The Cuckoo's Calling(111)

“Did you notice Lula telephoning anyone while she was with you?”

“No,” said Ciara, after a thoughtful pause. “I remember her checking her phone a lot, but she didn’t speak to anyone, as far as I can remember. If she was phoning anyone, she was doing it on the quiet. She was in and out of the room a bit. I don’t know.”

“Bryony thought she seemed excited about Deeby Macc.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ciara impatiently. “It was everyone else who was excited about Deeby Macc—Guy and Bryony and—well, even I was, a bit,” she said, with endearing honesty. “But Looly wasn’t that fussed. She was in love with Evan. You can’t believe everything Bryony says.”

“Did Lula have a piece of paper with her, that you can remember? A bit of blue paper, which she’d written on?”

“No,” said Ciara again. “Why? What was it?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Strike, and Ciara looked suddenly thunderstruck.

“God—you’re not telling me she left a note? Oh my God. How f*cking mad would that be? But—no! That would mean she’d have, like, already decided she was going to do it.”

“Maybe it was something else,” said Strike. “You mentioned at the inquest that Lula expressed an intention to leave everything to her brother, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Ciara earnestly, nodding. “Yeah, what happened was, Guy had sent Looly these fabby handbags from the new range. I knew he wouldn’t have sent me any, even though I was in the advert too. Anyway, I unwrapped the white one, Cashile, you know, and it was just, like, beautiful; he does these detachable silk linings and he’d had it custom-printed for her with this amazing African print. So I said, ‘Looly, will you leave me this one?’ just as a joke. And she said, like, really seriously, ‘I’m leaving everything to my brother, but I’m sure he’d let you have anything you want.’ ”

Strike was watching and listening for any sign that she was lying or exaggerating, but the words came easily and, to all appearances, frankly.

“That was a strange thing to say, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah, I s’pose,” said Ciara, shaking the hair back off her face again. “But Looly was like that; she could go a bit dark and dramatic sometimes. Guy used to say, ‘Less of the cuckoo, Cuckoo.’ Anyway,” Ciara sighed, “she didn’t take the hint about the Cashile bag. I was hoping she’d just give it to me; I mean, she had four.”

“Would you say you were close to Lula?”

“Oh God, yeah, super-close, she told me everything.”

“A couple of people have mentioned that she didn’t trust too easily. That she was scared of confidences turning up in the press. I’ve been told that she tested people to see whether she could trust them.”

“Oh yeah, she did get a bit, like, paranoid after her real mum started selling stories about her. She actually asked me,” said Ciara, with an airy wave of her cigarette, “whether I’d told anyone she was back with Evan. I mean, come on. There was no way she was going to keep that quiet. Everyone was talking about it. I said to her, ‘Looly, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’ That’s Oscar Wilde,” she added, kindly. “But Looly didn’t like that side of being famous.”

“Guy Somé thinks that Lula wouldn’t have got back with Duffield if he hadn’t been out of the country.”

Ciara glanced towards the door, and dropped her voice.

“Guy would say that. He was just, like, super-protective of Looly. He adored her; he really loved her. He thought Evan was bad for her, but honestly, he doesn’t know the real Evan. Evan’s, like, totally f*cked up, but he’s a good person. He went to see Lady Bristow not long ago, and I said to him, ‘Why, Evan, what on earth did you put yourself through that for?’ Because, you know, her family hated him. And d’you know what he said? ‘I just wanna speak to somebody who cares as much as I do that she’s gone.’ I mean, how sad is that?”

Strike cleared his throat.

“The press have totally got it in for Evan, it’s just so unfair, he can’t do anything right.”

“Duffield came to your place, didn’t he, the night she died?”

“God, yeah, and there you are!” said Ciara indignantly. “They made out we were, like, shagging or something! He had no money, and his driver had disappeared, so he just, like, hiked across London so he could crash at mine. He slept on the sofa. So we were together when we heard the news.”

She raised her cigarette to her full mouth and drew deeply on it, her eyes on the floor.

“It was terrible. You can’t imagine. Terrible. Evan was…oh my God. And then,” she said, in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “they were all saying it was him. After Tansy Chillingham said she’d heard a row. The press just went crazy. It was awful.”

She looked up at Strike, holding her hair off her face. The harsh overhead light merely illuminated her perfect bone structure.

“You haven’t met Evan, have you?”

“No.”

“D’you want to? You could come with me now. He said he was going along to Uzi tonight.”