The Cuckoo's Calling(38)
While he walked, traffic rumbling past him, he remembered Sundays in Cornwall in his childhood, when everything closed down except the church and the beach. Sunday had had a particular flavor in those days; an echoing, whispering quiet, the gentle chink of china and the smell of gravy, the TV as dull as the empty high street, and the relentless rush of the waves on the beach when he and Lucy had run down on to the shingle, forced back on to primitive resources.
His mother had once said to him: “If Joan’s right, and I end up in hell, it’ll be eternal Sunday in bloody St. Mawes.”
Strike, who was heading away from the commercial center towards the Thames, phoned his client as he walked.
“John Bristow?”
“Yeah, sorry to disturb you at the weekend, John…”
“Cormoran?” said Bristow, immediately friendly. “Not a problem, not a problem at all! How did it go with Wilson?”
“Very good, very useful, thanks. I wanted to know whether you can help me find a friend of Lula’s. It’s a girl she met in therapy. Her Christian name begins with an R—something like Rachel or Raquelle—and she was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith when Lula died. Does that ring any bells?”
There was a moment’s silence. When Bristow spoke again, the disappointment in his voice verged on annoyance.
“What do you want to speak to her for? Tansy’s quite clear that the voice she heard from upstairs was male.”
“I’m not interested in this girl as a suspect, but as a witness. Lula had an appointment to meet her at a shop, Vashti, right after she saw you at your mother’s flat.”
“Yeah, I know; that came out at the inquest. I mean—well, of course, you know your job, but—I don’t really see how she would know anything about what happened that night. Listen—wait a moment, Cormoran…I’m at my mother’s and there are other people here…need to find a quieter spot…”
Strike heard the sounds of movement, a murmured “Excuse me,” and Bristow came back on the line.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to say all this in front of the nurse. Actually, I thought, when you rang, you might be someone else calling up to talk to me about Duffield. Everybody I know has rung to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“You obviously don’t read the News of the World. It’s all there, complete with pictures: Duffield turned up to visit my mother yesterday, out of the blue. Photographers outside the house; it caused a lot of inconvenience and upset with the neighbors. I was out with Alison, or I’d never have let him in.”
“What did he want?”
“Good question. Tony, my uncle, thinks it was money—but Tony usually thinks people are after money; anyway, I’ve got power of attorney, so there was nothing doing there. God knows why he came. The one small mercy is that Mum doesn’t seem to have realized who he is. She’s on immensely strong painkillers.”
“How did the press find out he was coming?”
“That,” said Bristow, “is an excellent question. Tony thinks he phoned them himself.”
“How is your mother?”
“Poorly, very poorly. They say she could hang on for weeks, or—or it could happen at any moment.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Strike. He raised his voice as he passed underneath a flyover, across which traffic was moving noisily. “Well, if you do happen to remember the name of Lula’s Vashti friend…”
“I’m afraid I still don’t really understand why you’re so interested in her.”
“Lula made this girl travel all the way from Hammersmith to Notting Hill, spent fifteen minutes with her and then walked out. Why didn’t she stay? Why meet for such a short space of time? Did they argue? Anything out of the ordinary that happens around a sudden death could be relevant.”
“I see,” said Bristow hesitantly. “But…well, that sort of behavior wasn’t really out of the ordinary for Lula. I did tell you that she could be a bit…a bit selfish. It would be like her to think that a token appearance would keep the girl happy. She often had these brief enthusiasms for people, you know, and then dropped them.”
His disappointment at Strike’s chosen line of inquiry was so evident that the detective felt it might be politic to slip in a little covert justification of the immense fee his client was paying.
“The other reason I was calling was to let you know that tomorrow evening I’m meeting one of the CID officers who covered the case. Eric Wardle. I’m hoping to get hold of the police file.”
“Fantastic!” Bristow sounded impressed. “That’s quick work!”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got good contacts in the Met.”
“Then you’ll be able to get some answers about the Runner! You’ve read my notes?”
“Yeah, very useful,” said Strike.
“And I’m trying to fix up a lunch with Tansy Bestigui this week, so you can meet her and hear her testimony first hand. I’ll ring your secretary, shall I?”
“Great.”
There was this to be said for having an underworked secretary he could not afford, Strike thought, once he had rung off: it gave a professional impression.
St. Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless turned out to be situated right behind the noisy concrete flyover. A plain, ill-proportioned and contemporaneous cousin of Lula’s Mayfair house, red brick with humbler, grubby white facings; no stone steps, no garden, no elegant neighbors, but a chipped door opening directly on to the street, peeling paint on the window ledges and a forlorn air. The utilitarian modern world had encroached until it sat huddled and miserable, out of synch with its surroundings, the flyover a mere twenty yards away, so that the upper windows looked directly out upon the concrete barriers and the endlessly passing cars. An unmistakably institutional flavor was given by the large silver buzzer and speaker beside the door, and the unapologetically ugly black camera, with its dangling wires, that hung from the lintel in a wire cage.