The Cuckoo's Calling(33)

“Anyway, Lula goes into the shop, right, and she’d told me on the way to her mother’s she was gonna have lunch there, right, but she’s only in there a quarter of an hour or something, then she comes out alone and tells me to drive her home. So that was a bit f*cking strange, right? And Raquelle, or whatever her name is—it’ll come back to me—wasn’t with her. We usedta give Raquelle a lift home normally, when they’d been out together. And the blue piece of paper was gone. And Lula never said a word to me all the way back home.”

“Did you mention this blue paper to the police?”

“Yeah. They didn’t think it was worth shit,” said Kolovas-Jones. “Said it was probably a shopping list.”

“Can you remember what it looked like?”

“It was just blue. Like airmail paper.”

He looked down at his watch.

“I gotta go in ten.”

“So that was the last time you ever saw Lula?”

“Yeah, it was.”

He picked at the corner of a fingernail.

“What was your first thought, when you heard she was dead?”

“I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones, chewing at the hangnail he had been picking. “I was f*cking shocked. You don’t expect that, do you? Not when you’ve just seen someone hours before. The press were all saying it was Duffield, because they’d had a row in that nightclub and stuff. I thought it might’ve been him, to tell you the truth. Bastard.”

“You knew him, did you?”

“I drove them a coupla times,” said Kolovas-Jones. A flaring of his nostrils, a tightness around the lines of his mouth, together suggested a bad smell.

“What did you think of him?”

“I thought he was a talentless tosser.” With unexpected virtuosity, he suddenly adopted a flat, drawling voice: “Are we gonna need him later, Lules? He’d better wait, yeah?” said Kolovas-Jones, crackling with temper. “Never once spoke to me directly. Ignorant, sponging piece of shit.”

Derrick said, sotto voce, “Kieran’s an actor.”

“Just bit parts,” said Kolovas-Jones. “So far.”

And he digressed into a brief exposition of the television dramas in which he had appeared, exhibiting, in Strike’s estimation, a marked desire to be considered more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame. To have had it so often in the back of his car and not yet to have caught it from his passengers must (thought Strike) have been tantalizing and, perhaps, infuriating.

“Kieran auditioned for Freddie Bestigui,” said Wilson. “Didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a lack of enthusiasm that told the outcome plainly.

“How did that come about?” asked Strike.

“Usual way,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a hint of hauteur. “Through my agent.”

“Nothing came of it?”

“They decided to go in another direction,” said Kolovas-Jones. “They wrote out the part.”

“OK, so you picked up Deeby Macc from, where—Heathrow?—that night?”

“Terminal Five, yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, apparently brought back to a sense of mundane reality, and glancing at his watch. “Listen, I’d better get going.”

“All right if I walk you back to the car?” asked Strike.

Wilson showed himself happy to go along too; Strike paid the bill for all three of them and they left. Out on the pavement, Strike offered both his companions cigarettes; Wilson declined, Kolovas-Jones accepted.

A silver Mercedes was parked a short distance away, around the corner in Electric Lane.

“Where did you take Deeby when he arrived?” Strike asked Kolovas-Jones, as they approached the car.

“He wanted a club, so I took him to Barrack.”

“What time did you get him there?”

“I dunno…half eleven? Quarter to twelve? He was wired. Didn’t want to sleep, he said.”

“Why Barrack?”

“Friday night at Barrack’s best hip-hop night in London,” said Kolovas-Jones, on a slight laugh, as though this was common knowledge. “And he musta liked it, ’cause it was gone three by the time he came out again.”

“So did you drive him to Kentigern Gardens and find the police there, or…?”

“I’d already heard on the car radio what had happened,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I told Deeby when he got back to the car. His entourage all started making phone calls, waking up people at the record company, trying to make other arrangements. They got him a suite at Claridges; I drove him there. I didn’t get home till gone five. Switched on the news and watched it all on Sky. Fucking unbelievable.”

“I’ve been wondering who let the paparazzi staking out number eighteen know that Deeby wasn’t going to be there for hours. Someone tipped them off; that’s why they’d left the street before Lula fell.”

“Yeah? I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones.

He increased his pace very slightly, reaching the car ahead of the other two and unlocking it.

“Didn’t Macc have a load of luggage with him? Was it in the car with you?”

“Nah, it’d all been sent ahead by the record company days before. He got off the plane with just a carry-on bag—and about ten security people.”