10
ROBIN STOOD SWAYING WITH THE REST of the tightly packed commuters on a northbound Bakerloo Tube train, everyone wearing the tense and doleful expressions appropriate to a Monday morning. She felt the phone in her coat pocket buzz, and extricated it with difficulty, her elbow pressing unpleasantly into some unspecified flabby portion of a suited, bad-breathed man beside her. When she saw that the message was from Strike, she felt momentarily excited, nearly as excited as she had been to see Duffield in the paper yesterday. Then she scrolled down, and read:
Out. Key behind cistern of toilet. Strike.
She did not force the phone back into her pocket, but continued to clutch it as the train rattled on through dark tunnels, and she tried not to breathe in the flabby man’s halitosis. She was disgruntled. The previous day, she and Matthew had eaten lunch, in company with two university friends of Matthew’s, at his favorite gastropub, the Windmill on the Common. When Robin had spotted the picture of Evan Duffield in an open copy of the News of the World at a nearby table, she had made a breathless excuse, right in the middle of one of Matthew’s stories, and hurried outside to text Strike.
Matthew had said, later, that she had shown bad manners, and even worse not to explain what she was up to, in favor of maintaining that ludicrous air of mystery.
Robin gripped the hand strap tightly, and as the train slowed, and her heavy neighbor leaned into her, she felt both a little foolish, and resentful towards the two men, most particularly the detective, who was evidently uninterested in the unusual movements of Lula Landry’s ex-boyfriend.
By the time she had marched through the usual chaos and debris to Denmark Street, extracted the key from behind the cistern as instructed, and been snubbed yet again by a superior-sounding girl in Freddie Bestigui’s office, Robin was in a thoroughly bad temper.
Though he did not know it, Strike was, at that very moment, passing the scene of the most romantic moments of Robin’s life. The steps below the statue of Eros were swarming with Italian teenagers this morning, as Strike went by on the St. James’s side, heading for Glasshouse Street.
The entrance to Barrack, the nightclub which had so pleased Deeby Macc that he had remained there for hours, fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, was only a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. The facade looked as if it was made out of industrial concrete, and the name was picked out in shining black letters, vertically placed. The club extended up over four floors. As Strike had expected, its doorway was surmounted by CCTV cameras, whose range, he thought, would cover most of the street. He walked around the building, noting the fire exits, and making for himself a rough sketch of the area.
After a second long internet session the previous evening, Strike felt that he had a thorough grasp of the subject of Deeby Macc’s publicly declared interest in Lula Landry. The rapper had mentioned the model in the lyrics of three tracks, on two separate albums; he had also spoken about her in interviews as his ideal woman and soul mate. It was difficult to gauge how seriously Macc intended to be taken when he made these comments; allowance had to be made, in all the print interviews Strike had read, firstly for the rapper’s sense of humor, which was both dry and sly, and secondly for the awe tinged with fear every interviewer seemed to feel when confronted with him.
An ex-gang member who had been imprisoned for gun and drug offenses in his native Los Angeles, Macc was now a multimillionaire, with a number of lucrative businesses aside from his recording career. There was no doubt that the press had become “excited,” to use Robin’s word, when news had leaked out that Macc’s record company had rented him the apartment below Lula’s. There had been much rabid speculation as to what might happen when Deeby Macc found himself a floor away from his supposed dream woman, and how this incendiary new element might affect the volatile relationship between Landry and Duffield. These non-stories had all been peppered with undoubtedly spurious comments from friends of both—“He’s already called her and asked her to dinner,” “She’s preparing a small party for him in her flat when he hits London.” Such speculation had almost eclipsed the flurry of outraged comment from sundry columnists that the twice-convicted Macc, whose music (they said) glorified his criminal past, was entering the country at all.
When he had decided that the streets surrounding Barrack had no more to tell him, Strike continued on foot, making notes of yellow lines in the vicinity, of Friday-night parking restrictions and of those establishments nearby that also had their own security cameras. His notes complete, he felt that he had earned a cup of tea and a bacon roll on expenses, both of which he enjoyed in a small café, while reading an abandoned copy of the Daily Mail.
His mobile rang as he was starting his second cup of tea, halfway through a gleeful account of the Prime Minister’s gaffe in calling an elderly female voter “bigoted” without realizing that his microphone was still turned on.
A week ago, Strike had allowed his unwanted temp’s calls to go to voicemail. Today, he picked up.
“Hi, Robin, how’re you?”
“Fine. I’m just calling to give you your messages.”
“Fire away,” said Strike, as he drew out a pen.
“Alison Cresswell’s just called—John Bristow’s secretary—to say she’s booked a table at Cipriani at one o’clock tomorrow, so that he can introduce you to Tansy Bestigui.”
“Great.”
“I’ve tried Freddie Bestigui’s production company again. They’re getting irritated. They say he’s in LA. I’ve left another request for him to call you.”
“Good.”
“And Peter Gillespie’s telephoned again.”
“Uh huh,” said Strike.
“He says it’s urgent, and could you please get back to him as soon as possible.”
Strike considered asking her to call Gillespie back and tell him to go and fuck himself.
“Yeah, will do. Listen, could you text me the address of the night-club Uzi?”
“Right.”
“And try and find a number for a bloke called Guy Somé? He’s a designer.”
“It’s pronounced ‘ghee,’ ” said Robin.
“What?”
“His Christian name. It’s pronounced the French way: ‘Ghee.’ ”
“Oh, right. Well, could you try and find a contact number for him?”
“Fine,” said Robin.
“Ask him if he’d be prepared to talk to me. Leave a message saying who I am, and who’s hired me.”
“Fine.”
It was borne in on Strike that Robin’s tone was frosty. After a second or two, he thought he might know why.
“By the way, thanks for that text you sent yesterday,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you; it would have looked strange if I’d started texting, where I was. But if you could call Nigel Clements, Duffield’s agent, and ask for an appointment, that would be great too.”
Her animosity fell away at once, as he had meant it to; her voice was many degrees warmer when she spoke again; verging, in fact, on excited.
“But Duffield can’t have had anything to do with it, can he? He had a cast-iron alibi!”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that,” said Strike, deliberately ominous. “And listen, Robin, if another death threat comes in—they usually arrive on Mondays…”
“Yes?” she said eagerly.
“File it,” said Strike.
He could not be sure—it seemed unlikely; she struck him as so prim—but he thought he heard her mutter, “Sod you, then,” as she hung up.
Strike spent the rest of the day engaged in tedious but necessary spadework. When Robin had texted him the address, he visited his second nightclub of the day, this time in South Kensington. The contrast with Barrack was extreme; Uzi’s discreet entrance might have been to a smart private house. There were security cameras over its doors, too. Strike then took a bus to Charles Street, where he was fairly sure Guy Somé lived, and walked what he guessed to be the most direct route between the designer’s address and the house where Landry had died.
His leg was aching badly again by late afternoon, and he stopped for a rest and more sandwiches before setting out for the Feathers, near Scotland Yard, and his appointment with Eric Wardle.
It was another Victorian pub, this time with enormous windows reaching almost from floor to ceiling, looking out on to a great gray 1920s building decorated with statues by Jacob Epstein. The nearest of these sat over the doors, and stared down through the pub windows; a fierce seated deity was being embraced by his infant son, whose body was weirdly twisted back on itself, to show his genitalia. Time had eroded all shock value.
Inside the Feathers, machines were clinking and jingling and flashing primary-colored lights; the wall-mounted plasma TVs, surrounded with padded leather, were showing West Bromwich Albion versus Chelsea with the sound off, while Amy Winehouse throbbed and moaned from hidden speakers. The names of ales were painted on the cream wall above the long bar, which faced a wide dark-wood staircase with curving steps and shining brass handrails, leading up to the first floor.
Strike had to wait to be served, giving him time to look around. The place was full of men, most of whom had military-short hair; but a trio of girls with tangerine tans stood around a high table, throwing back their over-straightened peroxide hair, in their tiny, tight spangled dresses, shifting their weight unnecessarily on their teetering heels. They were pretending not to know that the only solitary drinker, a handsome, boyish man in a leather jacket, who was sitting on a high bar seat beside the nearby window, was examining them, point by point, with a practiced eye. Strike bought himself a pint of Doom Bar and approached their appraiser.
“Cormoran Strike,” he said, reaching Wardle’s table. Wardle had the kind of hair Strike envied in other men; nobody would ever have called Wardle “pubehead.”
“Yeah, I thought it might be you,” said the policeman, shaking hands. “Anstis said you were a big bloke.”
Strike pulled up a bar stool, and Wardle said, without preamble:
“What’ve you got for me, then?”
“There was a fatal stabbing just off Ealing Broadway last month. Guy called Liam Yates? Police informant, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, he got a knife in the neck. But we know who did it,” said Wardle, with a patronizing laugh. “Half the crooks in London know. If that’s your information—”
“Don’t know where he is, though, do you?”
With a quick glance at the determinedly unconscious girls, Wardle slid a notebook out of his pocket.
“Go on.”
“There’s a girl who works in Betbusters on the Hackney Road called Shona Holland. She lives in a rented flat two streets away from the bookie’s. She’s got an unwelcome house guest at the moment called Brett Fearney, who used to beat up her sister. Apparently he’s not the sort of bloke you refuse a favor.”
“Got the full address?” asked Wardle, who was scribbling hard.
“I’ve just given you the name of the tenant and half the postcode. How about trying a bit of detective work?”
“And where did you say you got this?” asked Wardle, still jotting rapidly with the notebook balanced under the table on his knee.
“I didn’t,” replied Strike equably, sipping his beer.
“Got some interesting friends, haven’t you?”
“Very. Now, in a spirit of fair exchange…”
Wardle, replacing his notebook in his pocket, laughed.
“What you’ve just given me might be a crock of shit.”
“It isn’t. Play fair, Wardle.”
The policeman eyed Strike for a moment, apparently torn between amusement and suspicion.
“What are you after, then?”
“I told you on the phone: bit of inside information on Lula Landry.”
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“Inside information, I said. My client thinks there was foul play.”
Wardle’s expression hardened.
“Hooked up with a tabloid, have we?”
“No,” said Strike. “Her brother.”
“John Bristow?”
Wardle took a long pull on his pint, his eyes on the upper thighs of the nearest girl, his wedding ring reflecting red lights from the pinball machine.
“Is he still fixated on the CCTV footage?”
“He mentioned it,” admitted Strike.
“We tried to trace them,” said Wardle, “those two black guys. We put out an appeal. Neither of them turned up. No big surprise—a car alarm went off just about the time they would have been passing it—or trying to get into it. Maserati. Very tasty.”
“Reckon they were nicking cars, do you?”
“I don’t say they went there specifically to nick cars; they might have spotted an opportunity, seeing it parked there—what kind of tosser leaves a Maserati parked on the street? But it was nearly two in the morning, the temperature was below zero, and I can’t think of many innocent reasons why two men would choose to meet at that time, in a Mayfair street where neither of them, as far as we could find out, lived.”
“No idea where they came from, or where they went afterwards?”
“We’re pretty sure the one Bristow’s obsessed with, the one who was walking towards her flat just before she fell, got off the number thirty-eight bus in Wilton Street at a quarter past eleven. There’s no saying what he did before he passed the camera at the end of Bellamy Road an hour and a half later. He tanked back past it about ten minutes after Landry jumped, sprinted up Bellamy Road and most probably turned right down Weldon Street. There’s some footage of a guy more or less meeting his description—tall, black, hoodie, scarf round the face—caught on Theobalds Road about twenty minutes later.”
“He made good time if he got to Theobalds Road in twenty minutes,” commented Strike. “That’s out towards Clerkenwell, isn’t it? Must be two, two and a half miles. And the pavements were frozen.”
“Yeah, well, it might not’ve been him. The footage was shit. Bristow thought it was very suspicious that he had his face covered, but it was minus ten that night, and I was wearing a balaclava to work myself. Anyway, whether he was in Theobalds Road or not, nobody ever came forward to say they’d recognized him.”
“And the other one?”
“Sprinted off down Halliwell Street, about two hundred yards down; no idea where he went after that.”
“Or when he entered the area?”
“Could’ve come from anywhere. We haven’t got any other footage of him.”
“Aren’t there supposed to be ten thousand CCTV cameras in London?”
“They aren’t everywhere yet. Cameras aren’t the answer to our problems, unless they’re maintained and monitored. The one in Garriman Street was out, and there aren’t any in Meadowfield Road or Hartley Street. You’re like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you’ve told the missus you’re at the office and you’re at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone’s trying to force your bathroom window open. Can’t have it both ways.”
“I’m not after it either way,” said Strike. “I’m just asking what you know about Runner Two.”
“Muffled up to the eyeballs, like his mate; all you could see were his hands. If I’d been him, and had a guilty conscience about the Maserati, I’d have holed up in a bar and exited with a bunch of other people; there’s a place called Bojo’s off Halliwell Street he could’ve gone and mingled with the punters. We checked,” Wardle said, forestalling Strike’s question. “Nobody recognized him from the footage.”
They drank for a moment in silence.
“Even if we’d found them,” said Wardle, setting down his glass, “the most we could’ve got from them is an eyewitness account of her jumping. There wasn’t any unexplained DNA in her flat. Nobody had been in that place who shouldn’t have been in there.”
“It isn’t just the CCTV footage that’s giving Bristow ideas,” said Strike. “He’s been seeing a bit of Tansy Bestigui.”
“Don’t talk to me about Tansy fucking Bestigui,” said Wardle irritably.
“I’m going to have to mention her, because my client reckons she’s telling the truth.”
“Still at it, is she? Still hasn’t given it up? I’ll tell you about Mrs. Bestigui, shall I?”
“Go on,” said Strike, one hand wrapped around the beer at his chest.
“Carver and I got to the scene about twenty, twenty-five minutes after Landry hit the road. Uniformed police were already there. Tansy Bestigui was still going strong with the hysterics when we saw her, gibbering and shaking and screaming that there was a murderer in the building.
“Her story was that she got up out of bed around two and went for a pee in the bathroom; she heard shouting from two flats above and saw Landry’s body fall past the window.
“Now, the windows in those flats are triple-glazed or something. They’re designed to keep the heat and the air conditioning in, and the noise of the hoi polloi out. By the time we were interviewing her, the street below was full of panda cars and neighbors, but you’d never have known it from up there except for the flashing blue lights. We could’ve been inside a fucking pyramid for all the noise that got inside that place.
“So I said to her, ‘Are you sure you heard shouting, Mrs. Bestigui? Because this flat seems to be pretty much soundproofed.’
“She wouldn’t back down. Swore she’d heard every word. According to her, Landry screamed something like ‘You’re too late,’ and a man’s voice said, ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ Auditory hallucinations, they call them,” said Wardle. “You start hearing things when you snort so much coke your brains start dribbling out of your nose.”
He took another long pull on his pint.
“Anyway, we proved beyond doubt she couldn’t have heard it. The Bestiguis moved into a friend’s house the next day to get away from the press, so we put a few blokes in their flat, and a guy up on Landry’s balcony, shouting his head off. The lot on the first floor couldn’t hear a word he was saying, and they were stone-cold sober, and making an effort.
“But while we were proving she was talking shit, Mrs. Bestigui was phoning half of London to tell them she was the sole witness to the murder of Lula Landry. The press were already on to it, because some of the neighbors had heard her screaming about an intruder. Papers had tried and convicted Evan Duffield before we even got back to Mrs. Bestigui.
“We put it to her that we’d now proven she couldn’t have heard what she said she’d heard. Well, she wasn’t ready to admit it had all been in her own head. She’d got a lot riding on it now, with the press swarming outside her front door like she was Lula Landry reborn. So she came back with ‘Oh, didn’t I say? I opened them. Yeah, I opened the windows for a breath of fresh air.’ ”
Wardle gave a scathing laugh.
“Sub-zero outside, and snowing.”
“And she was in her underwear, right?”
“Looking like a rake with two plastic tangerines tied to it,” said Wardle, and the simile came out so easily that Strike was sure he was far from the first to have heard it. “We went ahead and double-checked the new story; we dusted for prints, and right enough, she hadn’t opened the windows. No prints on the latches or anywhere else; the cleaner had done them the morning before Landry died, and hadn’t been in since. As the windows were locked and bolted when we arrived, there’s only one conclusion to be drawn, isn’t there? Mrs. Tansy Bestigui is a fucking liar.”
Wardle drained his glass.
“Have another one,” said Strike, and he headed for the bar without waiting for an answer.
He noticed Wardle’s curious gaze roaming over his lower legs as he returned to the table. Under different circumstances, he might have banged the prosthesis hard against the table leg, and said “It’s this one.” Instead, he set down two fresh pints and some pork scratchings, which to his irritation were served in a small white ramekin, and continued where they had left off.
“Tansy Bestigui definitely witnessed Landry falling past the window, though, didn’t she? Because Wilson reckons he heard the body fall right before Mrs. Bestigui started screaming.”
“Maybe she saw it, but she wasn’t having a pee. She was doing a couple of lines of charlie in the bathroom. We found it there, cut and ready for her.”
“Left some, had she?”
“Yeah. Presumably the body falling past the window put her off.”
“The window’s visible from the bathroom?”
“Yeah. Well, just.”
“You got there pretty quickly, didn’t you?”
“Uniformed lot were there in about eight minutes, and Carver and I were there in about twenty.” Wardle lifted his glass, as though to toast the force’s efficiency.
“I’ve spoken to Wilson, the security guard,” said Strike.
“Yeah? He didn’t do bad,” said Wardle, with a trace of condescension. “It wasn’t his fault he had the runs. But he didn’t touch anything, and he did a proper search right after she’d jumped. Yeah, he did all right.”
“He and his colleagues were a bit lazy on the door codes.”
“People always are. Too many pin numbers and passwords to remember. Know the feeling.”
“Bristow’s interested in the possibilities of the quarter of an hour when Wilson was in the bog.”
“We were, too, for about five minutes, before we’d satisfied ourselves that Mrs. Bestigui was a publicity-mad cokehead.”
“Wilson mentioned that the pool was unlocked.”
“Can he explain how a murderer got into the pool area, or back to it, without walking right past him? A fucking pool,” said Wardle, “nearly as big as the one I’ve got at my gym, and all for the use of three fucking people. A gym on the ground floor behind the security desk. Underground fucking parking. Flats done up with marble and shit like…like a fucking five-star hotel.”
The policeman sat shaking his head very slowly over the unequal distribution of wealth.
“Different world,” he said.
“I’m interested in the middle flat,” said Strike.
“Deeby Macc’s?” said Wardle, and Strike was surprised to see a grin of genuine warmth spread across the policeman’s face. “What about it?”
“Did you go in there?”
“I had a look, but Bryant had already searched it. Empty. Windows bolted, alarm set and working properly.”
“Is Bryant the one who knocked into the table and smashed a big floral arrangement?”
Wardle snorted.
“Heard about that, did you? Mr. Bestigui wasn’t too chuffed about it. Oh yeah. Two hundred white roses in a crystal vase the size of a dustbin. Apparently he’d read that Macc asks for white roses in his rider. His rider,” Wardle said, as though Strike’s silence implied an ignorance of what the term meant. “Stuff they ask for in their dressing rooms. I’d’ve thought you’d know about this stuff.”
Strike ignored the insinuation. He had hoped for better from Anstis.
“Ever find out why Bestigui wanted Macc to have roses?”
“Just schmoozing, isn’t it? Probably wanted to put Macc in a film. He was fucked off to the back teeth when he heard Bryant had ruined them. Yelling the place down when he found out.”
“Anyone find it strange that he was upset about a bunch of flowers, when his neighbor’s lying in the street with her head smashed in?”
“He’s one obnoxious fucker, Bestigui,” said Wardle, with feeling. “Used to people jumping to attention when he speaks. He tried treating all of us like staff, till he realized that wasn’t clever.
“But the shouting wasn’t really about the flowers. He was trying to drown out his wife, give her a chance to pull herself together. He kept forcing his way in between her and anyone who wanted to question her. Big guy as well, old Freddie.”
“What was he worried about?”
“That the longer she bawled and shook like a frozen whippet, the more bloody obvious it became that she’d been doing coke. He must’ve known it was lying around somewhere in the flat. He can’t have been delighted to have the Met come bursting in. So he tried to distract everyone with a tantrum about his five-hundred-quid floral arrangement.
“I read somewhere that he’s divorcing her. I’m not surprised. He’s used to the press tiptoeing around him, because he’s such a litigious bastard; he can’t have enjoyed all the attention he got after Tansy shot her mouth off. The press made hay while they could. Rehashed old stories about him throwing plates at underlings. Punches in meetings. They say he paid his last wife a massive lump sum to stop her talking about his sex life in court. He’s pretty well known as a prize shit.”
“You didn’t fancy him as a suspect?”
“Oh, we fancied him a lot; he was on the spot and he’s got a rep for violence. It never looked likely, though. If his wife knew that he’d done it, or that he’d been out of the flat at the moment Landry fell, I’m betting she’d have told us so: she was out of control when we got there. But she said he’d been in bed, and the bedclothes were disarranged and looked slept in.
“Plus, if he’d managed to sneak out of the flat without her realizing it, and gone up to Landry’s place, we’re left with the problem of how he got past Wilson. He can’t have taken the lift, so he’d have passed Wilson in the stairwell, coming down.”
“So the timings rule him out?”
Wardle hesitated.
“Well, it’s just possible. Just, assuming Bestigui can move a damn sight faster than most men of his age and weight, and that he started running the moment he pushed her over. But there’s still the fact that we didn’t find his DNA anywhere in the flat, the question of how he got out of the flat without his wife knowing he’d gone, and the small matter of why Landry would have let him in. All her friends agreed she didn’t like him. Anyway,” Wardle finished the dregs of his pint, “Bestigui’s the kind of man who’d hire a killer if he wanted someone taken care of. He wouldn’t sully his own hands.”
“Another one?”
Wardle checked his watch.
“My shout,” he said, and he ambled up to the bar. The three young women standing around the high table fell silent, watching him greedily. Wardle threw them a smirk as he walked back past with his drinks, and they glanced over at him as he resumed the bar stool beside Strike.
“How d’you think Wilson shapes up as a possible killer?” Strike asked the policeman.
“Badly,” said Wardle. “He couldn’t have got up and down quickly enough to meet Tansy Bestigui on the ground floor. Mind you, his CV’s a crock of shit. He was employed on the basis of being ex-police, and he was never in the force.”
“Interesting. Where was he?”
“He’s been knocking around the security world for years. He admitted he’d lied to get his first job, about ten years ago, and he’d just kept it on his CV.”
“He seems to have liked Landry.”
“Yeah. He’s older than he looks,” said Wardle, inconsequentially. “He’s a grandfather. They don’t show age like us, do they, Afro-Caribbeans? I wouldn’t’ve put him as any older than you.” Strike wondered idly how old Wardle thought he was.
“You got forensics to check out her flat?”
“Oh yeah,” said Wardle, “but that was purely because the higher-ups wanted to put the thing beyond reasonable doubt. We knew within the first twenty-four hours it had to be suicide. We went the extra mile, though, with the whole fucking world watching.”
He spoke with poorly disguised pride.
“The cleaner had been through the whole place that morning—sexy Polish girl, crap English, but bloody thorough with a duster—so the day’s prints stood out good and clear. Nothing unusual.”
“Wilson’s prints were in there, presumably, because he searched the place after she fell?”
“Yeah, but nowhere suspicious.”
“So as far as you’re concerned, there were only three people in the whole building when she fell. Deeby Macc should have been there, but…”
“…he went straight from the airport to a nightclub, yeah,” said Wardle. Again, a broad and apparently involuntary grin illuminated his face. “I interviewed Deeby at Claridges the day after she died. Massive bloke. Like you,” he said, with a glance at Strike’s bulky torso, “only fit.” Strike took the hit without demur. “Proper ex-gangster. He’s been in and out of the nick in LA. He nearly didn’t get a visa to get into the UK.
“He had an entourage with him,” said Wardle. “All hanging around the room, rings on every finger, tattoos on their necks. He was the biggest, though. One scary fucker Deeby’d be, if you met him down an alleyway. Politer than Bestigui by ten fucking miles. Asked me how the hell I could do my job without a gun.”
The policeman was beaming. Strike could not help drawing the conclusion that Eric Wardle, CID, was, in this case, as starstruck as Kieran Kolovas-Jones.
“Wasn’t a long interview, seeing as he’d only just got off a plane and never set foot inside Kentigern Gardens. Routine. I got him to sign his latest CD for me at the end,” Wardle added, as though he could not help himself. “That brought the house down, he loved it. The missus wanted to put it on eBay, but I’m keeping…”
Wardle stopped talking with an air of having given away a little more than he had intended. Amused, Strike helped himself to a handful of pork scratchings.
“What about Evan Duffield?”
“Him,” said Wardle. The stardust that had sparkled over the policeman’s account of Deeby Macc was gone; the policeman was scowling. “Little junkie shit. He pissed us around from start to finish. He went straight into rehab the day after she died.”
“I saw. Where?”
“Priory, where else? Fucking rest cure.”
“So when did you interview him?”
“Next day, but we had to find him first; his people were being as obstructive as possible. Same story as Bestigui, wasn’t it? They didn’t want us to know what he’d really been doing. My missus,” said Wardle, scowling even harder, “thinks he’s sexy. You married?”
“No,” said Strike.
“Anstis told me you left the army to get married to some woman who looks like a supermodel.”
“What was Duffield’s story, once you got to him?”
“They’d had a big bust-up in the club, Uzi. Plenty of witnesses to that. She left, and his story was that he followed her, about five minutes later, wearing this fucking wolf mask. It covers the whole head. Lifelike, hairy thing. He told us he’d got it from a fashion shoot.”
Wardle’s expression was eloquent of contempt.
“He liked putting this thing on to get in and out of places, to piss off the paparazzi. So, after Landry left Uzi, he got in his car—he had a driver outside, waiting for him—and went to Kentigern Gardens. Driver confirmed all that. Yeah, all right,” Wardle corrected himself impatiently, “he confirmed that he drove a man in a wolf’s head, who he assumed was Duffield as he was of Duffield’s height and build, and wearing what looked like Duffield’s clothes, and speaking in Duffield’s voice, to Kentigern Gardens.”
“But he didn’t take the wolf head off on the journey?”
“It’s only about fifteen minutes to her flat from Uzi. No, he didn’t take it off. He’s a childish little prick.
“So then, by Duffield’s own account, he saw the paps outside her flat and decided not to go in after all. He told the driver to take him off to Soho, where he let him out. Duffield walked round the corner to his dealer’s flat in d’Arblay Street, where he shot up.”
“Still wearing the wolf’s head?”
“No, he took it off there,” said Wardle. “The dealer, name of Whycliff, is an ex-public schoolboy with a habit way worse than Duffield’s. He gave a full statement agreeing that Duffield had come round at about half past two. It was only the pair of them there, and yeah, I’d take long odds that Whycliff would lie for Duffield, but a woman on the ground floor heard the doorbell ring and says she saw Duffield on the stair.
“Anyway, Duffield left Whycliff’s around four, with the bloody wolf’s head back on, and rambled off towards the place where he thought his car and driver were waiting; except that the driver was gone. The driver claimed a misunderstanding. He thought Duffield was an arsehole; he made that clear when we took his statement. Duffield wasn’t paying him; the car was on Landry’s account.
“So then Duffield, who’s got no money on him, walks all the way to Ciara Porter’s place in Notting Hill. We found a few people who’d seen a man wearing a wolf’s head strolling along relevant streets, and there’s footage of him cadging a free box of matches from a woman in an all-night garage.”
“Can you make out his face?”
“No, because he only shoved the wolf head up to speak to her, and all you can see is its snout. She said it was Duffield, though.
“He got to Porter’s around half four. She let him sleep on the sofa, and about an hour later she got the news about Landry being dead, and woke him up to tell him. Cue histrionics and rehab.”
“You checked for a suicide note?” asked Strike.
“Yeah. There was nothing in the flat, nothing on her laptop, but that wasn’t a surprise. She did it on the spur of the moment, didn’t she? She was bipolar, she’d just argued with that little tosser and it pushed her over—well, you know what I mean.”
Wardle checked his watch, and drained the last of his pint.
“I’m gonna have to go. The wife’ll be pissed off, I told her I’d only be half an hour.”
The over-tanned girls had left without either man noticing. Out on the pavement, both lit up cigarettes.
“I hate this fucking smoking ban,” said Wardle, zipping his leather jacket up to the neck.
“Have we got a deal, then?” asked Strike.
Cigarette between his lips, Wardle pulled on a pair of gloves.
“I dunno about that.”
“C’mon, Wardle,” said Strike, handing the policeman a card, which Wardle accepted as though it were a joke item. “I’ve given you Brett Fearney.”
Wardle laughed outright.
“Not yet you haven’t.”
He slipped Strike’s card into a pocket, inhaled, blew smoke skywards, then shot the larger man a look compounded of curiosity and appraisal.
“Yeah, all right. If we get Fearney, you can have the file.”