The Cuckoo's Calling(43)

“I’m not after it either way,” said Strike. “I’m just asking what you know about Runner Two.”

“Muffled up to the eyeballs, like his mate; all you could see were his hands. If I’d been him, and had a guilty conscience about the Maserati, I’d have holed up in a bar and exited with a bunch of other people; there’s a place called Bojo’s off Halliwell Street he could’ve gone and mingled with the punters. We checked,” Wardle said, forestalling Strike’s question. “Nobody recognized him from the footage.”

They drank for a moment in silence.

“Even if we’d found them,” said Wardle, setting down his glass, “the most we could’ve got from them is an eyewitness account of her jumping. There wasn’t any unexplained DNA in her flat. Nobody had been in that place who shouldn’t have been in there.”

“It isn’t just the CCTV footage that’s giving Bristow ideas,” said Strike. “He’s been seeing a bit of Tansy Bestigui.”

“Don’t talk to me about Tansy f*cking Bestigui,” said Wardle irritably.

“I’m going to have to mention her, because my client reckons she’s telling the truth.”

“Still at it, is she? Still hasn’t given it up? I’ll tell you about Mrs. Bestigui, shall I?”

“Go on,” said Strike, one hand wrapped around the beer at his chest.

“Carver and I got to the scene about twenty, twenty-five minutes after Landry hit the road. Uniformed police were already there. Tansy Bestigui was still going strong with the hysterics when we saw her, gibbering and shaking and screaming that there was a murderer in the building.

“Her story was that she got up out of bed around two and went for a pee in the bathroom; she heard shouting from two flats above and saw Landry’s body fall past the window.

“Now, the windows in those flats are triple-glazed or something. They’re designed to keep the heat and the air conditioning in, and the noise of the hoi polloi out. By the time we were interviewing her, the street below was full of panda cars and neighbors, but you’d never have known it from up there except for the flashing blue lights. We could’ve been inside a f*cking pyramid for all the noise that got inside that place.

“So I said to her, ‘Are you sure you heard shouting, Mrs. Bestigui? Because this flat seems to be pretty much soundproofed.’

“She wouldn’t back down. Swore she’d heard every word. According to her, Landry screamed something like ‘You’re too late,’ and a man’s voice said, ‘You’re a f*cking liar.’ Auditory hallucinations, they call them,” said Wardle. “You start hearing things when you snort so much coke your brains start dribbling out of your nose.”

He took another long pull on his pint.

“Anyway, we proved beyond doubt she couldn’t have heard it. The Bestiguis moved into a friend’s house the next day to get away from the press, so we put a few blokes in their flat, and a guy up on Landry’s balcony, shouting his head off. The lot on the first floor couldn’t hear a word he was saying, and they were stone-cold sober, and making an effort.

“But while we were proving she was talking shit, Mrs. Bestigui was phoning half of London to tell them she was the sole witness to the murder of Lula Landry. The press were already on to it, because some of the neighbors had heard her screaming about an intruder. Papers had tried and convicted Evan Duffield before we even got back to Mrs. Bestigui.

“We put it to her that we’d now proven she couldn’t have heard what she said she’d heard. Well, she wasn’t ready to admit it had all been in her own head. She’d got a lot riding on it now, with the press swarming outside her front door like she was Lula Landry reborn. So she came back with ‘Oh, didn’t I say? I opened them. Yeah, I opened the windows for a breath of fresh air.’ ”

Wardle gave a scathing laugh.

“Sub-zero outside, and snowing.”

“And she was in her underwear, right?”

“Looking like a rake with two plastic tangerines tied to it,” said Wardle, and the simile came out so easily that Strike was sure he was far from the first to have heard it. “We went ahead and double-checked the new story; we dusted for prints, and right enough, she hadn’t opened the windows. No prints on the latches or anywhere else; the cleaner had done them the morning before Landry died, and hadn’t been in since. As the windows were locked and bolted when we arrived, there’s only one conclusion to be drawn, isn’t there? Mrs. Tansy Bestigui is a f*cking liar.”

Wardle drained his glass.

“Have another one,” said Strike, and he headed for the bar without waiting for an answer.

He noticed Wardle’s curious gaze roaming over his lower legs as he returned to the table. Under different circumstances, he might have banged the prosthesis hard against the table leg, and said “It’s this one.” Instead, he set down two fresh pints and some pork scratchings, which to his irritation were served in a small white ramekin, and continued where they had left off.

“Tansy Bestigui definitely witnessed Landry falling past the window, though, didn’t she? Because Wilson reckons he heard the body fall right before Mrs. Bestigui started screaming.”

“Maybe she saw it, but she wasn’t having a pee. She was doing a couple of lines of charlie in the bathroom. We found it there, cut and ready for her.”