The Cuckoo's Calling(78)

“Yeah. More uh less,” said Rochelle.

“Kieran says they usually gave you a lift home after you’d been out together.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well. She wuz too busy that day, weren’ she?”

Rochelle did a poor job of masking her resentment.

“Talk me through what happened in the shop. Did either of you try anything on?”

“Yeah,” said Rochelle, after a pause. “She did.” Another hesitation. “Long Alexander McQueen dress. He killed hiself and all,” she added, in a distant voice.

“Did you go into the changing room with her?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened in the changing room?” prompted Strike.

Her eyes reminded him of those of a bull he had once come face to face with as a small boy: deep-set, deceptively stoic, unfathomable.

“She put on the dress,” said Rochelle.

“She didn’t do anything else? Didn’t call anyone?”

“No. Well, yeah. She mighta.”

“D’you know who she called?”

“I can’t remember.”

She drank, obscuring her face again with the paper cup.

“Was it Evan Duffield?”

“It mighta bin.”

“Can you remember what she said?”

“No.”

“One of the shop assistants overheard her, while she was on the phone. She seemed to be making an appointment to meet someone at her flat much later. In the early hours of the morning, the girl thought.”

“Yeah?”

“So that doesn’t seem like it could have been Duffield, does it, seeing as she already had an arrangement to meet him at Uzi?”

“Know a lot, don’t you?” she said.

“Everyone knows they met at Uzi that night,” said Strike. “It was in all the papers.”

The dilating or contracting of Rochelle’s pupils would be almost impossible to see, because of the virtually black irises surrounding them.

“Yeah, I s’pose,” she conceded.

“Was it Deeby Macc?”

“No!” She yelped it on a laugh. “She din’ know his number.”

“Famous people can nearly always get each other’s numbers,” said Strike.

Rochelle’s expression clouded. She glanced down at the blank screen on her gaudy pink mobile.

“I don’ think she had his,” she said.

“But you heard her trying to make an arrangement to meet someone in the small hours?”

“No,” said Rochelle, avoiding his eyes, swilling the dregs of her coffee around the paper cup. “I can’ remember nuthin’ like that.”

“You understand how important this could be?” said Strike, careful to keep his tone unthreatening. “If Lula made an arrangement to meet someone at the time she died? The police never knew about this, did they? You never told them?”

“I gotta go,” she said, throwing down the last morsel of cookie, grabbing the strap of her cheap handbag and glaring at him.

Strike said:

“It’s nearly lunchtime. Can I buy you anything else?”

“No.”

But she did not move. He wondered how poor she was, whether she ate regularly or not. There was something about her, beneath the surliness, that he found touching: a fierce pride, a vulnerability.

“Yeah, all right then,” she said, dropping her handbag and slumping back on to the hard chair. “I’ll have a Big Mac.”

He was afraid she might leave while he was at the counter, but when he returned with two trays, she was still there; she even thanked him grudgingly.

Strike tried a different tack.

“You know Kieran quite well, do you?” he asked, pursuing the glow that had illuminated her at the mention of his name.

“Yeah,” she said, self-consciously. “I met him a lot with ’er. ’E wuz always driving ’er.”

“He says that Lula was writing something in the back of the car, before she arrived at Vashti. Did she show you, or give you, anything she’d written?”

“No,” she said. She crammed fries into her mouth and then said, “I ain’t seen nuthin like that. Why, what was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it were a shopping list or something?”

“Yeah, that’s what the police thought. You’re sure you didn’t notice her carrying a bit of paper, a letter, an envelope?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Kieran know you’re meeting me?” asked Rochelle.

“Yeah, I told him you were on my list. He told me you used to live at St. Elmo’s.”

This seemed to please her.

“Where are you living now?”

“What’s it to you?” she demanded, suddenly fierce.

“It’s nothing to me. I’m just making polite conversation.”

This drew a small snort from Rochelle.

“I got my own place in Hammersmith now.”

She chewed for a while and then, for the first time, proffered unsolicited information.

“We usedta listen to Deeby Macc in his car. Me, Kieran and Lula.”

And she began to rap:

No hydroquinone, black to the backbone,