The Cuckoo's Calling

  5

  “I’M SO SORRY HE HASN’T got back to you,” Robin told the caller, seven miles away in the office. “Mr. Strike’s incredibly busy at the moment. Let me take your name and number, and I’ll make sure he phones you this afternoon.”

  “Oh, there’s no need for that,” said the woman. She had a pleasant, cultivated voice with a faint suspicion of hoarseness, as though her laugh would be sexy and bold. “I don’t really need to speak to him. Could you just give him a message for me? I wanted to warn him, that’s all. God, this is…it’s a bit embarrassing; it isn’t the way I’d have chosen…Well, anyway. Could you please just tell him that Charlotte Campbell called, and that I’m engaged to Jago Ross? I didn’t want him to hear about it from anyone else, or read about it. Jago’s parents have gone and put it in the bloody Times. Mortifying.”

  “Oh. All right,” said Robin, her mind suddenly paralyzed like her pen.

  “Thanks very much—Robin, did you say? Thanks. ’Bye.”

  Charlotte rang off first. Robin replaced the receiver in slow motion, feeling acutely anxious. She did not want to deliver this news. She might be only the messenger, but she would feel as though she were delivering an assault on Strike’s determination to keep his private life under wraps, on his firm avoidance of the subject of the boxes of possessions, the camp bed, the detritus of his evening meals in the bins every morning.

  Robin pondered her options. She could forget to relay the message, and simply tell him to call Charlotte and get her to do her own dirty work (as Robin put it to herself). What, though, if Strike refused to call, and somebody else told him about the engagement? Robin had no means of knowing whether Strike and his ex (girlfriend? fiancée? wife?) had legions of mutual friends. If she and Matthew ever split up, if he became engaged to another woman (it gave her a twisting feeling in her chest to even think of it), all her closest friends and family would feel involved, and would undoubtedly stampede to tell her; she would, she supposed, prefer to be forewarned in as low-key and private a way as possible.

  When she heard Strike ascending the stair nearly an hour later, apparently talking on his mobile and in good spirits, Robin experienced a sharp stab of panic to the stomach as though she were about to sit an exam. When he pushed open the glass door, and she saw that he was not holding a mobile at all, but rapping under his breath, she felt even worse.

  “Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari,” muttered Strike, who was holding a boxed electric fan in his arms. “Afternoon.”

  “Hello.”

  “Thought we could use this. It’s stuffy in here.”

  “Yes, that would be good.”

  “Just heard Deeby Macc playing in the shop,” Strike informed her, setting down the fan in a corner and peeling off his jacket. ‘Something something and Ferrari, Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari.’ Wonder who Johari was. Some rapper he was having a feud with, d’you think?”

  “No,” said Robin, wishing that he was not so cheerful. “It’s a psychological term. The Johari window. It’s all to do with how well we know ourselves, and how well other people know us.”

  Strike paused in the act of hanging up his jacket and stared at her.

  “You didn’t get that out of Heat magazine.”

  “No. I was doing psychology at university. I dropped out.”

  She felt, obscurely, that it might somehow even the playing field to tell him about one of her own personal failures, before delivering the bad news.

  “You dropped out of university?” He seemed uncharacteristically interested. “That’s a coincidence. I did, too. So why ‘fuck Johari’?”

  “Deeby Macc had therapy in prison. He became interested and did a lot of reading on psychology. I got that bit out of the papers,” she added.

  “You’re a mine of useful information.”

  She experienced another elevator-drop in the pit of her stomach.

  “There was a call, when you were out. From a Charlotte Campbell.”

  He looked up quickly, frowning.

  “She asked me to give you a message, which was,” Robin’s gaze slid sideways, to hover momentarily on Strike’s ear, “that she’s engaged to Jago Ross.”

  Her eyes were drawn, irresistibly, back to his face, and she felt a horrible chill.

  One of the earliest and most vivid memories of Robin’s childhood was of the day that the family dog had been put down. She herself had been too young to understand what her father was saying; she took the continuing existence of Bruno, her oldest brother’s beloved Labrador, for granted. Confused by her parents’ solemnity, she had turned to Stephen for a clue as to how to react, and all security had crumbled, for she had seen, for the first time in her short life, happiness and comfort drain out of his small and merry face, and his lips whiten as his mouth fell open. She had heard oblivion howling in the silence that preceded his awful scream of anguish, and then she had cried, inconsolably, not for Bruno, but for the terrifying grief of her brother.

  Strike did not speak immediately. Then he said, with palpable difficulty:

  “Right. Thanks.”

  He walked into the inner office, and closed the door.

  Robin sat back down at her desk, feeling like an executioner. She could not settle to anything. She considered knocking on the door again, and offering a cup of tea, but decided against. For five minutes she restlessly reorganized the items on her desk, glancing regularly at the closed inner door, until it opened again, and she jumped, and pretended to be busy at the keyboard.

  “Robin, I’m just going to nip out,” he said.

  “OK.”

  “If I’m not back at five, you can lock up.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  He took down his jacket, and left with a purposeful tread that did not deceive her.

  The roadworks were spreading like a lesion; every day there was an extension of the mayhem, and of the temporary structures to protect pedestrians and enable them to pick their way through the devastation. Strike noticed none of it. He walked automatically over trembling wooden boards to the Tottenham, the place he associated with escape and refuge.

  Like the Ordnance Arms, it was empty but for one other drinker; an old man just inside the door. Strike bought a pint of Doom Bar and sat down on one of the low red leather seats against the wall, almost beneath the sentimental Victorian maid who scattered rosebuds, sweet and silly and simple. He drank as though his beer was medicine, without pleasure, intent on the result.

  Jago Ross. She must have been in touch with him, seeing him, while they were still living together. Even Charlotte, with all her mesmeric power over men, her astonishing sure-handed skill, could not have moved from reacquaintance to engagement in three weeks. She had been meeting Ross on the sly, while swearing undying love to Strike.

  This put a very different light on the bombshell she had dropped on him a month before the end, and the refusal to show him proof, and the shifting dates, and the sudden conclusion of it all.

  Jago Ross had been married once already. He had kids; Charlotte had heard on the grapevine that he was drinking hard. She had laughed with Strike about her lucky escape of so many years before; she had expressed pity for his wife.

  Strike bought a second pint, and then a third. He wanted to drown the impulses, crackling like electrical charges, to go and find her, to bellow, to rampage, to break Jago Ross’s jaw.

  He had not eaten at the Ordnance Arms, nor since, and it had been a long time since he had consumed so much alcohol in one sitting. It took him barely an hour of steady, solitary, determined beer consumption to become properly drunk.

  Initially, when the slim, pale figure appeared at his table, he told it thickly that it had the wrong man and the wrong table.

  “No I haven’t,” said Robin firmly. “I’m just going to get myself a drink too, all right?”

  She left him staring hazily at her handbag, which she had placed on the stool. It was comfortingly familiar, brown, a little sh
abby. She usually hung it up on a coat peg in the office. He gave it a friendly smile, and drank to it.

  Up at the bar, the barman, who was young and timid-looking, said to Robin: “I think he’s had enough.”

  “That’s hardly my fault,” she retorted.

  She had looked for Strike in the Intrepid Fox, which was nearest to the office, in Molly Moggs, the Spice of Life and the Cambridge. The Tottenham had been the last pub she was planning to try.

  “Whassamatter?” Strike asked her, when she sat down.

  “Nothing’s the matter,” said Robin, sipping her half-lager. “I just wanted to make sure you’re OK.”

  “Yez’m fine,” said Strike, and then, with an effort at clarity, “I yam fine.”

  “Good.”

  “Jus’ celebratin’ my fiancée zengagement,” he said, raising his eleventh pint in an unsteady toast. “She shou’ never’ve left’m. Never,” he said, loudly and clearly, “have. Left. The Hon’ble. Jago Ross. Who is’n outstanding cunt.”

  He virtually shouted the last word. There were more people in the pub than when Strike had arrived, and most of them seemed to have heard him. They had been casting him wary looks even before he shouted. The scale of him, with his drooping eyelids and his bellicose expression, had ensured a small no-go zone around him; people skirted his table on the way to the bathrooms as though it was three times the size.

  “Shall we take a walk?” Robin suggested. “Get something to eat?”

  “D’you know what?” he said, leaning forwards with his elbows on the table, almost knocking over his pint. “D’you know what, Robin?”

  “What?” she said, holding his beer steady. She was suddenly possessed of a strong desire to giggle. Many of their fellow drinkers were watching them.

  “Y’re a very nice girl,” said Strike. “Y’are. Y’re a very nice p’son. I’ve noticed,” he said, nodding solemnly. “Yes. ’Ve noticed that.”

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling, trying not to laugh.

  He sat back in his seat, closed his eyes and said:

  “Sorry. ’M’pissed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’ do it much these days.”

  “No.”

  “Haven’ eat’n anything.”

  “Shall we go and get something to eat, then?”

  “Yeah, we c’do,” he said, with his eyes still shut. “She tol’ me she was pregnant.”

  “Oh,” said Robin, sadly.

  “Yeah. Tol’ me. An’ then sh’said it was gone. Can’t’ve been mine. Nev’ added up.”

  Robin said nothing. She did not want him to remember that she had heard this. He opened his eyes.

  “She left ’im for me, an’ now she’s left ’im…no, she’s lef’ me fr’im…”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “…lef’ me fr’im. Don’t be sorry. Y’re a nice person.”

  He pulled cigarettes out of his pocket, and inserted one between his lips.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” she reminded him gently, but the barman, who seemed to have been waiting for a cue, came hurrying over towards them now, looking tense.

  “You need to go outside to do that,” he told Strike loudly.

  Strike peered up at the boy, bleary-eyed, surprised.

  “It’s all right,” Robin told the barman, gathering up her handbag. “Come on, Cormoran.”

  He stood, massive, ungainly, swaying, unfolding himself out of the cramped space behind the table and glaring at the barman, whom Robin could not blame for taking a step backwards.

  “There’z no need,” Strike told him, “t’shout. No need. Fuckin’ rude.”

  “OK, Cormoran, let’s go,” said Robin, standing back to give him space to pass.

  “Juz a moment, Robin,” said Strike, one large hand held aloft. “Juz a moment.”

  “Oh God,” said Robin quietly.

  “ ’V’ you ever done any boxing?” Strike asked the barman, who looked terrified.

  “Cormoran, let’s go.”

  “I wuzza boxer. ’Narmy, mate.”

  Over at the bar, some wisecracker murmured, “I could’ve been a contender.”

  “Let’s go, Cormoran,” said Robin. She took his arm, and to her great relief and surprise he came along meekly. It reminded her of leading the enormous Clydesdale her uncle had kept on his farm.

  Out in the fresh air Strike leaned back against one of the Tottenham’s windows and tried, fruitlessly, to light his cigarette; Robin had to work the lighter for him in the end.

  “What you need is food,” she told him, as he smoked with his eyes closed, listing slightly so that she was afraid he would fall over. “Sober you up.”

  “I don’ wanna sober up,” Strike muttered. He overbalanced and only saved himself from falling with several rapid sidesteps.

  “Come on,” she said, and she guided him across the wooden bridge spanning the gulf in the road, where the clattering machines and builders had at last fallen silent and departed for the night.

  “Robin, didjer know I wuzza boxer?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” she said.

  She had meant to take him back to the office and give him food there, but he came to a halt at the kebab shop at the end of Denmark Street and had lurched through the door before she could stop him. Sitting outside on the pavement at the only table, they ate kebabs, and he told her about his boxing career in the army, digressing occasionally to remind her what a nice person she was. She managed to persuade him to keep his voice down. The full effect of all the alcohol he had consumed was still making itself felt, and food seemed to be doing little to help. When he went off to the bathroom, he took such a long time that she began to worry that he had passed out.

  Checking her watch, she saw that it was now ten past seven. She called Matthew, and told him she was dealing with an urgent situation at the office. He did not sound pleased.

  Strike wound his way back on to the street, bouncing off the door frame as he emerged. He planted himself firmly against the window and tried to light another cigarette.

  “R’bin,” he said, giving up and gazing down at her. “R’bin, d’you know wadda kairos mo…” He hiccoughed. “Mo…moment is?”

  “A kairos moment?” she repeated, hoping against hope it was not something sexual, something that she would not be able to forget afterwards, especially as the kebab shop owner was listening in and smirking behind them. “No, I don’t. Shall we go back to the office?”

  “You don’t know whadditis?” he asked, peering at her.

  “No.”

  “ ’SGreek,” he told her. “Kairos. Kairos moment. An’ it means,” and from somewhere in his soused brain he dredged up words of surprising clarity, “the telling moment. The special moment. The supreme moment.”

  Oh please, thought Robin, please don’t tell me we’re having one.

  “An’ d’you know what ours was, R’bin, mine an’ Charlotte’s?” he said, staring into the middle distance, his unlit cigarette hanging from his hand. “It was when she walk’d into the ward—I was in hosp’tal f’long time an’ I hadn’ seen her f’two years—no warning—an’ I saw her in the door an’ ev’ryone turned an’ saw her too, an’ she walked down the ward an’ she never said a word an,” he paused to draw breath, and hiccoughed again, “an’ she kissed me aft’ two years, an’ we were back together. Nobody talkin’. Fuckin’ beautiful. Mos’ beaut’ful woman I’ve ’ver seen. Bes’ moment of the whole fuckin’—’fmy whole fuckin’ life, prob’bly. I’m sorry, R’bin,” he added, “f’r sayin’ ‘fuckin’.’ Sorry ’bout that.”

  Robin felt equally inclined to laughter and tears, though she did not know why she should feel so sad.

  “Shall I light that cigarette for you?”

  “Y’re a great person, Robin, y’know that?”

  Near the turning into Denmark Street he stopped dead, still swaying like a tree in the wind, and told her loudly that Charlotte did not love Jago Ross; it was all a game, a game to hurt him, Str
ike, as badly as she could.

  Outside the black door to the office he halted again, holding up both hands to stop her following him upstairs.

  “Y’ gotta go home now, R’bin.”

  “Let me just make sure you get upstairs OK.”

  “No. No. ’M fine now. An’ I might chunder. ’M legless. An’,” said Strike, “you don’ get that fuckin’ tired old fuckin’ joke. Or do you? Know most of it now. Did I tell you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Ne’r mind, R’bin. You go home now. I gotta be sick.”

  “Are you sure…?”

  “ ’M sorry I kep’ sayin’ fuck—swearin’. Y’re a nice pers’n, R’bin. G’bye now.”

  She looked back at him when she reached Charing Cross Road. He was walking with the awful, clumsy deliberation of the very drunk towards the dingy entrance to Denmark Place, there, no doubt, to vomit in the dark alleyway, before staggering upstairs to his camp bed and kettle.

  6

  THERE WAS NO CLEAR MOMENT of moving from sleep to consciousness. At first he was lying facedown in a dreamscape of broken metal, rubble and screams, bloodied and unable to speak; then he was lying on his stomach, doused in sweat, his face pressed into the camp bed, his head a throbbing ball of pain and his open mouth dry and rank. The sun pouring in at the unblinded windows scoured his retinas even with his eyelids closed: raw red, with capillaries spread like fine black nets over tiny, taunting, popping lights.

  He was fully clothed, his prosthesis still attached, lying on top of his sleeping bag as though he had fallen there. Stabbing memories, like glass shards through his temple: persuading the barman that another pint was a good idea. Robin, across the table, smiling at him. Could he really have eaten a kebab in the state he was in? At some point he remembered wrestling his fly, desperate to piss but unable to extract the end of shirt caught in his zip. He slid a hand underneath himself—even this slight movement made him want to groan or vomit—and found, to his vague relief, that the zip was closed.

  Slowly, like a man balancing some fragile package on his shoulders, Strike moved himself into a sitting position and squinted around the brightly lit room with no idea what time it could be, or indeed what day it was.