The Cuckoo's Calling(51)

Ursula was watching Bristow through the window; he was standing on the pavement, talking hard into his mobile as he paced up and down. Her tongue properly loosened now, she said:

“I bet I know what that’s about. Conway Oates’s executors are making a fuss about how the firm handled his affairs. He was the American financier, you know? Cyprian and Tony are in a real bait about it, making John fly around trying to smooth things over. John always gets the shitty end of the stick.”

Her tone was more scathing than sympathetic.

Bristow returned to the table, looking flustered.

“Sorry, sorry, Alison just wanted to give me some messages,” he said.

The waiter came to collect their plates. Strike was the only one who had cleared his. When the waiter was out of earshot, Strike said:

“Tansy, the police disregarded your evidence because they didn’t think you could have heard what you claimed to have heard.”

“Well they were wrong, weren’t they?” she snapped, her good humor gone in a trice. “I did hear it.”

“Through a closed window?”

“It was open,” she said, meeting none of her companions’ eyes. “It was stuffy, I opened one of the windows on the way to get water.”

Strike was sure that pressing her on the point would only lead to her refusing to answer any other questions.

“They also allege that you’d taken cocaine.”

Tansy made a little noise of impatience, a soft “cuh.”

“Look,” she said, “I had some earlier, during dinner, OK, and they found it in the bathroom when they looked around the flat. The f*cking boredom of the Dunnes. Anyone would have done a couple of lines to get through Benjy Dunne’s bloody anecdotes. But I didn’t imagine that voice upstairs. A man was there, and he killed her. He killed her,” repeated Tansy, glaring at Strike.

“And where do you think he went afterwards?”

“I don’t know, do I? That’s what John’s paying you to find out. He sneaked out somehow. Maybe he climbed out the back window. Maybe he hid in the lift. Maybe he went out through the car park downstairs. I don’t bloody know how he got out, I just know he was there.”

“We believe you,” interjected Bristow anxiously. “We believe you, Tansy. Cormoran needs to ask these questions to—to get a clear picture of how it all happened.”

“The police did everything they could to discredit me,” said Tansy, disregarding Bristow and addressing Strike. “They got there too late, and he’d already gone, so of course they covered it up. No one who hasn’t been through what I went through with the press can understand what it was like. It was absolute bloody hell. I went into the clinic just to get away from it all. I can’t believe it’s legal, what the press are allowed to do in this country; and all for telling the truth, that’s the bloody joke. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t I? I would have, if I’d known what was coming.”

She twisted her loose diamond ring around her finger.

“Freddie was asleep in bed when Lula fell, wasn’t he?” Strike asked Tansy.

“Yah, that’s right,” she said.

Her hand slid up to her face and she smoothed nonexistent strands of hair off her forehead. The waiter returned with menus again, and Strike was forced to hold back his questions until they had ordered. He was the only one to ask for pudding; all the rest had coffee.

“When did Freddie get out of bed?” he asked Tansy, when the waiter had left.

“What do you mean?”

“You say he was in bed when Lula fell; when did he get up?”

“When he heard me screaming,” she said, as though this was obvious. “I woke him up, didn’t I?”

“He must have moved quickly.”

“Why?”

“You said: ‘I ran out of the flat, past Freddie, and downstairs.’ So he was already in the room before you ran out to tell Derrick what had happened?”

A missed beat.

“That’s right,” she said, smoothing her immaculate hair again, shielding her face.

“So he went from fast asleep in bed, to awake and in the sitting room, within seconds? Because you started screaming and running pretty much instantaneously, from what you said?”

Another infinitesimal pause.

“Yah,” she said. “Well—I don’t know. I think I screamed—I screamed while I was frozen on the spot—for a moment, maybe—I was just so shocked—and Freddie came running out of the bedroom, and then I ran past him.”

“Did you stop to tell him what you’d seen?”

“I can’t remember.”

Bristow looked as though he was about to stage one of his untimely interventions again. Strike held up a hand to forestall him; but Tansy plunged off on another tack, eager, he guessed, to leave the subject of her husband.

“I’ve thought and thought about how the killer got in, and I’m sure he must have followed her inside when she came in that morning, because of Derrick Wilson leaving his desk and being in the bathroom. I thought Wilson ought to have been bloody sacked for it, actually. If you ask me, he was having a sneaky sleep in the back room. I don’t know how the killer would have known the key code, but I’m sure that’s when he must have got in.”