The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(67)
Author: J.K. Rowling

They left. When the door had closed, Bestigui said:

“All right, whatever your f**king name is, you can have five minutes.”

Strike sat down, uninvited, in one of the black leather chairs facing Bestigui’s desk, while the producer returned to his seat behind it, subjecting Strike to a hard, cold glare that was quite unlike the one Strike had received from Bestigui’s estranged wife; this was the intense scrutiny of a professional gambler. Bestigui reached for a packet of cigarillos, pulled a black glass ashtray towards himself and lit up with a gold lighter.

“All right, let’s hear what these alleged photographs show,” he said, squinting through clouds of pungent smoke, the picture of a film mafioso.

“The silhouette,” said Strike, “of a woman crouching on the balcony outside your sitting-room windows. She looks nak*d, but as you and I know, she was in her underwear.”

Bestigui puffed hard for a few seconds, then removed the cigarillo and said:

“Bullshit. You couldn’t see that from the street. Solid stone bottom of the balcony; from that angle you wouldn’t see anything. You’re taking a punt.”

“The lights were on in your sitting room. You can see her outline through the gaps in the stone. There was room then, of course, because the shrubs weren’t there, were they? People can’t resist fiddling with the scene afterwards, even when they’ve got away with it,” Strike added, conversationally. “You were trying to pretend that there was never any room for anyone to squat on that balcony, weren’t you? But you can’t go back and Photoshop reality. Your wife was perfectly positioned to hear what happened up on the third-floor balcony just before Lula Landry died.

“Here’s what I think happened,” Strike went on, while Bestigui continued to squint through the smoke rising from his cigarillo. “You and your wife had a row while she was undressing for bed. Perhaps you found her stash in the bathroom, or you interrupted her doing a couple of lines. So you decided an appropriate punishment would be to shut her outside on the sub-zero balcony.

“People might ask how a street full of paps didn’t notice a part-naked woman being shoved out on a balcony over their heads, but the snow was falling very thickly, and they’ll have been stamping their feet trying to keep the circulation going, and their attention was focused on the ends of the street, while they were waiting for Lula and Deeby Macc. And Tansy didn’t make any noise, did she? She ducked down and hid; she didn’t want to show herself, half nak*d, in front of thirty photographers. You might even have shoved her out there at the same time that Lula’s car came round the corner. Nobody would have been looking at your windows if Lula Landry had just appeared in a skimpy little dress.”

“You’re full of shit,” said Bestigui. “You haven’t got any photographs.”

“I never said I had them. I said I’d been shown them.”

Bestigui took the cigarillo from his lips, changed his mind about talking, and replaced it. Strike allowed several moments to elapse, but when it became clear that Bestigui was not going to avail himself of the opportunity to speak, he continued:

“Tansy must’ve started hammering on the window immediately after Landry fell past her. You weren’t expecting your wife to start screaming and banging on the glass, were you? Understandably averse to anyone witnessing your bit of domestic abuse, you opened up. She ran straight past you, screaming her head off, out of the flat, and downstairs to Derrick Wilson.

“At which point you looked down over the balustrade and saw Lula Landry lying dead in the street below.”

Bestigui puffed smoke slowly, without taking his eyes off Strike’s face.

“What you did next might seem quite incriminating to a jury. You didn’t dial 999. You didn’t run after your half-frozen, hysterical wife. You didn’t even—which the jury might find more understandable—run and flush away the coke you knew was lying in open view in the bathroom.

“No, what you did next, before following your wife or calling the police, was to wipe that window clean. There’d be no prints to show that Tansy had placed her hands on the outside of the glass, would there? Your priority was to make sure that nobody could prove you had shoved your wife out on to a balcony in a temperature of minus ten. What with your unsavory reputation for assault and abuse, and the possibility of a lawsuit from a young employee in the air, you weren’t going to hand the press or a prosecutor any additional evidence, were you?

“Once you’d satisfied yourself that you’d removed any trace of her prints from the glass, you ran downstairs and compelled her to return to your flat. In the short time available to you before the police arrived, you bullied her into agreeing not to admit where she’d been when the body fell. I don’t know what you promised her, or threatened her with; but whatever it was, it worked.

“You still didn’t feel completely safe, though, because she was so shocked and distressed you thought she might blurt out the whole story. So you tried to distract the police by ranting about the flowers that had been knocked over in Deeby Macc’s flat, hoping Tansy would pull herself together and stick to the deal.

“Well she has, hasn’t she? God knows how much it’s cost you, but she’s let herself be dragged through the dirt in the press; she’s put up with being called a coke-addled fantasist; she’s stuck to her cock-and-bull story about hearing Landry and the murderer argue, through two floors, and soundproofed glass.

“Once she realizes there’s photographic proof of where she was, though,” said Strike, “I think she’ll be glad to come clean. Your wife might think she loves money more than anything in the world, but her conscience is troubling her. I’m confident she’ll crack pretty fast.”

Bestigui had smoked his cigarillo down to its last few millimeters. Slowly he ground it out in the black glass ashtray. Long seconds passed, and the noise in the outside office filtered through the glass wall beside them: voices, the ringing of a telephone.

Bestigui stood up and lowered Roman blinds of canvas down over the glass partition, so that none of the nervy girls in the office beyond could see in. He sat back down and ran thick fingers thoughtfully over the crumpled terrain of his lower face, glancing at Strike and away again, towards the blank cream canvas he had created. Strike could almost see options occurring to the producer, as though he was riffling a deck of cards.

“The curtains were drawn,” Bestigui said finally. “There wasn’t enough light coming out of the windows to make out a woman hiding on the balcony. Tansy’s not going to change her story.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Strike, stretching out his legs; the prosthesis was still uncomfortable. “When I put it to her that the legal term for what the pair of you have done is ‘conspiring to prevent the course of justice,’ and that a belated show of conscience might keep her out of the nick; when I add in the public sympathy she’s bound to get as the victim of domestic abuse, and the amount of money she’s likely to be offered for exclusive rights to her story; when she realizes she’s going to get her say in court, and that she’ll be believed, and that she’ll be able to bring about the conviction of the man she heard murdering her neighbor—Mr. Bestigui, I don’t think even you’ve got enough money to keep her quiet.”

The coarse skin around Bestigui’s mouth flickered. He picked up his packet of cigarillos but did not extract one. There was a long silence during which he turned the packet between his fingers, round and round.

At last he said:

“I’m admitting nothing. Get out.”

Strike did not move.

“I know you’re keen to phone your lawyer,” he said, “but I think you’re overlooking the silver lining here.”

“I’ve had enough of you. I said, get out.”

“However unpleasant it’s going to be, having to admit to what happened that night, it’s still preferable to becoming the prime suspect in a murder case. It’s going to be about the lesser of evils from here on in. If you cough to what really happened, you’re putting yourself in the clear for the actual murder.”

He had Bestigui’s attention now.

“You couldn’t have done it,” said Strike, “because if you’d been the one who threw Landry off the balcony two floors above, you wouldn’t have been able to let Tansy back inside within seconds of the body falling. I think you shut your wife outside, headed off into the bedroom, got into bed, got comfy—the police said the bed looked disarranged and slept in—and kept an eye on the clock. I don’t think you wanted to fall asleep. If you’d left her too long on that balcony, you’d have been up for manslaughter. No wonder Wilson said she was shaking like a whippet. Probably in the early stages of hypothermia.”

Another silence, except for Bestigui’s fat fingers drumming lightly on the edge of the desk. Strike took out his notebook.

“Are you ready to answer a few questions now?”

“Fuck you!”

The producer was suddenly consumed by the rage he had so far suppressed, his jaw jutting and his shoulders hunched, level with his ears. Strike could imagine him looking thus as he bore down on his emaciated, coked-up wife, hands outstretched.

“You’re in the shit here,” said Strike calmly, “but it’s entirely up to you how deep you sink. You can deny everything, battle it out with your wife in the court and the papers, end up in jail for perjury and obstructing the police. Or you can start cooperating, right now, and earn Lula’s family’s gratitude and good will. That’d go a long way to demonstrating remorse, and it’ll help when it comes to pleas for clemency. If your information helps catch Lula’s killer, I can’t see you getting much worse than a reprimand from the bench. It’s going to be the police who’ll get the real going-over from the public and the press.”

Bestigui was breathing noisily, but seemed to be pondering Strike’s words. At last he snarled:

“There wasn’t any f**king killer. Wilson never found anyone up there. Landry jumped,” he said, with a small, dismissive jerk of his head. “She was a f**ked-up little druggie, like my f**king wife.”

“There was a killer,” said Strike simply, “and you helped him get away with it.”

Something in Strike’s expression stifled Bestigui’s clear urge to jeer. His eyes were slits of onyx as he mulled over what Strike had said.

“I’ve heard you were keen to put Lula in a film?”

Bestigui seemed disconcerted by the change of subject.

“It was just an idea,” he muttered. “She was a flake but she was f**king gorgeous.”

“You fancied getting her and Deeby Macc into a film together?”