The Cuckoo's Calling

Carver’s blunt, wide face was clenched; his glaring blue eyes vivid in the purple-red face.

“You’re in a heap of trouble here, pal, and a famous dad, a peg leg and a good war aren’t going to get you out of it. How do we know you didn’t scare the poor bitch into fucking jumping? Mentally ill, wasn’t she? How do we know you didn’t make her think she’d done something wrong? You were the last person to see her alive, pal. I wouldn’t like to be sitting where you are now.”

“Rochelle crossed Grantley Road and walked away from me, as alive as you are. You’ll find someone who saw her after she left me. Nobody’s going to forget that coat.”

Wardle pushed himself off the filing cabinets, dragged a hard plastic chair over to the desk and sat down.

“Let’s have it, then,” he told Strike. “Your theory.”

“She was blackmailing Lula Landry’s killer.”

“Piss off,” snapped Carver, and Wardle snorted in slightly stagey amusement.

“The day before she died,” said Strike, “Landry met Rochelle for fifteen minutes in that shop in Notting Hill. She dragged Rochelle straight into a changing cubicle, where she made a telephone call begging somebody to meet her at her flat in the early hours of the following morning. That call was overheard by an assistant at the shop; she was in the next cubicle; they’re separated by a curtain. Girl called Mel, red hair and tattoos.”

“People will spout any amount of shit when there’s a celebrity involved,” said Carver.

“If Landry phoned anyone from that cubicle,” said Wardle, “it was Duffield, or her uncle. Her phone records show they were the only people she called, all afternoon.”

“Why did she want Rochelle there when she made the call?” asked Strike. “Why drag her friend into the cubicle with her?”

“Women do that stuff,” said Carver. “They piss in herds, too.”

“Use your fucking intelligence: she was making the call on Rochelle’s phone,” said Strike, exasperated. “She’d tested everyone she knew to try and see who was talking to the press about her. Rochelle was the only one who kept her mouth shut. She established that the girl was trustworthy, bought her a mobile, registered it in Rochelle’s name but took care of all the charges. She’d had her own phone hacked, hadn’t she? She was getting paranoid about people listening in and reporting on her, so she bought a Nokia and registered it to somebody else, to give herself a totally secure means of communication when she wanted it.

“I grant you, that doesn’t necessarily rule out her uncle, or Duffield, because calling them on the alternative number might have been a signal they’d organized between them. Alternatively, she was using Rochelle’s number to speak to somebody else; someone she didn’t want the press to know about. I’ve got Rochelle’s mobile number. Find out what network she was with and you’ll be able to check all this. The unit itself is a crystal-covered pink Nokia, but you won’t find that.”

“Yeah, because it’s at the bottom of the Thames,” said Wardle.

“Course it isn’t,” said Strike. “The killer’s got it. He’ll have got it off her before he threw her into the river.”

“Fuck off!” jeered Carver, and Wardle, who had seemed interested against his better judgment, shook his head.

“Why did Landry want Rochelle there when she made the call?” Strike repeated. “Why not make it from the car? Why, when Rochelle was homeless, and virtually destitute, did she never sell her story on Landry? They’d have given her a great wad for it. Why didn’t she cash in, once Landry was dead, and couldn’t be hurt?”

“Decency?” suggested Wardle.

“Yeah, that’s one possibility,” said Strike. “The other’s that she was making enough by blackmailing the killer.”

“Boll-ocks,” moaned Carver.

“Yeah? That Muppet coat she was pulled up wearing cost one and a half grand.”

A tiny pause.

“Landry probably gave it to her,” said Wardle.

“If she did, she managed to buy her something that wasn’t in the shops back in January.”

“Landry was a model, she had inside contacts—fuck this shit,” snapped Carver, as though he had irritated himself.

“Why,” said Strike, leaning forwards on his arms into the miasma of body odor that surrounded Carver, “did Lula Landry make a detour to that shop for fifteen minutes?”

“She was in a hurry.”

“Why go at all?”

“She didn’t want to let the girl down.”

“She got Rochelle to come right across town—this penniless, homeless girl, the girl she usually gave a lift home afterwards, in her chauffeur-driven car—dragged her into a cubicle, and then walked out fifteen minutes later, leaving her to make her own way home.”

“She was a spoiled bitch.”