The Cuckoo's Calling

long legs underneath her, sat back down and smoked in silence for a few seconds.
    “You were with her most of her last day, weren’t you?” Strike asked.
    “ Don’t fucking remind me,” said Ciara, closing her eyes. “I’ve only been over it, like, a million times. Trying to get my head around how you can go from, like, completely bloody happy to dead in, like, hours.”
    “She was completely happy?”
    “God, happier than I’d ever seen her, that last week. We got back from a job in Antigua for Vogue, and she and Evan got back together and they had the commitment ceremony; it was all fantastic for her, she was on cloud nine.”
    “You were at this commitment ceremony?”
    “Oh yeah,” said Ciara, dropping her cigarette end into a can of Coke, where it was extinguished with a small hiss. “God, it was beyond romantic. Evan just, like, sprang it on her at Dickie Carbury’s house. You know Dickie Carbury, the restaurateur? He’s got this fabulous place in the Cotswolds, and we were all there for the weekend, and Evan had bought them both matching bangles from Fergus Keane, gorgeous, oxidized silver. He forced us all down to the lake after dinner in the freezing cold and the snow, and then he recited this poem he’d written to her, and put the bangle on her wrist. Looly was laughing her head off, but then she just, like, recited a poem she knew back to him. Walt Whitman. It was,” said Ciara, with an air of sudden seriousness, “honestly, like, so impressive, just to have the perfect poem to say, just like that. People think models are dumb, you know.” She threw her hair back again and offered Strike a cigarette before taking another herself. “I get so bored of telling people I’ve got a deferred place to read English at Cambridge.”
    “Have you?” asked Strike, unable to suppress the surprise in his voice.
    “Yeah,” she said, blowing out smoke prettily, “but, you know, the modeling’s going so well, I’m going to give it another year. It’s opening doors, you know?”
    “So this commitment ceremony was when—a week before Lula died?”
    “Yeah,” said Ciara, “the Saturday before.”
    “And it was just an exchange of poems and bangles. No vows, no officiant?”
    “No, it wasn’t legally binding or anything, it was just, like, this lovely, this perfect moment. Well, except for Freddie Bestigui, he was being a bit of a pain. But at least,” Ciara drew hard on her cigarette, “his bloody wife wasn’t there.”
    “Tansy?”
    “Tansy Chillingham, yeah. She’s a bitch. It’s so not a surprise they’re divorcing; they led, like, totally separate lives, you never saw them out together.
    “To tell you the truth, Freddie wasn’t too bad that weekend, seeing what a nasty rep he’s got. He was just a bore, the way he kept trying to suck up to Looly, but he wasn’t awful like they say he can be. I heard a story about this, like, totally naive girl he promised a bit part in a film…Well, I don’t know whether it was true.” Ciara squinted for a moment at the end of her cigarette. “She never reported it, anyway.”
    “You said Freddie was being a pain; in what way?”
    “Oh God, he kept, like, cornering Looly and going on about how great she’d be on screen, and like, what a great bloke her dad was.”
    “Sir Alec?”
    “Yeah, Sir Alec, of course. Oh my God,” said Ciara, wide-eyed, “if he’d known her real father, Looly would’ve, like, flipped out completely! That would have been, like, the dream of her life! No, he just said he’d known Sir Alec years and years ago, and they came from, like, the same East End manor or something, so he should be considered, like, her godfather or something. I think he was trying to be funny, but not. Anyway, everyone could tell he was just trying to work out how to get her into a film. He was a jerk about the commitment ceremony; he kept shouting ‘I’ll give away the bride.’ He was pissed; he drank like crazy all through dinner. Dickie had to shut him up. Then after the ceremony, we all had champagne back at the house and Freddie had, like, another two bottles on top of everything he’d already put away. He kept yelling at Looly that she’d make such a great actress, but she didn’t care. She just ignored him. She was cuddled up with Evan on the sofa, just, like…”
    And suddenly, tears were sparkling in Ciara’s kohled eyes, and she squashed them out of sight with the flat palms of her pretty white hands.
    “…