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 hi
s 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.
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