“I’ll make sure I am,” Strike replied.
The file arrived three hours later, while he was eating fish and chips out of a small polystyrene tray in his lap and watching the London evening news on his portable television. The courier buzzed the outer door and Strike signed for a bulky package sent from Scotland Yard. Once unwrapped, a thick gray folder full of photocopied material was disclosed. Strike took it back to Robin’s desk, and began the lengthy process of digesting the contents.
Here were statements from those who had seen Lula Landry during the final evening of her life; a report on the DNA evidence lifted from her flat; photocopied pages of the visitors’ book complied by security at number 18, Kentigern Gardens; details of the medication Lula had been prescribed to control bipolar disorder; the autopsy report; medical records for the previous year; mobile phone and landline records; and a precis of the findings on the model’s laptop. There was also a DVD, on which Wardle had scribbled CCTV 2 Runners.
The DVD drive on Strike’s secondhand computer had not worked since he acquired it; he therefore slipped the disc into the pocket of the overcoat hanging by the glass door, and resumed his contemplation of the printed material contained within the ring-binder, his notebook open beside him.
Night descended outside the office, and a pool of golden light fell from the desk lamp on to each page as Strike methodically read the documents that had added up to a conclusion of suicide. Here, amid the statements shorn of superfluity, minutely detailed timings, the copied labels from the bottles of drugs found in Landry’s bathroom cabinet, Strike tracked the truth he had sensed behind Tansy Bestigui’s lies.
The autopsy indicated that Lula had been killed on impact with the road, and that she had died from a broken neck and internal bleeding. There was a certain amount of bruising to the upper arms. She had fallen wearing only one shoe. The photographs of the corpse confirmed LulaMyInspirationForeva’s assertion that Landry had changed her clothes on coming home from the nightclub. Instead of the dress in which she had been photographed entering her building, the corpse wore a sequined top and trousers.
Strike turned to the shifting statements that Tansy had given to the police; the first simply claiming a trip to the bathroom from the bedroom; the second adding the opening of her sitting-room window. Freddie, she said, had been in bed throughout. The police had found half a line of cocaine on the flat marble rim of the bath, and a small plastic bag of the drug hidden inside a box of Tampax in the cabinet above the sink.
Freddie’s statement confirmed that he had been asleep when Landry fell, and that he had been woken by his wife’s screams; he said that he had hurried into the sitting room in time to see Tansy run past him in her underwear. The vase of roses he had sent to Macc, and which a clumsy policeman had smashed, were intended, he admitted, as a gesture of welcome and introduction; yes, he would have been glad to strike up an acquaintance with the rapper, and yes, it had crossed his mind that Macc might be perfect in a thriller now in development. His shock at Landry’s death had undoubtedly made him overreact to the ruin of his floral gift. He had initially believed his wife when she said she had overheard the argument upstairs; he had subsequently come, reluctantly, to accept the police view that Tansy’s account was indicative of cocaine consumption. Her drug habit had placed great strain on the marriage, and he had admitted to the police that he was aware that his wife habitually used the stimulant, though he had not known that she had a supply in the flat that night.
Bestigui further stated that he and Landry had never visited each other’s flats, and that their simultaneous stay at Dickie Carbury’s (which the police appeared to have heard about on a subsequent occasion, for Freddie had been reinterviewed after the initial statement) had barely advanced their acquaintance. “She associated mainly with the younger guests, while I spent most of the weekend with Dickie, who is a contemporary of mine.” Bestigui’s statement presented the unassailable front of a rock face without crampons.
After reading the police account of events inside the Bestiguis’ flat, Strike added several sentences to his own notes. He was interested in the half a line of cocaine on the side of the bath, and even more interested in the few seconds after Tansy had seen the flailing figure of Lula Landry fall past the window. Much would depend, of course, on the layout of the Bestiguis’ apartment (there was no map or diagram of it in the folder), but Strike was bothered by one consistent aspect of Tansy’s shifting stories: she insisted throughout that her husband had been in bed, asleep, when Landry fell. He remembered the way she had shielded her face, by pretending to push back her hair, as he pressed her on the point. All in all, and notwithstanding the police view, Strike considered the precise location of both Bestiguis at the moment Lula Landry fell off her balcony to be far from proven.
He resumed his systematic perusal of the file. Evan Duffield’s statement conformed in most respects to Wardle’s secondhand tale. He admitted to having attempted to prevent his girlfriend leaving Uzi by seizing her by the upper arms. She had broken free and left; he had followed her shortly afterwards. There was a one-sentence mention of the wolf mask, couched in the unemotional language of the policeman who had interviewed him: “I am accustomed to wearing a wolf’s-head mask when I wish to avoid the attentions of photographers.” A brief statement from the driver who had taken Duffield from Uzi confirmed Duffield’s account of visiting Kentigern Gardens and moving on to d’ Arblay Street, where he had dropped his passenger and left. The antipathy Wardle claimed the driver had felt towards Duffield was not conveyed in the bald factual account prepared for his signature by the police.
There were a couple of other statements supporting Duffield’s: one from a woman who claimed to have seen him climbing the stairs to his dealer’s, one from the dealer, Whycliff, himself. Strike recalled Wardle’s expressed opinion that Whycliff would lie for Duffield. The woman downstairs could have been cut in on any payment. The rest of the witnesses who claimed to have seen Duffield roaming the streets of London could only honestly say that they had seen a man in a wolf mask.
Strike lit a cigarette and read through Duffield’s statement again. He was a man with a violent temper, who had admitted to attempting to force Lula to remain in the club. The bruising to the upper arms of the body was almost certainly his work. If, however, he had taken heroin with Whycliff, Strike knew that the odds of him being in a fit state to infiltrate number 18, Kentigern Gardens, or to work himself into a murderous rage, were negligible. Strike was familiar with the behavior of heroin addicts; he had met plenty at the last squat his mother had lived in. The drug rendered its slaves passive and docile; the absolute antithesis of shouting, violent alcoholics, or twitchy, paranoid coke-users. Strike had known every kind of substance-abuser, both inside the army and out. The glorification of Duffield’s habit by the media disgusted him. There was no glamour in heroin. Strike’s mother had died on a filthy mattress in the corner of the room, and nobody had realized she was dead for six hours.
He got up, crossed the room and wrenched open the dark, rain-spattered window, so that the thud of the bass from the 12 Bar Café became louder than ever. Still smoking, he looked out at Charing Cross Road, glittering with car lights and puddles, where Friday-night revelers were striding and lurching past the end of Denmark Street, umbrellas wobbling, laughter ringing above the traffic. When, Strike wondered, would he next enjoy a pint on a Friday with friends? The notion seemed to belong to a different universe, a life left behind. The strange limbo in which he was living, with Robin his only real human contact, could not last, but he was still not ready to resume a proper social life. He had lost the army, and Charlotte and half a leg; he felt a need to become thoroughly accustomed to the man he had become, before he felt ready to expose himself to other people’s surprise and pity. The bright orange cigarette stub flew down into the dark street and was extinguished in the watery gutter; Strike pushed down the window, returned to his desk and pulled the file firmly back towards him.