The Cuckoo's Calling

Strike paused to rub his eyes, wincing because he had forgotten that one of them was bruised. He was now in that light-headed, twitchy state that signified true exhaustion. With a long, grunting sigh he considered Bristow’s notes, with one hairy fist holding a pen ready to make his own annotations.

Bristow might interpret the law with dispassion and objectivity in the office that had provided him with his smart engraved business card, but the contents of this envelope merely confirmed Strike’s view that his client’s personal life was dominated by an unjustifiable obsession. Whatever the origin of Bristow’s preoccupation with the Runner—whether because he nursed a secret fear of that urban bogeyman, the criminal black male, or for some other, deeper, more personal reason—it was unthinkable that the police had not investigated the Runner, and his (possibly lookout, possibly car thief) companion, and certain that they had had good reason for excluding him from suspicion.

Yawning widely, Strike turned to the second page of Bristow’s notes.

At 1:45, Derrick Wilson, the security guard on duty at the desk overnight, felt unwell and went into the back bathroom, where he remained for approximately a quarter of an hour. For fifteen minutes prior to Lula’s death, therefore, the lobby of her building was deserted and anybody could have entered and exited without being seen. Wilson only came out of the bathroom after Lula fell, when he heard Tansy Bestigui screaming.

This window of opportunity tallies exactly with the time the Runner would have reached 18 Kentigern Gardens if he passed the security camera on the junction of Alderbrook and Bellamy Roads at 1:39.

“And how,” murmured Strike, massaging his forehead, “did he see through the front door, to know the guard was in the bog?”

I have spoken to Derrick Wilson, who is happy to be interviewed.

And I bet you’ve paid him to do it, Strike thought, noting the security guard’s telephone number beneath these concluding words.

He laid down the pen with which he had been intending to add his own notes, and clipped Bristow’s jottings into the file. Then he turned off the desk lamp and limped out to pee in the toilet on the landing. After brushing his teeth over the cracked basin, he locked the glass door, set his alarm clock and undressed.

By the neon glow of the street lamp outside, Strike undid the straps of his prosthetic, easing it from the aching stump, removing the gel liner that had become an inadequate cushion against pain. He laid the false leg beside his recharging mobile phone, maneuvered himself into his sleeping bag and lay with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. Now, as he had feared, the leaden fatigue of the body was not enough to still the misfiring mind. The old infection was active again; tormenting him, dragging at him.

What would she be doing now?

Yesterday evening, in a parallel universe, he had lived in a beautiful apartment in a most desirable part of London, with a woman who made every man who laid eyes on her treat Strike with a kind of incredulous envy.

“Why don’t you just move in with me? Oh, for God’s sake, Bluey, doesn’t it make sense? Why not?”

He had known, from the very first, that it was a mistake. They had tried it before, and each time it had been more calamitous than the last.

“We’re engaged, for God’s sake, why won’t you live with me?”

She had said things that were supposed to be proofs that, in the process of almost losing him forever, she had been as irrevocably changed as he had, with his one and a half legs.

“I don’t need a ring. Don’t be ridiculous, Bluey. You need all your money for the new business.”

He closed his eyes. There could be no going back from this morning. She had lied once too often, about something too serious. But he went over it all again, like a sum he had long since solved, afraid he had made some elementary mistake. Painstakingly he added together the constantly shifting dates, the refusal to check with chemist or doctor, the fury with which she had countered any request for clarification, and then the sudden announcement that it was over, with never a shred of proof that it had been real. Along with every other suspicious circumstance, there was his hard-won knowledge of her mythomania, her need to provoke, to taunt, to test.