The Cuckoo's Calling(56)

Yawning, Strike lit another cigarette to keep himself awake, and began to read the statement of Lula’s mother. By Lady Yvette Bristow’s own account, she had been drowsy and unwell in the aftermath of her operation; but she insisted that her daughter had been “perfectly happy” when she came to visit that morning, and had evinced nothing but concern for her mother’s condition and prospects of recovery. Perhaps the blunt, unnuanced prose of the recording officer was to blame, but Strike took from Lady Bristow’s recollections the impression of a determined denial. She alone suggested that Lula’s death had been an accident, that she had somehow slipped over the balcony without meaning to; it had been, said Lady Bristow, an icy night.

Strike skim-read Bristow’s statement, which tallied in all respects with the account he had given Strike in person, and proceeded to that of Tony Landry, John and Lula’s uncle. He had visited Yvette Bristow at the same time as Lula on the day before the latter’s death, and asserted that his niece had seemed “normal.” Landry had then driven to Oxford, where he had attended a conference on international developments in family law, staying overnight in the Malmaison Hotel. His account of his whereabouts was followed by some incomprehensible comments about telephone calls. Strike turned, for elucidation, to the annotated copies of phone records.

Lula had barely used her landline in the week prior to her death, and not at all on the day before she died. From her mobile, however, she had made no fewer than sixty-six calls on her last day of life. The first, at 9:15 in the morning, had been to Evan Duffield; the second, at 9:35, to Ciara Porter. There followed a gap of hours, in which she had spoken to nobody on the mobile, and then, at 1:21, she had begun a positive frenzy of telephoning two numbers, almost alternately. One of these was Duffield’s; the other belonged, according to the crabbed scribble beside the number’s first appearance, to Tony Landry. Again and again she had telephoned these two men. Here and there were gaps of twenty minutes or so, during which she made no calls; then she would begin telephoning again, doubtless hitting “redial.” All of this frenetic calling, Strike deduced, must have taken place once she was back in her flat with Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter, though neither of the two women’s statements made mention of repeated telephoning.

Strike turned back to Tony Landry’s statement, which cast no light on the reason his niece had been so anxious to contact him. He had turned off the sound on his mobile while at the conference, he said, and had not realized until much later that his niece had called him repeatedly that afternoon. He had no idea why she had done so and had not called her back, giving as his reason that by the time he realized that she had been trying to reach him, she had stopped calling, and he had guessed, correctly as it turned out, that she would be in a nightclub somewhere.

Strike was now yawning every few minutes; he considered making himself coffee, but could not muster the energy. Wanting his bed, but driven on by habit to complete the job in hand, he turned to the copies of security logbook pages showing the entrances and exits of visitors to number 18 on the day preceding Lula Landry’s death. A careful perusal of signatures and initials revealed that Wilson had not been as meticulous in his record-keeping as his employers might have hoped. As Wilson had already told Strike, the movements of the building’s residents were not recorded in the book; so the comings and goings of Landry and the Bestiguis were missing. The first entry Wilson had made was for the postman, at 9:10; next, at 9:22, came Florist delivery Flat 2; finally, at 9:50, Securibell. No time of departure was marked for the alarm checker.

Otherwise it had been (as Wilson had said) a quiet day. Ciara Porter had arrived at 12:50; Bryony Radford at 1:20. While Radford’s departure was recorded with her own signature at 4:40, Wilson had added the entrance of caterers to the Bestiguis’ flat at 7, Ciara’s exit with Lula at 7:15 and the departure of the caterers at 9:15.

It frustrated Strike that the only page that the police had photocopied was the day before Landry’s death, because he had hoped that he might find the surname of the elusive Rochelle somewhere in the entrance log’s pages.

It was nearly midnight when Strike turned his attention to the police report on the contents of Landry’s laptop. They appeared to have been searching, principally, for emails indicating suicidal mood or intent, and in this respect they had been unsuccessful. Strike scanned the emails Landry had sent and received in the last two weeks of her life.

It was strange, but nevertheless true, that the countless photographs of her otherworldly beauty had made it harder rather than easier for Strike to believe that Landry had ever really existed. The ubiquity of her features had made them seem abstract, generic, even if the face itself had been uniquely beautiful.

Now, however, out of these dry black marks on paper, out of erratically spelled messages littered with in-jokes and nicknames, the wraith of the dead girl rose before him in the dark office. Her emails gave him what the multitude of photographs had not: a realization in the gut, rather than the brain, that a real, living, laughing and crying human being had been smashed to death on that snowy London street. He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file’s pages, but instead it was the ghost of Lula herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives.

He saw, now, why John Bristow insisted that his sister had had no thought of death. The girl who had typed out these words emerged as a warmhearted friend, sociable, impulsive, busy and glad to be so; enthusiastic about her job, excited, as Bristow had said, about the prospect of a trip to Morocco.