The Cuckoo's Calling - Страница 32

Bestigui further stated that he and Landry had never visited each other’s flats, and that their simultaneous stay at Dickie Carbury’s (which the police appeared to have heard about on a subsequent occasion, for Freddie had been reinterviewed after the initial statement) had barely advanced their acquaintance. “She associated mainly with the younger guests, while I spent most of the weekend with Dickie, who is a contemporary of mine.” Bestigui’s statement presented the unassailable front of a rock face without crampons.

After reading the police account of events inside the Bestiguis’ flat, Strike added several sentences to his own notes. He was interested in the half a line of cocaine on the side of the bath, and even more interested in the few seconds after Tansy had seen the flailing figure of Lula Landry fall past the window. Much would depend, of course, on the layout of the Bestiguis’ apartment (there was no map or diagram of it in the folder), but Strike was bothered by one consistent aspect of Tansy’s shifting stories: she insisted throughout that her husband had been in bed, asleep, when Landry fell. He remembered the way she had shielded her face, by pretending to push back her hair, as he pressed her on the point. All in all, and notwithstanding the police view, Strike considered the precise location of both Bestiguis at the moment Lula Landry fell off her balcony to be far from proven.

He resumed his systematic perusal of the file. Evan Duffield’s statement conformed in most respects to Wardle’s secondhand tale. He admitted to having attempted to prevent his girlfriend leaving Uzi by seizing her by the upper arms. She had broken free and left; he had followed her shortly afterwards. There was a one-sentence mention of the wolf mask, couched in the unemotional language of the policeman who had interviewed him: “I am accustomed to wearing a wolf’s-head mask when I wish to avoid the attentions of photographers.” A brief statement from the driver who had taken Duffield from Uzi confirmed Duffield’s account of visiting Kentigern Gardens and moving on to d’ Arblay Street, where he had dropped his passenger and left. The antipathy Wardle claimed the driver had felt towards Duffield was not conveyed in the bald factual account prepared for his signature by the police.

There were a couple of other statements supporting Duffield’s: one from a woman who claimed to have seen him climbing the stairs to his dealer’s, one from the dealer, Whycliff, himself. Strike recalled Wardle’s expressed opinion that Whycliff would lie for Duffield. The woman downstairs could have been cut in on any payment. The rest of the witnesses who claimed to have seen Duffield roaming the streets of London could only honestly say that they had seen a man in a wolf mask.

Strike lit a cigarette and read through Duffield’s statement again. He was a man with a violent temper, who had admitted to attempting to force Lula to remain in the club. The bruising to the upper arms of the body was almost certainly his work. If, however, he had taken heroin with Whycliff, Strike knew that the odds of him being in a fit state to infiltrate number 18, Kentigern Gardens, or to work himself into a murderous rage, were negligible. Strike was familiar with the behavior of heroin addicts; he had met plenty at the last squat his mother had lived in. The drug rendered its slaves passive and docile; the absolute antithesis of shouting, violent alcoholics, or twitchy, paranoid coke-users. Strike had known every kind of substance-abuser, both inside the army and out. The glorification of Duffield’s habit by the media disgusted him. There was no glamour in heroin. Strike’s mother had died on a filthy mattress in the corner of the room, and nobody had realized she was dead for six hours.

He got up, crossed the room and wrenched open the dark, rain-spattered window, so that the thud of the bass from the 12 Bar Café became louder than ever. Still smoking, he looked out at Charing Cross Road, glittering with car lights and puddles, where Friday-night revelers were striding and lurching past the end of Denmark Street, umbrellas wobbling, laughter ringing above the traffic. When, Strike wondered, would he next enjoy a pint on a Friday with friends? The notion seemed to belong to a different universe, a life left behind. The strange limbo in which he was living, with Robin his only real human contact, could not last, but he was still not ready to resume a proper social life. He had lost the army, and Charlotte and half a leg; he felt a need to become thoroughly accustomed to the man he had become, before he felt ready to expose himself to other people’s surprise and pity. The bright orange cigarette stub flew down into the dark street and was extinguished in the watery gutter; Strike pushed down the window, returned to his desk and pulled the file firmly back towards him.

Derrick Wilson’s statement told him nothing he did not already know. There was no mention in the file of Kieran Kolovas-Jones, or of his mysterious blue piece of paper. Strike turned next, with some interest, to the statements of the two women with whom Lula had spent her final afternoon, Ciara Porter and Bryony Radford.

The makeup artist remembered Lula as cheerful and excited about Deeby Macc’s imminent arrival. Porter, however, stated that Landry “had not been herself,” that she had seemed “low and anxious,” and had refused to discuss what was upsetting her. Porter’s statement added an intriguing detail that nobody had yet told Strike. The model asserted that Landry had made specific mention, that afternoon, of an intention to leave “everything” to her brother. No context was given; but the impression left was of a girl in a clearly morbid frame of mind.

Strike wondered why his client had not mentioned that his sister had declared her intention of leaving him everything. Of course, Bristow already had a trust fund. Perhaps the possible acquisition of further vast sums of money did not seem as noteworthy to him as it would to Strike, who had never inherited a penny.

Yawning, Strike lit another cigarette to keep himself awake, and began to read the statement of Lula’s mother. By Lady Yvette Bristow’s own account, she had been drowsy and unwell in the aftermath of her operation; but she insisted that her daughter had been “perfectly happy” when she came to visit that morning, and had evinced nothing but concern for her mother’s condition and prospects of recovery. Perhaps the blunt, unnuanced prose of the recording officer was to blame, but Strike took from Lady Bristow’s recollections the impression of a determined denial. She alone suggested that Lula’s death had been an accident, that she had somehow slipped over the balcony without meaning to; it had been, said Lady Bristow, an icy night.

Strike skim-read Bristow’s statement, which tallied in all respects with the account he had given Strike in person, and proceeded to that of Tony Landry, John and Lula’s uncle. He had visited Yvette Bristow at the same time as Lula on the day before the latter’s death, and asserted that his niece had seemed “normal.” Landry had then driven to Oxford, where he had attended a conference on international developments in family law, staying overnight in the Malmaison Hotel. His account of his whereabouts was followed by some incomprehensible comments about telephone calls. Strike turned, for elucidation, to the annotated copies of phone records.

Lula had barely used her landline in the week prior to her death, and not at all on the day before she died. From her mobile, however, she had made no fewer than sixty-six calls on her last day of life. The first, at 9:15 in the morning, had been to Evan Duffield; the second, at 9:35, to Ciara Porter. There followed a gap of hours, in which she had spoken to nobody on the mobile, and then, at 1:21, she had begun a positive frenzy of telephoning two numbers, almost alternately. One of these was Duffield’s; the other belonged, according to the crabbed scribble beside the number’s first appearance, to Tony Landry. Again and again she had telephoned these two men. Here and there were gaps of twenty minutes or so, during which she made no calls; then she would begin telephoning again, doubtless hitting “redial.” All of this frenetic calling, Strike deduced, must have taken place once she was back in her flat with Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter, though neither of the two women’s statements made mention of repeated telephoning.

Strike turned back to Tony Landry’s statement, which cast no light on the reason his niece had been so anxious to contact him. He had turned off the sound on his mobile while at the conference, he said, and had not realized until much later that his niece had called him repeatedly that afternoon. He had no idea why she had done so and had not called her back, giving as his reason that by the time he realized that she had been trying to reach him, she had stopped calling, and he had guessed, correctly as it turned out, that she would be in a nightclub somewhere.

Strike was now yawning every few minutes; he considered making himself coffee, but could not muster the energy. Wanting his bed, but driven on by habit to complete the job in hand, he turned to the copies of security logbook pages showing the entrances and exits of visitors to number 18 on the day preceding Lula Landry’s death. A careful perusal of signatures and initials revealed that Wilson had not been as meticulous in his record-keeping as his employers might have hoped. As Wilson had already told Strike, the movements of the building’s residents were not recorded in the book; so the comings and goings of Landry and the Bestiguis were missing. The first entry Wilson had made was for the postman, at 9:10; next, at 9:22, came Florist delivery Flat 2; finally, at 9:50, Securibell. No time of departure was marked for the alarm checker.