The Cuckoo's Calling(66)

“Unfortunate choice of phrase, but I see what you mean,” said Strike, writing Bristow off rocker. “How exactly has John been tipped over the edge?”

“Well, many would say that instigating this reinvestigation is irrational and pointless,” said Landry.

Strike kept his pen poised over the notepad. For a moment, Landry’s jaws moved as though he was chewing; then he said forcefully:

“Lula was a manic depressive who jumped out of the window after a row with her junkie boyfriend. There is no mystery. It was goddamn awful for all of us, especially her poor bloody mother, but those are the unsavory facts. I’m forced to the conclusion that John is having some kind of breakdown, and, if you don’t mind me speaking frankly…”

“Feel free.”

“…your collusion is perpetuating his unhealthy refusal to accept the truth.”

“Which is that Lula killed herself?”

“A view that is shared by the police, the pathologist and the coroner. John, for reasons that are obscure to me, is determined to prove murder. How he thinks that will make any of us feel any better, I could not tell you.”

“Well,” said Strike, “people close to suicides often feel guilty. They think, however unreasonably, that they might have done more to help. A murder verdict would exonerate the family of any blame, wouldn’t it?”

“None of us has anything to feel guilty about,” said Landry, his tone steely. “Lula received the very best medical care from her early teens, and every material advantage her adoptive family could give her. ‘Spoiled rotten’ might be the phrase best suited to describe my adopted niece, Mr. Strike. Her mother would have literally died for her, and scant repayment she ever received.”

“You thought Lula ungrateful, did you?”

“There’s no need to bloody write that down. Or are those notes destined for some tawdry rag?”

Strike was interested in how completely Landry had jettisoned the suavity he had brought to the table. The waitress arrived with Landry’s food. He did not thank her, but glared at Strike until she had passed on. Then he said:

“You’re poking around where you can only do harm. I was stunned, frankly, when I found out what John was up to. Stunned.”

“Hadn’t he expressed doubts about the suicide theory to you?”

“He’d expressed shock, naturally, like all of us, but I certainly don’t recall any suggestion of murder.”

“Are you close to your nephew, Mr. Landry?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“It might explain why he didn’t tell you what he was thinking.”

“John and I have a perfectly amicable working relationship.”

“ ‘Working relationship’?”

“Yes, Mr. Strike: we work together. Do we live in each other’s pockets outside the office? No. But we are both involved in caring for my sister—Lady Bristow, John’s mother, who is now a terminal case. Our out-of-hours conversations usually concern Yvette.”

“John strikes me as a dutiful son.”

“Yvette’s all he has left now, and the fact that she’s dying isn’t helping his mental condition either.”

“She’s hardly all he’s got left. There’s Alison, isn’t there?”

“I am not aware that that is a very serious relationship.”

“Perhaps one of John’s motives, in employing me, is a desire to give his mother the truth before she dies?”

“The truth won’t help Yvette. Nobody enjoys accepting that they have reaped what they have sown.”

Strike said nothing. As he had expected, the lawyer could not resist the temptation to clarify, and after a moment he continued:

“Yvette has always been morbidly maternal. She adores babies.” He spoke as though this was faintly disgusting, a kind of perversion. “She would have been one of those embarrassing women who have twenty children if she could have found a man of sufficient virility. Thank God Alec was sterile—or hasn’t John mentioned that?”

“He told me Sir Alec Bristow wasn’t his natural father, if that’s what you mean.”

If Landry was disappointed not to be first with the information, he rallied at once.

“Yvette and Alec adopted the two boys, but she had no idea how to manage them. She is, quite simply, an atrocious mother. No control, no discipline; complete overindulgence and a point-blank refusal to see what is under her nose. I don’t say it was all down to her parenting—who knows what the genetic influences were—but John was whiny, histrionic and clingy and Charlie was completely delinquent, with the result—”

Landry stopped talking abruptly, patches of color high in his cheeks.

“With the result that he rode over the edge of a quarry?” Strike suggested.

He had said it to watch Landry’s reaction, and was not disappointed. He had the impression of a tunnel contracting, a distant door closing: a shutting down.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. And it was a bit late, then, for Yvette to start screaming and clawing at Alec, and passing out cold on the floor. If she’d had an iota of control, the boy wouldn’t have set out expressly to defy her. I was there,” said Landry, stonily. “On a weekend visit. Easter Sunday. I had been for a walk down to the village, and I came back to find them all looking for him. I headed straight for the quarry. I knew, you see. It was the place he’d been forbidden to go—so there he was.”