The Cuckoo's Calling - Страница 66

“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 fucking 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?”