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.”
“So you wouldn’t say she was suicidal when you saw her that day?”
“I dunno. I never saw ’er for long enough, did I?”
“Where were you when you heard she’d died?”
“I wuz in the hostel. Loadsa people knew I knew her. Janine woke me up and told me.”
“And your immediate thought was that it was suicide?”
“Yeah. An’ I gotta go now. I gotta go.”
She had made up her mind and he could see that he was not going to be able to stop her. After wriggling back into the ludicrous fur jacket, she hoisted her handbag onto her shoulder.
“Say hullo to Kieran for me.”
“Yeah, I will.”
“See yuh.”
She waddled out of the restaurant without a backward glance.
Strike watched her walk past the window, her head down, her brows knitted, until she passed out of sight. It had stopped raining. Idly he pulled her tray towards him and finished her last few fries.
Then he stood up so abruptly that the baseball-capped girl who had been approaching his table to clear and wipe it jumped back a step with a little cry of surprise. Strike hurried out of the McDonald’s and off up Grantley Road.
Rochelle was standing on the corner, clearly visible in her furry magenta coat, part of a knot of people waiting for the lights to change at a pedestrian crossing. She was gabbling into the pink jeweled Nokia. Strike caught up with her, insinuating himself into the group behind her, making of his bulk a weapon, so that people moved aside to avoid him.
“…wanted to know who she was arrangin’ to meet that night…yeah, an’—”
Rochelle turned her head, watching traffic, and realized that Strike was right behind her. Removing the mobile from her ear, she jabbed at a button, cutting the call.
“What?” she asked him aggressively.
“Who were you calling then?”
“Mind yer own fuckin’ business!” she said furiously. The waiting pedestrians stared. “Are you followin’ me?”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “Listen.”
The lights changed; they were the only two not to start off over the road, and were jostled by the passing walkers.
“Will you give me your mobile number?”
The implacable bull’s eyes looked back at him, unreadable, bland, secretive.
“Wha’ for?”
“Kieran asked me to get it,” he lied. “I forgot. He thinks you left a pair of sunglasses in his car.”
He did not think she was convinced, but after a moment she dictated a number, which he wrote down on the back of one of his own cards.
“That all?” she asked aggressively, and she proceeded across the road as far as an island, where the lights changed again. Strike limped after her. She looked both angry and perturbed by his continuing presence.
“What?”
“I think you know something you’re not telling me, Rochelle.”
She glared at him.
“Take this,” said Strike, pulling a second card out of his overcoat pocket. “If you think of anything you’d like to tell me, call, all right? Call that mobile number.”
She did not answer.
“If Lula was murdered,” said Strike, while the cars whooshed by them, and rain glittered in the gutters at their feet, “and you know something, you could be in danger from the killer too.”
This evoked a tiny, complacent, scathing smile. Rochelle did not think she was in danger. She thought she was safe.
The green man had appeared. Rochelle gave a toss of her dry, wiry hair and moved away across the road, ordinary, squat and plain, still clutching her mobile in one hand and Strike’s card in the other. Strike stood alone on the island, watching her with a feeling of impotence and unease. She might never have sold her story to the newspapers, but he could not believe that she had bought that designer jacket, ugly though he found it, from the proceeds of a job in a shop.