagine that voice upstairs. A man was there, and he killed her. He killed her,” repeated Tansy, glaring at Strike.

“And where do you think he went afterwards?”

“I don’t know, do I? That’s what John’s paying you to find out. He sneaked out somehow. Maybe he climbed out the back window. Maybe he hid in the lift. Maybe he went out through the car park downstairs. I don’t bloody know how he got out, I just know he was there.”

“We believe you,” interjected Bristow anxiously. “We believe you, Tansy. Cormoran needs to ask these questions to—to get a clear picture of how it all happened.”

“The police did everything they could to discredit me,” said Tansy, disregarding Bristow and addressing Strike. “They got there too late, and he’d already gone, so of course they covered it up. No one who hasn’t been through what I went through with the press can understand what it was like. It was absolute bloody hell. I went into the clinic just to get away from it all. I can’t believe it’s legal, what the press are allowed to do in this country; and all for telling the truth, that’s the bloody joke. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t I? I would have, if I’d known what was coming.”

She twisted her loose diamond ring around her finger.

“Freddie was asleep in bed when Lula fell, wasn’t he?” Strike asked Tansy.

“Yah, that’s right,” she said.

Her hand slid up to her face and she smoothed nonexistent strands of hair off her forehead. The waiter returned with menus again, and Strike was forced to hold back his questions until they had ordered. He was the only one to ask for pudding; all the rest had coffee.

“When did Freddie get out of bed?” he asked Tansy, when the waiter had left.

“What do you mean?”

“You say he was in bed when Lula fell; when did he get up?”

“When he heard me screaming,” she said, as though this was obvious. “I woke him up, didn’t I?”

“He must have moved quickly.”

“Why?”

“You said: ‘I ran out of the flat, past Freddie, and downstairs.’ So he was already in the room before you ran out to tell Derrick what had happened?”

A missed beat.

“That’s right,” she said, smoothing her immaculate hair again, shielding her face.

“So he went from fast asleep in bed, to awake and in the sitting room, within seconds? Because you started screaming and running pretty much instantaneously, from what you said?”

Another infinitesimal pause.

“Yah,” she said. “Well—I don’t know. I think I screamed—I screamed while I was frozen on the spot—for a moment, maybe—I was just so shocked—and Freddie came running out of the bedroom, and then I ran past him.”

“Did you stop to tell him what you’d seen?”

“I can’t remember.”

Bristow looked as though he was about to stage one of his untimely interventions again. Strike held up a hand to forestall him; but Tansy plunged off on another tack, eager, he guessed, to leave the subject of her husband.

“I’ve thought and thought about how the killer got in, and I’m sure he must have followed her inside when she came in that morning, because of Derrick Wilson leaving his desk and being in the bathroom. I thought Wilson ought to have been bloody sacked for it, actually. If you ask me, he was having a sneaky sleep in the back room. I don’t know how the killer would have known the key code, but I’m sure that’s when he must have got in.”

“Do you think you’d be able to recognize the man’s voice again? The one you heard shouting?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “It was just a man’s voice. It could have been anyone. There was nothing unusual about it. I mean, afterwards I thought, Was it Duffield?” she said, gazing at him intently, “because I’d heard Duffield shouting upstairs, once before, from the top landing. Wilson had to throw him out; Duffield was trying to kick in Lula’s door. I never understood what a girl with her looks was doing with someone like Duffield,” she added in parenthesis.

“Some women say he’s sexy,” agreed Ursula, emptying the wine bottle into her glass, “but I can’t see the appeal. He’s just skanky and horrible.”

“It’s not even,” said Tansy, twisting the loose diamond ring again, “as though he’s got money.”

“But you don’t think it was his voice you heard that night?”

“Well, like I say, it could have been,” she said impatiently, with a small shrug of her thin shoulders. “He’s got an alibi, though, hasn’t he? Loads of people said he was nowhere near Kentigern Gardens the night Lula was killed. He spent part of it at Ciara Porter’s, didn’t he? Bitch,” Tansy added, with a small, tight smile. “Sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend.”

“Were they sleeping together?” asked Strike.

“Oh, what do you think?” laughed Ursula, as though the question was too naive for words. “I know Ciara Porter, she modeled in this charity fashion show I was involved in setting up. She’s such an airhead and such a slut.”

The coffees had arrived, along with Strike’s sticky toffee pudding.

“I’m sorry, John, but Lula didn’t have very good taste in friends,” said Tansy, sipping her espresso. “There was Ciara, and then there was that Bryony Radford. Not that she was a friend, exactly, but I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

“Who’s Bryony?” asked Strike disingenuously, for he remembered who she was.

“Makeup artist. Charges a fortune, and such a bloody bitch,” said Ursula. “I used her once, before one of the Gorbachev Foundation balls, and afterwards she told ev—”

Ursula stopped abruptly, lowered her glass and picked up her coffee instead. Strike, who despite its undoubted irrelevance to the matter in hand was quite interested to know what Bryony had told everyone, began to speak, but Tansy talked loudly over him.

“Oh, and there was that ghastly girl Lula used to bring around to the flat, too, John, remember?”

She appealed to Bristow again, but he looked blank.

“You know, that ghastly—that rarely awful-colored girl she sometimes dragged back. A kind of hobo person. I mean…she literally smelled. When she’d been in the lift…you could smell it. And she took her into the pool, too. I didn’t think blacks could swim.”

Bristow was blinking rapidly, pink in the face.

“God knows what Lula was doing with her,” said Tansy. “Oh, you must remember, John. She was fat. Scruffy. Looked a bit subnormal.”

“I don’t…” mumbled Bristow.

“Are you talking about Rochelle?” asked Strike.

“Oh, yah, I think that was her name. She was at the funeral, anyway,” said Tansy. “I noticed her. She was sitting right at the back.

“Now, you will remember, won’t you,” she turned the full force of her dark eyes upon Strike, “that this is all entirely off the record. I mean, I cannot afford for Freddie to find out I’m talking to you. I’m not going to go through all that shit with the press again. Bill, please,” she barked at the waiter.

When it arrived, she passed it without comment to Bristow.

As the sisters were preparing to leave, shaking their glossy brown hair back over their shoulders and pulling on expensive jackets, the door of the restaurant opened and a tall, thin, besuited man of around sixty entered, looked around and headed straight for their table. Silver-haired and distinguished-looking, impeccably dressed, there was a certain chilliness about his pale blue eyes. His walk was brisk and purposeful.

“This is a surprise,” he said smoothly, stopping in the space between the two women’s chairs. None of the other three had seen the man coming, and all bar Strike displayed equal parts of shock and something more than displeasure at the sight of him. For a fraction of a second, Tansy and Ursula froze, Ursula in the act of pulling sunglasses out of her bag.

Tansy recovered first.

“Cyprian,” she said, offering her face for his kiss. “Yes, what a lovely surprise!”

“I thought you were going shopping, Ursula dear?” he said, his eyes on his wife as he gave Tansy a conventional peck on each cheek.

“We stopped for lunch, Cyps,” she replied, but her color was heightened, and Strike sensed an ill-defined nastiness in the air.

The older man’s pale eyes moved deliberately over Strike and came to rest on Bristow.

“I thought Tony was handling your divorce, Tansy?” he asked.

“He is,” said Tansy. “This isn’t a business lunch, Cyps. Purely social.”

He gave a wintry smile.

“Let me escort you out, then, m’dears,” he said.

With a cursory farewell to Bristow, and no word whatsoever for Strike, the two sisters permitted themselves to be shepherded out of the restaurant by Ursula’s husband. When the door had swung shut behind the threesome, Strike asked Bristow:

“What was that about?”

“That was Cyprian,” said Bristow. He seemed agitated as he fumbled with his credit card and the bill. “Cyprian May. Ursula’s husband. Senior partner at the firm. He won’t like Tansy talking to you. I wonder how he knew where we were. Probably got it out of Alison.”

“Why won’t he like her talking to me?”

“Tansy’s his sister-in-law,” said Bristow, putting on his overcoat. “He won’t want her to make a fool of herself—as he’ll see it—all over again. I’ll probably get a real bollocking for persuading her to meet you. I expect he’s phoning my uncle right now, to complain about me.”

Bristow’s hands, Strike noticed, were trembling.

The lawyer left in a taxi ordered by the maître d’. Strike headed away from Cipriani on foot, loosening his tie as he walked, and lost so deeply in thought that he was only jerked out of his reverie by a loud horn blast from a car he had not seen speeding towards him as he crossed Grosvenor Street.

With this salutary reminder that his safety would otherwise be in jeopardy, Strike headed for a patch of pale wall belonging to the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa, leaned up against it out of the pedestrian flow, lit up and pulled out his mobile phone. After some listening and fast-forwarding, he managed to locate that part of Tansy’s recorded testimony that dealt with those moments immediately preceding Lula Landry’s fall past her window.

…towards the bedroom, I heard shouting. She—Lula—was saying, “It’s too late, I’ve already done it,” and then a man said, “You’re a lying fucking bitch,” and then—and then he threw her over. I actually saw her fall.

He could just make out the tiny chink of Bristow’s glass hitting the table top. Strike rewound again and listened.

…saying, “It’s too late, I’ve already done it,” and then a man said, “You’re a lying fucking bitch,” and then—and then he threw her over. I actually saw her fall.

He recalled Tansy’s imitation of Landry’s flailing arms, and the horror on her frozen face as she did it. Slipping his mobile back into his pocket, he took out his notebook and began to make notes for himself.

Strike had met countless liars; he could smell them; and he knew perfectly well that Tansy was of their number. She could not have heard what she claimed to have heard from her flat; the police had therefore deduced that she could not have heard it at all. Against Strike’s expectation, however, in spite of the fact that every piece of evidence he had heard until this moment suggested that Lula Landry had committed suicide, he found himself convinced that Tansy Bestigui really believed that she had overheard an argument before Landry fell. That was the only part of her story that rang with authenticity, an authenticity that shone a garish light on the fakery with which she garnished it.

Strike pushed himself off the wall and began to walk east along Grosvenor Street, paying slightly more attention to traffic, but inwardly recalling Tansy’s expression, her tone, her mannerisms, as she spoke of Lula Landry’s final moments.

Why would she tell the truth on the essential point, but surround it with easily disproven falsehoods? Why would she lie about what she had been doing when she heard shouting from Landry’s flat? Strike remembered Adler: “A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.” Tansy had come along today to make a last attempt to find someone who would believe her, and yet swallow the lies in which she insisted on swaddling her evidence.

He walked fast, barely conscious of the twinges from his right knee. At last he realized that he had walked all along Maddox Street and emerged on Regent Street. The red awnings of Hamleys Toy Shop fluttered a little in the distance, and Strike remembered that he had intended to buy a birthday present for his nephew’s forthcoming birthday on the way back to the office.

The multicolored, squeaking, flashing maelstrom into which he walked registered on him only vaguely. Blindly he moved from floor to floor, untroubled by the shrieks, the whirring of airborne toy helicopters, the oinks of mechanical pigs moving across his distracted path. Finally, after twenty minutes or so, he came to rest near the HM Forces dolls. Here he stood, quite still, gazing at the ranks of miniature marines and paratroopers but barely seeing them; deaf to the whispers of parents trying to maneuver their sons around him, too intimidated to ask the strange, huge, staring man to move.