14
THE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS FRESH and bright. Strike took the underground to genteel and leafy Chelsea. This was a part of London that he barely knew, for Leda had never, even in her most spendthrift phases, managed to secure a toehold in the vicinity of the Royal Chelsea Hospital, pale and gracious in the spring sun.
Franklin Row was an attractive street of more red brick; here were plane trees, and a great grassy space bordered with railings, in which a throng of primary school children were playing games in pale blue Aertex tops and navy blue shorts, watched by tracksuited teachers. Their happy cries punctuated the sedate quiet otherwise disturbed only by birdsong; no cars passed as Strike strolled down the pavement towards the house of Lady Yvette Bristow, his hands in his pockets.
The wall beside the partly glass door, set at the top of four white stone steps, bore an old-fashioned Bakelite panel of doorbells. Strike checked to see that Lady Yvette Bristow’s name was clearly marked beside Flat E, then retreated to the pavement and stood waiting in the gentle warmth of the day, looking up and down the street.
Ten thirty arrived, but John Bristow did not. The square remained deserted, but for the twenty small children running between hoops and colored cones beyond the railings.
At ten forty-five, Strike’s mobile vibrated in his pocket. The text was from Robin:
Alison has just called to say that JB is unavoidably detained. He does not want you to speak to his mother without him present.
Strike immediately texted Bristow:
How long are you likely to be detained? Any chance of doing this later today?
He had barely sent the message when the phone began to ring.
“Yeah, hello?” said Strike.
“Oggy?” came Graham Hardacre’s tinny voice, all the way from Germany. “I’ve got the stuff on Agyeman.”
“Your timing’s uncanny.” Strike pulled out his notebook. “Go on.”
“He’s Lieutenant Jonah Francis Agyeman, Royal Engineers. Aged twenty-one, unmarried, last tour of duty started eleventh of January. He’s back in June. Next of kin, a mother. No siblings, no kids.”
Strike scribbled it all down in his notebook, with the mobile phone held between jaw and shoulder.
“I owe you one, Hardy,” he said, putting the notebook away. “Haven’t got a picture, have you?”
“I could email you one.”
Strike gave Hardacre the office email address, and, after routine inquiries about each other’s lives, and mutual expressions of goodwill, terminated the call.
It was five to eleven. Strike waited, phone in hand, in the peaceful, leafy square, while the gamboling children played with their hoops and their beanbags, and a tiny silver plane drew a thick white line across the periwinkle sky. At last, with a small chirrup clearly audible in the quiet street, Bristow’s texted reply arrived:
No chance today. I’ve been forced to go out to Rye. Maybe tomorrow?
Strike sighed.
“Sorry, John,” he muttered, and he climbed the steps and rang Lady Bristow’s doorbell.
The entrance hall, quiet, spacious and sunny, nevertheless had a faintly depressing air of communality that a bucket-shaped vase of dried flowers and a dull green carpet and pale yellow walls, probably chosen for their inoffensiveness, could not dissipate. As at Kentigern Gardens, there was a lift, this one with wooden doors. Strike chose to walk upstairs. The building had a faint shabbiness that in no way diminished its quiet aura of wealth.
The door of the top flat was opened by the smiling West Indian Macmillan nurse who had buzzed him through the front door.
“You’re not Mister Bristow,” she said brightly.
“No, I’m Cormoran Strike. John’s on his way.”
She let him in. Lady Bristow’s hallway was pleasantly cluttered, papered in faded red and covered in watercolors in old gilt frames; an umbrella stand was full of walking sticks, and coats hung on a row of pegs. Strike glanced right, and saw a sliver of the study at the end of the corridor: a heavy wooden desk and a swivel chair with its back to the door.
“Will you wait in the sitting room while I check whether Lady Bristow is ready to see you?”
“Yeah, of course.”
He walked through the door she indicated into a charming room with primrose walls, lined with bookcases bearing photographs. An old-fashioned dial telephone sat on an end table beside a comfortable chintz-covered sofa. Strike checked that the nurse was out of sight before slipping the receiver off the hook and repositioning it, unobtrusively skewed on its rests.
Close by the bay window on a bonheur du jour stood a large photograph, framed in silver, showing the wedding of Sir and Lady Alec Bristow. The groom looked much older than his wife, a rotund, beaming, bearded man; the bride was thin, blonde and pretty in an insipid way. Ostensibly admiring the photograph, Strike stood with his back to the door, and slid open a little drawer in the delicate cherrywood desk. Inside was a supply of fine pale blue writing paper and matching envelopes. He slid the drawer shut again.
“Mister Strike? You can come through.”
Back through the red-papered hall, a short passage, and into a large bedroom, where the dominant colors were duck-egg blue and white, and everywhere gave an impression of elegance and taste. Two doors on the left, both ajar, led to a small en-suite bathroom, and what seemed to be a large walk-in wardrobe. The furniture was delicate and Frenchified; the props of serious illness—the drip on its metal stand, the bedpan lying clean and shiny on a chest of drawers, with an array of medications—were glaring impostors.
The dying woman wore a thick ivory-colored bed jacket and reclined, dwarfed by her carved wooden bed, on many white pillows. No trace of Lady Bristow’s youthful prettiness remained. The raw bones of the skeleton were clearly delineated now, beneath fine skin that was shiny and flaking. Her eyes were sunken, filmy and dim, and her wispy hair, fine as a baby’s, was gray against large expanses of pink scalp. Her emaciated arms lay limp on top of the covers, a catheter protruded. Her death was an almost palpable presence in the room, as though it stood waiting patiently, politely, behind the curtains.
A faint smell of lime blossom pervaded the atmosphere, but did not entirely eclipse that of disinfectant and bodily decay; smells that recalled, to Strike, the hospital where he had lain helpless for months. A second large bay window had been raised a few inches, so that the warm fresh air and the distant cries of the sports-playing children could enter the room. The view was of the topmost branches of the leafy sunlit plane trees.
“Are you the detective?”
Her voice was thin and cracked, her words slightly slurred. Strike, who had wondered whether Bristow had told her the truth about his profession, was glad that she knew.
“Yes, I’m Cormoran Strike.”
“Where’s John?”
“He’s been held up at the office.”
“Again,” she murmured, and then: “Tony works him very hard. It isn’t fair.” She peered at him, blurrily, and indicated a small painted chair with one slightly raised finger. “Do sit down.”
There were chalky white lines around her faded irises. As he sat, Strike noticed two more silver-framed photographs standing on the bedside table. With something akin to an electric shock, he found himself looking into the eyes of ten-year-old Charlie Bristow, chubby-faced, with his slightly mullety haircut: frozen forever in the eighties, his school shirt with its long pointed collar, and the huge knot in his tie. He looked just as he had when he had waved goodbye to his best friend, Cormoran Strike, expecting to meet each other again after Easter.
Beside Charlie’s photograph was a smaller one, of an exquisite little girl with long black ringlets and big brown eyes, in a navy blue school uniform: Lula Landry, aged no more than six.
“Mary,” said Lady Bristow, without raising her voice, and the nurse bustled over. “Could you get Mr. Strike…coffee? Tea?” she asked him, and he was transported back two and a half decades, to Charlie Bristow’s sunlit garden, and the gracious blonde mother, and the iced lemonade.
“A coffee would be great, thank you very much.”
“I do apologize for not making it myself,” said Lady Bristow, as the nurse departed, with heavy footfalls, “but as you can see, I am entirely dependent, now, on the kindness of strangers. Like poor Blanche Dubois.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, as though to concentrate better on some internal pain. He wondered how heavily medicated she was. Beneath the gracious manner, he divined the faintest whiff of something bitter in her words, much as the lime blossom failed to cover the smell of decay, and he wondered at it, considering that Bristow spent most of his time dancing attendance on her.
“Why isn’t John here?” asked Lady Bristow again, with her eyes still shut.
“He’s been held up at the office,” repeated Strike.
“Oh, yes. Yes, you said.”
“Lady Bristow, I’d like to ask you a few questions, and I apologize in advance if they seem over-personal, or distressing.”
“When you have been through what I have,” she said quietly, “nothing much can hurt you anymore. Do call me Yvette.”
“Thank you. Do you mind if I take notes?”
“No, not at all,” she said, and she watched him take out his pen and notebook with a dim show of interest.
“I’d like to start, if you don’t mind, with how Lula came into your family. Did you know anything about her background when you adopted her?”
She looked the very picture of helplessness and passivity lying there with her limp arms on the covers.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t know anything. Alec might have known, but if he did, he never told me.”
“What makes you think your husband knew something?”
“Alec always went into things as deeply as he could,” she said, with a faint, reminiscent smile. “He was a very successful businessman, you know.”
“But he never told you anything about Lula’s first family?”
“Oh no, he wouldn’t have done that.” She seemed to find this a strange suggestion. “I wanted her to be mine, just mine, you see. Alec would have wanted to protect me, if he knew anything. I could not have borne the idea that somebody out there might come and claim her one day. I had already lost Charlie, and I wanted a daughter so badly; the idea of losing her, too…”
The nurse returned bearing a tray with two cups on it and a plate of chocolate bourbons.
“One coffee,” she said cheerfully, placing it beside Strike on the nearer of the bedside tables, “and one camomile tea.”
She bustled out again. Lady Bristow closed her eyes. Strike took a gulp of black coffee and said:
“Lula went looking for her biological parents in the year before she died, didn’t she?”
“That’s right,” said Lady Bristow, with her eyes still closed. “I had just been diagnosed with cancer.”
There was a pause, in which Strike put down his coffee cup with a soft chink, and the distant cheers of the small children in the square outside floated through the open window.
“John and Tony were very, very angry with her,” said Lady Bristow. “They didn’t think she ought to have started trying to find her biological mother, when I was so very ill. The tumor was already advanced when they found it. I had to go straight on to chemotherapy. John was very good; he drove me back and forth to the hospital, and came to stay with me during the worst bits, and even Tony rallied round, but all Lula seemed to care about…” She sighed, and opened her faded eyes, seeking Strike’s face. “Tony always said that she was very spoiled. I daresay it was my fault. I had lost Charlie, you see; I couldn’t do enough for her.”
“Do you know how much Lula managed to find out about her birth family?”
“No, I don’t, I’m afraid. I think she knew how much it upset me. She didn’t tell me a great deal. I know that she found the mother, of course, because there was all the dreadful publicity. She was exactly what Tony had predicted. She hadn’t ever wanted Lula. An awful, awful woman,” whispered Lady Bristow. “But Lula kept seeing her. I was having chemotherapy all through that time. I lost my hair…”
Her voice trailed away. Strike felt, as perhaps she meant him to, like a brute as he pressed on:
“What about her biological father? Did she ever tell you she’d found out anything about him?”
“No,” said Lady Bristow weakly. “I didn’t ask. I had the impression that she had given up on the whole business once she found that horrible mother. I didn’t want to discuss it, any of it. It was too distressing. I think she realized that.”
“She didn’t mention her biological father the last time you saw her?” Strike pressed on.
“Oh no,” she said, in her soft voice. “No. That was not a very long visit, you know. She told me, the moment she arrived, I remember, that she could not stay long. She had to meet her friend Ciara Porter.”
Her sense of ill-usage wafted gently towards him like the smell of the bedridden she exuded: a little fusty, a little overripe. Something about her recalled Rochelle; although they were as different as two women could be, both gave off the resentment of those who feel shortchanged and neglected.
“Can you remember what you and Lula talked about that day?”
“Well, I had been given so many painkillers, you understand. I had had a very serious operation. I can’t remember every detail.”
“But you remember Lula coming to see you?” asked Strike.
“Oh yes,” she said. “She woke me up, I had been sleeping.”
“Can you remember what you talked about?”
“My operation, of course,” she said, with just a touch of asperity. “And then, a little bit, about her big brother.”
“Her big…?”
“Charlie,” said Lady Bristow, pitifully. “I told her about the day he died. I had never really talked to her about it before. The worst, the very worst day of my life.”
Strike could imagine her, prostrate and a little groggy, but no less resentful for all that, holding her unwilling daughter there at her side by talking about her pain, and her dead son.
“How could I have known that that would be the last time I would ever see her?” breathed Lady Bristow. “I didn’t realize that I was about to lose a second child.”
Her bloodshot eyes filled. She blinked, and two fat tears fell down on to her hollow cheeks.
“Could you please look in that drawer,” she whispered, pointing a withered finger at the bedside table, “and get me out my pills?”
Strike slid it open and saw many white boxes inside, of varying types and with various labels upon them.
“Which…?”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,” she said.
He took one out; it was clearly labeled Valium. She had enough in there to overdose ten times.
“If you could pop a couple out for me?” she said. “I’ll take them with some tea, if it’s cool enough.”
He handed her her pills and the cup; her hands trembled; he had to support the saucer and he thought, inappropriately, of a priest offering communion.
“Thank you,” she murmured, relaxing back on to her pillows as he replaced her tea on the table, and fixing him with her plaintive eyes. “Didn’t John tell me you knew Charlie?”
“Yes, I did,” said Strike. “I’ve never forgotten him.”
“No, of course not. He was a most lovable child. Everyone always said so. The sweetest boy, the very sweetest I have ever known. I miss him every single day.”
Outside the window, the children shrieked, and the plane trees rustled, and Strike thought of how the room would have looked on a winter morning months ago, when the trees must have been barelimbed, when Lula Landry had sat where he was sitting, with her beautiful eyes perhaps fixed on the picture of dead Charlie while her groggy mother told the horrible story.
“I had never really talked to Lula about it before. The boys had gone out on their bikes. We heard John screaming, and then Tony shouting, shouting…”
Strike’s pen had not made contact with paper yet. He watched the dying woman’s face as she talked.
“Alec wouldn’t let me look, wouldn’t let me anywhere near the quarry. When he told me what had happened, I fainted. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I could not understand how God could have let it happen.
“But since then, I’ve come to think that perhaps I have deserved all of it,” said Lady Bristow distantly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I’ve wondered whether I’m being punished. Because I loved them too much. I spoiled them. I couldn’t say no. Charlie, Alec and Lula. I think it must be punishment, because otherwise it would be too unspeakably cruel, wouldn’t it? To make me go through it again, and again, and again.”
Strike had no answer to give. She invited pity, but he found he could not pity her even as much as, perhaps, she deserved. She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.
“I wanted Lula so much,” said Lady Bristow, “but I don’t think she ever…She was a darling little thing. So beautiful. I would have done anything for that girl. But she didn’t love me the way Charlie and John loved me. Maybe it was too late. Maybe we got her too late.
“John was jealous when she first came to us. He had been devastated about Charlie…but they ended up being very close friends. Very close.”
A tiny frown crumpled the paper-fine skin of her forehead.
“So Tony was quite wrong.”
“What was he wrong about?” asked Strike quietly.
Her fingers twitched upon the covers. She swallowed.
“Tony didn’t think we should have adopted Lula.”
“Why not?” asked Strike.
“Tony never liked any of my children,” said Yvette Bristow. “My brother is a very hard man. Very cold. He said dreadful things after Charlie died. Alec hit him. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true—what Tony said.”
Her milky gaze slid to Strike’s face, and he thought he glimpsed the woman she must have been when she still had her looks: a little clingy, a little childish, prettily dependent, an ultra-feminine creature, protected and petted by Sir Alec, who strove to satisfy her every whim and wish.
“What did Tony say?”
“Horrible things about John and Charlie. Awful things. I don’t,” she said weakly, “want to repeat them. And then he phoned Alec, when he heard that we were adopting a little girl, and told him we ought not to do it. Alec was furious,” she whispered. “He forbade Tony our house.”
“Did you tell Lula about all this when she visited that day?” asked Strike. “About Tony, and the things he said after Charlie died; and when you adopted her?”
She seemed to sense a reproach.
“I can’t remember exactly what I said to her. I had just had a very serious operation. I was a little drowsy from all the drugs. I can’t remember precisely what I said now…”
And then, with an abrupt change of subject:
“That boy reminded me of Charlie. Lula’s boyfriend. The very handsome boy. What is his name?”
“Evan Duffield?”
“That’s right. He came to see me a little while ago, you know. Quite recently. I don’t know exactly…I lose track of time. They give me so many drugs now. But he came to see me. It was so sweet of him. He wanted to talk about Lula.”
Strike remembered Bristow’s assertion that his mother had not known who Duffield was, and he wondered whether Lady Bristow had played this little game with her son; making herself out to be more confused than she really was, to stimulate his protective instincts.
“Charlie would have been handsome like that, if he’d lived. He might have been a singer, or an actor. He loved performing, do you remember? I felt very sorry for that boy Evan. He cried here, with me. He told me that he thought she was meeting another man.”
“What other man was that?”
“The singer,” said Lady Bristow vaguely. “The singer who’d written songs about her. When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel. I felt very sorry for him. He told me he felt guilty. I told him he had nothing to feel guilty about.”
“Why did he say he felt guilty?”
“For not following her into her apartment. For not being there, to stop her dying.”
“If we could just go back for a moment, Yvette, to the day before Lula’s death?”
She looked reproachful.
“I’m afraid I can’t remember anything else. I’ve told you everything I remember. I was just out of hospital. I was not myself. They’d given me so many drugs, for the pain.”
“I understand that. I just wanted to know whether you remember your brother, Tony, visiting you that day?”
There was a pause, and Strike saw something harden in the weak face.
“No, I don’t remember Tony coming,” said Lady Bristow at last. “I know he says he was here, but I don’t remember him coming. Maybe I was asleep.”
“He claims to have been here when Lula was visiting,” said Strike.
Lady Bristow gave the smallest shrug of her fragile shoulders.
“Maybe he was here,” she said, “but I don’t remember it.” And then, her voice rising, “My brother’s being much nicer to me now he knows that I’m dying. He visits a lot now. Always putting down poison about John, of course. He’s always done that. But John has always been very good to me. He has done things for me while I’ve been ill…things no son should have to do. It would have been more appropriate for Lula…but she was a spoiled girl. I loved her, but she could be selfish. Very selfish.”
“So on that last day, the last time you saw Lula—” said Strike, returning doggedly to the main point, but Lady Bristow cut across him.
“After she left, I was very upset,” she said. “Very upset indeed. Talking about Charlie always does that to me. She could see how distressed I was, but she still left to meet her friend. I had to take pills, and I slept. No, I never saw Tony; I didn’t see anyone else. He might say he was here, but I don’t remember anything until John woke me up with a supper tray. John was cross. He told me off.”
“Why was that?”
“He thinks I take too many pills,” said Lady Bristow, like a little girl. “I know he wants the best for me, poor John, but he doesn’t realize…he couldn’t…I’ve had so much pain in my life. He sat with me for a long time that night. We talked about Charlie. We talked into the early hours of the morning. And while we were talking,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, “at the very time we were talking, Lula fell…she fell off the balcony.
“So it was John who had to break the news to me, the next morning. The police had arrived on the doorstep, at the crack of dawn. He came into the bedroom to tell me and…”
She swallowed, and shook her head, limp, barely alive.
“That’s why the cancer came back, I know it. People can only bear so much pain.”
Her voice was becoming more slurred. He wondered how much Valium she had already taken, as she closed her eyes drowsily.
“Yvette, would it be all right if I used your bathroom?” he asked.
She assented with a sleepy nod.
Strike got up, and moved quickly, and surprisingly quietly for a man of his bulk, into the walk-in wardrobe.
The space was lined with mahogany doors that reached to the ceiling. Strike opened one of the doors and glanced inside, at overstuffed railings of dresses and coats, with a shelf of bags and hats above, breathing in the musty smell of old shoes and fabric which, in spite of the evident costliness of the contents, evoked an old charity shop. Silently he opened and closed door after door, until, on the fourth attempt, he saw a cluster of clearly brand-new handbags, each of a different color, that had been squeezed on to the high shelf.
He took down the blue one, shop-new and shiny. Here was the GS logo, and the silk lining that was zipped into the bag. He ran his fingers around it, into every corner, then replaced it deftly on the shelf.
He selected the white bag next: the lining was patterned with a stylized African print. Again he ran his fingers all around the interior. Then he unzipped the lining.
It came out, just as Ciara had described, like a metal-edged scarf, exposing the rough interior of the white leather. Nothing was visible inside until he looked more closely, and then he saw the line of pale blue running down the side of the stiff rectangular cloth-covered board holding the base of the bag in shape. He lifted up the board and saw, beneath it, a folded piece of pale blue paper, scribbled all over in an untidy hand.
Strike replaced the bag swiftly on the shelf with the lining bundled inside, and took from an inside pocket of his jacket a clear plastic bag, into which he inserted the pale blue paper, shaken open but unread. He closed the mahogany door and continued to open others. Behind the penultimate door was a safe, operated by a digital keypad.
Strike took a second plastic bag from inside his jacket, slid it over his hand and began to press keys, but before he had completed his trial, he heard movement outside. Hastily thrusting the crumpled bag back into a pocket, he closed the wardrobe door as quietly as possible and walked back into the bedroom, to find the Macmillan nurse bending over Yvette Bristow. She looked around when she heard him.
“Wrong door,” said Strike. “I thought it was the bathroom.”
He went into the small en-suite, and here, with the door closed, before flushing the toilet and turning on the taps for the nurse’s benefit, he read the last will and testament of Lula Landry, scribbled on her mother’s writing paper and witnessed by Rochelle Onifade.
Yvette Bristow was still lying with her eyes closed when he returned to the bedroom.
“She’s asleep,” said the nurse, gently. “She does this a lot.”
“Yes,” said Strike, the blood pounding in his ears. “Please tell her I said goodbye, when she wakes up. I’m going to have to leave now.”
They walked together down the comfortable passageway.
“Lady Bristow seems very ill,” Strike commented.
“Oh yes, she is,” said the nurse. “She could die any time now. She’s very poorly.”
“I think I might have left my…” said Strike vaguely, wandering left into the yellow sitting room he had first visited, leaning over the sofa to block the nurse’s view and carefully replacing the telephone receiver he had taken off the hook.
“Yes, here it is,” he said, pretending to palm something small and put it in his pocket. “Well, thanks very much for the coffee.”
With his hand on the door, he turned to look at her.
“Her Valium addiction’s as bad as ever, then?” he said.
Unsuspicious, trusting, the nurse smiled a tolerant smile.
“Yes, it is, but it can’t hurt her now. Mind you,” she said, “I’d give those doctors a piece of my mind. She’s had three of them giving her prescriptions for years, from the labels on the boxes.”
“Very unprofessional,” said Strike. “Thanks again for the coffee. Goodbye.”
He jogged down the stairs, his mobile already out of his pocket, so exhilarated that he did not concentrate on where he was going, so that he took a corner on the stair and let out a bellow of pain as the prosthetic foot slipped on the edge; his knee twisted and he fell, hard and heavy, down six stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom with an excruciating, fiery pain in both the joint and the end of his stump, as though it was freshly severed, as though the scar tissue was still healing.
“Fuck. Fuck!”
“Are you all right?” shouted the Macmillan nurse, gazing down at him over the banisters, her face comically inverted.
“I’m fine—fine!” he shouted back. “Slipped! Don’t worry! Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he moaned under his breath, as he pulled himself back to his feet on the newel post, scared to put his full weight on the prosthesis.
He limped downstairs, leaning on the banisters as much as possible; half hopped across the lobby floor and hung on the heavy front door as he maneuvered himself out on to the front steps.
The sporting children were receding in a distant crocodile, pale and navy blue, winding their way back to their school and lunch. Strike stood leaning against warm brick, cursing himself fluently and wondering what damage he had done. The pain was excruciating, and the skin that had already been irritated felt as though it had been torn; it burned beneath the gel pad that was supposed to protect it, and the idea of walking all the way to the underground was miserably unappealing.
He sat down on the top step and phoned a taxi, after which he made a further series of calls, firstly to Robin, then to Wardle, then to the offices of Landry, May, Patterson.
The black cab swung around the corner. For the very first time, it occurred to Strike how like miniature hearses they were, these stately black vehicles, as he hoisted himself upright and limped, in escalating pain, down to the pavement.