The Cuckoo's Calling

“So now the street’s empty. The moment has arrived. You pulled on Deeby’s hoodie. Big mistake. But you must admit, with all the lucky breaks you got that night, something had to go wrong.

“And then—and I’m going to give you full marks for this, because it puzzled me for a long time—you took a few of those white roses out of their vase, didn’t you? You wiped the ends dry—not quite as thoroughly as you should have done, but pretty well—and you carried them out of Flat Two, leaving the door ajar again, and climbed the stairs to your sister’s flat.

“You didn’t notice that you’d left a few little drops of water from the roses, by the way. Wilson slipped on them, later.

“You got up to Lula’s flat, and you knocked. When she looked through the peephole, what did she see? White roses. She’d been standing on her balcony, with the windows wide open, watching and waiting for her long-lost brother to come down the street, but somehow he seems to have got in without her seeing him! In her excitement, she throws open the door—and you’re in.”

Bristow was completely still. Even his knee had stopped jiggling.

“And you killed her, just the same way you killed Charlie, just the same way you later killed Rochelle: you pushed her, hard and fast—maybe you lifted her—but she was caught by surprise, wasn’t she, just like the others?

“You were yelling at her for not giving you money, for depriving you, just as you’ve always been deprived, haven’t you, John, of your portion of parental love.

“She yelled at you that you wouldn’t get a penny, even if you killed her. As you fought, and you forced her across her sitting room towards that balcony and the drop, she told you she had another brother, a real brother, and that he was on his way, and that she’d made a will in his favor.

“ ‘It’s too late, I’ve already done it!’ she screamed. And you called her a lying fucking bitch, and you threw her down into the street to her death.”

Bristow was barely breathing.

“I think you must have dropped the roses at her front door. You ran back out, picked them up, sprinted down the stairs and back into Flat Two, where you rammed them back into their vase. Fuck me, you were lucky. That vase got smashed accidentally by a copper, and those roses were the one clue to show that someone had been in that flat; you can’t have replaced them the way the florist had arranged them, not when you knew you had minutes to get clear of that building.

“The next bit took nerve. I doubt you expected anyone to raise the alarm straight away, but Tansy Bestigui had been on the balcony below you. You heard her screaming, and realized you had even less time to get out of there than you’d been counting on. Wilson ran out to the street to check Lula, and then, waiting at the door, staring through the peephole, you saw him run upstairs to the top floor.

“You reset the alarm, let yourself out of the flat and edge down the stairwell. The Bestiguis are bellowing at each other in their own flat. You run downstairs—heard by Freddie Bestigui, though he had other preoccupations at the time—the lobby’s empty—you run through it and out on to the street, where it’s snowing thick and fast.

“And you ran, didn’t you; hoodie up, face covered, gloved hands pumping. And at the end of the street, you saw another man running, running for his life, away from the corner where he’d just seen his sister fall to her death. You didn’t know each other. I don’t think you had a thought to spare for who he was, not then. You ran as fast as you could, in Deeby Macc’s borrowed clothes, past the CCTV camera that caught you both on film, and off down Halliwell Street, where your luck caught up with you again, and there were no more cameras.

“I expect you chucked the hoodie and the gloves in a bin and grabbed a taxi, did you? The police never bothered looking for a suited white man who was out and about that night. You went home to your mother’s, you made food for her, you changed the time on her clock and you woke her up. She’s still convinced that the two of you were talking about Charlie—nice touch, John—at the precise moment that Lula plunged to her death.

“You got away with it, John. You could have afforded to keep paying Rochelle for life. With your luck, Jonah Agyeman might even have died in Afghanistan; you’ve been getting your hopes up every time you’ve seen a picture of a black soldier in the paper, haven’t you? But you didn’t want to trust to luck. You’re a twisted, arrogant fucker, and you thought you could arrange things better.”

There was a long silence.

“No proof,” said Bristow, at last. It was so dark in the office now that he was barely more than a silhouette to Strike. “No proof at all.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong there,” said Strike. “The police should have got a warrant by now.”

“For what?” asked Bristow, and he finally felt confident enough to laugh. “To search the bins of London for a hoodie that you say was thrown away three months ago?”

“No, to look in your mother’s safe, of course.”