“Rochelle!”
Some of them glanced at him, but returned immediately to their conversations. Consoling himself that frequenters of this entrance were probably used to a degree of eccentricity in those they met in its vicinity, Strike lit a cigarette and waited.
Half past ten passed, and no black girl went through the doors. Either she had missed her appointment, or she had used a different entrance. A feather-light breeze tickled the back of his neck as he sat smoking, watching, waiting. The hospital building was enormous, a vast concrete box with rectangular windows; there were surely numerous entrances on every side.
Strike straightened his injured leg, which was still sore, and considered, again, the possibility that he would have to return to see his consultant. He found even this degree of proximity to a hospital slightly depressing. His stomach rumbled. He had passed a McDonald’s on the way here. If he had not found her by midday, he would go and eat there.
Twice more he shouted “Rochelle!” at black women who entered and exited the building, and both times they glanced back, purely to see who had shouted, in one case giving him a look of disdain.
Then, just after eleven, a short, stocky black girl emerged from the hospital with a slightly awkward, rocking, side-to-side gait. He knew quite well that he had not missed her going in, not only because of her distinctive walk, but because she wore a very noticeable short coat of magenta-colored fake fur, which flattered neither her height nor her breadth.
“Rochelle!”
The girl stopped, turned and stared around, scowling, looking for the person who had called her name. Strike limped towards her, and she glared at him with an understandable mistrust.
“Rochelle? Rochelle Onifade? Hi. My name’s Cormoran Strike. Can I have a word?”
“I always come in Redbourne Street entrance,” she told him five minutes later, after he had given a garbled and fictitious account of the way he had found her. “I come out this way ’cause I was gonna go to McDonald’s.”
So that was where they went. Strike bought two coffees and two large cookies, and carried them to the window table where Rochelle was waiting, curious and suspicious.
She was uncompromisingly plain. Her greasy skin, which was the color of burned earth, was covered in acne pustules and pits; her small eyes were deep-set and her teeth were crooked and rather yellow. The chemically straightened hair showed four inches of black roots, then six inches of harsh, coppery wire-red. Her tight, too-short jeans, her shiny gray handbag and her bright white trainers looked cheap. However, the squashy fake-fur jacket, garish and unflattering though Strike found it, was of a different quality altogether: fully lined, as he saw when she took it off, with a patterned silk, and bearing the label not (as he had expected, remembering Lula Landry’s email to the designer) of Guy Somé, but of an Italian of whom even Strike had heard.
“You sure you inna journalist?” she asked, in her low, husky voice.
Strike had already spent some time outside the hospital trying to establish his bona fides in this respect.
“No, I’m not a journalist. Like I said, I know Lula’s brother.”
“You a friend of his?”
“Yeah. Well, not exactly a friend. He’s hired me. I’m a private detective.”
She was instantly, openly scared.
“Whaddayuhwanna talk to me for?”
“There’s nothing to worry about…”
“Whyd’yuhwanna talk to me, though?”
“It’s nothing bad. John isn’t sure that Lula committed suicide, that’s all.”
He guessed that the only thing keeping her in the seat was her terror of the construction he might put on instant flight. Her fear was out of all proportion to his manner or words.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he assured her again. “John wants me to take another look at the circumstances, that’s—”
“Does ’e say I’ve got something to do wiv ’er dying?”
“No, of course not. I’m just hoping you might be able to tell me about her state of mind, what she got up to in the lead-up to her death. You saw her regularly, didn’t you? I thought you might be able to tell me what was going on in her life.”
Rochelle made as though to speak, then changed her mind and attempted to drink her scalding coffee instead.
“So, what—’er brother’s trying to make out she never killed ’erself? What, like she was pushed out the window?”
“He thinks it’s possible.”
She seemed to be trying to fathom something, to work it out in her head.
“I don’t ’ave to talk to you. You ain’t real police.”
“Yeah, that’s true. But wouldn’t you like to help find out what—”
“She jumped,” declared Rochelle Onifade firmly.
“What makes you so sure?” asked Strike.
“I jus’ know.”
“It seems to have come as a shock to nearly everyone else she knew.”
“She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus’ takes you over. It’s an illness,” she said, although she made the words sound like “it’s uh nillness.”
Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. He had slept badly. Nillness, that was where Lula Landry had gone, and where all of them, he and Rochelle included, were headed. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow’s mother…sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.
He was sure that if he took out his notebook, she would clam up, or leave. He therefore continued to ask questions as casually as he could manage, asking her how she had come to attend the clinic, how she had first met Lula.
Still immensely suspicious, she gave monosyllabic answers at first, but slowly, gradually, she became more forthcoming. Her own history was pitiful. Early abuse, care, severe mental illness, foster homes and violent outbursts culminating, at sixteen, in homelessness. She had secured proper treatment as the indirect result of being hit by a car. Hospitalized when her bizarre behavior had made treating her physical wounds nearly impossible, a psychiatrist had at last been called in. She was on drugs now, which, when she took them, greatly eased her symptoms. Strike found it pathetic, and touching, that the outpatient clinic where she had met Lula Landry seemed to have become, for Rochelle, the highlight of her week. She spoke with some affection of the young psychiatrist who ran the group.
“So that’s where you met Lula?”
“Di’n’t her brother tell ya?”
“He was vague on the details.”
“Yeah, she come to our group. She wuz referred.”
“And you got talking?”
“Yeah.”
“You became friends?”
“Yeah.”
“You visited her at home? Swam in the pool?”
“Why shou’n’t I?”
“No reason. I’m only asking.”
She thawed very slightly.
“I don’t like swimming. I don’t like water over m’face. I went in the jacuzzi. And we went shoppin’ an’ stuff.”
“Did she ever talk to you about her neighbors; the other people in her building?”
“Them Bestiguis? A bit. She din’ like them. That woman’s a bitch,” said Rochelle, with sudden savagery.
“What makes you say that?”
“Have you met ’er? She look at me like I wuz dirt.”
“What did Lula think of her?”
“She din’ like ’er neither, nor her husband. He’s a creep.”
“In what way?”
“He jus’ is,” said Rochelle, impatiently; but then, when Strike did not speak, she went on. “He wuz always tryin’ ter get her downstairs when his wife wuz out.”