The Cuckoo's Calling

“By the way, thanks for that text you sent yesterday,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you; it would have looked strange if I’d started texting, where I was. But if you could call Nigel Clements, Duffield’s agent, and ask for an appointment, that would be great too.”

Her animosity fell away at once, as he had meant it to; her voice was many degrees warmer when she spoke again; verging, in fact, on excited.

“But Duffield can’t have had anything to do with it, can he? He had a cast-iron alibi!”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that,” said Strike, deliberately ominous. “And listen, Robin, if another death threat comes in—they usually arrive on Mondays…”

“Yes?” she said eagerly.

“File it,” said Strike.

He could not be sure—it seemed unlikely; she struck him as so prim—but he thought he heard her mutter, “Sod you, then,” as she hung up.

Strike spent the rest of the day engaged in tedious but necessary spadework. When Robin had texted him the address, he visited his second nightclub of the day, this time in South Kensington. The contrast with Barrack was extreme; Uzi’s discreet entrance might have been to a smart private house. There were security cameras over its doors, too. Strike then took a bus to Charles Street, where he was fairly sure Guy Somé lived, and walked what he guessed to be the most direct route between the designer’s address and the house where Landry had died.

His leg was aching badly again by late afternoon, and he stopped for a rest and more sandwiches before setting out for the Feathers, near Scotland Yard, and his appointment with Eric Wardle.

It was another Victorian pub, this time with enormous windows reaching almost from floor to ceiling, looking out on to a great gray 1920s building decorated with statues by Jacob Epstein. The nearest of these sat over the doors, and stared down through the pub windows; a fierce seated deity was being embraced by his infant son, whose body was weirdly twisted back on itself, to show his genitalia. Time had eroded all shock value.

Inside the Feathers, machines were clinking and jingling and flashing primary-colored lights; the wall-mounted plasma TVs, surrounded with padded leather, were showing West Bromwich Albion versus Chelsea with the sound off, while Amy Winehouse throbbed and moaned from hidden speakers. The names of ales were painted on the cream wall above the long bar, which faced a wide dark-wood staircase with curving steps and shining brass handrails, leading up to the first floor.

Strike had to wait to be served, giving him time to look around. The place was full of men, most of whom had military-short hair; but a trio of girls with tangerine tans stood around a high table, throwing back their over-straightened peroxide hair, in their tiny, tight spangled dresses, shifting their weight unnecessarily on their teetering heels. They were pretending not to know that the only solitary drinker, a handsome, boyish man in a leather jacket, who was sitting on a high bar seat beside the nearby window, was examining them, point by point, with a practiced eye. Strike bought himself a pint of Doom Bar and approached their appraiser.

“Cormoran Strike,” he said, reaching Wardle’s table. Wardle had the kind of hair Strike envied in other men; nobody would ever have called Wardle “pubehead.”

“Yeah, I thought it might be you,” said the policeman, shaking hands. “Anstis said you were a big bloke.”

Strike pulled up a bar stool, and Wardle said, without preamble:

“What’ve you got for me, then?”

“There was a fatal stabbing just off Ealing Broadway last month. Guy called Liam Yates? Police informant, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, he got a knife in the neck. But we know who did it,” said Wardle, with a patronizing laugh. “Half the crooks in London know. If that’s your information—”

“Don’t know where he is, though, do you?”

With a quick glance at the determinedly unconscious girls, Wardle slid a notebook out of his pocket.

“Go on.”

“There’s a girl who works in Betbusters on the Hackney Road called Shona Holland. She lives in a rented flat two streets away from the bookie’s. She’s got an unwelcome house guest at the moment called Brett Fearney, who used to beat up her sister. Apparently he’s not the sort of bloke you refuse a favor.”

“Got the full address?” asked Wardle, who was scribbling hard.

“I’ve just given you the name of the tenant and half the postcode. How about trying a bit of detective work?”

“And where did you say you got this?” asked Wardle, still jotting rapidly with the notebook balanced under the table on his knee.

“I didn’t,” replied Strike equably, sipping his beer.

“Got some interesting friends, haven’t you?”

“Very. Now, in a spirit of fair exchange…”

Wardle, replacing his notebook in his pocket, laughed.

“What you’ve just given me might be a crock of shit.”

“It isn’t. Play fair, Wardle.”

The policeman eyed Strike for a moment, apparently torn between amusement and suspicion.

“What are you after, then?”

“I told you on the phone: bit of inside information on Lula Landry.”