The Cuckoo's Calling

“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.