The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1) Page 75
Author: J.K. Rowling

“They all said I was deluded,” he almost shouted. “But I wasn’t bloody deluded at all!”

“No, John, you weren’t deluded,” said Strike. “Not deluded. More like bat-shit insane.”

Through the shaded window came the sounds of London, alive at all hours, rumbling and growling, part man, part machine. There was no noise inside the room but Bristow’s ragged breathing.

“Excuse me?” he said, ludicrously polite. “What did you call me?”

Strike smiled.

“I said you’re bat-shit insane. You killed your sister, got away with it, and then asked me to reinvestigate her death.”

“You—you cannot be serious.”

“Oh yeah, I can. It’s been obvious to me from the start that the person who benefits most from Lula’s death is you, John. Ten million quid, once your mother gives up the ghost. Not to be sniffed at, is it? Especially as I don’t think you’ve got much more than your salary, however much you bang on about your trust fund. Albris shares are hardly worth the paper they’re written on these days, are they?”

Bristow gaped at him for several long moments; then, sitting up a little straighter, he glanced at the camp bed propped in the corner.

“Coming from a virtual down-and-out who sleeps in his office, I find that a laughable assertion.” Bristow’s voice was calm and derisory, but his breathing was abnormally fast.

“I know you’ve got much more money than I have,” said Strike. “But, as you rightly point out, that’s not saying much. And I will say for myself that I haven’t yet stooped to embezzling from clients. How much of Conway Oates’s money did you steal before Tony realized what you were up to?”

“Oh, I’m an embezzler too, am I?” said Bristow, with an artificial laugh.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Strike. “Not that it matters to me. I don’t care whether you killed Lula because you needed to replace the money you’d nicked, or because you wanted her millions, or because you hated her guts. The jury will want to know, though. They’re always suckers for motive.”

Bristow’s knee had begun jiggling up and down again.

“You’re unhinged,” he said, with another forced laugh. “You’ve found a will in which she leaves everything not to me, but to that man.” He pointed towards the outer room, where he had viewed Jonah’s picture. “You tell me that it was that same man who was walking towards Lula’s flat, on camera, the night she fell to her death, and who was seen sprinting back past the camera ten minutes later. And yet you accuse me. Me.”

“John, you knew before you ever came to see me that it was Jonah on that CCTV footage. Rochelle told you. She was there in Vashti when Lula called Jonah and arranged to meet him that night, and she witnessed a will leaving him everything. She came to you, told you everything and started blackmailing you. She wanted money for a flat and some expensive clothes, and in return she promised to keep her mouth shut about the fact that you weren’t Lula’s heir.

“Rochelle didn’t realize you were the killer. She thought Jonah pushed Lula out of the window. And she was bitter enough, after seeing a will in which she didn’t feature, and being dumped in that shop on the last day of Lula’s life, not to care about the killer walking free as long as she got the money.”

“This is utter rubbish. You’re out of your mind.”

“You put every obstacle you could in the way of me finding Rochelle,” Strike went on, as though he had not heard Bristow. “You pretended you didn’t know her name, or where she lived; you acted incredulous that I thought she might be useful to the inquiry and you took photos off Lula’s laptop so that I couldn’t see what she looked like. True, she could have pointed me directly to the man you were trying to frame for murder, but on the other hand, she knew that there was a will that would deprive you of your inheritance, and your number one objective was to keep that will quiet while you tried to find and destroy it. Bit of a joke, really, it being in your mother’s wardrobe all along.

“But even if you’d destroyed it, John, what then? For all you knew, Jonah himself knew that he was Lula’s heir. And there was another witness to the fact that there was a will, though you didn’t know it: Bryony Radford, the makeup artist.”

Strike saw Bristow’s tongue flick around his mouth, moistening his lips. He could feel the lawyer’s fear.

“Bryony doesn’t want to admit that she went snooping through Lula’s things, but she saw that will at Lula’s place, before Lula had time to hide it. Bryony’s dyslexic, though. She thought ‘Jonah’ said ‘John.’ She tied that in with Ciara saying that Lula was leaving her brother everything, and concluded that she needn’t tell anybody what she’d read on the sly, because you were getting the money anyway. You’ve had the luck of the devil at times, John.

“But I can see how—to a twisted mind like yours—the best solution to your predicament was to fit Jonah up for murder. If he was doing life, it wouldn’t matter whether or not the will ever surfaced—or whether he, or anyone else, knew about it—because the money would come to you in any case.”

“Ridiculous,” said Bristow breathlessly. “You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing, Strike. You haven’t got a shred of proof for anything you’re saying—”

“Yes I have.” Strike cut across him, and Bristow stopped talking immediately, his pallor visible through the gloom. “The CCTV footage.”

“That footage shows Jonah Agyeman running from the scene of the killing, as you’ve just acknowledged!”

“There was another man caught on camera.”

“So he had an accomplice—a lookout.”

“I wonder what defending counsel will say is wrong with you, John?” asked Strike softly. “Narcissism? Some kind of God complex? You think you’re completely untouchable, don’t you, a genius who makes the rest of us look like chimps? The second man running from the scene wasn’t Jonah’s accomplice, or his lookout, or a car thief. He wasn’t even black. He was a white man in black gloves. He was you.”

“No,” said Bristow. The one word throbbed with panic; but then, with an almost visible effort, he hitched a contemptuous smile back on to his face. “How can it be me? I was in Chelsea with my mother. She told you so. Tony saw me there. I was in Chelsea.”

“Your mother is a Valium-addicted invalid who was asleep most of that day. You didn’t get back to Chelsea until after you’d killed Lula. I think you went into your mother’s room in the small hours, reset her clock and then woke her up, pretending it was dinnertime. You think you’re a criminal genius, John, but that’s been done a million times before, though rarely with such an easy mark. Your mother hardly knows what day it is, the amount of opiates she’s got in her system.”

“I was in Chelsea all day,” repeated Bristow, his knee jiggling up and down. “All day, except for when I nipped into the office for files.”

“You took a hoodie and gloves out of the flat beneath Lula’s. You’re wearing them in the CCTV footage,” said Strike, ignoring the interruption, “and that was a big mistake. That hoodie was unique. There was only one of them in the world; it had been customized for Deeby Macc by Guy Somé. It could only have come out of the flat beneath Lula’s, so we know that’s where you’d been.”

“You have absolutely no proof,” said Bristow. “I am waiting for proof.”

“Of course you are,” said Strike, simply. “An innocent man wouldn’t be sitting here listening to me. He’d have stormed out by now. But don’t worry. I’ve got proof.”

“You can’t have,” said Bristow hoarsely.

“Motive, means and opportunity, John. You had the lot.

“Let’s start at the beginning. You don’t deny that you went to Lula’s first thing in the morning…”

“No, of course not.”

“…because people saw you there. But I don’t think Lula ever gave you the contract with Somé that you used to get upstairs to see her. I think you’d swiped that at some point previously. Wilson waved you up, and minutes later you were having a shouting match with Lula on her doorstep. You couldn’t pretend that didn’t happen, because the cleaner overheard it. Fortunately for you, Lechsinka’s English is so bad that she confirmed your version of the row: that you were furious that Lula had reunited with her freeloading druggie boyfriend.

“But I think that row was really about Lula’s refusal to give you money. All her sharper friends have told me you had quite the reputation for coveting her fortune, but you must have been particularly desperate for a handout that day, to force your way in and start shouting like that. Had Tony noticed a lack of funds in Conway Oates’s account? Did you need to replace it urgently?”

“Baseless speculation,” said Bristow, his knee still jerking up and down.

“We’ll see whether it’s baseless or not once we get to court,” said Strike.

“I’ve never denied that Lula and I argued.”

“After she refused to hand over a check, and slammed the door in your face, you went back down the stairs, and there was the door to Flat Two standing open. Wilson and the alarm repairman were busy looking at the keypad, and Lechsinka was somewhere in there by then—maybe vacuuming, because that would have helped mask the noise of you creeping into the hall behind the two men.

“It wasn’t that much of a risk, really. If they’d turned and seen you, you could have pretended you’d come in to thank Wilson for letting you up. You crossed the hall while they were busy with the alarm fuse box, and you hid somewhere in that big flat. There’s loads of space. Empty cupboards. Under the bed.”

Bristow was shaking his head in silent denial. Strike continued in the same matter-of-fact tone:

“You must have heard Wilson telling Lechsinka to set the alarm to 1966. Finally, Lechsinka, Wilson and the Securibell guy left, and you had sole possession of the flat. Unfortunately for you, however, Lula had now left the building, so you couldn’t go back upstairs and try and bully her into coughing up.”

“Total fantasy,” said the lawyer. “I never set foot in Flat Two in my life. I left Lula’s and went in to the office to pick up files—”

“From Alison, isn’t that what you said, the first time we went through your movements that day?” asked Strike.

Patches of pink blossomed again up Bristow’s stringy neck. After a small hesitation, he cleared his throat and said: