The Cuckoo's Calling - Страница 20

“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.