The Cuckoo's Calling(79)

Takin’ Deeby lightly, better buy an early tombstone,

I’m drivin’ my Ferrari—f*ck Johari—got my head on straight

Nothin’ talks like money talks—I’m shoutin’ at ya, Mister Jake.



She looked proud, as though she had put him firmly in his place, with no retort possible.

“Tha’s from ‘Hydroquinone,’ ” she said. “On Jake On My Jack.”

“What’s hydroquinone?” Strike asked.

“Skin light’ner. We usedta rap that with the car windows down,” said Rochelle. A warm, reminiscent smile lit her face out of plainness.

“Lula was looking forward to meeting Deeby Macc, then, was she?”

“Yeah, she wuz,” said Rochelle. “She knew ’e liked ’er, she wuz pleased with herself about that. Kieran wuz proper excited an’ all, he kep’ askin’ Lula to introduce him. He wanted to meet Deeby.”

Her smile faded; she picked morosely at her burger, then said:

“Is that all you wanna know, then? ’Cause I gotta go.”

She began wolfing the remnants of her meal, cramming food into her mouth.

“Lula must have taken you to a lot of places, did she?”

“Yeah,” said Rochelle, her mouth full of burger.

“Did you go to Uzi with her?”

“Yeah. Once.”

She swallowed, and began to talk about the other places she had seen during the early phase of her friendship with Lula, which (in spite of Rochelle’s determined attempts to repudiate any suggestion that she had been dazzled by the lifestyle of a multimillionairess) had all the romance of a fairy tale. Lula had snatched Rochelle away from the bleak world of her hostel and group therapy and swept her, once a week, into a whirl of expensive fun. Strike noted how very little Rochelle had told him about Lula the person, as opposed to Lula the holder of the magic plastic cards that bought handbags, jackets and jewelry, and the necessary means by which Kieran appeared regularly, like a genie, to whisk Rochelle away from her hostel. She described, in loving detail, the presents Lula had bought her, shops to which Lula had taken her, restaurants and bars to which they had gone together, places lined with celebrities. None of these, however, seemed to have impressed Rochelle in the slightest; for every name she mentioned there was a deprecating remark:

“ ’E wuz a dick.” “She’s plastic all over.” “They ain’t nuthing special.”

“Did you meet Evan Duffield?” Strike asked.

“ ’Im.” The monosyllable was heavy with contempt. “ ’E’s a twat.”

“Is he?”

“Yeah, ’e is. Ask Kieran.”

She gave the impression that she and Kieran stood together, sane, dispassionate observers of the idiots populating Lula’s world.

“In what way was he a twat?”

“ ’E treated ’er like shit.”

“Like how?”

“Sold stories,” said Rochelle, reaching for the last of her fries. “One time she tested ev’ryone. Told us all a diff’rent story to see which ones got in the papers. I wuz the only one who kep’ their mouf shut, ev’ryone else blabbed.”

“Who’d she test?”

“Ciara Porter. ’Im, Duffield. That Guy Summy,” Rochelle pronounced his first name to rhyme with “die,” “but then she reckoned it wasn’t ’im. Made excuses for ’im. But ’e used ’er as much as anyone.”

“In what way?”

“He di’n’t want ’er to work for anyone else. Wanted ’er to do it all for ’is company, get ’im all the publicity.”

“So, after she’d found out she could trust you…”

“Yeah, then she bought me the phone.”

There was a missed beat.

“So she cud get in touch wiv me whenever she wanted.”

She swept the sparkling pink Nokia suddenly off the table and stuffed it deep into the pocket of her squashy pink coat.

“I suppose you’ve had to take over the charges yourself now?” Strike asked.

He thought that she was going to tell him to mind his own business, but instead she said:

“ ’Er family ’asn’t noticed they’re still payin’ for it.”

And this thought seemed to give her a slightly malicious pleasure.

“Did Lula buy you that jacket?” Strike asked.

“No,” she snapped, furiously defensive. “I got this myself, I’m working now.”

“Really? Where are you working?”

“Whut’s it to you?” she demanded again.

“I’m showing polite interest.”

A tiny, brief smile touched the wide mouth, and she relented again.

“I’m doing afternoons in a shop up the road from my new place.”

“Are you in another hostel?”

“No,” she said, and he sensed again the digging in, the refusal to go further that he would push at his peril. He changed tack.

“It must have been a shock to you when Lula died, was it?”

“Yeah. It wuz,” she said, thoughtlessly; then, realizing what she had said, she backtracked. “I knew she wuz depressed, but you never ’spect people tuh do that.”