Part Four
Optimumque est, ut volgo dixere, aliena insania frui.
And the best plan is, as the popular saying was, to profit by the folly of others.
Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis
1
STRIKE VISITED ULU EARLY TO shower, and dressed with unusual care, on the morning of his visit to the studio of Guy Somé. He knew, from his perusal of the designer’s website, that Somé advocated the purchase and wear of such items as chaps in degraded leather, ties of metal mesh and black-brimmed headbands that seemed to have been made by cutting the tops out of old bowlers. With a faint feeling of defiance, Strike put on the conventional, comfortable dark blue suit he had worn to Cipriani.
The studio he sought had been a disused nineteenth-century warehouse, which stood on the north bank of the Thames. The glittering river dazzled his eyes as he tried to find the entrance, which was not clearly marked; nothing on the outside proclaimed the use to which the building was being put.
At last he discovered a discreet, unmarked bell, and the door was opened electronically from within. The stark but airy hallway was chilly with air-conditioning. A jingling and clacking noise preceded the entrance into the hall of a girl with tomato-red hair, dressed in head-to-toe black and wearing many silver bangles.
“Oh,” she said, seeing Strike.
“I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Somé at ten,” he told her. “Cormoran Strike.”
“Oh,” she said again. “OK.”
She disappeared the same way she had come. Strike used the wait to call the mobile telephone number of Rochelle Onifade, as he had been doing ten times a day since he had met her. There was no response.
Another minute passed, and then a small black man was suddenly crossing the floor towards Strike, catlike and silent on rubber soles. He walked with an exaggerated swing of his hips, his upper body quite still except for a little counterbalancing sway of the shoulders, his arms almost rigid.
Guy Somé was nearly a foot shorter than Strike and had perhaps a hundredth of his body fat. The front of the designer’s tight black T-shirt was decorated with hundreds of tiny silver studs which formed an apparently three-dimensional image of Elvis’s face, as though his chest were a Pin Art toy. The eye was further confused by the fact that a well-defined six-pack moved underneath the tight Lycra. Somé’s snug gray jeans bore a faint dark pinstripe, and his trainers seemed to be made out of black suede and patent leather.
His face contrasted strangely with his taut, lean body, for it abounded in exaggerated curves: the eyes exophthalmic so that they appeared fishlike, looking out of the sides of his head. The cheeks were round, shining apples and the full-lipped mouth was a wide oval: his small head was almost perfectly spherical. Somé looked as though he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the grotesque.
He held out a hand with a slight crook of the wrist.
“Yeah, I can see a bit of Jonny,” he said, looking up into Strike’s face; his voice was camp and faintly cockney. “Much butcher, though.”
Strike shook hands. There was surprising strength in the fingers. The red-haired girl came jingling back.
“I’ll be busy for an hour, Trudie, no calls,” Somé told her. “Bring us some tea and bicks, darling.”
He executed a dancer’s turn, beckoning to Strike to follow him.
Down a whitewashed corridor they passed an open door, and a flat-faced middle-aged oriental woman stared back at Strike through the gauzy film of gold stuff she was throwing over a dummy; the room around her was as brilliantly lit as a surgical theater, but full of workbenches, cramped and cluttered with bolts of fabric, the walls a collage of fluttering sketches, photographs and notes. A tiny blonde woman, dressed in what appeared to Strike to be a giant black tubular bandage, opened a door and crossed the corridor in front of them; she gave him precisely the same cold, blank stare as the red-haired Trudie. Strike felt abnormally huge and hairy; a woolly mammoth attempting to blend in among capuchin monkeys.
He followed the strutting designer to the end of the corridor and up a spiral staircase of steel and rubber, at the top of which was a large white rectangular office space. Floor-to-ceiling windows all along the right-hand side showed a stunning view of the Thames and the south bank. The rest of the whitewashed walls were hung with photographs. What arrested Strike’s attention was an enormous twelve-foot-tall blowup of the infamous “Fallen Angels” on the wall opposite Somé’s desk. On closer inspection, however, he realized that it was not the shot with which the world was familiar. In this version, Lula had thrown back her head in laughter: the strong column of her throat rose vertically out of the long hair, which had become disarranged in her amusement, so that a single dark nipple protruded. Ciara Porter was looking up at Lula, the beginnings of laughter on her own face, but slower to get the joke: the viewer’s attention was drawn, as in the more famous version of the picture, immediately to Lula.
She was represented elsewhere; everywhere. There on the left, among a group of models all wearing transparent shifts in rainbow colors; further along, in profile, with gold leaf on her lips and eyelids. Had she learned how to compose her face into its most photogenic arrangement, to project emotion so beautifully? Or had she simply been a pellucid surface through which her feelings naturally shone?
“Park your arse anywhere,” said Somé, dropping into a seat behind a dark wood and steel desk covered in sketches; Strike pulled up a chair composed of a single length of contorted perspex. There was a T-shirt lying on the desk, which carried a picture of Princess Diana as a garish Mexican Madonna, glittering with bits of glass and beads, and complete with a flaming scarlet heart of shining satin, on which an embroidered crown was perched lopsided.
“You like?” said Somé, noticing the direction of Strike’s gaze.
“Oh yeah,” lied Strike.
“Sold out nearly everywhere; bad-taste letters from Catholics; Joe Mancura wore one on Jools Holland. I’m thinking of doing William as Christ on a long-sleeve for winter. Or Harry, do you think, with an AK47 to hide his cock?”
Strike smiled vaguely. Somé crossed his legs with a little more flourish than was strictly necessary and said, with startling bravado:
“So, the Accountant thinks Cuckoo might’ve been killed? I always called Lula ‘Cuckoo,’ ” he added, unnecessarily.
“Yeah. John Bristow’s a lawyer, though.”
“I know he is, but Cuckoo and I always called him the Accountant. Well, I did, and Cuckoo sometimes joined in, if she was feeling wicked. He was forever nosing into her percentages and trying to wring every last cent out of everyone. I suppose he’s paying you the detective equivalent of the minimum wage?”
“He’s paying me a double wage, actually.”
“Oh. Well he’s probably a bit more generous now he’s got Cuckoo’s money to play with.”
Somé chewed on a fingernail, and Strike was reminded of Kieran Kolovas-Jones; the designer and driver were similar in build, too, small but well proportioned.
“All right, I’m being a bitch,” said Somé, taking his nail out of his mouth. “I never liked John Bristow. He was always on Cuckoo’s case about something. Get a life. Get out of the closet. Have you heard him rhapsodizing about his mummy? Have you met his girlfriend? Talk about a beard: I think she’s got one.”
He rattled out the words in one nervy, spiteful stream, pausing to open a hidden drawer in the desk, from which he took out a packet of menthol cigarettes. Strike had already noticed that Somé’s nails were bitten to their quicks.
“Her family was the whole reason she was so fucked up. I used to tell her, ‘Drop them, sweetie, move on.’ But she wouldn’t. That was Cuckoo for you, always flogging a dead horse.”
He offered Strike one of the pure white cigarettes, which the detective declined, before lighting one with an engraved Zippo. As he flipped the lid of the lighter shut, Somé said:
“I wish I’d thought of calling in a private detective. It never occurred to me. I’m glad someone’s done it. I just cannot believe she committed suicide. My therapist says that’s denial. I’m having therapy twice a week, not that it makes any fucking difference. I’d be snaffling Valium like Lady Bristow if I could still design when I’m on it, but I tried it the week after Cuckoo died and I was like a zombie. I suppose it got me through the funeral.”
Jingling and rattling from the spiral staircase announced the reappearance of Trudie, who emerged through the floor in jerky stages. She laid upon the desk a black lacquered tray, on which stood two silver filigree Russian tea glasses, in each of which was a pale green steaming concoction with wilted leaves floating in it. There was also a plate of wafer-thin biscuits that looked as though they might be made of charcoal. Strike remembered his pie and mash and his mahogany-colored tea at the Phoenix with nostalgia.
“Thanks, Trudie. And get me an ashtray, darling.”
The girl hesitated, clearly on the verge of protesting.
“Just do it,” snarled Somé. “I’m the fucking boss, I’ll burn the building down if I want to. Pull the fucking batteries out of the fire alarms. But get the ashtray first.
“The alarm went off last week, and set off all the sprinklers downstairs,” Somé explained to Strike. “So now the backers don’t want anyone smoking in the building. They can stick that one right up their tight little bumholes.”
He inhaled deeply, then exhaled through his nostrils.
“Don’t you ask questions? Or do you just sit there looking scary until someone blurts out a confession?”
“We can do questions,” said Strike, pulling out his notebook and pen. “You were abroad when Lula died, weren’t you?”
“I’d just got back, a couple of hours before.” Somé’s fingers twitched a little on the cigarette. “I’d been in Tokyo, hardly any sleep for eight days. Touched down at Heathrow at about ten thirty with the most fucking appalling jet lag. I can’t sleep on planes. I wanna be awake if I’m going to crash.”
“How did you get home from the airport?”
“Cab. Elsa had fucked up my car booking. There should’ve been a driver there to meet me.”
“Who’s Elsa?”
“The girl I sacked for fucking up my car booking. It was the last thing I fucking wanted, to have to find a cab at that time of night.”
“Do you live alone?”
“No. By midnight I was tucked up in bed with Viktor and Rolf. My cats,” he added with a flicker of a grin. “I took an Ambien, slept for a few hours, then woke up at five in the morning. I switched on Sky News from the bed, and there was a man in a horrible sheepskin hat, standing in the snow in Cuckoo’s street, saying she was dead. The ticker-tape across the bottom of the screen was saying it too.”
Somé inhaled heavily on the cigarette, and white smoke curled out of his mouth with his next words.
“I nearly fucking died. I thought I was still asleep, or that I’d woken up in the wrong fucking dimension or something…I started calling everyone…Ciara, Bryony…all their phones were engaged. And all the time I was watching the screen, thinking they’d flash up something saying there had been a mistake, that it wasn’t her. I kept praying it was the bag lady. Rochelle.”
He paused, as though he expected some comment from Strike. The latter, who had been making notes as Somé spoke, asked, still writing:
“You know Rochelle, do you?”
“Yeah. Cuckoo brought her in here once. In it for all she could get.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She hated Cuckoo. Jealous as fuck; I could see it, even if Cuckoo couldn’t. She was in it for the freebies, she didn’t give a monkey’s whether Cuckoo lived or died. Lucky for her, as it turned out…
“So, the longer I watched the news, I knew there wasn’t a mistake. I fell a-fucking-part.”
His fingers trembled a little on the snow-white stick he was sucking.
“They said that a neighbor had overheard an argument; so of course I thought it was Duffield. I thought Duffield had knocked her through the window. I was all set to tell the pigs what a cunt he is; I was ready to stand in the dock and testify to the fucker’s character. And if this ash falls off my cigarette,” he continued in precisely the same tone, “I will fire that little bitch.”
As though she had heard him, Trudie’s rapid footfalls grew louder and louder until she emerged again into the room, breathing heavily and clutching a heavy glass ashtray.
“Thank you,” said Somé, with a pointed inflection, as she placed it in front of him and scurried back downstairs.
“Why did you think it was Duffield?” asked Strike, once he judged Trudie to be safely out of earshot.
“Who else would Cuckoo have let in at two in the morning?”
“How well do you know him?”
“Well enough, little piss ant that he is.” Somé picked up his mint tea. “Why do women do it? Cuckoo, too…she wasn’t stupid—actually, she was razor-sharp—so what did she see in Evan Duffield? I’ll tell you,” he said, without pausing for an answer. “It’s that wounded-poet crap, that soul-pain shit, that too-much-of-a-tortured-genius-to-wash bollocks. Brush your teeth, you little bastard. You’re not fucking Byron.”
He slammed his glass down and cupped his right elbow in his left hand, steadying his forearm and continuing to draw heavily on the cigarette.
“No man would put up with the likes of Duffield. Only women. Maternal instinct gone warped, if you ask me.”
“You think he had it in him to kill her, do you?”
“Of course I do,” said Somé dismissively. “Of course he has. All of us have got it in us, somewhere, to kill, so why would Duffield be any exception? He’s got the mentality of a vicious twelve-year-old. I can imagine him in one of his rages, having a tantrum and then just—”
With his cigarette-free hand he made a violent shoving movement.
“I saw him shouting at her once. At my after-show party, last year. I got in between them; I told him to have a go at me instead. I might be a little poof,” Somé said, the round-cheeked face set, “but I’d back myself against that drugged-up fuck any day. He was a tit at the funeral, too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Lurching around, off his face. No fucking respect. I was full of tranks myself or I’d’ve told him what I thought of him. Pretending to be devastated, hypocritical little shit.”
“You never thought it was suicide?”
Somé’s strange, bulging eyes bored into Strike.
“Never. Duffield says he was at his dealer’s, disguised as a wolf. What kind of fucking alibi is that? I hope you’re checking him out. I hope you’re not dazzled by his fucking celebrity, like the police.”
Strike remembered Wardle’s comments on Duffield.
“I don’t think they found Duffield dazzling.”
“They’ve got more taste than I credited them with, then,” said Somé.
“Why are you so sure it wasn’t suicide? Lula had had mental health problems, hadn’t she?”
“Yeah, but we had a pact, like Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. We’d sworn that if either of us was thinking seriously of killing themselves, we’d call the other. She would’ve called me.”
“When did you last hear from her?”
“She phoned me on the Wednesday, while I was still in Tokyo,” said Somé. “Silly cow always forgot it was eight hours ahead; I had my phone on mute at two in the morning, so I didn’t pick up; but she left a message, and she was not suicidal. Listen to this.”
He reached into his desk drawer again, pressed several buttons, then held the mobile out to Strike.
And Lula Landry spoke close and real, slightly raw and throaty, in Strike’s ear, in deliberately affected mockney.
“Aw wight, darlin’? Got something to tell you, I’m not sure whether you’re going to like it but it’s a biggie, and I’m so fucking happy I’ve gotta tell someone, so ring me when you can, OK, can’t wait, mwah mwah.”
Strike handed back the phone.
“Did you call her back? Did you find out what the big news was?”
“No.” Somé ground out his cigarette and reached immediately for another one. “The Japs had me in back-to-back meetings; every time I thought of calling her, the time difference was in the way. Anyway…to tell you the truth, I thought I knew what she was going to say, and I wasn’t any too fucking pleased about it. I thought she was pregnant.”
Somé nodded several times with the fresh cigarette clutched between his teeth; then he removed it to say:
“Yeah, I thought she’d gone and got herself knocked up.”
“By Duffield?”
“I hoped to fuck not. I didn’t know at the time that they’d got back together. She wouldn’t have dared hook up with him if I’d been in the country; no, she waited till I was in Japan, the sneaky little bitch. She knew I hated him, and she cared what I thought. We were like family, Cuckoo and me.”
“Why did you think she might be pregnant?”
“It was the way she sounded. You’ve heard it—she was so excited…I had this feeling. It was the kind of thing Cuckoo would’ve done, and she’d have expected me to be as pleased as she was, and fuck her career, fuck me, counting on her to launch my brand-new accessories line…”
“Was this the five-million-pound contract her brother told me about?”
“Yeah, and I’ll bet the Accountant pushed her to hold out for as much as she could get, too,” said Somé, with another flash of temper. “It wasn’t like Cuckoo to try and wring every last penny out of me. She knew it was going to be fabulous, and would take her to a whole new level if she fronted it. It shouldn’t have been all about the money. Everyone associated her with my stuff; her big break came on a shoot for Vogue when she wore my Jagged dress. Cuckoo loved my clothes, she loved me, but people get to a certain level, and everyone’s telling them they’re worth more, and they forget who put them there, and suddenly it’s all about the bottom line.”
“You must’ve thought she was worth it, to commit to a five-million-pound contract?”
“Yeah, well, I’d pretty much designed the range for her, so having to shoot around a fucking pregnancy wouldn’t have been funny. And I could just imagine Cuckoo going silly afterwards, throwing it all in, not wanting to leave the fucking baby. She was the type; always looking for people to love, for a surrogate family. Those Bristows fucked her up good. They only adopted her as a toy for Yvette, who is the scariest bitch in the world.”
“In what way?”
“Possessive. Morbid. Didn’t want to let Cuckoo out of her sight in case she died, like the kid she’d been bought to replace. Lady Bristow used to come to all the shows, getting under everyone’s feet, till she got too ill. And there was an uncle, who treated Cuckoo like scum until she started pulling in big money. He got a bit more respectful then. They all know the value of a buck, the Bristows.”
“They’re a wealthy family, aren’t they?”
“Alec Bristow didn’t leave that much, not relatively speaking. Not compared to proper money. Not like your old man. How come,” said Somé, swerving suddenly off the conversational track, “Jonny Rokeby’s son’s working as a private dick?”
“Because that’s his job,” said Strike. “Go on about the Bristows.”
Somé did not appear to resent being bossed around; if anything, he seemed to relish it, possibly because it was such an unusual experience.
“I just remember Cuckoo telling me that most of what Alec Bristow left was in shares in his old company, and Albris has gone down the pan in the recession. It’s hardly fucking Apple. Cuckoo had out-earned the whole fucking lot of them before she was twenty.”
“Was that picture,” said Strike, indicating the enormous “Fallen Angels” image on the wall behind him, “part of the five-million-pound campaign?”
“Yeah,” said Somé. “Those four bags were the start of it. She’s holding ‘Cashile’ there; I gave them all African names, for her. She was fixated on Africa. That whorish real mother she unearthed had told her her father was African, so Cuckoo had gone mad on it; talking about studying there, doing voluntary work…never mind that the old slapper had probably been sleeping with about fifty Yardies. African,” said Guy Somé, grinding out his cigarette stub in the glass ashtray, “my Aunt Fanny. The bitch just told Cuckoo what she wanted to hear.”
“And you decided to go ahead and use the picture for the campaign, even though Lula had just…?”
“It was meant as a fucking tribute.” Somé spoke loudly over him. “She’d never looked more beautiful. It was supposed to be a fucking tribute to her, to us. She was my muse. If the bastards couldn’t understand that, fuck ’em, that’s all. The press in this country are lower than scum. Judging everyone by their fucking selves.”
“The day before she died, some handbags were sent to Lula…”
“Yeah, they were mine. I sent her one of each of those,” said Somé, indicating the picture with the end of a new cigarette, “and I sent Deeby Macc some clothes by the same courier.”
“Had he ordered them, or…?”
“Freebies, dear,” drawled Somé. “Just good business. Couple of customized hoodies and some accessories. Celebrity endorsements never hurt.”
“Did he ever wear the stuff?”
“I don’t know,” said Somé in a more subdued tone. “I had other things to worry about the next day.”
“I’ve seen YouTube footage of him wearing a hoodie with studs on it, like that,” said Strike, pointing at Somé’s chest. “Making a fist.”
“Yeah, that was one of them. Someone must’ve sent the stuff on to him. One had a fist, one had a handgun, and some of his lyrics on the backs.”
“Did Lula talk to you about Deeby Macc coming to stay in the flat downstairs?”
“Oh yeah. She wasn’t nearly excited enough. I kept saying to her, babes, if he’d written three tracks about me I’d be waiting behind the front door naked when he got in.” Somé blew smoke in two long streams from his nostrils, looking sideways at Strike. “I like ’em big and rough,” he said. “But Cuckoo didn’t. Well, look what she hooked up with. I kept telling her, you’re the one making all this fucking song-and-dance about your roots; find yourself a nice black boy and settle down. Deeby would’ve been fucking perfect; why not?
“Last season’s show, I had her walking down the catwalk to Deeby’s ‘Butterface Girl.’ ‘Bitch you ain’t all that, get a mirror that don’ fool ya, Give it up an’ tone it down, girl, ’cause you ain’t no fuckin’ Lula.’ Duffield hated it.”
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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 motherfuckin’ 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-fuck 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 fucking 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.”
“You never spoke to her after their weekend at Dickie Carbury’s, did you?”
“No. Did he do something then? You don’t suspect Bestigui, do you?”
Somé sat up in his seat, staring.
“Fuck…Freddie Bestigui? Well, he’s a shit, I know that. This little girl I know…well, friend of a friend…she was working for his production company, and he tried to fucking rape her. No, I am not exaggerating,” said Somé. “Literally. Rape. Got her a bit drunk after work and had her on the floor; some assistant had forgotten his mobile and came back for it, and walked in on them. Bestigui paid them both off. Everyone was telling her to press charges, but she took the money and ran. They say he used to discipline his second wife in some pretty fucking kinky ways; that’s why she walked away with three mill; she threatened him with the press. But Cuckoo would never have let Freddie Bestigui into her flat at two in the morning. Like I say, she wasn’t a stupid girl.”
“What do you know about Derrick Wilson?”
“Who’s he?”
“The security guard who was on duty the night she died.”
“Nothing.”
“He’s a big guy, with a Jamaican accent.”
“This might shock you, but not all the black people in London know each other.”
“I wondered whether you’d ever spoken to him, or heard Lula talk about him.”
“No, we had more interesting things to talk about than the security guard.”
“Does the same apply to her driver, Kieran Kolovas-Jones?”
“Oh, I know who Kolovas-Jones is,” said Somé, with a slight smirk. “Striking little poses whenever he thought I might be looking out of the window. He’s about five fucking feet too short to model.”
“Did Lula ever talk about him?”
“No, why would she?” asked Somé restlessly. “He was her driver.”
“He’s told me they were quite close. He mentioned that she’d given him a jacket you designed. Worth nine hundred quid.”
“Big fucking deal,” said Somé, with easy contempt. “My proper stuff goes for upwards of three grand a coat. I slap the logo on shell suits and they sell like crazy, so it’d be silly not to.”
“Yeah, I was going to ask you about that,” said Strike. “Your—ready-to-wear line, is it?”
Somé looked amused.
“That’s right. That’s the stuff that isn’t made-to-measure, see? You buy it straight off the rack.”
“Right. How widely is that stuff sold?”
“It’s everywhere. When were you last in a clothes shop?” asked Somé, his wicked bulging eyes roving over Strike’s dark blue jacket. “What is that, anyway, your demob suit?”
“When you say ‘everywhere’…”
“Smart department stores, boutiques, online,” rattled off Somé. “Why?”
“One of two men caught on CCTV running away from Lula’s area that night was wearing a jacket with your logo on it.”
Somé twitched his head very slightly, a gesture of repudiation and irritation.
“Him and a million other people.”
“Didn’t you see—?”
“I didn’t look at any of that shit,” said Somé fiercely. “All the—all the coverage. I didn’t want to read about it, I didn’t want to think about it. I told them to keep it away from me,” he said, gesturing towards the stairs and his staff. “All I knew was that she was dead and Duffield was behaving like someone with something to hide. That’s all I knew. That was enough.”
“OK. Still on the subject of clothes, in the last picture of Lula, the one where she was walking into the building, she seemed to be wearing a dress and a coat…”
“Yeah, she was wearing Maribelle and Faye,” said Somé. “The dress was called Maribelle—”
“Yeah, got it,” said Strike. “But when she died, she was wearing something different.”
This seemed to surprise Somé.
“Was she?”
“Yeah. In the police pictures of the body—”
But Somé threw up his arm in an involuntary gesture of refutation, of self-protection, then got to his feet, breathing hard, and walked to the photograph wall, where Lula stared out of several pictures, smiling, wistful or serene. When the designer turned to face Strike again, the strange bulging eyes were wet.
“Fucking hell,” he said, in a low voice. “Don’t talk about her like that. ‘The body.’ Fucking hell. You’re a cold-blooded bastard, aren’t you? No fucking wonder old Jonny’s not keen on you.”
“I wasn’t trying to upset you,” said Strike calmly. “I only want to know whether you can think of any reason she’d have changed her clothes when she got home. When she fell, she was wearing trousers and a sequined top.”
“How the fuck should I know why she changed?” asked Somé, wildly. “Maybe she was cold. Maybe she was—This is fucking ridiculous. How could I know that?”
“I’m only asking,” said Strike. “I read somewhere that you’d told the press she died in one of your dresses.”
“That wasn’t me, I never announced it. Some tabloid bitch rang the office and asked for the name of that dress. One of the seamstresses told her, and they called her my spokesman. Making out I’d tried to get publicity out of it, the cunts. Fucking hell.”
“D’you think you could put me in touch with Ciara Porter and Bryony Radford?”
Somé seemed off-balance, confused.
“What? Yeah…”
But he had begun to cry in earnest; not like Bristow, with wild gulps and sobs, but silently, with tears sliding down his smooth dark cheeks and on to his T-shirt. He swallowed and closed his eyes, turned his back on Strike, rested his forehead against the wall and trembled.
Strike waited in silence until Somé had wiped his face several times and turned again towards him. He made no mention of his tears, but walked back to his chair, sat down and lit a cigarette. After two or three deep drags, he said in a practical and unemotional voice:
“If she changed her clothes, it was because she was expecting someone. Cuckoo always dressed the part. She must’ve been waiting for someone.”
“Well that’s what I thought,” said Strike. “But I’m no expert on women and their clothes.”
“No,” said Somé, with a ghost of his malicious smile, “you don’t look it. You want to speak to Ciara and Bryony?”
“It’d help.”
“They’re both doing a shoot for me on Wednesday: 1 Arlington Terrace in Islington. If you come along fivish, they’d be free to talk to you.”
“That’s good of you, thanks.”
“It isn’t good of me,” said Somé quietly. “I want to know what happened. When are you speaking to Duffield?”
“As soon as I can get hold of him.”
“He thinks he’s got away with it, the little shit. She must’ve changed because she knew he was coming, mustn’t she? Even though they’d rowed, she knew he’d follow her. But he’ll never talk to you.”
“He’ll talk to me,” said Strike easily, as he put away his notebook and checked his watch. “I’ve taken up a lot of your time. Thanks again.”
As Somé led Strike back down the spiral stairs and along the white-walled corridor, some of his swagger returned to him. By the time they shook hands in the cool tiled lobby, no trace of distress remained on show.
“Lose some weight,” he told Strike, as a parting shot, “and I’ll send you something XXL.”
As the warehouse door swung closed behind Strike, he heard Somé call to the tomato-haired girl at the desk: “I know what you’re thinking, Trudie. You’re imagining him taking you roughly from behind, aren’t you? Aren’t you, darling? Big rough soldier boy,” and Trudie’s squeal of shocked laughter.