The Cuckoo's Calling

“What you did next might seem quite incriminating to a jury. You didn’t dial 999. You didn’t run after your half-frozen, hysterical wife. You didn’t even—which the jury might find more understandable—run and flush away the coke you knew was lying in open view in the bathroom.

“No, what you did next, before following your wife or calling the police, was to wipe that window clean. There’d be no prints to show that Tansy had placed her hands on the outside of the glass, would there? Your priority was to make sure that nobody could prove you had shoved your wife out on to a balcony in a temperature of minus ten. What with your unsavory reputation for assault and abuse, and the possibility of a lawsuit from a young employee in the air, you weren’t going to hand the press or a prosecutor any additional evidence, were you?

“Once you’d satisfied yourself that you’d removed any trace of her prints from the glass, you ran downstairs and compelled her to return to your flat. In the short time available to you before the police arrived, you bullied her into agreeing not to admit where she’d been when the body fell. I don’t know what you promised her, or threatened her with; but whatever it was, it worked.

“You still didn’t feel completely safe, though, because she was so shocked and distressed you thought she might blurt out the whole story. So you tried to distract the police by ranting about the flowers that had been knocked over in Deeby Macc’s flat, hoping Tansy would pull herself together and stick to the deal.

“Well she has, hasn’t she? God knows how much it’s cost you, but she’s let herself be dragged through the dirt in the press; she’s put up with being called a coke-addled fantasist; she’s stuck to her cock-and-bull story about hearing Landry and the murderer argue, through two floors, and soundproofed glass.

“Once she realizes there’s photographic proof of where she was, though,” said Strike, “I think she’ll be glad to come clean. Your wife might think she loves money more than anything in the world, but her conscience is troubling her. I’m confident she’ll crack pretty fast.”

Bestigui had smoked his cigarillo down to its last few millimeters. Slowly he ground it out in the black glass ashtray. Long seconds passed, and the noise in the outside office filtered through the glass wall beside them: voices, the ringing of a telephone.

Bestigui stood up and lowered Roman blinds of canvas down over the glass partition, so that none of the nervy girls in the office beyond could see in. He sat back down and ran thick fingers thoughtfully over the crumpled terrain of his lower face, glancing at Strike and away again, towards the blank cream canvas he had created. Strike could almost see options occurring to the producer, as though he was riffling a deck of cards.

“The curtains were drawn,” Bestigui said finally. “There wasn’t enough light coming out of the windows to make out a woman hiding on the balcony. Tansy’s not going to change her story.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Strike, stretching out his legs; the prosthesis was still uncomfortable. “When I put it to her that the legal term for what the pair of you have done is ‘conspiring to prevent the course of justice,’ and that a belated show of conscience might keep her out of the nick; when I add in the public sympathy she’s bound to get as the victim of domestic abuse, and the amount of money she’s likely to be offered for exclusive rights to her story; when she realizes she’s going to get her say in court, and that she’ll be believed, and that she’ll be able to bring about the conviction of the man she heard murdering her neighbor—Mr. Bestigui, I don’t think even you’ve got enough money to keep her quiet.”

The coarse skin around Bestigui’s mouth flickered. He picked up his packet of cigarillos but did not extract one. There was a long silence during which he turned the packet between his fingers, round and round.

At last he said:

“I’m admitting nothing. Get out.”

Strike did not move.

“I know you’re keen to phone your lawyer,” he said, “but I think you’re overlooking the silver lining here.”

“I’ve had enough of you. I said, get out.”

“However unpleasant it’s going to be, having to admit to what happened that night, it’s still preferable to becoming the prime suspect in a murder case. It’s going to be about the lesser of evils from here on in. If you cough to what really happened, you’re putting yourself in the clear for the actual murder.”

He had Bestigui’s attention now.