The Cuckoo's Calling

think your husband knew something?”
    “Alec always went into things as deeply as he could,” she said, with a faint, reminiscent smile. “He was a very successful businessman, you know.”
    “But he never told you anything about Lula’s first family?”
    “Oh no, he wouldn’t have done that.” She seemed to find this a strange suggestion. “I wanted her to be mine, just mine, you see. Alec would have wanted to protect me, if he knew anything. I could not have borne the idea that somebody out there might come and claim her one day. I had already lost Charlie, and I wanted a daughter so badly; the idea of losing her, too…”
    The nurse returned bearing a tray with two cups on it and a plate of chocolate bourbons.
    “One coffee,” she said cheerfully, placing it beside Strike on the nearer of the bedside tables, “and one camomile tea.”
    She bustled out again. Lady Bristow closed her eyes. Strike took a gulp of black coffee and said:
    “Lula went looking for her biological parents in the year before she died, didn’t she?”
    “That’s right,” said Lady Bristow, with her eyes still closed. “I had just been diagnosed with cancer.”
    There was a pause, in which Strike put down his coffee cup with a soft chink, and the distant cheers of the small children in the square outside floated through the open window.
    “John and Tony were very, very angry with her,” said Lady Bristow. “They didn’t think she ought to have started trying to find her biological mother, when I was so very ill. The tumor was already advanced when they found it. I had to go straight on to chemotherapy. John was very good; he drove me back and forth to the hospital, and came to stay with me during the worst bits, and even Tony rallied round, but all Lula seemed to care about…” She sighed, and opened her faded eyes, seeking Strike’s face. “Tony always said that she was very spoiled. I daresay it was my fault. I had lost Charlie, you see; I couldn’t do enough for her.”
    “Do you know how much Lula managed to find out about her birth family?”
    “No, I don’t, I’m afraid. I think she knew how much it upset me. She didn’t tell me a great deal. I know that she found the mother, of course, because there was all the dreadful publicity. She was exactly what Tony had predicted. She hadn’t ever wanted Lula. An awful, awful woman,” whispered Lady Bristow. “But Lula kept seeing her. I was having chemotherapy all through that time. I lost my hair…”
    Her voice trailed away. Strike felt, as perhaps she meant him to, like a brute as he pressed on:
    “What about her biological father? Did she ever tell you she’d found out anything about him?”
    “No,” said Lady Bristow weakly. “I didn’t ask. I had the impression that she had given up on the whole business once she found that horrible mother. I didn’t want to discuss it, any of it. It was too distressing. I think she realized that.”
    “She didn’t mention her biological father the last time you saw her?” Strike pressed on.
    “Oh no,” she said, in her soft voice. “No. That was not a very long visit, you know. She told me, the moment she arrived, I remember, that she could not stay long. She had to meet her friend Ciara Porter.”
    Her sense of ill-usage wafted gently towards him like the smell of the bedridden she exuded: a little fusty, a little overripe. Something about her recalled Rochelle; although they were as different as two women could be, both gave off the resentment of those who feel shortchanged and neglected.
    “Can you remember what you and Lula talked about that day?”
    “Well, I had been given so many painkillers, you understand. I had had a very serious operation. I can’t remember every detail.”
    “But you remember Lula coming to see you?” asked Strike.
    “Oh yes,” she said. “She woke me up, I had been sleeping.”
    “Can you remember what you talked about?”
    “My operation, of course,” she said, with just a touch of asperity. “And then, a little bit, about her big brother.”
    “Her big…?”
    “Charlie,” said Lady Bristow, pitifully. “I told her about the day he died. I had never really talked to her about it before. The worst, the very worst day of my life.”
    Strike could imagine her, prostrate and a little groggy, but no less resentful for all that, holding her unwilling daughter there at her side by talking about her pain, and her dead son.
    “How could I have known that that would