The Cuckoo's Calling(127)

“That’s what she was wearing when I bought her the burger.”

“In that case, the contents of the stomach should give an accurate—” began the mortician.

“D’you know if she’s got any next of kin?” Carver demanded of Strike.

“There’s an aunt in Kilburn. I don’t know her name.”

Slivers of glistening eyeball showed through Rochelle’s almost closed lids; they had the characteristic brightness of the drowned. There were traces of bloody foam in the creases around her nostrils.

“How are her hands?” Strike asked the mortician, because Rochelle was uncovered only to the chest.

“Never mind her hands,” snapped Carver. “We’re done here, thanks,” he told the mortician loudly, his voice reverberating around the room; and then, to Strike: “We want a word with you. Car’s outside.”

He was helping police with their inquiries. Strike remembered hearing the phrase on the news when he had been a small boy, obsessed by every aspect of police work. His mother had always blamed this strange early preoccupation on her brother, Ted, ex-Red Cap and fount of (to Strike) thrilling stories of travel, mystery and adventure. Helping police with their inquiries: as a five-year-old, Strike had imagined a noble and disinterested citizen volunteering to give up his time and energy to assist the police, who issued him with magnifying glass and truncheon and allowed him to operate under a cloak of glamorous anonymity.

This was the reality: a small interrogation room, with a cup of machine-made coffee given to him by Wardle, whose attitude towards Strike was devoid of the animosity that crackled from Carver’s every open pore, but free of every trace of former friendliness. Strike suspected that Wardle’s superior did not know the full extent of their previous interactions.

A small black tray on the scratched desk held seventeen pence in change, a single Yale key and a plastic-covered bus pass; Strike’s card was discolored and crinkled but still legible.

“What about her bag?” Strike asked Carver, who was sitting across the desk, while Wardle leaned up against the filing cabinet in the corner. “Gray. Cheap and plastic-looking. That hasn’t turned up, has it?”

“She probably left it in her squat, or wherever the f*ck she lived,” said Carver. “Suicides don’t usually pack a bag to jump.”

“I don’t think she jumped,” said Strike.

“Oh don’t you, now?”

“I wanted to see her hands. She hated water over her face, she told me so. When people have struggled in the water, the position of their hands—”

“Well, it’s nice to get your expert opinion,” said Carver, with sledgehammer irony. “I know who you are, Mr. Strike.”

He leaned back in his chair, placing his hands behind his head, revealing dried patches of sweat on the underarms of his shirt. The sharp, sour, oniony smell of BO wafted across the desk.

“He’s ex-SIB,” threw in Wardle, from beside the filing cabinet.

“I know that,” barked Carver, raising wiry eyebrows flecked with scurf. “I’ve heard from Anstis all about the f*cking leg and the life-saving medal. Quite the colorful CV.”

Carver removed his hands from behind his head, leaned forwards and laced his fingers together on the desk instead. His corned-beef complexion and the purple bags under his hard eyes were not flattered by the strip lighting.

“I know who your old man is and all.”

Strike scratched his unshaven chin, waiting.

“Like to be as rich and famous as Daddy, would you? Is that what all this is about?”

Carver had the bright blue, bloodshot eyes that Strike had always (since meeting a major in the Paras with just such eyes, who was subsequently cashiered for serious bodily harm) associated with a choleric, violent nature.

“Rochelle didn’t jump. Nor did Lula Landry.”

“Bollocks,” shouted Carver. “You’re speaking to the two men who proved Landry jumped. We went through every bit of f*cking evidence with a fine-toothed f*cking comb. I know what you’re up to. You’re milking that poor sod Bristow for all you can get. Why are you f*cking smiling at me?”

“I’m thinking what a tit you’re going to look when this interview gets reported in the press.”

“Don’t you dare f*cking threaten me with the press, dickhead.”

Carver’s blunt, wide face was clenched; his glaring blue eyes vivid in the purple-red face.

“You’re in a heap of trouble here, pal, and a famous dad, a peg leg and a good war aren’t going to get you out of it. How do we know you didn’t scare the poor bitch into f*cking jumping? Mentally ill, wasn’t she? How do we know you didn’t make her think she’d done something wrong? You were the last person to see her alive, pal. I wouldn’t like to be sitting where you are now.”

“Rochelle crossed Grantley Road and walked away from me, as alive as you are. You’ll find someone who saw her after she left me. Nobody’s going to forget that coat.”

Wardle pushed himself off the filing cabinets, dragged a hard plastic chair over to the desk and sat down.

“Let’s have it, then,” he told Strike. “Your theory.”

“She was blackmailing Lula Landry’s killer.”

“Piss off,” snapped Carver, and Wardle snorted in slightly stagey amusement.