The Cuckoo's Calling: List 3

The knowledge that he would be sharing his office again on Monday added piquancy to Strike’s weekend solitude, rendering it less irksome, more valuable.

Sick of the smell of artificial limes, he managed to force open the painted-shut window behind his desk, which allowed a cold, clean breeze to wipe the fusty corners of the two small rooms.

Thirty-five, it whispered, and nothing to show for all your years of graft except a few cardboard boxes and a massive debt.

At liberty, now, to collect and collate evidence in whatever way he chose, Strike continued to conform to the protocols of the Criminal Procedure and Investigation Act.

She gave him a brief precis of her husband’s workload, then returned to the attack.

“Because you know what, Stick”—the childhood nickname boded ill: she was trying to soften him up—“I’ve been looking into this, and you could apply to the British Legion for—”

She always seemed to think that she made a good job of dissimulating her deep dislike of Charlotte.

Landry’s early photographs showed a sixteen-year-old with the face of Nefertiti, who managed to project to the lens an extraordinary combination of worldliness and vulnerability, with long thin legs like a giraffe’s and a jagged scar running down the inside of her left arm that fashion editors seemed to have found an interesting adjunct to her spectacular face, for it was sometimes given prominence in photographs.

Duffield’s band had released a well-reviewed album on the back of their lead singer’s newfound fame, and split up in considerable acrimony around the time that he had met Lula.

The death of his girlfriend had fixed Duffield more securely than ever in that firmament of the idolized, the vilified, the deified.

The death of his girlfriend had fixed Duffield more securely than ever in that firmament of the idolized, the vilified, the deified.

The death of his girlfriend had fixed Duffield more securely than ever in that firmament of the idolized, the vilified, the deified.

A certain darkness, a fatalism, hung around him; both his most fervent admirers and his detractors seemed to take pleasure in the idea that he had one booted foot in the afterworld already; that there was an inevitability about his descent into despair and oblivion.

He seemed to make a veritable parade of his frailties, and Strike fingered for some minutes over another of those tiny, jerky YouTube videos...

Somehow she made the incongruity, the staginess of it, believable; she really did look as though she had been slung from heaven because she was too venal, because she so coveted the accessories she was clutching to herself.

Somehow she made the incongruity, the staginess of it, believable; she really did look as though she had been slung from heaven because she was too venal, because she so coveted the accessories she was clutching to herself.

Sunday had had a particular flavor in those days; an echoing, whispering quiet, the gentle chink of china and the smell of gravy, the TV as dull as the empty high street, and the relentless rush of the waves on the beach when he and Lucy had run down on to the shingle, forced back on to primitive resources.

An unmistakably institutional flavor was given by the large silver buzzer and speaker beside the door, and the unapologetically ugly black camera, with its dangling wires, that hung from the lintel in a wire cage.

An emaciated young girl with a sore at the corner of her mouth stood smoking outside the front door, wearing a dirty man’s jumper that swamped her.

His colleague, evincing some irritation at his willingness to talk to Strike, ceded her place at the counter and vanished from sight.

She did not force the phone back into her pocket, but continued to clutch it as the train rattled on through dark tunnels, and she tried not to breathe in the flabby man’s halitosis.

These non-stories had all been peppered with undoubtedly spurious comments from friends of both—“He’s already called her and asked her to dinner,” “She’s pre­paring a small party for him in her flat when he hits London.”

Such speculation had almost eclipsed the flurry of outraged comment from sundry columnists that the twice-convicted Macc, whose music (they said) glorified his criminal past, was entering the country at all.

His mobile rang as he was starting his second cup of tea, halfway through a gleeful account of the Prime Minister’s gaffe in calling an elderly female voter “bigoted” without realizing that his microphone was still turned on.

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

Strike ignored the insinuation.

He’s used to the press tiptoeing around him, because he’s such a litigious bastard; he can’t have enjoyed all the attention he got after Tansy shot her mouth off.

Strike took the hit without demur.

“He got to Porter’s around half four. She let him sleep on the sofa, and about an hour later she got the news about Landry being dead, and woke him up to tell him. Cue histrionics and rehab.”

“I kept it for you,” she said diffidently.

Military police did not tally with Matthew’s impression of a charlatan, or a waster.

It was only as he walked up Davies Street, the sun warm on his back and imparting a ruddy glow to the red-brick building ahead, that he thought how odd it would be, yet not unlikely, if he ran into one of his half-siblings there.

While the preliminaries of ordering drinks and handing around menus were navigated, Bristow nervous and over-talkative throughout, the sisters subjected Strike to the kind of brazenly critical stares that only people of a certain class feel entitled to give.

Her dark eyes were fractionally too close together, and the Botox and fillers could not smooth away the petulance in her expression.

Charlotte had had friends like this; sleek-haired, expensively educated and clothed, all of them appalled by her strange yen for the enormous, battered-looking Strike.

A subsection of humanity would become loquacious only on one favorite subject: it might be their own innocence, or somebody else’s guilt; it might be their collection of pre-war biscuit tins; or it might, as in the case of Ursula May, be the hopeless passion of a plain secretary.

“Who’s Bryony?” asked Strike disingenuously, for he remembered who she was.

With a cursory farewell to Bristow, and no word whatsoever for Strike, the two sisters permitted themselves to be shepherded out of the restaurant by Ursula’s husband.

Strike headed away from Cipriani on foot, loosening his tie as he walked, and lost so deeply in thought that he was only jerked out of his reverie by a loud horn blast from a car he had not seen speeding towards him as he crossed Grosvenor Street.

With this salutary reminder that his safety would otherwise be in jeopardy, Strike headed for a patch of pale wall belonging to the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa, leaned up against it out of the pedestrian flow, lit up and pulled out his mobile phone.