“Get on with it,” said Strike. “Her, not you,” he added hastily. “It’s a woman writing, right?”
“Yes, a Melanie Telford,” said Robin, scrolling back to the top of the screen to reveal the head shot of a jowly middle-aged blonde. “Do you want me to skip the rest?”
“No, no, keep going.”
Robin cleared her throat once more and continued.
“ ‘The answer, surely, is no.’ That’s the bit about aspiring models being deterred.”
“Yeah, got that.”
“Right, well…‘A hundred years after Emmeline Pankhurst, a generation of pubescent females seeks nothing better than to be reduced to the status of a cut-out paper doll, a flat avatar whose fictionalized adventures mask such disturbance and distress that she threw herself from a third-story window. Appearance is alclass="underline" the designer Guy Somé was quick to inform the press that she jumped wearing one of his dresses, which sold out in the twenty-four hours after her death. What better advert could there be than that Lula Landry chose to meet her maker in Somé?
“ ‘No, it is not the young woman whose loss we bemoan, for she was no more real to most of us than the Gibson girls who dripped from Dana’s pen. What we mourn is the physical image flickering across a multitude of red-tops and celeb mags; an image that sold us clothes and handbags and a notion of celebrity that, in her demise, proved to be empty and transient as a soap bubble. What we actually miss, were we honest enough to admit it, are the entertaining antics of that paper-thin good-time girl, whose strip-cartoon existence of drug abuse, riotous living, fancy clothes and dangerous on-off boyfriend we can no longer enjoy.
“ ‘Landry’s funeral was covered as lavishly as any celebrity wedding in the tawdry magazines who feed on the famous, and whose publishers will surely mourn her demise longer than most. We were permitted glimpses of various celebrities in tears, but her family were given the tiniest picture of all; they were a surprisingly unphotogenic lot, you see.
“ ‘Yet the account of one mourner genuinely touched me. In response to the inquiry of a man who she may not have realized was a reporter, she revealed that she had met Landry at a treatment facility, and that they had become friends. She had taken her place in a rear pew to say farewell, and slipped as quietly away again. She has not sold her story, unlike so many others who consorted with Landry in life. It may tell us something touching about the real Lula Landry, that she inspired genuine affection in an ordinary girl. As for the rest of us—’ ”
“Doesn’t she give this ordinary girl from the treatment facility a name?” interrupted Strike.
Robin scanned the story silently.
“No.”
Strike scratched his imperfectly shaven chin.
“Bristow didn’t mention any friend from a treatment facility.”
“D’you think she could be important?” asked Robin eagerly, turning in her swivel chair to look at him.
“It could be interesting to talk to someone who knew Landry from therapy, instead of nightclubs.”
Strike had only asked Robin to look up Landry’s connections on the internet because he had nothing else for her to do. She had already telephoned Derrick Wilson, the security guard, and arranged a meeting with Strike on Friday morning at the Phoenix Café in Brixton. The day’s post had comprised two circulars and a final demand; there had been no calls, and she had already organized everything in the office that could be alphabetized, stacked or arranged according to type and color.
Inspired by her Google proficiency of the previous day, therefore, he had set her this fairly pointless task. For the past hour or so she had been reading out odd snippets and articles about Landry and her associates, while Strike put into order a stack of receipts, telephone bills and photographs relating to his only other current case.
“Shall I see whether I can find out more about that girl, then?” asked Robin.
“Yeah,” said Strike absently, examining a photograph of a stocky, balding man in a suit and a very ripe-looking redhead in tight jeans. The besuited man was Mr. Geoffrey Hook; the redhead, however, bore no resemblance to Mrs. Hook, who, prior to Bristow’s arrival in his office, had been Strike’s only client. Strike stuck the photograph into Mrs. Hook’s file and labeled it No. 12, while Robin turned back to the computer.
For a few moments there was silence, except for the flick of photographs and the tapping of Robin’s short nails against the keys. The door into the inner office behind Strike was closed to conceal the camp bed and other signs of habitation, and the air was heavy with the scent of artificial limes, due to Strike’s liberal use of cheap air-freshener before Robin had arrived. Lest she perceive any tinge of sexual interest in his decision to sit at the other end of her desk, he had pretended to notice her engagement ring for the first time before sitting down, then made polite, studiously impersonal conversation about her fiancé for five minutes. He learned that he was a newly qualified accountant called Matthew; that it was to live with Matthew that Robin had moved to London from Yorkshire the previous month, and that the temping was a stopgap measure before finding a permanent job.
“D’you think she could be in one of these pictures?” Robin asked, after a while. “The girl from the treatment center?”
She had brought up a screen full of identically sized photographs, each showing one or more people dressed in dark clothes, all heading from left to right, making for the funeral. Crash barriers and the blurred faces of a crowd formed the backdrop to each picture.
Most striking of all was the picture of a very tall, pale girl with golden hair drawn back into a ponytail, on whose head was perched a confection of black net and feathers. Strike recognized her, because everyone knew who she was: Ciara Porter, the model with whom Lula had spent much of her last day on earth; the friend with whom Landry had been photographed for one of the most famous shots of her career. Porter looked beautiful and somber as she walked towards Lula’s funeral service. She seemed to have attended alone, because there was no disembodied hand supporting her thin arm or resting on her long back.
Next to Porter’s picture was that of a couple captioned Film producer Freddie Bestigui and wife Tansy. Bestigui was built like a bull, with short legs, a broad barrel chest and a thick neck. His hair was gray and brush-cut; his face a crumpled mass of folds, bags and moles, out of which his fleshy nose protruded like a tumor. Nevertheless, he cut an imposing figure in his expensive black overcoat, with his skeletal young wife on his arm. Almost nothing could be discerned of Tansy’s true appearance, behind the upturned fur of her coat collar and the enormous round sunglasses.
Last in this top row of photographs was Guy Somé, fashion designer. He was a thin black man who was wearing a midnight-blue frock coat of exaggerated cut. His face was bowed and his expression indiscernible, due to the way the light fell on his dark head, though three large diamond earrings in the lobe facing the camera had caught the flashes and glittered like stars. Like Porter, he appeared to have arrived unaccompanied, although a small group of mourners, unworthy of their own legends, had been captured within the frame of his picture.
Strike drew his chair nearer to the screen, though still keeping more than an arm’s length between himself and Robin. One of the unidentified faces, half severed by the edge of the picture, was John Bristow, recognizable by the short upper lip and the hamsterish teeth. He had his arm around a stricken-looking older woman with white hair; her face was gaunt and ghastly, the nakedness of her grief touching. Behind this pair was a tall, haughty-looking man who gave the impression of deploring the surroundings in which he found himself.