“I can’t see anyone who might be this ordinary girl,” said Robin, moving the screen down to scrutinize more pictures of famous and beautiful people looking sad and serious. “Oh, look…Evan Duffield.”
He was dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans and a military-style black overcoat. His hair, too, was black; his face all sharp planes and hollows; icy blue eyes stared directly into the camera lens. Though taller than both of them, he looked fragile compared to the companions flanking him: a large man in a suit and an anxious-looking older woman, whose mouth was open and who was making a gesture as though to clear a path ahead of them. The threesome reminded Strike of parents steering a sick child away from a party. Strike noticed that, in spite of Duffield’s air of disorientation and distress, he had made a good job of applying his eyeliner.
“Look at those flowers!”
Duffield slid up into the top of the screen and vanished: Robin had paused on the photograph of an enormous wreath in the shape of what Strike took, initially, to be a heart, before realizing it represented two curved angel wings, composed of white roses. An inset photograph showed a close-up of the attached card.
“ ‘Rest in peace, Angel Lula. Deeby Macc,’ ” Robin read aloud.
“Deeby Macc? The rapper? So they knew each other, did they?”
“No, I don’t think so; but there was that whole thing about him renting a flat in her building; she’d been mentioned in a couple of his songs, hadn’t she? The press were all excited about him staying there…”
“You’re well informed on the subject.”
“Oh, you know, just magazines,” said Robin vaguely, scrolling back through the funeral photographs.
“What kind of name is ‘Deeby’?” Strike wondered aloud.
“It comes from his initials. It’s ‘D. B.’ really,” she enunciated clearly. “His real name’s Daryl Brandon Macdonald.”
“A rap fan, are you?”
“No,” said Robin, still intent on the screen. “I just remember things like that.”
She clicked off the images she was perusing and began tapping away on the keyboard again. Strike returned to his photographs. The next showed Mr. Geoffrey Hook kissing his ginger-haired companion, hand palpating one large, canvas-covered buttock, outside Ealing Broadway Tube station.
“Here’s a bit of film on YouTube, look,” said Robin. “Deeby Macc talking about Lula after she died.”
“Let’s see it,” said Strike, rolling his chair forwards a couple of feet and then, on second thought, back one.
The grainy little video, three inches by four, jerked into life. A large black man wearing some kind of hooded top with a fist picked out in studs on the chest sat in a black leather chair, facing an unseen interviewer. His hair was closely shaven and he wore sunglasses.
“…Lula Landry’s suicide?” said the interviewer, who was English.
“That was fucked-up, man, that was fucked-up,” replied Deeby, running his hand over his smooth head. His voice was soft, deep and hoarse, with the very faintest trace of a lisp. “That’s what they do to success: they hunt you down, they tear you down. That’s what envy does, my friend. The motherfuckin’ press chased her out that window. Let her rest in peace, I say. She’s getting peace right now.”
“Pretty shocking welcome to London for you,” said the interviewer, “with her, y’know, like, falling past your window?”
Deeby Macc did not answer at once. He sat very still, staring at the interviewer through his opaque lenses. Then he said:
“I wasn’t there, or you got someone who says I was?”
The interviewer’s yelp of nervous, hastily stifled laughter jarred.
“God, no, not at all—not…”
Deeby turned his head and addressed someone standing off-camera.
“Think I oughta’ve brought my lawyers?”
The interviewer brayed with sycophantic laughter. Deeby looked back at him, still unsmiling.
“Deeby Macc,” said the breathless interviewer, “thank you very much for your time.”
An outstretched white hand slid forwards on to the screen; Deeby raised his own in a fist. The white hand reconstituted itself, and they bumped knuckles. Somebody off-screen laughed derisively. The video ended.
“ ‘The motherfuckin’ press chased her out that window,’ ” Strike repeated, rolling his chair back to its original position. “Interesting point of view.”
He felt his mobile phone vibrate in his trouser pocket, and drew it out. The sight of Charlotte’s name attached to a new text caused a surge of adrenalin through his body, as though he had just sighted a crouching beast of prey.
I will be out on Friday morning between 9 and 12 if you want to collect your things.
“What?” He had the impression that Robin had just spoken.
“I said, there’s a horrible piece here about her birth mother.”
“OK. Read it out.”
He slid his mobile back into his pocket. As he bent his large head again over Mrs. Hook’s file, his thoughts seemed to reverberate as though a gong had been struck inside his skull.
Charlotte was behaving with sinister reasonableness; feigning adult calm. She had taken their endlessly elaborate duel to a new level, never before reached or tested: “Now let’s do it like grown-ups.” Perhaps a knife would plunge between his shoulder blades as he walked through the front door of her flat; perhaps he would walk into the bedroom to discover her corpse, wrists slit, lying in a puddle of congealing blood in front of the fireplace.
Robin’s voice was like the background drone of a vacuum cleaner. With an effort, he refocused his attention.
“ ‘…sold the romantic story of her liaison with a young black man to as many tabloid journalists as were prepared to pay. There is nothing romantic, however, about Marlene Higson’s story as it is remembered by her old neighbors.
“ ‘ “She was turning tricks,” says Vivian Cranfield, who lived in the flat above Higson’s at the time she fell pregnant with Landry. “There were men coming in and out of her place every hour of the day and night. She never knew who that baby’s father was, it could have been any of them. She never wanted the baby. I can still remember her out in the hall, crying, on her own, while her mum was busy with a punter. Tiny little thing in her nappy, hardly walking…someone must have called Social Services, and not before time. Best thing that ever happened to that girl, getting adopted.”
“ ‘The truth will, no doubt, shock Landry, who has talked at length in the press about her reunion with her long-lost birth mother…’—this was written,” explained Robin, “before Lula died.”
“Yeah,” said Strike, closing the folder abruptly. “D’ you fancy a walk?”
2
THE CAMERAS LOOKED LIKE MALEVOLENT shoeboxes atop their pole, each with a single blank, black eye. They pointed in opposite directions, staring the length of Alderbrook Road, which bustled with pedestrians and traffic. Both pavements were crammed with shops, bars and cafés. Double-deckers rumbled up and down bus lanes.
“This is where Bristow’s Runner was caught on film,” observed Strike, turning his back on Alderbrook Road to look up the much quieter Bellamy Road, which led, lined with tall and palatial houses, into the residential heart of Mayfair. “He passed here twelve minutes after she fell…this’d be the quickest route from Kentigern Gardens. Night buses run here. Best bet to pick up a taxi. Not that that’d be a smart move if you’d just murdered a woman.”
He buried himself again in an extremely battered A–Z. Strike did not seem worried that anyone might mistake him for a tourist. No doubt, thought Robin, it would not matter if they did, given his size.
Robin had been asked to do several things, in the course of her brief temping career, that were outside the terms of a secretarial contract, and had therefore been a little unnerved by Strike’s suggestion of a walk. She was pleased, however, to acquit Strike of any flirtatious intent. The long walk to this spot had been conducted in almost total silence, Strike apparently deep in thought, and occasionally consulting his map.