The Cuckoo's Calling(63)

It was more than nice. Robin stared at her own reflection; she had never worn anything so beautiful in her life. The green dress was magically constructed to shrink her waist to nothingness, to carve her figure into flowing curves, to elongate her pale neck. She was a serpentine goddess in glittering viridian, and the assistants were all murmuring and gasping their appreciation.

“How much?” Robin asked the redhead.

“Two thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine,” said the girl.

“Nothing to him,” said Robin airily, striding out through the curtains to show Strike, whom they found examining a pile of gloves on a circular table.

His only comment on the green dress was “Yeah.” He had barely looked at her.

“Well, maybe it’s not Sandra’s color,” said Robin, with a sudden feeling of embarrassment; Strike was not, after all, her brother or her boyfriend; she had perhaps taken invention too far, parading in front of him in a skintight dress. She retreated into the changing room.

Stripped again to bra and pants she said:

“The last time Sandra was here, Lula Landry was in your café. Sandra said she was gorgeous in the flesh. Even better than in pictures.”

“Oh yeah, she was,” agreed the pink-haired girl, who was clutching to her chest the gold jacket she had fetched. “She used to be in here all the time, we used to see her every week. Do you want to try this?”

“She was in here the day before she died,” said the cotton candy–haired girl, helping Robin to wriggle into the gold jacket. “In this changing room, actually in this one.”

“Really?” said Robin.

“It’s not going to close over the bust, but it looks great open,” said the redhead.

“No, that’s no good, Sandra’s a bit bigger than me, if anything,” said Robin, ruthlessly sacrificing her fictional sister-in-law’s figure. “I’ll try that black dress. Did you say Lula Landry was here actually the day before she died?”

“Oh yeah,” said the girl with pink hair. “It was so sad, really so sad. You heard her, didn’t you, Mel?”

The tattooed redhead, who was holding up a black dress with lace inserts, made an indeterminate noise. Watching her in the mirror, Robin saw no eagerness to talk about what she had, whether deliberately or accidentally, overheard.

“She was speaking to Duffield, wasn’t she, Mel?” prompted the chatty pink-haired girl.

Robin saw Mel frown. Tattoos notwithstanding, Robin had the impression that Mel might well be the other two girls’ senior. She seemed to feel that discretion about what took place in these cream silk tents was part of her job, whereas the other two bubbled with the desire to recount gossip, particularly to a woman who seemed so eager to spend her rich brother’s money.

“It must be impossible not to hear what goes on in these—these tent things,” Robin commented, a little breathlessly, as she was inched into the lacy black dress by the combined efforts of the three assistants.

Mel unbent slightly.

“Yeah, it is. And people just come in here and start mouthing off about whatever they fancy. You can’t help overhearing stuff through this,” she said, pointing towards the stiff curtain of raw silk.

Now heavily constricted in a lace-and-leather straitjacket, Robin gasped:

“You’d think Lula Landry would be a bit more careful, with the press following her around wherever she went.”

“Yeah,” said the redhead. “You would. I mean, I’d never pass on anything I heard, but some people might.”

Disregarding the fact that she had evidently shared whatever she’d heard with her colleagues, Robin expressed appreciation for this rare sense of decency.

“I suppose you had to tell the police, though?” she said, pulling the dress straight and bracing herself for the raising of the zip.

“The police never came here,” said the girl with cotton candy hair, regret in her voice. “I said Mel should have gone and told them what she’d heard, but she didn’t want to.”

“It wasn’t anything,” said Mel, quickly. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. I mean, he wasn’t there, was he? That was proven.”

Strike had moved as close as he dared to the silk curtain, without arousing suspicious looks from the customers and remaining assistants.

Inside the changing cubicle, the pink-haired girl was heaving on the zip. Slowly Robin’s ribcage was compressed by a hidden boned corset. The listening Strike was disconcerted that her next question was almost a groan.

“D’you mean that Evan Duffield wasn’t at her flat when she died?”

“Yeah,” said Mel. “So it didn’t matter what she was saying to him earlier, did it? He wasn’t there.”

The four women considered Robin’s reflection for a moment.

“I don’t think,” said Robin, observing the way that two thirds of her breasts were squashed flat by the straining material, while the upper slopes overflowed the neckline, “Sandra’s going to fit into this. But don’t you think,” she said, breathing more freely as the cotton candy–haired girl unzipped her, “you ought to have told the police what she said, and let them decide whether it was important?”

“I said that, Mel, didn’t I?” crowed the pink-haired girl. “I told her that.”