The Cuckoo's Calling (30 page)

“It was no skin off my nose, anyway. I wasn’t breaking me ’eart; I was seeing Dez by then. ’E didn’t mind the baby. I moved in with Dez not long after Joe left.”

“Joe?”

“That was his name. Joe.”

She said it with conviction, but perhaps, thought Strike, that was because she had repeated the lie so often that the story had become easy, automatic.

“What was his surname?”

“I can’ fuckin’ remember. You’re like her. It was twenny-odd years ago. Mumumba,” said Marlene Higson, unabashed. “Or something like that.”

“Could it have been Agyeman?”

“No.”

“Owusu?”

“I toldya,” she said aggressively, “it were Mumumba or something.”

“Not Macdonald? Or Wilson?”

“You takin’ the piss? Macdonald? Wilson? From Africa?”

Strike concluded that her relationship with the African had never progressed to the exchange of surnames.

“And he was a student, you said? Where was he studying?”

“College,” said Marlene.

“Which one, can you remember?”

“I don’t bloody know. All right if I cadge a ciggie?” she added, in a slightly more conciliatory tone.

“Yeah, help yourself.”

She lit her cigarette with her own plastic lighter, puffed enthusiastically, then said, mellowed by the free tobacco:

“It mighta bin somethin’ to do with a museum. Attached, like.”

“Attached to a museum?”

“Yeah, ’cause I remember ’im sayin’, ‘Ay sometimes visit the museum in my free ahrs.’ ” Her imitation made the African student sound like an upper-class Englishman. She was smirking, as though this choice of recreation was absurd, ludicrous.

“Can you remember which museum it was that he visited?”

“The—the Museum of England or summit,” she said; and then, irritably, “You’re like her. How the fuck am I s’posedta remember after all this time?”

“And you never saw him again after he went home?”

“Nope,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to.” She drank lager. “He’s probably dead,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Africa, innit?” she said. “He coulda bin shot, couldn’t ’e? Or starved. Anythin’. Y’know what it’s like out there.”

Strike did know. He remembered the teeming streets of Nairobi; the aerial view of Angola’s rainforest, mist hanging over the treetops, and the sudden breathtaking beauty, as the chopper turned, of a waterfall in the lush green mountainside; and the Masai woman, baby at her breast, sitting on a box while Strike questioned her painstakingly about alleged rape, and Tracey manned the video camera beside him.

“D’you know whether Lula tried to find her father?”

“Yeah, she tried,” said Marlene dismissively.

“How?”

“She looked up college records,” said Marlene.

“But if you couldn’t remember where he went…”

“I dunno, she thought she’d found the place or summit, but she couldn’t find ’im, no. Mebbe I wasn’ remembrin’ his name right, I dunno. She used to go on an’ fuckin’ on; what did ’e look like, where was ’e studyin’. I said to ’er, he was tall an’ skinny an’ you wanna be grateful you got my ears, not ’is, ’cause there wouldna bin no fuckin’ modelin’ career if you’d got them fucking elephant lugs.”

“Did Lula ever talk to you about her friends?”

“Oh, yeah. There was that little black bitch, Raquelle, or whatever she called ’erself. Leechin’ all she could outta Lula. Oh, she did herself all right. Fuckin’ clothes an’ jew’lry an’ I-dunno-what-the-fuck else. I sez to Lula once, ‘I wouldn’ mind a new coat.’ But I wasn’ pushy, see. That Raquelle din’ mind askin’.”

She sniffed, and drained her glass.

“Did you ever meet Rochelle?”

“That was ’er name, was it? Yeah, once. She come along in a fuckin’ car with a driver to pick Lula up from seein’ me. Like Lady Muck out the back window, sneerin’ at me. She’ll be missin’ all of that now, I ’spect. In it for all she could get.

“An’ there was that Ciara Porter,” Marlene plowed on, with, if possible, even greater spite, “sleepin’ with Lula’s boyfriend the night she fuckin’ died. Nasty fuckin’ bitch.”

“Do you know Ciara Porter?”

“I seen it in the fuckin’ papers. ’E wen’ off to ’er place, di’n’t ’e, Evan? After he rowed with Lula. Went to Ciara. Fuckin’ bitch.”

It became clear, as Marlene talked on, that Lula had kept her natural mother firmly segregated from her friends, and that, with the exception of a brief glimpse of Rochelle, Marlene’s opinions and deductions about Lula’s social set were based entirely on the press reports she had greedily consumed.

Strike fetched more drinks, and listened to Marlene describe the horror and shock she had experienced on hearing (from the neighbor who had run in with the news, early in the morning of the 8th) that her daughter had fallen to her death from her balcony. Careful questioning revealed that Lula had not seen Marlene for two months before she died. Strike then listened to a diatribe about the treatment she had received from Lula’s adoptive family, following the model’s death.

“They di’n’t want me around, ’specially that fuckin’ uncle. ’Ave ya met ’im, ’ave ya? Fuckin’ Tony Landry? I contacted ’im abou’ the funeral an’ all I got was threats. Oh yeah. Fuckin’ threats. I said to ’im, ‘I’m ’er mother. I gotta right to be there.’ An’ he tole me I wasn’t ’er mother, that mad bitch was ’er mother,
Lady
Bristow. Funny, I says, ’cause I remember pushing ’er outta
my
fanny. Sorry for my crudity, but there you are. An’ he said I was causing distress, talkin’ to the press. They come an’ found
me,”
she told Strike furiously, and she jabbed her finger at the block of flats overlooking them. “Press come an’ foun’
me.
’Course I tole my side o’ the fuckin’ story. ’Course I did.

“Well, I didn’t wanna scene, not at a funeral, I didn’t wanna ruin things, but I wasn’t gonna be kept away. I went an’ sat in the back. I seen fuckin’ Rochelle there, givin’ me looks like I wuz dirt. But nobody stopped me in the end.

“They got what they wanted, that fuckin’ family. I di’n’ get nothin’. Nothin’. Tha’s not what Lula woulda wanted, I know that for a fact. She woulda wanted me to ’ave something. Not,” said Marlene, with an assumption of dignity, “that I cared abou’ the money. It weren’ about the money for me. Nuthin’ was gonna replace my daughter, not ten, not twenny mill.

“Mind you, she’d of bin livid if she’d known I didn’t get nuthin’,” she went on. “All that money goin’ begging; people can’t believe it when I tell ’em that I got nuthin’. Struggling to make the rent, and me own daughter lef’ millions. But there you are. That’s how the rich stay rich, ain’t it? They didn’ need it, but they didn’ mind a bit more. I dunno how that Landry sleeps at night, but that’s ’is business.”

“Did Lula ever tell you she was going to leave you anything? Did she mention having made a will?”

Marlene seemed suddenly alert to a whiff of hope.

“Oh yeah, she said she’d look aft’r me, yeah. Yeah, she tole me she’d see me all right. D’you think I shoulda tole someone that? Mentioned it, like?”

“I don’t think it would have made any difference, unless she made a will and left you something in it,” said Strike.

Her face fell back into its sullen expression.

“They prob’ly fuckin’ destroyed it, them bastards. They coulda done. That’s the sort of people they are. I wouldn’t put nuthin’ past that uncle.”

“I’M SO SORRY HE HASN’T
got back to you,” Robin told the caller, seven miles away in the office. “Mr. Strike’s incredibly busy at the moment. Let me take your name and number, and I’ll make sure he phones you this afternoon.”

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” said the woman. She had a pleasant, cultivated voice with a faint suspicion of hoarseness, as though her laugh would be sexy and bold. “I don’t really need to speak to him. Could you just give him a message for me? I wanted to warn him, that’s all. God, this is…it’s a bit embarrassing; it isn’t the way I’d have chosen…Well, anyway. Could you please just tell him that Charlotte Campbell called, and that I’m engaged to Jago Ross? I didn’t want him to hear about it from anyone else, or read about it. Jago’s parents have gone and put it in the bloody
Times.
Mortifying.”

“Oh. All right,” said Robin, her mind suddenly paralyzed like her pen.

“Thanks very much—Robin, did you say? Thanks. ’Bye.”

Charlotte rang off first. Robin replaced the receiver in slow motion, feeling acutely anxious. She did not want to deliver this news. She might be only the messenger, but she would feel as though she were delivering an assault on Strike’s determination to keep his private life under wraps, on his firm avoidance of the subject of the boxes of possessions, the camp bed, the detritus of his evening meals in the bins every morning.

Robin pondered her options. She could forget to relay the message, and simply tell him to call Charlotte and get her to do her own dirty work (as Robin put it to herself). What, though, if Strike refused to call, and somebody else told him about the engagement? Robin had no means of knowing whether Strike and his ex (girlfriend? fiancée? wife?) had legions of mutual friends. If she and Matthew ever split up, if he became engaged to another woman (it gave her a twisting feeling in her chest to even think of it), all her closest friends and family would feel involved, and would undoubtedly stampede to tell her; she would, she supposed, prefer to be forewarned in as low-key and private a way as possible.

When she heard Strike ascending the stair nearly an hour later, apparently talking on his mobile and in good spirits, Robin experienced a sharp stab of panic to the stomach as though she were about to sit an exam. When he pushed open the glass door, and she saw that he was not holding a mobile at all, but rapping under his breath, she felt even worse.

“Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari,” muttered Strike, who was holding a boxed electric fan in his arms. “Afternoon.”

“Hello.”

“Thought we could use this. It’s stuffy in here.”

“Yes, that would be good.”

“Just heard Deeby Macc playing in the shop,” Strike informed her, setting down the fan in a corner and peeling off his jacket. ‘Something something and Ferrari, Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari.’ Wonder who Johari was. Some rapper he was having a feud with, d’you think?”

“No,” said Robin, wishing that he was not so cheerful. “It’s a psychological term. The Johari window. It’s all to do with how well we know ourselves, and how well other people know us.”

Strike paused in the act of hanging up his jacket and stared at her.

“You didn’t get that out of
Heat
magazine.”

“No. I was doing psychology at university. I dropped out.”

She felt, obscurely, that it might somehow even the playing field to tell him about one of her own personal failures, before delivering the bad news.

“You dropped out of university?” He seemed uncharacteristically interested. “That’s a coincidence. I did, too. So why ‘fuck Johari’?”

“Deeby Macc had therapy in prison. He became interested and did a lot of reading on psychology. I got that bit out of the papers,” she added.

“You’re a mine of useful information.”

She experienced another elevator-drop in the pit of her stomach.

“There was a call, when you were out. From a Charlotte Campbell.”

He looked up quickly, frowning.

“She asked me to give you a message, which was,” Robin’s gaze slid sideways, to hover momentarily on Strike’s ear, “that she’s engaged to Jago Ross.”

Her eyes were drawn, irresistibly, back to his face, and she felt a horrible chill.

One of the earliest and most vivid memories of Robin’s childhood was of the day that the family dog had been put down. She herself had been too young to understand what her father was saying; she took the continuing existence of Bruno, her oldest brother’s beloved Labrador, for granted. Confused by her parents’ solemnity, she had turned to Stephen for a clue as to how to react, and all security had crumbled, for she had seen, for the first time in her short life, happiness and comfort drain out of his small and merry face, and his lips whiten as his mouth fell open. She had heard oblivion howling in the silence that preceded his awful scream of anguish, and then she had cried, inconsolably, not for Bruno, but for the terrifying grief of her brother.

Strike did not speak immediately. Then he said, with palpable difficulty:

“Right. Thanks.”

He walked into the inner office, and closed the door.

Robin sat back down at her desk, feeling like an executioner. She could not settle to anything. She considered knocking on the door again, and offering a cup of tea, but decided against. For five minutes she restlessly reorganized the items on her desk, glancing regularly at the closed inner door, until it opened again, and she jumped, and pretended to be busy at the keyboard.

“Robin, I’m just going to nip out,” he said.

“OK.”

“If I’m not back at five, you can lock up.”

“Yes, of course.”

“See you tomorrow.”

He took down his jacket, and left with a purposeful tread that did not deceive her.

The roadworks were spreading like a lesion; every day there was an extension of the mayhem, and of the temporary structures to protect pedestrians and enable them to pick their way through the devastation. Strike noticed none of it. He walked automatically over trembling wooden boards to the Tottenham, the place he associated with escape and refuge.

Like the Ordnance Arms, it was empty but for one other drinker; an old man just inside the door. Strike bought a pint of Doom Bar and sat down on one of the low red leather seats against the wall, almost beneath the sentimental Victorian maid who scattered rosebuds, sweet and silly and simple. He drank as though his beer was medicine, without pleasure, intent on the result.

Jago Ross. She must have been in touch with him, seeing him, while they were still living together. Even Charlotte, with all her mesmeric power over men, her astonishing sure-handed skill, could not have moved from reacquaintance to engagement in three weeks. She had been meeting Ross on the sly, while swearing undying love to Strike.

This put a very different light on the bombshell she had dropped on him a month before the end, and the refusal to show him proof, and the shifting dates, and the sudden conclusion of it all.

Jago Ross had been married once already. He had kids; Charlotte had heard on the grapevine that he was drinking hard. She had laughed with Strike about her lucky escape of so many years before; she had expressed pity for his wife.

Strike bought a second pint, and then a third. He wanted to drown the impulses, crackling like electrical charges, to go and find her, to bellow, to rampage, to break Jago Ross’s jaw.

He had not eaten at the Ordnance Arms, nor since, and it had been a long time since he had consumed so much alcohol in one sitting. It took him barely an hour of steady, solitary, determined beer consumption to become properly drunk.

Initially, when the slim, pale figure appeared at his table, he told it thickly that it had the wrong man and the wrong table.

“No I haven’t,” said Robin firmly. “I’m just going to get myself a drink too, all right?”

She left him staring hazily at her handbag, which she had placed on the stool. It was comfortingly familiar, brown, a little shabby. She usually hung it up on a coat peg in the office. He gave it a friendly smile, and drank to it.

Up at the bar, the barman, who was young and timid-looking, said to Robin: “I think he’s had enough.”

“That’s hardly my fault,” she retorted.

She had looked for Strike in the Intrepid Fox, which was nearest to the office, in Molly Moggs, the Spice of Life and the Cambridge. The Tottenham had been the last pub she was planning to try.

“Whassamatter?” Strike asked her, when she sat down.

“Nothing’s the matter,” said Robin, sipping her half-lager. “I just wanted to make sure you’re OK.”

“Yez’m fine,” said Strike, and then, with an effort at clarity, “I yam fine.”

“Good.”

“Jus’ celebratin’ my fiancée zengagement,” he said, raising his eleventh pint in an unsteady toast. “She shou’ never’ve left’m. Never,” he said, loudly and clearly, “have. Left. The Hon’ble. Jago Ross. Who is’n outstanding
cunt.”

He virtually shouted the last word. There were more people in the pub than when Strike had arrived, and most of them seemed to have heard him. They had been casting him wary looks even before he shouted. The scale of him, with his drooping eyelids and his bellicose expression, had ensured a small no-go zone around him; people skirted his table on the way to the bathrooms as though it was three times the size.

“Shall we take a walk?” Robin suggested. “Get something to eat?”

“D’you know what?” he said, leaning forwards with his elbows on the table, almost knocking over his pint. “D’you know what, Robin?”

“What?” she said, holding his beer steady. She was suddenly possessed of a strong desire to giggle. Many of their fellow drinkers were watching them.

“Y’re a very nice girl,” said Strike. “Y’are. Y’re a very nice p’son. I’ve noticed,” he said, nodding solemnly. “Yes. ’Ve noticed that.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling, trying not to laugh.

He sat back in his seat, closed his eyes and said:

“Sorry. ’M’pissed.”

“Yes.”

“Don’ do it much these days.”

“No.”

“Haven’ eat’n anything.”

“Shall we go and get something to eat, then?”

“Yeah, we c’do,” he said, with his eyes still shut. “She tol’ me she was pregnant.”

“Oh,” said Robin, sadly.

“Yeah. Tol’ me. An’ then sh’said it was gone. Can’t’ve been mine. Nev’ added up.”

Robin said nothing. She did not want him to remember that she had heard this. He opened his eyes.

“She left ’im for me, an’ now she’s left ’im…no, she’s lef’ me fr’im…”

“I’m sorry.”

“…lef’ me fr’im. Don’t be sorry. Y’re a nice person.”

He pulled cigarettes out of his pocket, and inserted one between his lips.

“You can’t smoke in here,” she reminded him gently, but the barman, who seemed to have been waiting for a cue, came hurrying over towards them now, looking tense.

“You need to go outside to do that,” he told Strike loudly.

Strike peered up at the boy, bleary-eyed, surprised.

“It’s all right,” Robin told the barman, gathering up her handbag. “Come on, Cormoran.”

He stood, massive, ungainly, swaying, unfolding himself out of the cramped space behind the table and glaring at the barman, whom Robin could not blame for taking a step backwards.

“There’z no need,” Strike told him, “t’shout. No need. Fuckin’ rude.”

“OK, Cormoran, let’s go,” said Robin, standing back to give him space to pass.

“Juz a moment, Robin,” said Strike, one large hand held aloft. “Juz a moment.”

“Oh God,” said Robin quietly.

“ ’V’ you ever done any boxing?” Strike asked the barman, who looked terrified.

“Cormoran, let’s go.”

“I wuzza boxer. ’Narmy, mate.”

Over at the bar, some wisecracker murmured, “I could’ve been a contender.”

“Let’s go, Cormoran,” said Robin. She took his arm, and to her great relief and surprise he came along meekly. It reminded her of leading the enormous Clydesdale her uncle had kept on his farm.

Out in the fresh air Strike leaned back against one of the Tottenham’s windows and tried, fruitlessly, to light his cigarette; Robin had to work the lighter for him in the end.

“What you need is food,” she told him, as he smoked with his eyes closed, listing slightly so that she was afraid he would fall over. “Sober you up.”

“I don’ wanna sober up,” Strike muttered. He overbalanced and only saved himself from falling with several rapid sidesteps.

“Come on,” she said, and she guided him across the wooden bridge spanning the gulf in the road, where the clattering machines and builders had at last fallen silent and departed for the night.

“Robin, didjer know I wuzza boxer?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” she said.

She had meant to take him back to the office and give him food there, but he came to a halt at the kebab shop at the end of Denmark Street and had lurched through the door before she could stop him. Sitting outside on the pavement at the only table, they ate kebabs, and he told her about his boxing career in the army, digressing occasionally to remind her what a nice person she was. She managed to persuade him to keep his voice down. The full effect of all the alcohol he had consumed was still making itself felt, and food seemed to be doing little to help. When he went off to the bathroom, he took such a long time that she began to worry that he had passed out.

Checking her watch, she saw that it was now ten past seven. She called Matthew, and told him she was dealing with an urgent situation at the office. He did not sound pleased.

Strike wound his way back on to the street, bouncing off the door frame as he emerged. He planted himself firmly against the window and tried to light another cigarette.

“R’bin,” he said, giving up and gazing down at her. “R’bin, d’you know wadda
kairos
mo…” He hiccoughed. “Mo…moment is?”

“A
kairos
moment?” she repeated, hoping against hope it was not something sexual, something that she would not be able to forget afterwards, especially as the kebab shop owner was listening in and smirking behind them. “No, I don’t. Shall we go back to the office?”

“You don’t know whadditis?” he asked, peering at her.