The Cuckoo's Calling(148)

“But…what did it say?”

“That she was leaving everything, her entire estate, to her brother, Lieutenant Jonah Agyeman of the Royal Engineers.”

“Jonah…who?”

“Go and look on the computer monitor outside. You’ll find a picture there.”

Bristow got up and moved like a sleepwalker towards the computer in the next room. Strike watched the screen illuminate as Bristow shifted the mouse. Agyeman’s handsome face shone out of the monitor, with his sardonic smile, pristine in his dress uniform.

“Oh my God,” said Bristow.

He returned to Strike and lowered himself back into the chair, gaping at the detective.

“I—I can’t believe it.”

“That’s the man who was on the CCTV footage,” said Strike, “running away from the scene the night that Lula died. He was staying in Clerkenwell with his widowed mother while he was on leave. That’s why he was hotfooting it along Theobalds Road twenty minutes later. He was heading home.”

Bristow drew breath in a loud gasp.

“They all said I was deluded,” he almost shouted. “But I wasn’t bloody deluded at all!”

“No, John, you weren’t deluded,” said Strike. “Not deluded. More like bat-shit insane.”

Through the shaded window came the sounds of London, alive at all hours, rumbling and growling, part man, part machine. There was no noise inside the room but Bristow’s ragged breathing.

“Excuse me?” he said, ludicrously polite. “What did you call me?”

Strike smiled.

“I said you’re bat-shit insane. You killed your sister, got away with it, and then asked me to reinvestigate her death.”

“You—you cannot be serious.”

“Oh yeah, I can. It’s been obvious to me from the start that the person who benefits most from Lula’s death is you, John. Ten million quid, once your mother gives up the ghost. Not to be sniffed at, is it? Especially as I don’t think you’ve got much more than your salary, however much you bang on about your trust fund. Albris shares are hardly worth the paper they’re written on these days, are they?”

Bristow gaped at him for several long moments; then, sitting up a little straighter, he glanced at the camp bed propped in the corner.

“Coming from a virtual down-and-out who sleeps in his office, I find that a laughable assertion.” Bristow’s voice was calm and derisory, but his breathing was abnormally fast.

“I know you’ve got much more money than I have,” said Strike. “But, as you rightly point out, that’s not saying much. And I will say for myself that I haven’t yet stooped to embezzling from clients. How much of Conway Oates’s money did you steal before Tony realized what you were up to?”

“Oh, I’m an embezzler too, am I?” said Bristow, with an artificial laugh.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Strike. “Not that it matters to me. I don’t care whether you killed Lula because you needed to replace the money you’d nicked, or because you wanted her millions, or because you hated her guts. The jury will want to know, though. They’re always suckers for motive.”

Bristow’s knee had begun jiggling up and down again.

“You’re unhinged,” he said, with another forced laugh. “You’ve found a will in which she leaves everything not to me, but to that man.” He pointed towards the outer room, where he had viewed Jonah’s picture. “You tell me that it was that same man who was walking towards Lula’s flat, on camera, the night she fell to her death, and who was seen sprinting back past the camera ten minutes later. And yet you accuse me. Me.”

“John, you knew before you ever came to see me that it was Jonah on that CCTV footage. Rochelle told you. She was there in Vashti when Lula called Jonah and arranged to meet him that night, and she witnessed a will leaving him everything. She came to you, told you everything and started blackmailing you. She wanted money for a flat and some expensive clothes, and in return she promised to keep her mouth shut about the fact that you weren’t Lula’s heir.

“Rochelle didn’t realize you were the killer. She thought Jonah pushed Lula out of the window. And she was bitter enough, after seeing a will in which she didn’t feature, and being dumped in that shop on the last day of Lula’s life, not to care about the killer walking free as long as she got the money.”

“This is utter rubbish. You’re out of your mind.”

“You put every obstacle you could in the way of me finding Rochelle,” Strike went on, as though he had not heard Bristow. “You pretended you didn’t know her name, or where she lived; you acted incredulous that I thought she might be useful to the inquiry and you took photos off Lula’s laptop so that I couldn’t see what she looked like. True, she could have pointed me directly to the man you were trying to frame for murder, but on the other hand, she knew that there was a will that would deprive you of your inheritance, and your number one objective was to keep that will quiet while you tried to find and destroy it. Bit of a joke, really, it being in your mother’s wardrobe all along.

“But even if you’d destroyed it, John, what then? For all you knew, Jonah himself knew that he was Lula’s heir. And there was another witness to the fact that there was a will, though you didn’t know it: Bryony Radford, the makeup artist.”