4
THE MEN’S CONVERSATION HAD BEEN carrying, with increasing clarity, through the flimsy dividing wall for a couple of minutes; now, in the sudden silence following the cessation of the drill, Bristow’s words were plainly audible.
Purely for her own amusement, in the high spirits of this happy day, Robin had been trying to act convincingly the part of Strike’s regular secretary, and not to give away to Bristow’s girlfriend that she had only been working for a private detective for half an hour. She concealed as best she could any sign of surprise or excitement at the outbreak of shouting, but she was instinctively on Bristow’s side, whatever the cause of the conflict. Strike’s job and his black eye had a certain beaten-up glamour, but his attitude towards her was deplorable, and her left breast was still sore.
Bristow’s girlfriend had been staring at the closed door ever since the men’s voices had first become audible over the noise of the drill. Thick-set and very dark, with a limp bob and what might have been a monobrow if she had not plucked it, she looked naturally cross. Robin had often noticed how couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself. Robin found it endearing that Bristow, who on the evidence of his smart suit and his prestigious firm could have set his sights on somebody much prettier, had chosen this girl, who she assumed was warmer and kinder than her appearance suggested.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a coffee, Alison?” she asked.
The girl looked around as though surprised at being spoken to, as though she had forgotten that Robin was there.
“No thanks,” she said, in a deep voice that was surprisingly melodious. “I knew he’d get upset,” she added, with an odd kind of satisfaction. “I’ve tried to talk him out of doing this, but he wouldn’t listen. Sounds like this so-called detective is turning him down. Good for him.”
Robin’s surprise must have shown, because Alison went on, with a trace of impatience:
“It’d be better for John if he’d just accept the facts. She killed herself. The rest of the family have come to terms with it, I don’t know why he can’t.”
There was no point pretending that she did not know what the woman was talking about. Everyone knew what had happened to Lula Landry. Robin could remember exactly where she had been when she had heard that the model had dived to her death on a sub-zero night in January: standing at the sink in the kitchen of her parents’ house. The news had come over the radio, and she had emitted a little cry of surprise, and run out of the kitchen in her nightshirt to tell Matthew, who was staying for the weekend. How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so? Robin had greatly admired Lula Landry’s looks. She did not much like her own milkmaid’s coloring: the model had been dark, luminous, fine-boned and fierce.
“It hasn’t been very long since she died.”
“Three months,” said Alison, shaking out her Daily Express. “Is he any good, this man?”
Robin had noticed Alison’s contemptuous expression as she took in the dilapidated condition, and undeniable grubbiness, of the little waiting room, and she had just seen, online, the pristine, palatial office where the other woman worked. Her answer was therefore prompted by self-respect rather than any desire to protect Strike.
“Oh yes,” she replied coolly. “He’s one of the best.”
She slit open a pink, kitten-embellished envelope with the air of a woman who daily dealt with exigencies much more complex and intriguing than Alison could possibly imagine.
Meanwhile, Strike and Bristow were facing each other across the inner room, the one furious, the other trying to find a way to reverse his position without jettisoning his self-respect.
“All I want, Strike,” said Bristow hoarsely, the color high in his thin face, “is justice.”
He might have struck a divine tuning fork; the word rang through the shabby office, calling forth an inaudible but plangent note in Strike’s breast. Bristow had located the pilot light Strike shielded when everything else had been blown to ashes. He stood in desperate need of money, but Bristow had given him another, better reason to jettison his scruples.
“OK. I understand. I mean it, John; I understand. Come back and sit down. If you still want my help, I’d like to give it.”
Bristow glared at him. There was no noise in the office but the distant shouts of the workmen below.
“Would you like your—er, wife, is she?—to come in?”
“No,” said Bristow, still tense, with his hand on the doorknob. “Alison doesn’t think I ought to be doing this. I don’t know why she wanted to come along, actually. Probably hoping you’d turn me down.”
“Please—sit down. Let’s go over this properly.”
Bristow hesitated, then moved back towards his abandoned chair.
His self-restraint crumbling at last, Strike took a chocolate biscuit and crammed it, whole, into his mouth; he took an unused notepad from his desk drawer, flicked it open, reached for a pen and managed to swallow the biscuit in the time it took Bristow to resume his seat.
“Shall I take that?” he suggested, pointing to the envelope Bristow was still clutching.
The lawyer handed it over as though unsure he could trust Strike with it. Strike, who did not wish to to peruse the contents in front of Bristow, put it aside with a small pat, which was intended to show that it was now a valued component of the investigation, and readied his pen.
“John, if you could give me a brief outline of what happened on the day your sister died, it would be very helpful.”
By nature methodical and thorough, Strike had been trained to investigate to a high and rigorous standard. First, allow the witness to tell their story in their own way: the untrammeled flow often revealed details, apparent inconsequentialities, that would later prove invaluable nuggets of evidence. Once the first gush of impression and recollection had been harvested, then it was time to solicit and arrange facts rigorously and precisely: people, places, property…
“Oh,” said Bristow, who seemed, after all his vehemence, unsure where to start, “I don’t really…let’s see…”
“When was the last time you saw her?” Strike prompted.
“That would have been—yes, the morning before she died. We…we had an argument, as a matter of fact, though thank God we made it up.”
“What time was this?”
“It was early. Before nine, I was on my way in to the office. Perhaps a quarter to nine?”
“And what did you argue about?”
“Oh, about her boyfriend, Evan Duffield. They’d just got back together again. The family had thought it was over and we’d been so pleased. He’s a horrible person, an addict and a chronic self-publicist; about the worst influence on Lula you could imagine.
“I might have been a bit heavy-handed, I—I see that now. I was eleven years older than Lula. I felt protective of her, you know. Perhaps I was bossy at times. She was always telling me that I didn’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Well…anything. She had lots of issues. Issues with being adopted. Issues with being black in a white family. She used to say I had it easy…I don’t know. Perhaps she was right.”
He blinked rapidly behind his glasses. “The row was really the continuation of a row we’d had on the telephone the night before. I just couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid as to go back to Duffield. The relief we all felt when they split up…I mean, given her own history with drugs, hooking up with an addict…” He drew breath. “She didn’t want to hear it. She never did. She was furious with me. She’d actually given instructions to the security man at the flats not to let me past the front desk next morning, but—well, Wilson waved me through anyway.”
Humiliating, thought Strike, to have to rely on the pity of doormen.
“I wouldn’t have gone up,” said Bristow miserably, blotches of color dappling his thin neck again, “but I had the contract with Somé to give back to her; she’d asked me to look over it and she needed to sign it…She could be quite blasé about things like that. Anyway, she wasn’t too happy that they’d let me upstairs, and we rowed again, but it burned itself out quite quickly. She calmed down.
“So then I told her that Mum would appreciate a visit. Mum had just got out of hospital, you see. She’d had a hysterectomy. Lula said she might pop in and see her later, at her flat, but that she couldn’t be sure. She had things on.”
Bristow took a deep breath; his right knee started jiggling up and down again and his knobble-knuckled hands washed each other in dumb show.
“I don’t want you to think badly of her. People thought her selfish, but she’d been the youngest in the family and rather indulged, and then she was ill and, naturally, the center of attention, and then she was plunged into this extraordinary life where things, people, revolved around her, and she was pursued everywhere by the paparazzi. It wasn’t a normal existence.”
“No,” said Strike.
“So, anyway, I told Lula how groggy and sore Mum was feeling, and she said she might look in on her later. I left; I nipped into my office to get some files from Alison, because I wanted to work from Mum’s flat that day and keep her company. I next saw Lula at Mum’s, mid-morning. She sat with Mum for a while in the bedroom until my uncle arrived to visit, and then nipped into the study where I was working, to say goodbye. She hugged me before she…”
Bristow’s voice cracked, and he stared down into his lap.
“More coffee?” Strike suggested. Bristow shook his bowed head. To give him a moment to pull himself together, Strike picked up the tray and headed for the outer office.
Bristow’s girlfriend looked up from her newspaper, scowling, when Strike appeared. “Aren’t you finished?” she asked.
“Evidently not,” said Strike, with no attempt at a smile. She glared at him while he addressed Robin.
“Could I get another cup of coffee, er…?”
Robin stood up and took the tray from him in silence.
“John needs to be back in the office at half past ten,” Alison informed Strike, in a slightly louder voice. “We’ll need to be off in ten minutes at the most.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Strike assured her blandly, before returning to the inner office, where Bristow was sitting as though in prayer, his head bowed over his clasped hands.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, as Strike sat back down. “It’s still difficult talking about it.”
“No problem,” said Strike, picking up his notebook again. “So Lula came to see your mother? What time was that?”
“Elevenish. It all came out at the inquest, what she did after that. She got her driver to take her to some boutique that she liked, and then she went back to her flat. She had an appointment at home with a makeup artist she knew, and her friend Ciara Porter joined her there. You’ll have seen Ciara Porter, she’s a model. Very blonde. They were photographed together as angels, you probably saw it: naked except for handbags and wings. Somé used the picture in his advertising campaign after Lula died. People said it was tasteless.
“So Lula and Ciara spent the afternoon together at Lula’s flat, and then they left to go out to dinner, where they met up with Duffield and some other people. The whole group went on to Uzi, the nightclub, and they were there until past midnight.
“Then Duffield and Lula argued. Lots of people saw it happen. He manhandled her a bit, tried to make her stay, but she left the club alone. Everyone thought he’d done it, afterwards, but he turned out to have a cast-iron alibi.”
“Cleared on the evidence of his drug dealer, wasn’t he?” asked Strike, still writing.
“Yes, exactly. So—so Lula arrived back at her flat around twenty past one. She was photographed going inside. You probably remember that picture. It was everywhere afterwards.”
Strike remembered: one of the world’s most photographed women, head bowed, shoulders hunched, eyes heavy and arms folded tightly around her torso, twisting her face away from the photographers. Once the verdict of suicide had been clearly established, it had taken on a macabre aspect: the rich and beautiful young woman, less than an hour from her death, attempting to conceal her wretchedness from the lenses she had courted, and which had so adored her.
“Were there usually photographers outside her door?”
“Yes, especially if they knew she was with Duffield, or they wanted to get a shot of her coming home drunk. But they weren’t only there for her that night. An American rapper was supposed to be arriving to stay in the same building that evening; Deeby Macc’s his name. His record company had rented the apartment beneath hers. In the event he never stayed there, because with the police all over the building it was easier for him to go to a hotel. But the photographers who had chased Lula’s car when she left Uzi joined the ones who were waiting for Macc outside the flats, so that made quite a crowd of them around the entrance of the building, though they all drifted away not long after she’d gone inside. Somehow they got a tip-off that Macc wouldn’t be there for hours.
“It was a bitterly cold night. Snowing. Below freezing. So the street was empty when she fell.”
Bristow blinked and took another sip of cold coffee, and Strike thought about the paparazzi who had left before Lula Landry fell from her balcony. Imagine, he thought, what a shot of Landry diving to her death would have gone for; enough to retire on, perhaps.
“John, your girlfriend says you need to be somewhere at half past ten.”
“What?”
Bristow seemed to return to himself. He checked the expensive watch and gasped.
“Good God, I had no idea I’d been here so long. What—what happens now?” he asked, looking slightly bewildered. “You’ll read my notes?”
“Yeah, of course,” Strike assured him, “and I’ll call you in a couple of days when I’ve done some preliminary work. I expect I’ll have a lot more questions then.”
“All right,” said Bristow, getting dazedly to his feet. “Here—take my card. And how would you like me to pay?”
“A month’s fee in advance will be great,” said Strike. Quashing feeble stirrings of shame, and remembering that Bristow himself had offered a double fee, he named an exorbitant amount, and to his delight Bristow did not quibble, nor ask whether he accepted credit cards nor even promise to drop the money in later, but drew out a real check-book and a pen.
“If, say, a quarter of it could be in cash,” Strike added, chancing his luck; and was staggered for the second time that morning when Bristow said, “I did wonder whether you’d prefer…” and counted out a pile of fifties in addition to the check.
They emerged into the outer office at the very moment that Robin was about to enter with Strike’s fresh coffee. Bristow’s girlfriend stood up when the door opened, and folded her newspaper with the air of one who had been kept waiting too long. She was almost as tall as Bristow, large-framed, with a surly expression and big, mannish hands.
“So you’ve agreed to do it, have you?” she asked Strike. He had the impression that she thought he was taking advantage of her rich boyfriend. Very possibly she was right.
“Yes, John’s hired me,” he replied.
“Oh well,” she said, ungraciously. “You’re pleased, I expect, John.”
The lawyer smiled at her, and she sighed and patted his arm, like a tolerant but slightly exasperated mother to a child. John Bristow raised his hand in a salute, then followed his girlfriend out of the room, and their footsteps clanged away down the metal stairs.