The Cuckoo's Calling

bang. Big bang in the distance. I realized later, that must’ve been the body—Lula, I mean—falling.
    “ Then the bawlin’ started, getting louder, coming down the stairs. So I pull up my pants and go running out into the lobby, and there’s Mrs. Bestigui, shaking and screaming and acting like one mad bitch in her underwear. She says Lula’s dead, that she’s been pushed off her balcony by a man in her flat.
    “I tell her to stay where she is and I run out the front door. And there she was. Lyin’ in the middle of the road, face down in the snow.”
    Wilson swigged his tea, and continued to cradle the mug in his large hand as he said:
    “Half her head was caved in. Blood in the snow. I could tell her neck was broken. And there was—yeah.”
    The sweet and unmistakable smell of human brains seemed to fill Strike’s nostrils. He had smelled it many times. You never forgot.
    “I ran back inside,” resumed Wilson. “Both the Bestiguis were in the lobby; he was tryin’ to get her back upstairs, inna some clothes, and she was still bawling. I told them to call the police and to keep an eye on the lift, in case he tried to come down that way.
    “I grabbed the master key out the back room and I ran upstairs. No one on the stairwell. I unlocked the door of Lula’s flat—”
    “Didn’t you think of taking anything with you, to defend yourself?” Strike interrupted. “If you thought there was someone in there? Someone who’d just killed a woman?”
    There was a long pause, the longest so far.
    “Didn’t think I’d need nothing,” said Wilson. “Thought I could take him, no problem.”
    “Take who?”
    “Duffield,” said Wilson quietly. “I thought Duffield was up there.”
    “Why?”
    “I thought he musta come in while I was in the bathroom. He knew the key code. I thought he musta gone upstairs and she’d let him in. I’d heard them rowing before. I’d heard him angry. Yeah. I thought he’d pushed her.
    “But when I got up to the flat, it was empty. I looked in every room and there was no one there. I opened the wardrobes, even, but nothing.
    “The windows in the lounge was wide open. It was below freezing that night. I didn’t close them, I didn’t touch nothing. I come out and pressed the button on the lift. The doors opened straight away; it was still at her floor. It was empty.
    “I ran back downstairs. The Bestiguis were in their flat when I passed their door; I could hear them; she was still bawling and he was still shouting at her. I didn’t know whether they’d called the police yet. I grabbed my mobile off the security desk and I went back out the front door, back to Lula, because—well, I didn’t like to leave her lying there alone. I was gonna call the police from the street, make sure they were coming. But I heard the siren before I’d even pressed nine. They were there quick.”
    “One of the Bestiguis had called them, had they?”
    “Yeah. He had. Two uniformed coppers in a panda car.”
    “OK,” said Strike. “I want to be clear on this one point: you believed Mrs. Bestigui when she said she’d heard a man up in the top flat?”
    “Oh yeah,” said Wilson.
    “Why?”
    Wilson frowned slightly, thinking, his eyes on the street over Strike’s right shoulder.
    “She hadn’t given you any details at this point, had she?” Strike asked. “Nothing about what she’d been doing when she heard this man? Nothing to explain why she was awake at two in the morning?”
    “No,” said Wilson. “She never gave me no explanation like that. It was the way she was acting, y’know. Hysterical. Shaking like a wet dog. She kept saying ‘There’s a man up there, he threw her over.’ She was proper scared.
    “But there was nobody there; I can swear that to you on the lives of mi kids. The flat was empty, the lift was empty, the stairwell was empty. If he was there, where did he go?”
    “The police came,” Strike said, returning mentally to the dark, snowy street, and the broken corpse. “What happened then?”
    “When Mrs. Bestigui saw the police car out her window, she came straight back down in her dressing gown, with her husband running after her; she come out into the street, into the snow, and starts bawling at them that there’s a murderer in the building.
    “Lights are going on all over the place now. Faces at windows. Half the street’s woken up. People coming out on to the pavements.
    “One of the coppers stayed with the body, calling for back-up