The Cuckoo's Calling(76)

“I always come in Redbourne Street entrance,” she told him five minutes later, after he had given a garbled and fictitious account of the way he had found her. “I come out this way ’cause I was gonna go to McDonald’s.”

So that was where they went. Strike bought two coffees and two large cookies, and carried them to the window table where Rochelle was waiting, curious and suspicious.

She was uncompromisingly plain. Her greasy skin, which was the color of burned earth, was covered in acne pustules and pits; her small eyes were deep-set and her teeth were crooked and rather yellow. The chemically straightened hair showed four inches of black roots, then six inches of harsh, coppery wire-red. Her tight, too-short jeans, her shiny gray handbag and her bright white trainers looked cheap. However, the squashy fake-fur jacket, garish and unflattering though Strike found it, was of a different quality altogether: fully lined, as he saw when she took it off, with a patterned silk, and bearing the label not (as he had expected, remembering Lula Landry’s email to the designer) of Guy Somé, but of an Italian of whom even Strike had heard.

“You sure you inna journalist?” she asked, in her low, husky voice.

Strike had already spent some time outside the hospital trying to establish his bona fides in this respect.

“No, I’m not a journalist. Like I said, I know Lula’s brother.”

“You a friend of his?”

“Yeah. Well, not exactly a friend. He’s hired me. I’m a private detective.”

She was instantly, openly scared.

“Whaddayuhwanna talk to me for?”

“There’s nothing to worry about…”

“Whyd’yuhwanna talk to me, though?”

“It’s nothing bad. John isn’t sure that Lula committed suicide, that’s all.”

He guessed that the only thing keeping her in the seat was her terror of the construction he might put on instant flight. Her fear was out of all proportion to his manner or words.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he assured her again. “John wants me to take another look at the circumstances, that’s—”

“Does ’e say I’ve got something to do wiv ’er dying?”

“No, of course not. I’m just hoping you might be able to tell me about her state of mind, what she got up to in the lead-up to her death. You saw her regularly, didn’t you? I thought you might be able to tell me what was going on in her life.”

Rochelle made as though to speak, then changed her mind and attempted to drink her scalding coffee instead.

“So, what—’er brother’s trying to make out she never killed ’erself? What, like she was pushed out the window?”

“He thinks it’s possible.”

She seemed to be trying to fathom something, to work it out in her head.

“I don’t ’ave to talk to you. You ain’t real police.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But wouldn’t you like to help find out what—”

“She jumped,” declared Rochelle Onifade firmly.

“What makes you so sure?” asked Strike.

“I jus’ know.”

“It seems to have come as a shock to nearly everyone else she knew.”

“She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus’ takes you over. It’s an illness,” she said, although she made the words sound like “it’s uh nillness.”

Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. He had slept badly. Nillness, that was where Lula Landry had gone, and where all of them, he and Rochelle included, were headed. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow’s mother…sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.

He was sure that if he took out his notebook, she would clam up, or leave. He therefore continued to ask questions as casually as he could manage, asking her how she had come to attend the clinic, how she had first met Lula.

Still immensely suspicious, she gave monosyllabic answers at first, but slowly, gradually, she became more forthcoming. Her own history was pitiful. Early abuse, care, severe mental illness, foster homes and violent outbursts culminating, at sixteen, in homelessness. She had secured proper treatment as the indirect result of being hit by a car. Hospitalized when her bizarre behavior had made treating her physical wounds nearly impossible, a psychiatrist had at last been called in. She was on drugs now, which, when she took them, greatly eased her symptoms. Strike found it pathetic, and touching, that the outpatient clinic where she had met Lula Landry seemed to have become, for Rochelle, the highlight of her week. She spoke with some affection of the young psychiatrist who ran the group.

“So that’s where you met Lula?”

“Di’n’t her brother tell ya?”

“He was vague on the details.”

“Yeah, she come to our group. She wuz referred.”

“And you got talking?”

“Yeah.”

“You became friends?”

“Yeah.”

“You visited her at home? Swam in the pool?”

“Why shou’n’t I?”

“No reason. I’m only asking.”

She thawed very slightly.