The Cuckoo's Calling - Страница 87

“I’ve given them a few combinations to try,” Strike went on. “If they don’t work, I suppose they’ll have to call in an expert to open it. But if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on 030483.”

A rustle, the blur of a pale hand, and Bristow lunged. The knife point grazed Strike’s chest as he slammed Bristow sideways; the lawyer slid off the desk, rolled over and attacked again, and this time Strike fell over backwards in his chair, with Bristow on top of him, trapped between the wall and the desk.

Strike had one of Bristow’s wrists, but he couldn’t see where the knife was: all was darkness, and he threw a punch that hit Bristow hard under the chin, knocking his head back and sending his glasses flying; Strike punched again, and Bristow hit the wall; Strike tried to sit up, with Bristow’s lower body pinning his agonizing half-leg to the ground, and the knife struck him hard in the upper arm: he felt it pierce the flesh, and the flow of warm blood, and the white-hot stinging pain.

He saw Bristow raise his arm in dim silhouette against the faint window; forcing himself up against the lawyer’s weight, he deflected the second knife blow, and with an almighty effort managed to throw the lawyer off, and the prosthesis slid out of his trouser leg as he tried to pin Bristow down, with his hot blood spattering over everything, and no knowledge of where the knife was now.

The desk was knocked over by Strike’s wrestling weight, and then, as he knelt with his good knee on Bristow’s thin chest, groping with his good hand to find the knife, light split his retinas in two, and a woman was screaming.

Dazzled, Strike glimpsed the knife rising to his stomach; he seized the prosthetic leg beside him and brought it down like a club on Bristow’s face, once, twice—

“Stop! Cormoran, STOP! YOU’RE GOING TO KILL HIM!”

Strike rolled off Bristow, who was no longer moving, dropped the prosthetic leg and lay on his back, clutching his bleeding arm beside the overturned desk.

“I thought,” he panted, unable to see Robin, “I told you to go home?”

But she was already on the telephone.

“Police and ambulance!”

“And get a taxi,” Strike croaked from the floor, his throat dry from so much talking. “I’m not traveling to hospital with this piece of shit.”

He stretched out an arm and retrieved the mobile that lay several feet away. The face was smashed, but it was still recording.

Epilogue

Nihil est ab omni

Parte beatum.

Nothing is an unmixed blessing.

Horace, Odes, Book 2

Ten Days Later

THE BRITISH ARMY REQUIRES OF its soldiers a subjugation of individual needs and ties that is almost incomprehensible to the civilian mind. It recognizes virtually no claims higher than its own; and the unpredictable crises of human life—births and deaths, weddings, divorces and illness—generally cause no more deviation to the military’s plans than pebbles pinging on the underbelly of a tank. Nevertheless, there are exceptional circumstances, and it was due to one such circumstance that Lieutenant Jonah Agyeman’s second tour of duty in Afghanistan was cut short.

His presence in Britain was urgently required by the Metropolitan Police, and while the army does not generally rate the claims of the Met higher than its own, in this case it was prepared to be helpful. The circumstances surrounding the death of Agyeman’s sister were garnering international attention, and a media storm around a hitherto obscure Sapper was deemed unhelpful both to the individual and the army he served. And so Jonah was put on a plane back to Britain, where the army did its impressive best to shield him from the ravenous press.

It was assumed by considerable numbers of the news-reading public that Lieutenant Agyeman would be delighted, firstly to be home from combat, and secondly to have returned in the expectation of wealth beyond his wildest imaginings. However, the young soldier that Cormoran Strike met in the Tottenham pub one lunchtime, ten days after the arrest of his sister’s murderer, was almost truculent, and seemed still to be in a state of shock.

The two men had, for different periods of time, lived the same life, and risked the same death. It was a bond that no civilian could understand, and for half an hour they talked about nothing but the army.

“You were a Suit, yeah?” Agyeman said. “Trust a Suit to fuck up my whole life.”

Strike smiled. He saw no ingratitude in Agyeman, even though the stitches in his arm pulled painfully every time he raised his pint.

“My mother wants me to come out,” said the soldier. “She keeps saying, that’ll be one good thing to come out of this mess.”

It was the first, oblique reference to the reason they were here, and that Jonah was not where he belonged, with his regiment, in the life he had chosen.

Then, quite suddenly, he began to talk, as though he had been waiting for Strike for months.

“She never knew my dad had another kid. He never told her. He was never even sure that Marlene woman was telling the truth about being pregnant. Right before he died, when he knew he had days left, he told me. ‘Don’t upset your mother,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you this because I’m dying, and I don’t know whether you’ve got a half-brother or sister out there.’ He said the mother had been white, and that she’d disappeared. She might have aborted it. Fuck me. If you’d known my dad. Never missed a Sunday at church. Took communion on his deathbed. I’d never expected anything like that, never.

“I was never even going to say anything to her about Dad and this woman. But then, out of the blue, I get this phone call. Thank Christ I was there, on leave. Only, Lula,” he said her name tentatively, as though he was not sure whether he had the right to it, “said she’d’ve hung up if it’d been my mum. She said she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She sounded all right.”

“I think she was,” said Strike.

“Yeah…but fuck me, it was weird. Would you believe it if some supermodel called you up and told you she was your sister?”

Strike thought of his own bizarre family history.

“Probably,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I suppose. Why would she lie? That’s what I thought, anyway. So I gave her my mobile number and we talked a few times, when she could hook up with her friend Rochelle. She had it all figured out, so the press wouldn’t find out. Suited me. I didn’t want my mother upset.”

Agyeman had pulled out a packet of Lambert and Butler cigarettes and was turning the box nervously in his fingers. They would have been bought cheap, Strike thought, with a small pang of remembrance, at the NAAFI.

“So she phones me up the day before it—it happened,” Jonah continued, “and she was begging me to come over. I’d already told her I couldn’t meet her that leave. Man, the situation was doing my head in. My sister the supermodel. Mum was worried about me leaving for Helmand. I couldn’t spring it on her, that Dad had had another kid. Not then. So I told Lula I couldn’t see her.

“She begged me to meet her before I left. She sounded upset. I said maybe I could get out later, you know, after Mum was in bed. I’d tell her I was going out for a quick drink with a mate or something. She told me to come really late, like at half one.

“So,” said Jonah, scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably, “I went. I was on the corner of her road…and I saw it happen.”

He wiped his hand across his mouth.

“I ran. I just ran. I didn’t know what the hell to think. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to have to explain anything to anyone. I knew she’d had mental problems, and I remembered how upset she’d been on the phone, and I thought, did she lure me here to see her jump?

“I couldn’t sleep. I was glad to leave, to tell you the truth. To get away from all the fucking news coverage.”

The pub buzzed around them, crowded with lunchtime customers.

“I think the reason she wanted to meet you so badly was because of what her mother had just told her,” Strike said. “Lady Bristow had taken a lot of Valium. I’m guessing she wanted to make the girl feel too bad to leave her, so she told Lula what Tony had said about John all those years before: that he pushed his younger brother Charlie into that quarry, and killed him.

“That’s why Lula was in such a state when she left her mother’s flat, and that’s why she kept trying to call her uncle and find out whether there was any truth in the story. And I think she was desperate to see you, because she wanted someone, anyone, she could love and trust. Her mother was difficult and dying, she hated her uncle, and she’d just been told her adoptive brother was a killer. She must have been desperate. And I think she was scared. The day before she died, Bristow had tried to force her to give him money. She must have been wondering what he’d do next.”

The pub clattered and rang with talk and clinking glasses, but Jonah’s voice sounded clearly over all of it.

“I’m glad you broke the bastard’s jaw.”

“And his nose,” said Strike cheerfully. “It’s lucky he’d stuck a knife in me, or I might not have got off with ‘reasonable force.’ ”

“He came armed,” said Jonah thoughtfully.

“ ’Course he did,” said Strike. “I’d had my secretary tip him off, at Rochelle’s funeral, that I was getting death threats from a nutter who wanted to slit me open. That planted the seed in his head. He thought, if it came to it, he’d try and pass off my death as the work of poor old Brian Mathers. Then, presumably, he’d have gone home, doctored his mother’s clock and tried to pull the same trick all over again. He’s not sane. Which isn’t to say he’s not a clever fucker.”