The Cuckoo's Calling

It was Monday morning, and Strike had just returned from a smoke in the sunny street and a chat with the girl from the record shop opposite. Robin’s hair was loose again; she obviously had no more interviews today. This deduction, and the effects of sunlight after rain, combined to lift Strike’s spirits. Robin, however, looked strained, standing behind her desk and holding out a pink piece of paper embellished with the usual kittens.

“Still at it, is he?”

Strike took the letter and read it through, grinning.

“I don’t understand why you aren’t going to the police,” said Robin. “The things he’s saying he wants to do to you…”

“Just file it,” said Strike dismissively, tossing the letter down and rifling through the rest of the paltry pile of mail.

“Yes, well, that’s not all,” said Robin, clearly annoyed by his attitude. “Temporary Solutions have just called.”

“Yeah? What did they want?”

“They asked for me,” said Robin. “They obviously suspect I’m still here.”

“And what did you say?”

“I pretended to be somebody else.”

“Quick thinking. Who?”

“I said my name was Annabel.”

“When asked to come up with a fake name on the spot, people usually choose one beginning with ‘A,’ did you know that?”

“But what if they send somebody to check?”

“Well?”

“It’s you they’ll try and get money from, not me! They’ll try and make you pay a recruitment fee!”

He smiled at her genuine anxiety that he would have to pay money he could not afford. He had been intending to ask her to telephone the office of Freddie Bestigui again, and to begin a search through online telephone directories for Rochelle Onifade’s Kilburn-based aunt. Instead he said:

“OK, we’ll vacate the premises. I was going to check out a place called Vashti this morning, before I meet Bristow. Maybe it’d look more natural if we both went.”

“Vashti? The boutique?” said Robin, at once.

“Yeah. You know it, do you?”

It was Robin’s turn to smile. She had read about it in magazines: it epitomized London glamour to her; a place where fashion editors found items of fabulous clothing to show their readers, pieces that would have cost Robin six months’ salary.

“I know of it,” she said.

He took down her trench coat and handed it to her.

“We’ll pretend you’re my sister, Annabel. You can be helping me pick out a present for my wife.”

“What’s the death-threat man’s problem?” asked Robin, as they sat side by side on the Tube. “Who is he?”

She had suppressed her curiosity about Jonny Rokeby, and about the dark beauty who had fled Strike’s building on her first day at work, and the camp bed they never mentioned; but she was surely entitled to ask questions about the death threats. It was she, after all, who had so far slit open three pink envelopes, and read the unpleasant and violent outpourings scrawled between gamboling kittens. Strike never even looked at them.

“He’s called Brian Mathers,” said Strike. “He came to see me last June because he thought his wife was sleeping around. He wanted her followed, so I put her under surveillance for a month. Very ordinary woman: plain, frumpy, bad perm; worked in the accounts department of a big carpet warehouse. Spent her weekdays in a poky little office with three female colleagues, went to bingo every Thursday, did the weekly shop on Fridays at Tesco, and on Saturdays went to the local Rotary Club with her husband.”

“When did he think she was sleeping around?” asked Robin.

Their pale reflections were swaying in the opaque black window; drained of color in the harsh overhead light, Robin looked older, yet ethereal, and Strike craggier, uglier.

“Thursday nights.”

“And was she?”

“No, she really was going to bingo with her friend Maggie, but all four Thursdays that I watched her, she made herself deliberately late home. She drove around a little bit after she’d left Maggie. One night she went into a pub and had a tomato juice on her own, sitting in a corner looking timid. Another night she waited in her car at the end of their street for forty-five minutes before driving around the corner.”

“Why?” asked Robin, as the train rattled loudly through a lengthy tunnel.

“Well that’s the question, isn’t it? Proving something? Trying to get him worked up? Taunting him? Punishing him? Trying to inject a bit of excitement into their dull marriage? Every Thursday, just a bit of unexplained time.

“He’s a twitchy bugger, and he’d swallowed the bait all right. It was driving him mad. He was sure she was meeting a lover once a week, that her friend Maggie was covering for her. He’d tried following her himself, but he was convinced that she went to bingo on those occasions because she knew he was watching.”

“So you told him the truth?”

“Yeah, I did. He didn’t believe me. He got very worked up and started shouting and screaming about everyone being in a conspiracy against him. Refused to pay my bill.