The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1) Page 47
Author: J.K. Rowling

Strike remembered Wardle: “Flats done up with marble and shit like…like a f**king five-star hotel.” Beside him, Robin was trying not to look impressed. This, then, was how multimillionaires lived. She and Matthew occupied the lower floor of a semidetached house in Clapham; its sitting room was the same size as that designated for the off-duty guards, which Wilson showed them first. There was just enough room for a table and two chairs; a wall-mounted box contained all the master keys, and another door led into a tiny toilet cubicle.

Wilson was wearing a black uniform that was constabular in design, with its brass buttons, black tie and white shirt.

“Monitors,” he pointed out to Strike as they emerged from the back room and paused behind the desk, where a row of four small black-and-white screens was hidden from guests. One showed footage from the camera over the front door, affording a circumscribed view of the street; another displayed a similarly deserted view of an underground car park; a third the empty back garden of number 18, which comprised lawn, some fancy planting and the high back wall Strike had hoisted himself up on; and the fourth the interior of the stationary lift. In addition to the monitors, there were two control panels for the communal alarms and those for the doors into the pool and car park, and two telephones, one attached to an outside line, the other connected only to the three flats.

“That,” said Wilson, indicating the solid wooden door, “goes to the gym, the pool an’ the car park,” and at Strike’s request he led them through it.

The gym was small, but mirrored like the lobby, so that it appeared twice as big. It had one window, facing the street, and contained a treadmill, rowing and step machines and a set of weights.

A second mahogany door led to a narrow marble stair, lit by cubic wall lights, which took them on to a small lower landing, where a plain painted door led to the underground car park. Wilson opened it with two keys, a Chubb and a Yale, then flicked a switch. The floodlit area was almost as long as the street itself, full of millions of pounds’ worth of Ferrari, Audi, Bentley, Jaguar and BMW. At twenty-foot intervals along the back wall were doors like the one through which they had just come: inner entrances to each of the houses of Kentigern Gardens. The electric garage doors leading from Serf’s Way were close by number 18, outlined by silvery daylight.

Robin wondered what the silent men beside her were thinking. Was Wilson used to the extraordinary lives of the people who lived here; used to underground car parks and swimming pools and Ferraris? And was Strike thinking (as she was) that this long row of doors represented possibilities she had not once considered: chances of secret, hidden scurrying between neighbors, and of hiding and departing in as many ways as there were houses in the street? But then she noticed the numerous black snouts pointing from regular spots on the shadowy upper walls, feeding footage back to countless monitors. Was it possible that none of them had been watched that night?

“OK,” said Strike, and Wilson led them back onto the marble staircase, and locked up the car park door behind them.

Down another short flight of stairs, the smell of chlorine became stronger with every step, until Wilson opened a door at the bottom and they were assailed by a wave of warm, damp, chemically laden air.

“This is the door that wasn’t locked that night?” Strike asked Wilson, who nodded as he pressed another switch, and light blazed.

They had walked on to the broad marble rim of the pool, which was shielded by a thick plastic cover. The opposite wall was, again, mirrored; Robin saw the three of them standing there, incongruous in full dress against a mural of tropical plants and fluttering butterflies that extended up over the ceiling. The pool was around fifteen meters long, and at the far end was a hexagonal jacuzzi, beyond which were three changing cubicles, fronted by lockable doors.

“No cameras here?” asked Strike, looking around, and Wilson shook his head.

Robin could feel sweat prickling on the back of her neck and under her arms. It was oppressive in the pool area, and she was pleased to climb the stairs ahead of the two men, back to the lobby, which in comparison was pleasant and airy. A petite young blonde had appeared in their absence, wearing a pink overall, jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a plastic bucket full of cleaning implements.

“Derrick,” she said in heavily accented English, when the security guard emerged from downstairs. “I neet key for two.”

“This is Lechsinka,” said Wilson. “The cleaner.”

She favored Robin and Strike with a small, sweet smile. Wilson moved around behind the mahogany desk and handed her a key from beneath it, and Lechsinka then ascended the stairs, her bucket swinging, her tightly bejeaned backside swelling and swaying seductively. Strike, conscious of Robin’s sideways glance, withdrew his gaze from it reluctantly.

Strike and Robin followed Wilson upstairs to Flat 1, which he opened up with a master key. The door on to the stairwell, Strike noted, had an old-fashioned peephole.

“Mister Bestigui’s place,” announced Wilson, stifling the alarm by entering the code on a pad to the right of the door. “Lechsinka’s already bin in this morning.”

Strike could smell polish and see the track marks of a vacuum cleaner on the white carpet of the hallway, with its brass wall lights and its five immaculate white doors. He noticed the discreet alarm keypad on the right wall, at right angles to a painting in which dreamy goats and peasants floated over a blue-toned village. Tall vases of orchids stood on a black japanned table beneath the Chagall.

“Where’s Bestigui?” Strike asked Wilson.

“LA,” said the security guard. “Back in two days.”

The light, bright sitting room had three tall windows, each of them with a shallow stone balcony beyond; its walls were Wedgwood blue and nearly everything else was white. All was pristine, elegant and beautifully proportioned. Here, too, there was a single superb painting: macabre, surreal, with a spear-bearing man masked as a blackbird, arm in arm with a gray-toned headless female torso.

It was from this room that Tansy Bestigui maintained she had heard a screaming match two floors above. Strike moved up close to the long windows, noting the modern catches, the thickness of the panes, the complete lack of noise from the street, though his ear was barely half an inch from the cold glass. The balcony beyond was narrow, and filled with potted shrubs trimmed into pointed cones.

Strike moved off towards the bedroom. Robin remained in the sitting room, turning slowly where she stood, taking in the chandelier of Venetian glass, the muted rug in shades of pale blue and pink, the enormous plasma TV, the modern glass and iron dining table and silk-cushioned iron chairs; the small silver objets d’art on glass side tables and on the white marble mantelpiece. She thought, a little sadly, of the IKEA sofa of which she had, until now, felt so proud; then she remembered Strike’s camp bed in the office with a twinge of shame. Catching Wilson’s eye, she said, unconsciously echoing Eric Wardle:

“It’s a different world, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You couldn’t have kids in here.”

“No,” said Robin, who had not considered the place from that point of view.

Her employer strode out of the bedroom, evidently absorbed in establishing some point to his own satisfaction, and disappeared into the hall.

Strike was, in fact, proving to himself that the logical route from the Bestiguis’ bedroom to their bathroom was through the hall, bypassing the sitting room altogether. Furthermore, it was his belief that the only place in the flat from which Tansy could conceivably have witnessed the fatal fall of Lula Landry—and realized what she was seeing—was from the sitting room. In spite of Eric Wardle’s assertion to the contrary, nobody standing in the bathroom could have had more than a partial view of the window past which Landry had fallen: insufficient, at night, to be sure that whatever had fallen was a human, let alone to identify which human it had been.

Strike returned to the bedroom. Now that he was in solitary possession of the marital home, Bestigui was sleeping on the side nearest the door and the hall, judging by the clutter of pills, glasses and books piled on that bedside table. Strike wondered whether this had been the case while he cohabited with his wife.

A large walk-in wardrobe with mirrored doors led off the bedroom. It was full of Italian suits and shirts from Turnbull & Asser. Two shallow subdivided drawers were devoted entirely to cufflinks in gold and platinum. There was a safe behind a false panel at the back of the shoe racks.

“I think that’s everything in here,” Strike told Wilson, rejoining the other two in the sitting room.

Wilson set the alarm when they left the flat.

“You know all the codes for the different flats?”

“Yeah,” said Wilson. “Gotta, in case they go off.”

They climbed the stairs to the second floor. The staircase turned so tightly around the lift shaft that it was a succession of blind corners. The door to Flat 2 was identical to that of Flat 1, except that it was standing ajar. They could hear the growl of Lechsinka’s vacuum cleaner from inside.

“We got Mister an’ Missus Kolchak in here now,” said Wilson. “Ukrainian.”

The hallway was identical in shape to that of number 1, with many of the same features, including the alarm keypad on the wall at right angles to the front door; but it was tiled instead of carpeted. A large gilt mirror faced the entrance instead of a painting, and two fragile, spindly wooden tables on either side of it bore ornate Tiffany lamps.

“Were Bestigui’s roses on something like that?” asked Strike.

“On one that’s jus’ like ’em, yeah,” said Wilson. “It’s back in the lounge now.”

“And you put it here, in the middle of the hall, with the roses on it?”

“Yeah, Bestigui wanted Macc to see ’em soon as he walked in, but there was plenty of room to walk around ’em, you can see that. No need to knock ’em over. But he was young, the copper,” said Wilson tolerantly.

“Where are the panic buttons you told me about?” Strike asked.

“Round here,” said Wilson, leading him out of the hall and into the bedroom. “There’s one by the bed, and there’s another one in the sitting room.”

“Have all the flats got these?”

“Yeah.”

The relative positions of the bedrooms, sitting room, kitchen and bathroom were identical to those of Flat 1. Many of the finishings were similar, down to the mirrored doors in the walk-in wardrobe, which Strike went to check. While he was opening doors and surveying the thousands of pounds’ worth of women’s dresses and coats, Lechsinka emerged from the bedroom with a belt, two ties and several polythene-covered dresses, fresh from the dry-cleaner’s, over her arm.

“Hi,” said Strike.