The Cuckoo's Calling(88)

Somé smoked for a moment in silence, his eyes on the wall of photographs. Strike asked:

“Where do you live? Around here?” though he knew the answer.

“No, I’m in Charles Street, in Kensington,” said Somé. “Moved there last year. It’s a long f*cking way from Hackney, I can tell you, but it was getting silly, I had to leave. Too much hassle. I grew up in Hackney,” he explained, “back when I was plain old Kevin Owusu. I changed my name when I left home. Like you.”

“I was never Rokeby,” said Strike, flicking over a page in his notebook. “My parents weren’t married.”

“We all know that, dear,” said Somé, with another flash of malice. “I dressed your old man for a Rolling Stone shoot last year: skinny suit and broken bowler. D’you see him much?”

“No,” said Strike.

“No, well, you’d make him look f*cking old, wouldn’t you?” said Somé, with a cackle. He fidgeted in his seat, lit yet another cigarette, clamped it between his lips and squinted at Strike through billows of menthol smoke.

“Why are we talking about me, anyway? Do people usually start telling you their life stories when you get out that notebook?”

“Sometimes.”

“Don’t you want your tea? I don’t blame you. I don’t know why I drink this shit. My old dad would have a coronary if he asked for a cup of tea and got this.”

“Is your family still in Hackney?”

“I haven’t checked,” said Somé. “We don’t talk. I practice what I preach, see?”

“Why do you think Lula changed her name?”

“Because she hated her f*cking family, same as me. She didn’t want to be associated with them anymore.”

“Why choose the same name as her Uncle Tony, then?”

“He’s not famous. It made a good name. Deeby couldn’t have written ‘Double L U B Mine’ if she’d been Lula Bristow, could he?”

“Charles Street isn’t too far from Kentigern Gardens, is it?”

“About a twenty-minute walk. I wanted Cuckoo to move in with me when she said she couldn’t stand her old place anymore, but she wouldn’t; she chose that f*cking five-star prison instead, just to get away from the press. They drove her into that place. They bear responsibility.”

Strike remembered Deeby Macc: The motherf*ckin’ press chased her out that window.

“She took me to see it. Mayfair, full of rich Russians and Arabs and bastards like Freddie Bestigui. I said to her, sweetie, you can’t live here; marble everywhere, marble isn’t chic in our climate…it’s like living in your own tomb…”

He faltered, then went on:

“She’d been through this head-f*ck for a few months. There’d been a stalker who was hand-delivering letters through her front door at three in the morning; she kept getting woken up by the letter box going. The things he said he wanted to do to her, it scared her. Then she split up with Duffield, and she had the paps round the front of her house all the bloody time. Then she finds out they’re hacking all her calls. And then she had to go and find that bitch of a mother. It was all getting too much. She wanted to be away from it all, to feel secure. I told her to move in with me, but instead she went and bought that f*cking mausoleum.

“She took it because it felt like a fortress with the round-the-clock security. She thought she’d be safe from everyone, that nobody would be able to get at her.

“But she hated it from the word go. I knew she would. She was cut off from everything she liked. Cuckoo loved color and noise. She liked being on the street, she liked walking, being free.

“One of the reasons the police said it wasn’t murder was the open windows. She’d opened them herself; it was only her prints on the handles. But I know why she opened them. She always opened the windows, even when it was freezing cold, because she couldn’t stand the silence. She liked being able to hear London.”

Somé’s voice had lost all its slyness and sarcasm. He cleared his throat and went on:

“She was trying to connect with something real; we used to talk about it all the time. It was our big thing. That’s what made her get involved with bloody Rochelle. It was a case of ‘there but for the grace of God.’ Cuckoo thought that’s what she’d have been, if she hadn’t been beautiful; if the Bristows hadn’t taken her in as a little plaything for Yvette.”

“Tell me about this stalker.”

“Mental case. He thought they were married or something. He was given a restraining order and compulsory psychiatric treatment.”

“Any idea where he is now?”

“I think he was deported back to Liverpool,” said Somé. “But the police checked him out; they told me he was in a secure ward up there the night she died.”

“Do you know the Bestiguis?”

“Only what Lula told me, that he was sleazy and she’s a walking waxwork. I don’t need to know her. I know her type. Rich girls spending their ugly husbands’ money. They come to my shows. They want to be my friend. Gimme an honest hooker any day.”

“Freddie Bestigui was at the same country-house weekend as Lula, a week before she died.”

“Yeah, I heard. He had a hard-on for her,” said Somé dismissively. “She knew it, as well; it wasn’t exactly a unique experience in her life, you know. He never got further than trying to get in the same lift, though, from what she told me.”