The Cuckoo's Calling

by Robert Galbraith

  The Mercedes had rounded the corner on to an almost deserted road; Strike realized that he had been holding himself so tensely that his remaining calf muscles were sore. In the wing mirror he could see two motorbikes, each being ridden pillion, following them. Princess Diana and the Parisian underpass; the ambulance bearing Lula Landry’s body, with cameras held high to the darkened glass as it passed; both careered through his thoughts as the car sped through the dark streets.

  Duffield lit a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw Kolovas-Jones scowl at his passenger in the rearview mirror, though he made no protest. After a moment or two, Ciara began whispering to Duffield. Strike thought he heard his own name.

  Five minutes later, they turned another corner and saw, ahead of them, another small crowd of black-clad photographers, who began flashing and running towards the car the moment it appeared. The motorbikes were pulling up right behind them; Strike saw the four men running to catch the moment when the car doors opened. Adrenalin erupted: Strike imagined himself exploding out of the car, punching, sending expensive cameras crashing on to concrete as their holders crumpled. And as if he had read Strike’s mind, Duffield said, with his hand poised on the door handle:

  “Knock their fucking lights out, Cormoran, you’re built for it.”

  The open doors, the night air and more maddening flashes; bull-like, Strike walked fast with his big head bowed, his eyes on Ciara’s tottering heels, refusing to be blinded. Up three steps they ran, Strike at the rear; and it was he who slammed the front door of the building in the faces of the photographers.

  Strike felt himself momentarily allied with the other two by the experience of being hunted. The tiny, dimly lit lobby felt safe and friendly. The paparazzi were still yelling to each other on the other side of the door, and their terse shouts recalled soldiers recceing a building. Duffield was fiddling at an inner door, trying a succession of keys in the lock.

  “I’ve only been here a couple of weeks,” he explained, finally opening it with a barging shoulder. Once over the threshold, he wriggled out of his tight jacket, threw it on to the floor by the door and then led the way, his narrow hips swinging in only slightly less exaggerated fashion than Guy Somé’s, down a short corridor into a sitting room, where he switched on lamps.

  The spare, elegant gray and black decor had been overlaid by clutter and stank of cigarette smoke, cannabis and alcohol fumes. Strike was reminded vividly of his childhood.

  “Need a slash,” announced Duffield, and called over his shoulder as he disappeared, with a directive jab of the thumb, “Drinks are in the kitchen, Cici.”

  She threw a smile at Strike, then left through the door Duffield had indicated.

  Strike glanced around the room, which looked as though it had been left, by parents of impeccable taste, in the care of a teenager. Every surface was covered in debris, much of it in the form of scribbled notes. Three guitars stood propped against the walls. A cluttered glass coffee table was surrounded by black-and-white seats, angled towards an enormous plasma TV. Bits of debris had overflowed from the coffee table on to the black fur rug below. Beyond the long windows, with their gauzy gray curtains, Strike could make out the shapes of the photographers still prowling beneath the street light.

  Duffield had returned, tugging up his fly. On finding himself alone with Strike, he gave a nervous giggle.

  “Make yourself at home, big fella. Hey, I know your old man, actually.”

  “Yeah?” said Strike, sitting down in one of the squashy ponyskin cube-shaped armchairs.

  “Yeah. Met him a couple of times,” said Duffield. “Cool dude.”

  He picked up a guitar, began to pick out a twiddling tune on it, thought better of it and put the instrument back against the wall.

  Ciara returned, carrying a bottle of wine and three glasses.

  “Couldn’t you get a cleaner, dearie?” she asked Duffield reprovingly.

  “They give up,” said Duffield. He vaulted over the back of a chair and landed with his legs sprawled over the side. “No fucking stamina.”

  Strike pushed aside the mess on the coffee table so that Ciara could set down the bottle and glasses.

  “I thought you’d moved in with Mo Innes,” she said, pouring out wine.

  “Yeah, that didn’t work out,” said Duffield, raking through the detritus on the table for cigarettes. “Ol’ Freddie’s rented me this place just for a month, while I’m going out to Pinewood. He wants to keep me away from me old haunts.”

  His grubby fingers passed over a string of what seemed to be rosary beads; numerous empty cigarette packets with bits of card torn out of them; three lighters, one of them an engraved Zippo; Rizla papers; tangled leads unattached to appliances; a pack of cards; a sordid stained handkerchief; sundry crumpled pieces of grubby paper; a music magazine featuring a picture of Duffield in moody black and white on the cover; opened and unopened mail; a pair of crumpled black leather gloves; a quantity of loose change and, in a clean china ashtray on the edge of the debris, a single cufflink in the form of a tiny silver gun. At last he unearthed a soft packet of Gitanes from under the sofa; lit up, blew a long jet of smoke at the ceiling, then addressed Ciara, who had placed herself on the sofa at right angles to the two men, sipping her wine.

  “They’ll say we’re fucking each other, again, Ci,” he said, pointing out of the window at the prowling shadows of the waiting photographers.

  “And what’ll they say Cormoran’s here for?” asked Ciara, with a sidelong glance at Strike. “A threesome?”

  “Security,” said Duffield, appraising Strike through narrowed eyes. “He looks like a boxer. Or a cage fighter. Don’t you want a proper drink, Cormoran?”

  “No, thanks,” said Strike.

  “What’s that, AA or being on duty?”

  “Duty.”

  Duffield raised his eyebrows and sniggered. He seemed nervous, shooting Strike darting looks, drumming his fingers on the glass table. When Ciara asked him whether he had visited Lady Bristow again, he seemed relieved to be offered a subject.

  “Fuck, no. Once was enough. It was fucking horrible. Poor bitch. On her fucking deathbed.”

  “It was beyond nice of you to go, though, Evan.”

  Strike knew that she was trying to show Duffield off in his best light.

  “Do you know Lula’s mother well?” he asked Duffield.

  “No. I only met her once before Lu died. She didn’t approve of me. None of Lu’s family approved of me. I dunno,” he fidgeted, “I just wanted to talk to someone who really gives a shit that she’s dead.”

  “Evan!” Ciara pouted. “I care she’s dead, excuse me!”

  “Yeah, well…”

  With one of his oddly feminine, fluid movements, Duffield curled up in the chair so that he was almost fetal, and sucked hard on his cigarette. On a table behind his head, illuminated by a cone of lamplight, was a large, stagey photograph of him with Lula Landry, clearly taken from a fashion shoot. They were mock-wrestling against a backdrop of fake trees; she was wearing a floor-length red dress, and he was in a slim black suit, with a hairy wolf’s mask pushed up on top of his forehead.

  “I wonder what my mum would say if I carked it? My parents’ve got an injunction out against me,” Duffield informed Strike. “Well, it was mainly my fucking father. Because I nicked their telly a couple of years ago. D’you know what?” he added, craning his neck to look at Ciara, “I’ve been clean five weeks, two days.”

  “That’s so fabulous, baby! That’s fantastic!”

  “Yeah,” he said. He swiveled upright again. “Aren’t you gonna ask me any questions?” he demanded of Strike. “I thought you were investigating Lu’s murder?”

  The bravado was undermined by the tremor in his fingers. His knees began bouncing up and down, just like John Bristow’s.

  “D’you think it was murder?” Strike asked.

  “No.” Duffield dragged on his cigarette. “Yeah. Maybe. I dunno. Murder makes more sense than fuc
king suicide, anyway. Because she wouldn’ta gone without leaving me a note. I keep waiting for a note to turn up, y’know, and then I’ll know it’s real. It don’t feel real. I can’t even remember the funeral. I was out of my fucking head. I took so much stuff I couldn’t fucking walk. I think, if I could just remember the funeral, it’d be easier to get my head round.”

  He jammed his cigarette between his lips and began drumming with his fingers on the edge of the glass table. After a while, apparently discomforted by Strike’s silent observation, he demanded:

  “Ask me something, then. Who’s hired you, anyway?”

  “Lula’s brother John.”

  Duffield stopped drumming.

  “That money-grabbing, poker-arsed wanker?”

  “Money-grabbing?”

  “He was fucking obsessed with how she spent her fucking money, like it was any of his fucking business. Rich people always think everyone else is a fucking freeloader, have you noticed that? Her whole frigging family thought I was gold-digging, and after a bit,” he raised a finger to his temple and made a boring motion, “it went in, it planted doubts, y’know?”

  He snatched one of the Zippos from the table and began flicking at it, trying to make it ignite. Strike watched tiny blue sparks erupt and die as Duffield talked.

  “I expect he thought she’d be better off with some rich fucking accountant, like him.”

  “He’s a lawyer.”

  “Whatever. What’s the difference, it’s all about helping rich people keep their mitts on as much money as they can, innit? He’s got his fucking trust fund from Daddy, what skin is it off his nose what his sister did with her own money?”

  “What was it that he objected to her buying, specifically?”

  “Shit for me. The whole fucking family was the same; they didn’t mind if she chucked it their way, keep it in the fucking family, that was OK. Lu knew they were a mercenary load of fuckers, but, like I say, it still left its fucking mark. Planted ideas in her head.”

  He threw the dead Zippo back on to the table, drew his knees up to his chest and glared at Strike with his disconcerting turquoise eyes.

  “So he still thinks I did it, does he? Your client?”

  “No, I don’t think he does,” said Strike.

  “He’s changed his narrow fuckwitted mind, then, because I heard he was going round telling everyone it was me, before they ruled it as suicide. Only, I’ve got a cast-iron fucking alibi, so fuck him. Fuck. Them. All.”

  Restless and nervy, he got to his feet, added wine to his almost untouched glass, then lit another cigarette.

  “What can you tell me about the day Lula died?” Strike asked.

  “The night, you mean.”

  “The day leading up to it might be quite important too. There are a few things I’d like to clear up.”

  “Yeah? Go on, then.”

  Duffield dropped back down into the chair, and pulled his knees up to his chest again.

  “Lula called you repeatedly between around midday and six in the evening, but you didn’t answer your phone.”

  “No,” said Duffield. He began picking, childishly, at a small hole in the knee of his jeans. “Well, I was busy. I was working. On a song. Didn’t want to stem the flow. The old inspiration.”

  “So you didn’t know she was calling you?”

  “Well, yeah. I saw her number coming up.” He rubbed his nose, stretched his legs out on to the glass table, folded his arms and said, “I felt like teaching her a little lesson. Let her wonder what I was up to.”

  “Why did you think she needed a lesson?”

  “That fucking rapper. I wanted her to move in with me while he was staying in her building. ‘Don’t be silly, don’t you trust me?’ ” His imitation of Lula’s voice and expression was disingenuously girlish. “I said to her, ‘Don’t you be fucking silly. Show me I got nothing to worry about, and come and stay with me.’ But she wouldn’t. So then I thought, two can play at that fucking game, darling. Let’s see how you like it. So I got Ellie Carreira over to my place, and we did a bit of writing together, and then I brought Ellie along to Uzi with me. Lu couldn’t fucking complain. Just business. Just songwriting. Just friends, like her and that rapper-gangster.”

  “I didn’t think she’d ever met Deeby Macc.”

  “She hadn’t, but he’d made his intentions pretty fucking public, hadn’t he? Have you heard that song he wrote? She was creaming her panties over it.”

  “ ‘Bitch you ain’t all that…’ ” Ciara began to quote obligingly, but a filthy look from Duffield silenced her.

  “Did she leave you voicemail messages?”

  “Yeah, a couple. ‘Evan, will you call me, please. It’s urgent. I don’t want to say it on the phone.’ It was always fucking urgent when she wanted to find out what I was up to. She knew I was pissed off. She was worried I might’ve called Ellie. She had a real hang-up about Ellie, because she knew we’d fucked.”

  “She said it was urgent, and that she didn’t want to say it on the phone?”

  “Yeah, but that was just to try and make me call. One of her little games. She could be fucking jealous, Lu. And pretty fucking manipulative.”

  “Can you think why she’d be calling her uncle repeatedly that day as well?”

  “What uncle?”

  “His name’s Tony Landry; he’s another lawyer.”

  “Him? She wouldn’t be calling him, she fucking hated him worse than her brother.”

  “She called him, repeatedly, over the same period that she was calling you. Leaving more or less the same message.”

  Duffield raked his unshaven chin with dirty nails, staring at Strike.

  “I dunno what that was about. Her mum, maybe. Old Lady B going into hospital or something.”

  “You don’t think something might have happened that morning which she thought was either relevant to or of interest to both you and her uncle?”

  “There isn’t any subject that could interest me and her fucking uncle at the same time,” said Duffield. “I’ve met him. Share prices and shit are all he’d be interested in.”

  “Maybe it was something about her, something personal?”

  “If it was, she wouldn’t call that fucker. They didn’t like each other.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “She felt about him like I feel about my fucking father. Neither of them thought we were worth shit.”

  “Did she talk to you about that?”

  “Oh, yeah. He thought her mental problems were just attention-seeking, bad behavior. Put on. Burden on her mother. He got a bit smarmier when she started making money, but she didn’t forget.”

  “And she didn’t tell you why she’d been calling you, once she got to Uzi?”

  “Nope,” said Duffield. He lit another cigarette. “She was fucked off from the moment she arrived, because Ellie was there. Didn’t like that at all. In a right fucking mood, wasn’t she?”

  For the first time he appealed to Ciara, who nodded sadly.

  “She didn’t really talk to me,” said Duffield. “She was mostly talking to you, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Ciara. “And she didn’t tell me there was anything, like, upsetting her or anything.”

  “A couple of people have told me her phone was hacked…” began Strike; Duffield talked over him.

  “Oh yeah, they were listening in on our messages for fucking weeks. They knew everywhere we were meeting and everything. Fucking bastards. We changed our phone numbers when we found out what was going on and we were fucking careful what messages we left after that.”

  “So you wouldn’t be surprised, if Lula had had something important or upsetting to tell you, that she didn’t want to be explicit over the phone?”

  “Yeah, but if it was that fucking important, she woulda told me at the club.”

  “But she didn’t?”

  “No, like I say, she never spoke to me all night.” A muscle was jumping in Duffield’s chiseled jaw. “She k
ept checking the time on her fucking phone. I knew what she was doing; trying to wind me up. Showing me she couldn’t wait to get home and meet fucking Deeby Macc. She waited until Ellie went off to the bog; then got up, came over to tell me she was leaving, and said I could have my bangle back; the one I gave her when we had our commitment ceremony. She chucked it down on the table in front of me, with everyone fucking gawping. So I picked it up and said, ‘Anyone fancy this, it’s going spare?’ and she fucked off.”

  He did not speak as though Lula had died three months previously, but as though it had all happened the day before, and there was still a possibility of reconciliation.

  “You tried to restrain her, though, right?” asked Strike.

  Duffield’s eyes narrowed.

  “Restrain her?”

  “You grabbed her arms, according to witnesses.”

  “Did I? I can’t remember.”

  “But she pulled free, and you stayed behind, is that right?”

  “I waited ten minutes, because I wasn’t gonna give her the satisfaction of chasing her in front of all those people, and then I left the club and got my driver to take me to Kentigern Gardens.”

  “Wearing the wolf mask,” said Strike.

  “Yeah, to stop those fucking scumbags,” he nodded towards the window, “selling pictures of me looking wasted or pissed off. They hate it when you cover your face. Depriving them of making their fucking parasitic living. One of them tried to pull Wolfie off me, but I held on. I got in the car and gave ’em a few pictures of the Wolf giving them the finger, out the back window. Got to the corner of Kentigern Gardens and there were more paps everywhere. I knew she must’ve got in already.”

  “Did you know the key code?”

  “Nineteen sixty-six, yeah. But I knew she’d’ve told security not to let me up. I wasn’t gonna walk in in front of all of them and then get chucked out on me arse five minutes later. I tried to phone her from the car, but she wouldn’t pick up. I thought she’d probably gone downstairs to welcome Deeby fucking Macc to London. So I went off to see a man about pain relief.”