1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“It’s not even,” said Tansy, twisting the loose diamond ring again, “as though
he’s got money.”
“But you don’t think it was his voice you heard that night?”
“Well, like I say, it could have been,” she said impatiently, with a small shrug
of her thin shoulders. “He’s got an alibi, though, hasn’t he? Loads of people said
he was nowhere near Kentigern Gardens the night Lula was killed. He spent part
of it at Ciara Porter’s, didn’t he? Bitch,” Tansy added, with a small, tight smile.
“Sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend.”
“Were they sleeping together?” asked Strike.
“Oh, what do you think?” laughed Ursula, as though the question was too
naive for words. “I know Ciara Porter, she modeled in this charity fashion show I
was involved in setting up. She’s such an airhead and such a slut.”
The coffees had arrived, along with Strike’s sticky toffee pudding.
“I’m sorry, John, but Lula didn’t have very good taste in friends,” said Tansy,
sipping her espresso. “There was Ciara, and then there was that Bryony Radford.
Not that she was a friend, exactly, but I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw
her.”
“Who’s Bryony?” asked Strike disingenuously, for he remembered who she
was.
“Makeup artist. Charges a fortune, and such a bloody bitch,” said Ursula. “I
used her once, before one of the Gorbachev Foundation balls, and afterwards she
told ev—”
Ursula stopped abruptly, lowered her glass and picked up her coffee instead.
Strike, who despite its undoubted irrelevance to the matter in hand was quite
interested to know what Bryony had told everyone, began to speak, but Tansy
talked loudly over him.
“Oh, and there was that ghastly girl Lula used to bring around to the flat, too,
John, remember?”
She appealed to Bristow again, but he looked blank.
“You know, that ghastly—that rarely awful-colored girl she sometimes
dragged back. A kind of hobo person. I mean…she literally smelled. When she’d
been in the lift…you could smell it. And she took her into the pool, too. I didn’t
think blacks could swim.”
Bristow was blinking rapidly, pink in the face.