The Cuckoo's Calling

“It was something about where the college was. Something her mother said. Looly thought she’d found the place it must have been, and she went to look at the records, or something, with this funny friend of hers called…”

“Rochelle?” suggested Strike. The Mercedes was now purring up Oxford Street.

“Yeah, Rochelle, that’s right. Looly met her in rehab or something, poor little thing. Looly was, like, unbelievably sweet to her. Used to take her shopping and stuff. Anyway, they never found him, or it was the wrong place, or something. I can’t remember.”

“Was she looking for a man called Agyeman?”

“I don’t think she ever told me the name.”

“Or Owusu?”

Ciara turned her beautiful light eyes upon him in astonishment.

“That’s Guy’s real name!”

“I know.”

“Oh my God,” Ciara giggled. “Guy’s dad never went to college. He was a bus driver. He used to beat Guy up for sketching dresses all the time. That’s why Guy changed his name.”

The car was slowing down. The long queue, four people wide, stretching along the block, led to a discreet entrance that might have been to a private house. A gaggle of dark figures was gathered around a white-pillared doorway.

“Paps,” said Kolovas-Jones, speaking for the first time. “Careful how you get out of the car, Ciara.”

He slid out of the driver’s seat and walked around to the left-hand back door; but the paparazzi were already running; ominous, darkly clad men, raising their long-nosed cameras as they closed in.

Ciara and Strike emerged into flashes like gunfire; Strike’s retinas were in sudden, dazzling whiteout; he ducked his head, his hand closed instinctively around Ciara Porter’s slender upper arm, and he steered her ahead of him through the black oblong that represented sanctuary, as the doors opened magically to admit them. The queuing hordes were shouting, protesting at their easy entry, yelping with excitement; and then the flashes stopped, and they were inside, where there was an industrial roar of noises, and a loud insistent bass line.

“Wow, you’ve got a great sense of direction,” said Ciara. “I usually, like, ricochet off the bouncers and they have to push me in.”

Streaks and blazes of purple and yellow light were still burned across Strike’s field of vision. He dropped her arm. She was so pale that she looked almost luminous in the gloom. Then they were jostled further inside the club by the entry of another dozen people behind them.

“C’mon,” said Ciara, and she slipped a soft, long-fingered hand inside his and tugged him along behind her.

Faces turned as they walked through the packed crowd, both of them taller by far than the majority of clubbers. Strike could see what looked like long glass fish tanks set into the walls, containing what seemed to be great floating blobs of wax, reminding him of his mother’s old lava lamps. There were long black leather banquettes along the walls, and, further in, nearer the dance floor, booths. It was hard to tell how big the club was, because of judiciously placed mirrors; at one point, Strike caught a glimpse of himself, head-on, looking like a sharply dressed heavy behind the silvery sylph that was Ciara. The music pounded through every part of him, vibrating through his head and body; the crowd on the dance floor was so dense that it seemed miraculous that they were managing even to stamp and sway.

They had reached a padded doorway, guarded by a bald bouncer who grinned at Ciara, revealing two gold teeth, and pushed open the concealed entrance.

They entered a quieter, though hardly less crowded bar area that was evidently reserved for the famous and their friends. Strike noticed a miniskirted television presenter, a soap actor, a comedian primarily famous for his sexual appetite; and then, in a distant corner, Evan Duffield.

He was wearing a skull-patterned scarf wound around his neck and skintight black jeans, sitting at the join of two black leather banquettes with arms stretched at right angles along the backs of the benches on either side, where his companions, mostly women, were crammed. His dark shoulder-length hair had been dyed blonde; he was pallid and bony-faced, and the smudges around his bright turquoise eyes were dark purple.

The group containing Duffield was emanating an almost magnetic force over the room. Strike saw it in the sneaking sidelong glances other occupants were shooting them; in the respectful space left around them, a wider orbit than anybody else had been granted. Duffield and his cohorts’ apparent unselfconsciousness was, Strike recognized, nothing but expert artifice; they had, all of them, the hyper-alertness of the prey animal combined with the casual arrogance of predators. In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted; they were receiving their due.