“Yeah? How far beyond?”
“Nah, nothing like that,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a grin. “Nothing like that.”
But Strike saw that the driver was not at all displeased that the idea had been mooted, that it had been thought plausible.
“I’d been driving her for a year. We talked a lot, y’know. Had a lot in common. Similar backgrounds, y’know?”
“In what way?”
“Mixed race,” said Kolovas-Jones. “And things were a bit dysfunctional in my family, right, so I knew where she was coming from. She didn’t know that many people like her, not once she got famous. Not to talk to properly.”
“Being mixed race was an issue for her, was it?”
“Growing up black in a white family, what d’you think?”
“And you had a similar childhood?”
“Me father’s half West Indian, half Welsh; me mother’s half Scouse, half Greek. Lula usedta say she envied me,” he said, sitting up a little straighter. “She said, ‘You know where you come from, even if it is bloody everywhere.’ And on my birthday, right,” he added, as though he had not yet sufficiently impressed upon Strike something which he felt was important, “she give me this Guy Somé jacket that was worth, like, nine hundred quid.”
Evidently expected to show a reaction, Strike nodded, wondering whether Kolovas-Jones had come along simply to tell somebody how close he had been to Lula Landry. Satisfied, the driver went on:
“So, right, the day she died—day before, I should say—I drove her to her mum’s in the morning, right? And she was not happy. She never liked going to see her mother.”
“Why not?”
“Because that woman’s fucking weird,” said Kolovas-Jones. “I drove them both out for a day, once, I think it was the mother’s birthday. She’s fucking creepy, Lady Yvette. Darling, my darling to Lula, every other word. She used to hang off her. Just fucking strange and possessive and over the top, right?
“Anyway, that day, right, her mum had just got out of hospital, so that wasn’t gonna be fun, was it? Lula wasn’t looking forward to seeing her. She was uptight like I hadn’t seen her before.
“And then I told her I couldn’t drive her that night, because I was booked for Deeby Macc, and she wasn’t happy about that, neither.”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause she liked me driving her, didn’t she?” said Kolovas-Jones, as though Strike was being obtuse. “I used to help her out with the paps and stuff, do a bit of bodyguard stuff to get her in and out of places.”
By the merest flicker of his facial muscles, Wilson managed to convey what he thought of the suggestion that Kolovas-Jones was bodyguard material.
“Couldn’t you have swapped with another driver, and driven her instead of Macc?”
“I coulda, but I didn’t want to,” Kolovas-Jones confessed. “I’m a big Deeby fan. Wanted to meet him. That’s what Lula was pissed off about. Anyway,” he hurried on, “I took her to her mum’s, and waited, and then, this is the bit I wanted to tell you about, right?
“She come out of her mother’s place and she was strange. Not like I’d ever seen her, right? Quiet, really quiet. Like she was in shock or something. Then she asked me for a pen, and she started scribbling something on a bit of blue paper. Wasn’t talking to me. Wasn’t saying anything. Just writing.
“So, I drove her to Vashti, ’cause she was supposedta be meeting her friend there for lunch, right—”
“What’s Vashti? What friend?”
“Vashti—it’s this shop—boutique, they call it. There’s a café in it. Trendy place. And the friend was…” Kolovas-Jones clicked his fingers repeatedly, frowning. “She was that friend she’d made when she was in hospital for her mental problems. What was her fucking name? I used to drive the two of them around. Christ…Ruby? Roxy? Raquelle? Something like that. She was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith. She was homeless.
“Anyway, Lula goes into the shop, right, and she’d told me on the way to her mother’s she was gonna have lunch there, right, but she’s only in there a quarter of an hour or something, then she comes out alone and tells me to drive her home. So that was a bit fucking strange, right? And Raquelle, or whatever her name is—it’ll come back to me—wasn’t with her. We usedta give Raquelle a lift home normally, when they’d been out together. And the blue piece of paper was gone. And Lula never said a word to me all the way back home.”
“Did you mention this blue paper to the police?”
“Yeah. They didn’t think it was worth shit,” said Kolovas-Jones. “Said it was probably a shopping list.”
“Can you remember what it looked like?”
“It was just blue. Like airmail paper.”
He looked down at his watch.
“I gotta go in ten.”
“So that was the last time you ever saw Lula?”
“Yeah, it was.”
He picked at the corner of a fingernail.
“What was your first thought, when you heard she was dead?”
“I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones, chewing at the hangnail he had been picking. “I was fucking shocked. You don’t expect that, do you? Not when you’ve just seen someone hours before. The press were all saying it was Duffield, because they’d had a row in that nightclub and stuff. I thought it might’ve been him, to tell you the truth. Bastard.”
“You knew him, did you?”
“I drove them a coupla times,” said Kolovas-Jones. A flaring of his nostrils, a tightness around the lines of his mouth, together suggested a bad smell.
“What did you think of him?”
“I thought he was a talentless tosser.” With unexpected virtuosity, he suddenly adopted a flat, drawling voice: “Are we gonna need him later, Lules? He’d better wait, yeah?” said Kolovas-Jones, crackling with temper. “Never once spoke to me directly. Ignorant, sponging piece of shit.”
Derrick said, sotto voce, “Kieran’s an actor.”
“Just bit parts,” said Kolovas-Jones. “So far.”
And he digressed into a brief exposition of the television dramas in which he had appeared, exhibiting, in Strike’s estimation, a marked desire to be considered more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame. To have had it so often in the back of his car and not yet to have caught it from his passengers must (thought Strike) have been tantalizing and, perhaps, infuriating.
“Kieran auditioned for Freddie Bestigui,” said Wilson. “Didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a lack of enthusiasm that told the outcome plainly.
“How did that come about?” asked Strike.
“Usual way,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a hint of hauteur. “Through my agent.”
“Nothing came of it?”
“They decided to go in another direction,” said Kolovas-Jones. “They wrote out the part.”
“OK, so you picked up Deeby Macc from, where—Heathrow?—that night?”
“Terminal Five, yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, apparently brought back to a sense of mundane reality, and glancing at his watch. “Listen, I’d better get going.”
“All right if I walk you back to the car?” asked Strike.
Wilson showed himself happy to go along too; Strike paid the bill for all three of them and they left. Out on the pavement, Strike offered both his companions cigarettes; Wilson declined, Kolovas-Jones accepted.
A silver Mercedes was parked a short distance away, around the corner in Electric Lane.
“Where did you take Deeby when he arrived?” Strike asked Kolovas-Jones, as they approached the car.
“He wanted a club, so I took him to Barrack.”
“What time did you get him there?”
“I dunno…half eleven? Quarter to twelve? He was wired. Didn’t want to sleep, he said.”
“Why Barrack?”