The Cuckoo's Calling(16)
Next, with one of the pens Robin had assembled neatly in the top drawer, Strike began to write, fluently and rapidly, beginning with the date. The notes of Bristow’s interview he tore out and attached separately to the file; the actions he had taken thus far, including calls to Anstis and to Wardle, were noted, their numbers preserved (but the details of his other friend, the provider of useful names and addresses, were not put on file).
Finally Strike gave his new case a serial number, which he wrote, along with the legend Sudden Death, Lula Landry, on the spine, before stowing the file in its place at the far right of the shelf.
Now, at last, he opened the envelope which, according to Bristow, contained those vital clues that police had missed. The lawyer’s handwriting, neat and fluid, sloped backwards in densely written lines. As Bristow had promised, the contents dealt mostly with the actions of a man whom he called “the Runner.”
The Runner was a tall black man, whose face was concealed by a scarf and who appeared on the footage of a camera on a late-night bus which ran from Islington towards the West End. He had boarded this bus around fifty minutes before Lula Landry died. He was next seen on CCTV footage taken in Mayfair, walking in the direction of Landry’s house, at 1:39 a.m. He had paused on camera and appeared to consult a piece of paper (poss an address or directions? Bristow had added helpfully in his notes) before walking out of sight.
Footage taken from the same CCTV camera shortly after showed the Runner sprinting back past the camera at 2:12 and out of sight. Second black man also running—poss lookout? Disturbed in car theft? Car alarm went off around the corner at this time, Bristow had written.
Finally there was CCTV footage of a black man closely resembling the Runner walking along a road close to Gray’s Inn Square, several miles away, later in the morning of Landry’s death. Face still concealed, Bristow had written.
Strike paused to rub his eyes, wincing because he had forgotten that one of them was bruised. He was now in that light-headed, twitchy state that signified true exhaustion. With a long, grunting sigh he considered Bristow’s notes, with one hairy fist holding a pen ready to make his own annotations.
Bristow might interpret the law with dispassion and objectivity in the office that had provided him with his smart engraved business card, but the contents of this envelope merely confirmed Strike’s view that his client’s personal life was dominated by an unjustifiable obsession. Whatever the origin of Bristow’s preoccupation with the Runner—whether because he nursed a secret fear of that urban bogeyman, the criminal black male, or for some other, deeper, more personal reason—it was unthinkable that the police had not investigated the Runner, and his (possibly lookout, possibly car thief) companion, and certain that they had had good reason for excluding him from suspicion.
Yawning widely, Strike turned to the second page of Bristow’s notes.
At 1:45, Derrick Wilson, the security guard on duty at the desk overnight, felt unwell and went into the back bathroom, where he remained for approximately a quarter of an hour. For fifteen minutes prior to Lula’s death, therefore, the lobby of her building was deserted and anybody could have entered and exited without being seen. Wilson only came out of the bathroom after Lula fell, when he heard Tansy Bestigui screaming.
This window of opportunity tallies exactly with the time the Runner would have reached 18 Kentigern Gardens if he passed the security camera on the junction of Alderbrook and Bellamy Roads at 1:39.
“And how,” murmured Strike, massaging his forehead, “did he see through the front door, to know the guard was in the bog?”
I have spoken to Derrick Wilson, who is happy to be interviewed.
And I bet you’ve paid him to do it, Strike thought, noting the security guard’s telephone number beneath these concluding words.
He laid down the pen with which he had been intending to add his own notes, and clipped Bristow’s jottings into the file. Then he turned off the desk lamp and limped out to pee in the toilet on the landing. After brushing his teeth over the cracked basin, he locked the glass door, set his alarm clock and undressed.
By the neon glow of the street lamp outside, Strike undid the straps of his prosthetic, easing it from the aching stump, removing the gel liner that had become an inadequate cushion against pain. He laid the false leg beside his recharging mobile phone, maneuvered himself into his sleeping bag and lay with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. Now, as he had feared, the leaden fatigue of the body was not enough to still the misfiring mind. The old infection was active again; tormenting him, dragging at him.
What would she be doing now?
Yesterday evening, in a parallel universe, he had lived in a beautiful apartment in a most desirable part of London, with a woman who made every man who laid eyes on her treat Strike with a kind of incredulous envy.
“Why don’t you just move in with me? Oh, for God’s sake, Bluey, doesn’t it make sense? Why not?”
He had known, from the very first, that it was a mistake. They had tried it before, and each time it had been more calamitous than the last.
“We’re engaged, for God’s sake, why won’t you live with me?”
She had said things that were supposed to be proofs that, in the process of almost losing him forever, she had been as irrevocably changed as he had, with his one and a half legs.
“I don’t need a ring. Don’t be ridiculous, Bluey. You need all your money for the new business.”