The Cuckoo's Calling(154)

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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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 f*cker.”

There seemed little more to say. As they left the pub, Agyeman, who had bought the drinks with nervous insistence, made what might have been a tentative offer of money to Strike, whose impecunious existence had padded out much of the media coverage. Strike cut the offer short, but he was not offended. He could see that the young Sapper was struggling to deal with the idea of his enormous new wealth; that he was buckling under the responsibility of it, the demands it made, the appeals it attracted, the decisions it entailed; that he was much more overawed than glad. There was also, of course, the horrible and ever-present knowledge of how his millions had come to him. Strike guessed that Jonah Agyeman’s thoughts were flitting wildly between his comrades back in Afghanistan, visions of sports cars and of his half-sister lying dead in the snow. Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?