The Cuckoo's Calling

STRIKE HAD ONCE TRIED TO count the number of schools he had attended in his youth, and had reached the figure of seventeen with the suspicion that he had forgotten a couple. He did not include the brief period of supposed home schooling which had taken place during the two months he had lived with his mother and half-sister in a squat in Atlantic Road in Brixton. His mother’s then boyfriend, a white Rastafarian musician who had rechristened himself Shumba, felt that the school system reinforced patriarchal and materialistic values with which his common-law stepchildren ought not to be tainted. The principal lesson that Strike had learned during his two months of home-based education was that cannabis, even if administered spiritually, could render the taker both dull and paranoid.

He took an unnecessary detour through Brixton Market on the way to the café where he was meeting Derrick Wilson. The fishy smell of the covered arcades; the colorful open faces of the supermarkets, teeming with unfamiliar fruit and vegetables from Africa and the West Indies; the halal butchers and the hairdressers, with large pictures of ornate braids and curls, and rows and rows of white polystyrene heads bearing wigs in the windows: all of it took Strike back twenty-six years, to the months he had spent wandering the Brixton streets with Lucy, his young half-sister, while his mother and Shumba lay dozily on dirty cushions back at the squat, vaguely discussing the important spiritual concepts in which the children ought to be instructed.

Seven-year-old Lucy had yearned for hair like the West Indian girls. On the long drive back to St. Mawes that had terminated their Brixton life, she had expressed a fervent desire for beaded braids from the back seat of Uncle Ted and Aunt Joan’s Morris Minor. Strike remembered Aunt Joan’s calm agreement that the style was very pretty, a frown line between her eyebrows reflected in the rearview mirror. Joan had tried, with diminishing success through the years, not to disparage their mother in front of the children. Strike had never discovered how Uncle Ted had found out where they were living; all he knew was that he and Lucy had let themselves into the squat one afternoon to find their mother’s enormous brother standing in the middle of the room, threatening Shumba with a bloody nose. Within two days, he and Lucy were back in St. Mawes, at the primary school they attended intermittently for years, taking up with old friends as though they had not left, and swiftly losing the accents they had adopted for camouflage, wherever Leda had last taken them.

He had not needed the directions Derrick Wilson had given Robin, because he knew the Phoenix Café on Coldharbour Lane of old. Occasionally Shumba and his mother had taken them there: a tiny, brown-painted, shed-like place where you could (if not a vegetarian, like Shumba and his mother) eat large and delicious cooked breakfasts, with eggs and bacon piled high, and mugs of tea the color of teak. It was almost exactly as he remembered: cozy, snug and dingy, its mirrored walls reflecting tables of mock-wood Formica, stained floor tiles of dark red and white, and a tapioca-colored ceiling covered in molded wallpaper. The squat middle-aged waitress had short straightened hair and dangling orange plastic earrings; she moved aside to let Strike past the counter.

A heavily built West Indian man was sitting alone at one table, reading a copy of the Sun, under a plastic clock that bore the legend Pukka Pies.

“Derrick?”

“Yeah…you Strike?”

Strike shook Wilson’s big, dry hand, and sat down. He estimated Wilson to be almost as tall as himself when standing. Muscle as well as fat swelled the sleeves of the security guard’s sweatshirt; his hair was close-cropped and he was clean-shaven, with fine almond-shaped eyes. Strike ordered pie and mash off the scrawled menu board on the back wall, pleased to reflect that he could charge the £4.75 to expenses.

“Yeah, the pie ’n’ mash is good here,” said Wilson.

A faint Caribbean lilt lifted his London accent. His voice was deep, calm and measured. Strike thought that he would be a reassuring presence in a security guard’s uniform.

“Thanks for meeting me, I appreciate it. John Bristow’s not happy with the results of the inquest on his sister. He’s hired me to take another look at the evidence.”

“Yeah,” said Wilson, “I know.”

“How much did he give you to talk to me?” Strike asked casually.

Wilson blinked, then gave a slightly guilty, deep-throated chuckle.

“Pony,” he said. “But if it makes the man feel better, yuh know? It won’t change nuthin’. She killed huhself. But ask your questions. I don’t mind.”

He closed the Sun. The front page bore a picture of Gordon Brown looking baggy-eyed and exhausted.

“You’ll have gone over everything with the police,” said Strike, opening his notebook and setting it down beside his plate, “but it would be good to hear, first hand, what happened that night.”