The Cuckoo's Calling - Страница 30

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.