11
“EVAN DUFFIELD’S AGENT SAYS HIS client isn’t taking any further calls or giving any interviews about Lula Landry,” said Robin next morning. “I did make it clear that you’re not a journalist, but he was adamant. And the people in Guy Somé’s office are ruder than Freddie Bestigui’s. You’d think I was trying to get an audience with the Pope.”
“OK,” said Strike. “I’ll see whether I can get at him through Bristow.”
It was the first time that Robin had seen Strike in a suit. He looked, she thought, like a rugby player en route to an international: large, conventionally smart in his dark jacket and subdued tie. He was on his knees, searching through one of the cardboard boxes he had brought from Charlotte’s flat. Robin was averting her gaze from his boxed-up possessions. They were still avoiding any mention of the fact that Strike was living in his office.
“Aha,” he said, finally locating, from amid a pile of his mail, a bright blue envelope: the invitation to his nephew’s party. “Bollocks,” he added, on opening it.
“What’s the matter?”
“It doesn’t say how old he is,” said Strike. “My nephew.”
Robin was curious about Strike’s relations with his family. As she had never been officially informed, however, that Strike had numerous half-brothers and -sisters, a famous father and a mildly infamous mother, she bit back all questions and continued to open the day’s paltry mail.
Strike got up off the floor, replaced the cardboard box in a corner of the inner office and returned to Robin.
“What’s that?” he asked, seeing a sheet of photocopied newsprint on the desk.
“I kept it for you,” she said diffidently. “You said you were glad you’d seen that story about Evan Duffield…I thought you might be interested in this, if you haven’t already seen it.”
It was a neatly clipped article about film producer Freddie Bestigui, taken from the previous day’s Evening Standard.
“Excellent; I’ll read that on the way to lunch with his wife.”
“Soon to be ex,” said Robin. “It’s all in that article. He’s not very lucky in love, Mr. Bestigui.”
“From what Wardle told me, he’s not a very lovable man,” said Strike.
“How did you get that policeman to talk to you?” Robin said, unable to hold back her curiosity on this point. She was desperate to learn more about the process and progress of the investigation.
“We’ve got a mutual friend,” said Strike. “Bloke I knew in Afghanistan; Met officer in the TA.”
“You were in Afghanistan?”
“Yeah.” Strike was pulling on his overcoat, the folded article on Freddie Bestigui and the invitation to Jack’s party between his teeth.
“What were you doing in Afghanistan?”
“Investigating a Killed In Action,” said Strike. “Military police.”
“Oh,” said Robin.
Military police did not tally with Matthew’s impression of a charlatan, or a waster.
“Why did you leave?”
“Injured,” said Strike.
He had described that injury to Wilson in the starkest of terms, but he was wary of being equally frank with Robin. He could imagine her shocked expression, and he stood in no need of her sympathy.
“Don’t forget to call Peter Gillespie,” Robin reminded him, as he headed out of the door.
Strike read the photocopied article as he rode the Tube to Bond Street. Freddie Bestigui had inherited his first fortune from a father who had made a great deal of money in haulage; he had made his second by producing highly commercial films that serious critics treated with derision. The producer was currently going to court to refute claims, by two newspapers, that he had behaved with gross impropriety towards a young female employee, whose silence he had subsequently bought. The accusations, carefully hedged around with many “alleged”s and “reported”s, included aggressive sexual advances and a degree of physical bullying. They had been made “by a source close to the alleged victim,” the girl herself having refused either to press charges or to speak to the press. The fact that Freddie was currently divorcing his latest wife, Tansy, was mentioned in the concluding paragraph, which ended with a reminder that the unhappy couple had been in the building on the night that Lula Landry took her own life. The reader was left with the odd impression that the Bestiguis’ mutual unhappiness might have influenced Landry in her decision to jump.
Strike had never moved in the kinds of circles that dined at Cipriani. It was only as he walked up Davies Street, the sun warm on his back and imparting a ruddy glow to the red-brick building ahead, that he thought how odd it would be, yet not unlikely, if he ran into one of his half-siblings there. Restaurants like Cipriani were part of the regular lives of Strike’s father’s legitimate children. He had last heard from three of them while in Selly Oak Hospital, undergoing physiotherapy. Gabi and Danni had jointly sent flowers; Al had visited once, laughing too loudly and scared of looking at the lower end of the bed. Afterwards, Charlotte had imitated Al braying and wincing. She was a good mimic. Nobody ever expected a girl that beautiful to be funny, yet she was.
The interior of the restaurant had an art deco feeling, the bar and chairs of mellow polished wood, with pale yellow tablecloths on the circular tables and white-jacketed, bow-tied waiters and waitresses. Strike spotted his client immediately among the clattering, jabbering diners, sitting at a table set for four and talking, to Strike’s surprise, to two women instead of one, both with long, glossy brown hair. Bristow’s rabbity face was full of the desire to please, or perhaps placate.
The lawyer jumped up to greet Strike when he saw him, and introduced Tansy Bestigui, who held out a thin, cool hand, but did not smile, and her sister, Ursula May, who did not hold out a hand at all. While the preliminaries of ordering drinks and handing around menus were navigated, Bristow nervous and over-talkative throughout, the sisters subjected Strike to the kind of brazenly critical stares that only people of a certain class feel entitled to give.
They were both as pristine and polished as life-size dolls recently removed from their cellophane boxes; rich-girl thin, almost hipless in their tight jeans, with tanned faces that had a waxy sheen especially noticeable on their foreheads, their long, gleaming dark manes with center partings, the ends trimmed with spirit-level exactitude.
When Strike finally chose to look up from his menu, Tansy said, without preamble:
“Are you really” (she pronounced it “rarely”) “Jonny Rokeby’s son?”
“So the DNA test said,” he replied.
She seemed uncertain whether he was being funny or rude. Her dark eyes were fractionally too close together, and the Botox and fillers could not smooth away the petulance in her expression.
“Listen, I’ve just been telling John,” she said curtly. “I’m not going public again, OK? I’m perfectly happy to tell you what I heard, because I’d love you to prove I was right, but you mustn’t tell anyone I’ve talked to you.”
The unbuttoned neck of her thin silk shirt revealed an expanse of butterscotch skin stretched over her bony sternum, giving an unattractively knobbly effect; yet two full, firm breasts jutted from her narrow ribcage, as though they had been borrowed for the day from a fuller-figured friend. “We could have met somewhere more discreet,” commented Strike.
“No, it’s fine, because nobody here will know who you are. You don’t look anything like your father, do you? I met him at Elton’s last summer. Freddie knows him. D’you see much of Jonny?”
“I’ve met him twice,” said Strike.
“Oh,” said Tansy.
The monosyllable contained equal parts of surprise and disdain.
Charlotte had had friends like this; sleek-haired, expensively educated and clothed, all of them appalled by her strange yen for the enormous, battered-looking Strike. He had come up against them for years, by phone and in person, with their clipped vowels and their stockbroker husbands, and the brittle toughness Charlotte had never been able to fake.
“I don’t think she should be talking to you at all,” said Ursula abruptly. Her tone and expression would have been appropriate had Strike been a waiter who had just thrown aside his apron and joined them, uninvited, at the table. “I think you’re making a big mistake, Tanz.”
Bristow said: “Ursula, Tansy simply—”
“It’s up to me what I do,” Tansy snapped at her sister, as though Bristow had not spoken, as though his chair was empty. “I’m only going to say what I heard, that’s all. It’s all off the record; John’s agreed to that.”
Evidently she too viewed Strike as domestic class. He was irked not only by their tone, but also by the fact that Bristow was giving witnesses assurances without his say-so. How could Tansy’s evidence, which could have come from nobody but her, be kept off the record?
For a few moments all four of them ran their eyes over the culinary options in silence. Ursula was the first to put down her menu. She had already finished a glass of wine. She helped herself to another, and glanced restlessly around the restaurant, her eyes lingering for a second on a blonde minor royal, before passing on.
“This place used to be full of the most fabulous people, even at lunchtime. Cyprian only ever wants to go to bloody Wiltons, with all the other stiffs in suits…”
“Is Cyprian your husband, Mrs. May?” asked Strike.
He guessed that it would needle her if he crossed what she evidently saw as an invisible line between them; she did not think that sitting at a table with her gave him a right to her conversation. She scowled, and Bristow rushed to fill the uncomfortable pause.
“Yes, Ursula’s married to Cyprian May, one of our senior partners.”
“So I’m getting the family discount on my divorce,” said Tansy, with a slightly bitter smile.
“And her ex will go absolutely ballistic if she starts dragging the press back into their lives,” Ursula said, her dark eyes boring into Strike’s. “They’re trying to thrash out a settlement. It could seriously prejudice her alimony if that all kicks off again. So you’d better be discreet.”
With a bland smile, Strike turned to Tansy:
“You had a connection with Lula Landry, then, Mrs. Bestigui? Your brother-in-law works with John?”
“It never came up,” she said, looking bored.
The waiter returned to take their orders. When he had left, Strike took out his notebook and pen.
“What are you doing with those?” demanded Tansy, in a sudden panic. “I don’t want anything written down! John?” she appealed to Bristow, who turned to Strike with a flustered and apologetic expression.
“D’you think you could just listen, Cormoran, and, ah, skip the note-taking?”
“No problem,” said Strike easily, removing his mobile phone from his pocket and replacing the notebook and pen. “Mrs. Bestigui—”
“You can call me Tansy,” she said, as though this concession made up for her objections to the notebook.
“Thanks very much,” said Strike, with the merest trace of irony. “How well did you know Lula?”
“Oh, hardly at all. She was only there for three months. It was just ‘Hi’ and ‘Nice day.’ She wasn’t interested in us, we weren’t nearly hip enough for her. It was a bore, to be honest, having her there. Paps outside the front door all the time. I had to put on makeup even to go to the gym.”
“Isn’t there a gym in the building?” asked Strike.
“I do Pilates with Lindsey Parr,” said Tansy, irritably. “You sound like Freddie; he was always complaining that I didn’t use the facilities at the flat.”
“And how well did Freddie know Lula?”
“Hardly at all, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. He had some idea about luring her into acting; he kept trying to invite her downstairs. She never came, though. And he followed her to Dickie Carbury’s house, the weekend before she died, while I was away with Ursula.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Bristow, looking startled.
Strike noticed Ursula’s quick smirk at her sister. He had the impression that she had been looking for an exchange of complicit glances, but Tansy did not oblige.
“I didn’t know until later,” Tansy told Bristow. “Yah, Freddie cadged an invitation from Dickie; there was a whole group of them there: Lula, Evan Duffield, Ciara Porter, all that tabloidy, druggie, trendy gang. Freddie must have stuck out like a sore thumb. I know he’s not much older than Dickie, but he looks ancient,” she added spitefully.
“What did your husband tell you about the weekend?”
“Nothing. I only found out he’d been there weeks later, because Dickie let it slip. I’m sure Freddie went to try and make up to Lula, though.”
“Do you mean,” asked Strike, “that he was interested in Lula sexually, or…?”
“Oh yah, I’m sure he was; he’s always liked dark girls better than blondes. What he really loves, though, is getting a bit of celebrity meat into his films. He drives directors mad, trying to crowbar in celebrities, to get a bit of extra press. I’ll bet he was hoping to get her signed up for a film, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Tansy added, with unexpected shrewdness, “if he had something planned around her and Deeby Macc. Imagine the press, with the fuss there was already about the two of them. Freddie’s got a genius for that stuff. He loves publicity for his films as much as he hates it for himself.”
“Does he know Deeby Macc?”
“Not unless they’ve met since we separated. He hadn’t met Macc before Lula died. God, he was thrilled that Macc was coming to stay in the building; he started talking about casting him the moment he heard.”
“Casting him as what?”
“I don’t know,” she said irritably. “Anything. Macc’s got a huge following; Freddie wasn’t going to pass that chance up. He’d probably have had a part written specially for him if he’d been interested. Oh, he would have been all over him. Telling him all about his pretend black grandmother.” Tansy’s voice was contemptuous. “That’s what he always does when he meets famous black people: tells them he’s a quarter Malay. Yeah, whatever, Freddie.”
“Isn’t he a quarter Malay?” asked Strike.
She gave a snide little laugh.
“I don’t know; I never met any of Freddie’s grandparents, did I? He’s about a hundred years old. I know he’ll say anything if he thinks there’s money in it.”
“Did anything ever come of these plans to get Lula and Macc into his films, as far as you’re aware?”
“Well, I’m sure Lula was flattered to be asked; most of these model girls are dying to prove they can do something other than stare into a camera, but she never signed up to anything, did she, John?”
“Not as far as I know,” said Bristow. “Although…but that was something different,” he mumbled, turning blotchily pink again. He hesitated, then, responding to Strike’s interrogative gaze, he said:
“Mr. Bestigui visited my mother a couple of weeks ago, out of the blue. She’s exceptionally poorly, and…well, I wouldn’t want to…”
His glance at Tansy was uncomfortable.
“Say what you like, I don’t care,” she said, with what seemed like genuine indifference.
Bristow made the strange jutting and sucking movement that temporarily hid the hamsterish teeth.
“Well, he wanted to talk to my mother about a film of Lula’s life. He, ah, framed his visit as something considerate and sensitive. Asking for her family’s blessing, official sanction, you know. Lula dead barely three months…Mum was distressed beyond measure. Unfortunately, I was not there when he called,” said Bristow, and his tone implied that he was generally to be found standing guard over his mother. “I wish, in a way, I had been. I wish I’d heard him out. I mean, if he’s got researchers working on Lula’s life story, much as I deplore the idea, he might know something, mightn’t he?”
“What kind of thing?” asked Strike.
“I don’t know. Something about her early life, perhaps? Before she came to us?”
The waiter arrived to place starters in front of them all. Strike waited until he had gone, and then asked Bristow:
“Have you tried to speak to Mr. Bestigui yourself, and find out whether he knew anything about Lula that the family didn’t?”
“That’s just what’s so difficult,” said Bristow. “When Tony—my uncle—heard what had happened, he contacted Mr. Bestigui to protest about him badgering my mother, and from what I’ve heard, there was a very heated argument. I don’t think Mr. Bestigui would welcome further contact from the family. Of course, the situation’s further complicated by the fact that Tansy is using our firm for the divorce. I mean, there’s nothing in that—we’re one of the top family law firms, and with Ursula being married to Cyprian, naturally she would come to us…But I’m sure it won’t have made Mr. Bestigui feel any more kindly towards us.”
Though he had kept his gaze on the lawyer all the time that Bristow was talking, Strike’s peripheral vision was excellent. Ursula had thrown another tiny smirk in her sister’s direction. He wondered what was amusing her. Doubtless her improved mood was not hindered by the fact that she was now on her fourth glass of wine.
Strike finished his starter and turned to Tansy, who was pushing her virtually untouched food around her plate.
“How long had you and your husband been at number eighteen before Lula moved in?”
“About a year.”
“Was there anyone in the middle flat when she arrived?”
“Yah,” said Tansy. “There was an American couple there with their little boy for six months, but they went back to the States not long after she arrived. After that, the property company couldn’t get anyone interested at all. The recession, you know? They cost an arm and a leg, those flats. So it was empty until the record company rented it for Deeby Macc.”
Both she and Ursula were distracted by the sight of a woman passing the table in what, to Strike, appeared to be a crocheted coat of lurid design.
“That’s a Daumier-Cross coat,” said Ursula, her eyes slightly narrowed over her wineglass. “There’s a waiting list of, like, six months…”
“It’s Pansy Marks-Dillon,” said Tansy. “Easy to be on the best-dressed list if your husband’s got fifty mill. Freddie’s the cheapest rich man in the world; I had to hide new stuff from him, or pretend it was fake. He could be such a bore sometimes.”
“You always look wonderful,” said Bristow, pink in the face.
“You’re sweet,” said Tansy Bestigui in a bored voice.
The waiter arrived to clear away their plates.
“What were you saying?” she asked Strike. “Oh, yah, the flats. Deeby Macc coming…except he didn’t. Freddie was furious he never got there, because he’d put roses in his flat. Freddie is such a cheap bastard.”
“How well do you know Derrick Wilson?” Strike asked.
She blinked.
“Well—he’s the security guard; I don’t know him, do I? He seemed all right. Freddie always said he was the best of the bunch.”
“Really? Why was that?”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know, you’d have to ask Freddie. And good luck with that,” she added, with a little laugh. “Freddie’ll talk to you when hell freezes over.”
“Tansy,” said Bristow, leaning in a little, “why don’t you just tell Cormoran what you actually heard that night?”
Strike would have preferred Bristow not to intervene.
“Well,” said Tansy. “It was getting on for two in the morning, and I wanted a drink of water.”
Her tone was flat and expressionless. Strike noticed that, even in this small beginning, she had altered the story she had told the police.
“So I went to the bathroom to get one, and as I was heading back across the sitting room, towards the bedroom, I heard shouting. She—Lula—was saying, ‘It’s too late, I’ve already done it,’ and then a man said, ‘You’re a lying fucking bitch,’ and then—and then he threw her over. I actually saw her fall.”
And Tansy made a tiny jerky movement with her hands that Strike understood to indicate flailing.
Bristow set down his glass, looking nauseated. Their main courses arrived. Ursula drank more wine. Neither Tansy nor Bristow touched their food. Strike picked up his fork and began to eat, trying not to look as though he was enjoying his puntarelle with anchovies.
“I screamed,” whispered Tansy. “I couldn’t stop screaming. I ran out of the flat, past Freddie, and downstairs. I just wanted to tell security that there was a man up there, so they could get him.
“Wilson came dashing out of the room behind the desk. I told him what had happened and he went straight out on to the street to see her, instead of running upstairs. Bloody fool. If only he’d gone upstairs first, he might have caught him! Then Freddie came down after me, and started trying to make me go back to our flat, because I wasn’t dressed.
“Then Wilson came back, and told us she was dead, and told Freddie to call the police. Freddie virtually dragged me back upstairs—I was completely hysterical—and he dialed 999 from our sitting room. And then the police came. And nobody believed a single word I said.”
She sipped her wine again, set down the glass and said quietly:
“If Freddie knew I was talking to you, he’d go ape.”
“But you’re quite sure, aren’t you, Tansy,” Bristow interjected, “that you heard a man up there?”
“Yah, of course I am,” said Tansy. “I’ve just said, haven’t I? There was definitely someone there.”
Bristow’s mobile rang.
“Excuse me,” he muttered. “Alison…yes?” he said, picking up.
Strike could hear the secretary’s deep voice, without being able to make out the words.
“Excuse me just a moment,” Bristow said, looking harried, and he left the table.
A look of malicious amusement appeared on both sisters’ smooth, polished faces. They glanced at each other again; then, somewhat to his surprise, Ursula asked Strike:
“Have you met Alison?”
“Briefly.”
“You know they’re together?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a bit pathetic, actually,” said Tansy. “She’s with John, but she’s actually obsessed with Tony. Have you met Tony?”
“No,” said Strike.
“He’s one of the senior partners. John’s uncle, you know?”
“Yes.”
“Very attractive. He wouldn’t go for Alison in a million years. I suppose she’s settled for John as consolation prize.”
The thought of Alison’s doomed infatuation seemed to afford the sisters great satisfaction.
“This is all common gossip at the office, is it?” asked Strike.
“Oh, yah,” said Ursula, with relish. “Cyprian says she’s absolutely embarrassing. Like a puppy dog around Tony.”
Her antipathy towards Strike seemed to have evaporated. He was not surprised; he had met the phenomenon many times. People liked to talk; there were very few exceptions; the question was how you made them do it. Some, and Ursula was evidently one of them, were amenable to alcohol; others liked a spotlight; and then there were those who merely needed proximity to another conscious human being. A subsection of humanity would become loquacious only on one favorite subject: it might be their own innocence, or somebody else’s guilt; it might be their collection of pre-war biscuit tins; or it might, as in the case of Ursula May, be the hopeless passion of a plain secretary.
Ursula was watching Bristow through the window; he was standing on the pavement, talking hard into his mobile as he paced up and down. Her tongue properly loosened now, she said:
“I bet I know what that’s about. Conway Oates’s executors are making a fuss about how the firm handled his affairs. He was the American financier, you know? Cyprian and Tony are in a real bait about it, making John fly around trying to smooth things over. John always gets the shitty end of the stick.”
Her tone was more scathing than sympathetic.
Bristow returned to the table, looking flustered.
“Sorry, sorry, Alison just wanted to give me some messages,” he said.
The waiter came to collect their plates. Strike was the only one who had cleared his. When the waiter was out of earshot, Strike said:
“Tansy, the police disregarded your evidence because they didn’t think you could have heard what you claimed to have heard.”
“Well they were wrong, weren’t they?” she snapped, her good humor gone in a trice. “I did hear it.”
“Through a closed window?”
“It was open,” she said, meeting none of her companions’ eyes. “It was stuffy, I opened one of the windows on the way to get water.”
Strike was sure that pressing her on the point would only lead to her refusing to answer any other questions.
“They also allege that you’d taken cocaine.”
Tansy made a little noise of impatience, a soft “cuh.”
“Look,” she said, “I had some earlier, during dinner, OK, and they found it in the bathroom when they looked around the flat. The fucking boredom of the Dunnes. Anyone would have done a couple of lines to get through Benjy Dunne’s bloody anecdotes. But I didn’t imagine that voice upstairs. A man was there, and he killed her. He killed her,” repeated Tansy, glaring at Strike.
“And where do you think he went afterwards?”
“I don’t know, do I? That’s what John’s paying you to find out. He sneaked out somehow. Maybe he climbed out the back window. Maybe he hid in the lift. Maybe he went out through the car park downstairs. I don’t bloody know how he got out, I just know he was there.”
“We believe you,” interjected Bristow anxiously. “We believe you, Tansy. Cormoran needs to ask these questions to—to get a clear picture of how it all happened.”
“The police did everything they could to discredit me,” said Tansy, disregarding Bristow and addressing Strike. “They got there too late, and he’d already gone, so of course they covered it up. No one who hasn’t been through what I went through with the press can understand what it was like. It was absolute bloody hell. I went into the clinic just to get away from it all. I can’t believe it’s legal, what the press are allowed to do in this country; and all for telling the truth, that’s the bloody joke. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t I? I would have, if I’d known what was coming.”
She twisted her loose diamond ring around her finger.
“Freddie was asleep in bed when Lula fell, wasn’t he?” Strike asked Tansy.
“Yah, that’s right,” she said.
Her hand slid up to her face and she smoothed nonexistent strands of hair off her forehead. The waiter returned with menus again, and Strike was forced to hold back his questions until they had ordered. He was the only one to ask for pudding; all the rest had coffee.
“When did Freddie get out of bed?” he asked Tansy, when the waiter had left.
“What do you mean?”
“You say he was in bed when Lula fell; when did he get up?”
“When he heard me screaming,” she said, as though this was obvious. “I woke him up, didn’t I?”
“He must have moved quickly.”
“Why?”
“You said: ‘I ran out of the flat, past Freddie, and downstairs.’ So he was already in the room before you ran out to tell Derrick what had happened?”
A missed beat.
“That’s right,” she said, smoothing her immaculate hair again, shielding her face.
“So he went from fast asleep in bed, to awake and in the sitting room, within seconds? Because you started screaming and running pretty much instantaneously, from what you said?”
Another infinitesimal pause.
“Yah,” she said. “Well—I don’t know. I think I screamed—I screamed while I was frozen on the spot—for a moment, maybe—I was just so shocked—and Freddie came running out of the bedroom, and then I ran past him.”
“Did you stop to tell him what you’d seen?”
“I can’t remember.”
Bristow looked as though he was about to stage one of his untimely interventions again. Strike held up a hand to forestall him; but Tansy plunged off on another tack, eager, he guessed, to leave the subject of her husband.
“I’ve thought and thought about how the killer got in, and I’m sure he must have followed her inside when she came in that morning, because of Derrick Wilson leaving his desk and being in the bathroom. I thought Wilson ought to have been bloody sacked for it, actually. If you ask me, he was having a sneaky sleep in the back room. I don’t know how the killer would have known the key code, but I’m sure that’s when he must have got in.”
“Do you think you’d be able to recognize the man’s voice again? The one you heard shouting?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “It was just a man’s voice. It could have been anyone. There was nothing unusual about it. I mean, afterwards I thought, Was it Duffield?” she said, gazing at him intently, “because I’d heard Duffield shouting upstairs, once before, from the top landing. Wilson had to throw him out; Duffield was trying to kick in Lula’s door. I never understood what a girl with her looks was doing with someone like Duffield,” she added in parenthesis.
“Some women say he’s sexy,” agreed Ursula, emptying the wine bottle into her glass, “but I can’t see the appeal. He’s just skanky and horrible.”
“It’s not even,” said Tansy, twisting the loose diamond ring again, “as though he’s got money.”
“But you don’t think it was his voice you heard that night?”
“Well, like I say, it could have been,” she said impatiently, with a small shrug of her thin shoulders. “He’s got an alibi, though, hasn’t he? Loads of people said he was nowhere near Kentigern Gardens the night Lula was killed. He spent part of it at Ciara Porter’s, didn’t he? Bitch,” Tansy added, with a small, tight smile. “Sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend.”
“Were they sleeping together?” asked Strike.
“Oh, what do you think?” laughed Ursula, as though the question was too naive for words. “I know Ciara Porter, she modeled in this charity fashion show I was involved in setting up. She’s such an airhead and such a slut.”
The coffees had arrived, along with Strike’s sticky toffee pudding.
“I’m sorry, John, but Lula didn’t have very good taste in friends,” said Tansy, sipping her espresso. “There was Ciara, and then there was that Bryony Radford. Not that she was a friend, exactly, but I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”
“Who’s Bryony?” asked Strike disingenuously, for he remembered who she was.
“Makeup artist. Charges a fortune, and such a bloody bitch,” said Ursula. “I used her once, before one of the Gorbachev Foundation balls, and afterwards she told ev—”
Ursula stopped abruptly, lowered her glass and picked up her coffee instead. Strike, who despite its undoubted irrelevance to the matter in hand was quite interested to know what Bryony had told everyone, began to speak, but Tansy talked loudly over him.
“Oh, and there was that ghastly girl Lula used to bring around to the flat, too, John, remember?”
She appealed to Bristow again, but he looked blank.
“You know, that ghastly—that rarely awful-colored girl she sometimes dragged back. A kind of hobo person. I mean…she literally smelled. When she’d been in the lift…you could smell it. And she took her into the pool, too. I didn’t think blacks could swim.”
Bristow was blinking rapidly, pink in the face.
“God knows what Lula was doing with her,” said Tansy. “Oh, you must remember, John. She was fat. Scruffy. Looked a bit subnormal.”
“I don’t…” mumbled Bristow.
“Are you talking about Rochelle?” asked Strike.
“Oh, yah, I think that was her name. She was at the funeral, anyway,” said Tansy. “I noticed her. She was sitting right at the back.
“Now, you will remember, won’t you,” she turned the full force of her dark eyes upon Strike, “that this is all entirely off the record. I mean, I cannot afford for Freddie to find out I’m talking to you. I’m not going to go through all that shit with the press again. Bill, please,” she barked at the waiter.
When it arrived, she passed it without comment to Bristow.
As the sisters were preparing to leave, shaking their glossy brown hair back over their shoulders and pulling on expensive jackets, the door of the restaurant opened and a tall, thin, besuited man of around sixty entered, looked around and headed straight for their table. Silver-haired and distinguished-looking, impeccably dressed, there was a certain chilliness about his pale blue eyes. His walk was brisk and purposeful.
“This is a surprise,” he said smoothly, stopping in the space between the two women’s chairs. None of the other three had seen the man coming, and all bar Strike displayed equal parts of shock and something more than displeasure at the sight of him. For a fraction of a second, Tansy and Ursula froze, Ursula in the act of pulling sunglasses out of her bag.
Tansy recovered first.
“Cyprian,” she said, offering her face for his kiss. “Yes, what a lovely surprise!”
“I thought you were going shopping, Ursula dear?” he said, his eyes on his wife as he gave Tansy a conventional peck on each cheek.
“We stopped for lunch, Cyps,” she replied, but her color was heightened, and Strike sensed an ill-defined nastiness in the air.
The older man’s pale eyes moved deliberately over Strike and came to rest on Bristow.
“I thought Tony was handling your divorce, Tansy?” he asked.
“He is,” said Tansy. “This isn’t a business lunch, Cyps. Purely social.”
He gave a wintry smile.
“Let me escort you out, then, m’dears,” he said.
With a cursory farewell to Bristow, and no word whatsoever for Strike, the two sisters permitted themselves to be shepherded out of the restaurant by Ursula’s husband. When the door had swung shut behind the threesome, Strike asked Bristow:
“What was that about?”
“That was Cyprian,” said Bristow. He seemed agitated as he fumbled with his credit card and the bill. “Cyprian May. Ursula’s husband. Senior partner at the firm. He won’t like Tansy talking to you. I wonder how he knew where we were. Probably got it out of Alison.”
“Why won’t he like her talking to me?”
“Tansy’s his sister-in-law,” said Bristow, putting on his overcoat. “He won’t want her to make a fool of herself—as he’ll see it—all over again. I’ll probably get a real bollocking for persuading her to meet you. I expect he’s phoning my uncle right now, to complain about me.”
Bristow’s hands, Strike noticed, were trembling.
The lawyer left in a taxi ordered by the ma?tre d’. Strike headed away from Cipriani on foot, loosening his tie as he walked, and lost so deeply in thought that he was only jerked out of his reverie by a loud horn blast from a car he had not seen speeding towards him as he crossed Grosvenor Street.
With this salutary reminder that his safety would otherwise be in jeopardy, Strike headed for a patch of pale wall belonging to the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa, leaned up against it out of the pedestrian flow, lit up and pulled out his mobile phone. After some listening and fast-forwarding, he managed to locate that part of Tansy’s recorded testimony that dealt with those moments immediately preceding Lula Landry’s fall past her window.
…towards the bedroom, I heard shouting. She—Lula—was saying, “It’s too late, I’ve already done it,” and then a man said, “You’re a lying fucking bitch,” and then—and then he threw her over. I actually saw her fall.
He could just make out the tiny chink of Bristow’s glass hitting the table top. Strike rewound again and listened.
…saying, “It’s too late, I’ve already done it,” and then a man said, “You’re a lying fucking bitch,” and then—and then he threw her over. I actually saw her fall.
He recalled Tansy’s imitation of Landry’s flailing arms, and the horror on her frozen face as she did it. Slipping his mobile back into his pocket, he took out his notebook and began to make notes for himself.
Strike had met countless liars; he could smell them; and he knew perfectly well that Tansy was of their number. She could not have heard what she claimed to have heard from her flat; the police had therefore deduced that she could not have heard it at all. Against Strike’s expectation, however, in spite of the fact that every piece of evidence he had heard until this moment suggested that Lula Landry had committed suicide, he found himself convinced that Tansy Bestigui really believed that she had overheard an argument before Landry fell. That was the only part of her story that rang with authenticity, an authenticity that shone a garish light on the fakery with which she garnished it.
Strike pushed himself off the wall and began to walk east along Grosvenor Street, paying slightly more attention to traffic, but inwardly recalling Tansy’s expression, her tone, her mannerisms, as she spoke of Lula Landry’s final moments.
Why would she tell the truth on the essential point, but surround it with easily disproven falsehoods? Why would she lie about what she had been doing when she heard shouting from Landry’s flat? Strike remembered Adler: “A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.” Tansy had come along today to make a last attempt to find someone who would believe her, and yet swallow the lies in which she insisted on swaddling her evidence.
He walked fast, barely conscious of the twinges from his right knee. At last he realized that he had walked all along Maddox Street and emerged on Regent Street. The red awnings of Hamleys Toy Shop fluttered a little in the distance, and Strike remembered that he had intended to buy a birthday present for his nephew’s forthcoming birthday on the way back to the office.
The multicolored, squeaking, flashing maelstrom into which he walked registered on him only vaguely. Blindly he moved from floor to floor, untroubled by the shrieks, the whirring of airborne toy helicopters, the oinks of mechanical pigs moving across his distracted path. Finally, after twenty minutes or so, he came to rest near the HM Forces dolls. Here he stood, quite still, gazing at the ranks of miniature marines and paratroopers but barely seeing them; deaf to the whispers of parents trying to maneuver their sons around him, too intimidated to ask the strange, huge, staring man to move.