Читаем The Cuckoo's Calling полностью

Strike had then telephoned her for a third time, and told her that he believed his investigation to be in its final phase, after which evidence would be laid to the police, resulting, he had no doubt, in a further explosion of publicity. Now that he came to think about it, he said, if she was unable to help, it might be just as well for her to be protected from another deluge of press inquiry. Marlene Higson had immediately clamored for her right to tell everything she knew, and Strike condescended to meet her, as she had already suggested, in the beer garden of the Ordnance Arms on Monday morning.

He took the train out to Canning Town station. It was overlooked by Canary Wharf, whose sleek, futuristic buildings resembled a series of gleaming metal blocks on the horizon; their size, like that of the national debt, impossible to gauge from such a distance. But a few minutes’ walk later, he was as far from the shining, suited corporate world as it was possible to be. Crammed up alongside dockside developments where many of those financiers lived in neat designer pods, Canning Town exhaled poverty and deprivation. Strike knew it of old, because it had once been home to the old friend who had given him Brett Fearney’s location. Down Barking Road he walked, his back to Canary Wharf, past a building with a sign that advertised “Kills 4 Communities,” at which he frowned for a moment before realizing that somebody had swiped the “S.”

The Ordnance Arms sat beside the English Pawnbroking Company Ltd. It was a large, low-slung, off-white-painted pub. The interior was no-nonsense and utilitarian, with a selection of wooden clocks on a terracotta-colored wall and a lividly patterned piece of red carpet the only gesture to anything as frivolous as decoration. Otherwise, there were two large pool tables, a long and accessible bar and plenty of empty space for milling drinkers. Just now, at eleven in the morning, it was empty except for one little old man in the corner and a cheery serving girl, who addressed her only customer as “Joey” and gave Strike directions through the back.

The beer garden turned out to be the grimmest of concrete backyards, containing bins and a solitary wooden table, at which a woman was sitting on a white plastic chair, with her fat legs crossed and her cigarette held at right angles to her cheek. There was barbed wire on top of the high wall, and a plastic bag had caught in it and was rustling in the breeze. Beyond the wall there rose a vast block of flats, yellow-painted and with evidence of squalor bulging over many of the balconies.

“Mrs. Higson?”

“Call me Marlene, love.”

She looked him up and down, with a slack smile and a knowing gaze. She was wearing a pink Lycra vest top under a zip-up gray hoodie, and leggings that ended inches above her bare gray-white ankles. There were grubby flip-flops on her feet and many gold rings on her fingers; her yellow hair, with its inches of graying brown root, was pulled back into a dirty toweling scrunchie.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“I’ll have a pint of Carling, if you twist my arm.”

The way she bent her body towards him, the way she pushed straw-like strands of hair out of her pouchy eyes, even the way she held her cigarette; all were grotesquely coquettish. Perhaps she knew no other way of relating to anything male. Strike found her simultaneously pathetic and repulsive.

“Shock?” said Marlene Higson, after Strike had bought them both beer, and joined her at the table. “You can say that again, when I’d gave ’er up for lost. It near broke my ’eart when she wen’, but I fort I was giving ’er a better life. I wouldna ’ad the strenf to do it uvverwise. Fort I was giving ’er all the fings I never ’ad. I grew up poor, proper poor. We ’ad nothing. Nothing.”

She looked away from him, drawing hard on her Rothman’s; when her mouth puckered into hard little lines around the cigarette, it looked like a cat’s anus.

“And Dez, me boyfriend, see, wasn’t too keen—you know, with ’er being colored, it were obvious she weren’t ’is. They go darker, see; when she were born, she looked white. But I still never woulda given ’er up if I ’adn’t seen a chance for ’er to get a better life, and I fort, she won’t miss me, she’s too young. I’ve gave ’er a good start, and mebbe, when she’s older, she’ll come and find me. And me dream come true,” she added, with a ghastly show of pathos. “She come’n’ found me.

“I’ll tell you somefing reely strange, right,” she said, without drawing breath. “A man friend of mine says to me, just a week before I got the call from ’er, ‘You know ’oo you look like?’ he says. I says, ‘Dahn be ser silly,’ but he says, ‘Straight up. Across the eyes, and the shape of the eyebrows, y’know?’ ”

She looked hopefully at Strike, who could not bring himself to respond. It seemed impossible that the face of Nefertiti could have sprung from this gray and purple mess.