1 The Cuckoo's Calling

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