“You’re in the wrong fucking room, Char, darling,” Ross had said, staking out his rights by the caressing arrogance of his tone. “Ritchie’s party’s upstairs.”
“I’m not coming,” she said, turning a smiling face upon him. “I’ve got to go and help Cormoran soak his T-shirt.”
Thus had she publicly dumped her Old Harrovian boyfriend for Cormoran Strike. It had been the most glorious moment of Strike’s nineteen years: he had publicly carried off Helen of Troy right under Menelaus’s nose, and in his shock and delight he had not questioned the miracle, but simply accepted it.
Only later had he realized that what had seemed like chance, or fate, had been entirely engineered by her. She had admitted it to him months later: that she had, to punish Ross for some transgression, deliberately entered the wrong room, and waited for a man, any man, to approach her; that he, Strike, had been a mere instrument to torture Ross; that she had slept with him in the early hours of the following morning in a spirit of vengefulness and rage that he had mistaken for passion.
There, in that first night, had been everything that had subsequently broken them apart and pulled them back together: her self-destructiveness, her recklessness, her determination to hurt; her unwilling but genuine attraction to Strike, and her secure place of retreat in the cloistered world in which she had grown up, whose values she simultaneously despised and espoused. Thus had begun the relationship that had led to Strike lying here on his camp bed fifteen years later, racked with more than physical pain, and wishing that he could rid himself of her memory.
8
WHEN ROBIN ARRIVED NEXT MORNING, it was, for the second time, to a locked glass door. She let herself in with the spare key that Strike had now entrusted to her, approached the closed inner door and stood silent, listening. After a few seconds, she heard the faintly muffled but unmistakable sound of deep snoring.
This presented her with a delicate problem, because of their tacit agreement not to mention Strike’s camp bed, or any of the other signs of habitation lying around the place. On the other hand, Robin had something of an urgent nature to communicate to her temporary boss. She hesitated, considering her options. The easiest route would be to try and wake Strike by clattering around the outer office, thereby giving him time to organize himself and the inner room, but that might take too long: her news would not keep. Robin therefore took a deep breath and rapped on the door.
Strike woke instantly. For one disoriented moment he lay there, registering the reproachful daylight pouring through the window. Then he remembered setting down the mobile phone after reading Charlotte’s text, and knew that he had forgotten to set the alarm.
“Don’t come in!” he bellowed.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Robin called through the door.
“Yeah—yeah, that’d be great. I’ll come out there for it,” Strike added loudly, wishing, for the first time, that he had fitted a lock on the inner door. His false foot and calf was standing propped against the wall, and he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts.
Robin hurried away to fill the kettle, and Strike fought his way out of his sleeping bag. He dressed at speed, making a clumsy job of putting on the prosthesis, folding the camp bed into its corner, pushing the desk back into place. Ten minutes after she had knocked on the door, he limped into the outer office smelling strongly of deodorant, to find Robin at her desk, looking very excited about something.
“Your tea,” she said, indicating a steaming mug.
“Great, thanks. Just give me a moment,” he said, and he left to pee in the bathroom on the landing. As he zipped up his fly, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, crumpled-looking and unshaven. Not for the first time, he consoled himself that his hair looked the same whether brushed or unbrushed.
“I’ve got news,” said Robin, when he had re-entered the office through the glass door and, with reiterated thanks, picked up his mug of tea.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve found Rochelle Onifade.”
He lowered the mug.
“You’re kidding. How the hell…?”
“I saw in the file that she was supposed to attend an outpatient clinic at St. Thomas’s,” said Robin excitedly, flushed and talking fast, “so I rang up the hospital yesterday evening, pretending to be her, and I said I’d forgotten the time of my appointment, and they told me it’s at ten thirty on Thursday morning. You’ve got,” she glanced at her computer monitor, “fifty-five minutes.”
Why had he not thought to tell her to do this?
“You genius, you bloody genius…”
He had slopped hot tea over his hand, and put the mug down on her desk.
“D’you know exactly…?”
“It’s in the psychiatric unit round the back of the main building,” said Robin, exhilarated. “See, you go in off Grantley Road, there’s a second car park…”
She had turned the monitor towards him to show him the map of St. Thomas’s. He checked his wrist, but his watch was still in the inner room.
“You’ll have time if you leave now,” Robin urged him.
“Yeah—I’ll get my stuff.”
Strike hurried to fetch his watch, wallet, cigarettes and phone. He was almost through the glass door, cramming his wallet into his back pocket, when Robin said:
“Er—Cormoran…”
She had never called him by his first name before. Strike assumed that this accounted for her slight air of bashfulness; then he realized that she was pointing meaningfully at his navel. Looking down, he saw that he had done up the buttons on his shirt wrongly, and was exposing a patch of belly so hairy that it resembled black coconut matting.
“Oh—right—cheers…”
Robin turned her attention politely to her monitor while he undid and refastened the buttons.
“See you later.”
“Yeah, ’bye,” she said, smiling at him as he departed at speed; but within seconds he was back, panting slightly.
“Robin, I need you to check something.”
She already had the pen in her hand, waiting.
“There was a legal conference in Oxford on the seventh of January. Lula Landry’s uncle Tony attended it. International family law. Anything you can find out. Specifically about him being there.”
“Right,” said Robin, scribbling.
“Cheers. You’re a genius.”
And he was gone, with uneven steps, down the metal stairs.
Though she hummed to herself as she settled down at her desk, a little of Robin’s cheerfulness drained away as she drank her tea. She had half hoped that Strike would invite her along to meet Rochelle Onifade, whose shadow she had hunted for two weeks.
Rush hour past, the crowds on the Tube had thinned. Strike was pleased, because the end of his stump was still smarting, to find a seat with ease. He had bought himself a pack of Extra Strong Mints at the station kiosk before boarding his train, and was now sucking four simultaneously, trying to conceal the fact that he had not had time to clean his teeth. His toothbrush and toothpaste were hidden inside his kitbag, even though it would have been much more convenient to leave them on the chipped sink in the bathroom. Catching sight of himself again, in the darkened train window, with his heavy stubble and his generally unkempt appearance, he asked himself why, when it was perfectly obvious that Robin knew he slept there, he maintained the fiction that he had some other home.
Strike’s memory and map sense were more than adequate to the task of locating the entrance to the psychiatric unit at St. Thomas’s, and he proceeded there without mishap, arriving at shortly after ten. He spent five minutes checking that the automatic double doors were the only entrance on Grantley Road, before positioning himself on a stone wall in the car park, some twenty yards away from the entrance, giving him a clear view of everyone entering and leaving.
Knowing only that the girl he sought was probably homeless, and certainly black, he had thought through his strategy for finding her on the Tube, and concluded that there was
really only one option open to him. At twenty past ten, therefore, when he saw a tall, thin black girl walking briskly towards the entrance, he called out (even though she looked too well-groomed, too neatly dressed):
“Rochelle!”
She glanced up to see who had shouted, but kept walking without any sign that the name had a personal application, and disappeared into the building. Next came a couple, both white; then a group of people of assorted ages and races whom Strike guessed to be hospital workers; but on the mere off-chance he called again:
“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.”
“Did Lula ever go?”
“No fuckin’ chance,” said Rochelle.
“You and Lula talked to each other a lot, I suppose, did you?”
“Yeah, we did, at f—Yeah, we did.”
She looked out of the window. A sudden shower of rain had caught passersby unawares. Transparent ellipses peppered the glass beside them.
“At first?” said Strike. “Did you talk less as time went on?”
“I’m gonna have to go soon,” said Rochelle, grandly. “I got things to do.”
“People like Lula,” said Strike, feeling his way, “can be spoiled. Treat people badly. They’re used to getting their own—”
“I ain’t no one’s servant,” said Rochelle fiercely.
“Maybe that’s why she liked you? Maybe she saw you as someone more equal—not a hanger-on?”
“Yeah, igzactly,” said Rochelle, mollified. “I weren’t impressed by her.”
“You can see why she’d want you as a friend, someone more down-to-earth…”
“Yeah.”
“…and you had your illness in common, didn’t you? So you understood her on a level most people wouldn’t.”
“And I’m black,” said Rochelle, “and she wuz wanting to feel proper black.”
“Did she talk to you about that?”
“Yeah, ’course,” said Rochelle. “She wuz wanting to find out where she come from, where she belong.”
“Did she talk to you about trying to find the black side of her family?”
“Yeah, of course. And she…yeah.”
She had braked almost visibly.
“Did she ever find anyone? Her father?”
“No. She never found ’im. No fuckin’ chance.”
“Really?”