The Cuckoo's Calling

  The door between inner and outer offices was closed, and he could not hear any movement on the other side. Perhaps his temp had left for good. Then he saw a white oblong lying on the floor, just inside the door, pushed under the gap at the bottom. Strike moved gingerly on to his hands and knees, and retrieved what he soon saw was a note from Robin.

  Dear Cormoran (he supposed there was no going back to “Mr. Strike” now),

  I read your list of points to investigate further at the front of the file. I thought I might be able to follow up the first two (Agyeman and the Malmaison Hotel). I will be on my mobile if you would rather I came back to the office.

  I have set an alarm just outside your door for 2 p.m., so that you have enough time to get ready for your 5 p.m. appointment at I Arlington Place, to interview Ciara Porter and Bryony Radford.

  There is water, paracetamol and Alka-Seltzer on the desk outside.

  Robin

  PS Please don’t be embarrassed about last night. You didn’t say or do anything you should regret.

  He sat quite still on his camp bed for five minutes, holding the note, wondering whether he was about to throw up, but enjoying the warm sunshine on his back.

  Four paracetamol and a glass of Alka-Seltzer, which almost decided the vomiting question for him, were followed by fifteen minutes in the dingy toilet, with results offensive to both nose and ear; but he was sustained throughout by a feeling of profound gratitude for Robin’s absence. Back in the outer office, he drank two more bottles of water and turned off the alarm, which had set his throbbing brains rattling in his skull. After some deliberation, he chose a set of clean clothes, took shower gel, deodorant, razor, shaving cream and towel out of the kitbag, pulled a pair of swimming trunks out of the bottom of one of the cardboard boxes on the landing, extracted the pair of gray metal crutches from another, then limped down the metal stair with a sports bag over his shoulder and the crutches in his other hand.

  He bought himself a family-sized bar of Dairy Milk on the way to Malet Street. Bernie Coleman, an acquaintance in the Army Medical Corps, had once explained to Strike how the majority of the symptoms associated with a crashing hangover were due to dehydration and hypoglycemia, which were the inevitable results of prolonged vomiting. Strike munched his way through the chocolate, crutches jammed under his arm and every step jarring his head, which still felt as though it was being compressed by tight wires.

  But the laughing god of drunkenness had not yet forsaken him. Agreeably detached from reality and from his fellow human beings, he walked down the steps to the ULU pool with an unfeigned sense of entitlement, and as usual nobody challenged him, not even the only other occupant of the changing room, who, after one glance of arrested interest at the prosthesis Strike was unstrapping, kept his eyes politely averted. His false leg stuffed into a locker along with yesterday’s clothes, and leaving the door open due to lack of change, Strike moved towards the shower on crutches, his belly spilling over the top of his trunks.

  He noted, as he soaped himself, that the chocolate and paracetamol were beginning to take the edge off his nausea and pain. Now, for the first time, he walked out to the large pool. There were only two students in here, both in the fast lane and wearing goggles, oblivious to everything but their own prowess. Strike proceeded to the far side, set the crutches down carefully beside the steps and slid into the slow lane.

  He was more unfit than he had ever been in his life. Ungainly and lopsided, he kept swimming into the side of the pool, but the cool, clean water was soothing to body and spirit. Panting, he completed a single length and rested there, his thick arms spread along the side of the pool, sharing the responsibility for his heavy body with the caressing water and gazing up at the high white ceiling.

  Little waves, outrunners sent by the young athletes on the other side of the pool, tickled his chest. The terrible pain in his head was receding into the distance; a fiery red light viewed through mist. The chlorine was sharp and clinical in his nostrils, but it no longer made him want to be sick. Deliberately, like a man ripping off a bandage on a congealing wound. Strike turned his attention to the thing he had attempted to drown in alcohol.

  Jago Ross; in every respect the antithesis of Strike: handsome in the manner of an Aryan prince, possessor of a trust fund, born to fulfill a preordained place in his family and the world; a man with all the confidence twelve generations of well-documented lineage can give. He had quit a succession of high-flying jobs, developed a persistent drinking problem, and was vicious in the manner of an overbred, badly disciplined animal.

  Charlotte and Ross belonged to that tight, interconnected network of public-schooled blue bloods who all knew each other’s families, connected through generations of interbreeding and old-school ties. While the water lapped his thickly hairy chest, Strike seemed to see himself, Charlotte and Ross at a great distance, from the wrong end of a telescope, so that the arc of their story became clear: it mirrored Charlotte’s restless day-to-day behavior, that craving for heightened emotion that expressed itself most typically in destructiveness. She had secured Jago Ross as a prize when eighteen, the most extreme example she could find of his type and the very epitome of eligibility, as her parents had seen it. Perhaps that had been too easy, and certainly too expected, because she had then dumped him for Strike, who, for all his brains, was anathema to Charlotte’s family; an uncategorizable mongrel. What was left, after all these years, to a woman who craved emotional storms, but to leave Strike again and again, until at last the only way to leave with real éclat was to move full circle, back to the place where he had found her?

  Strike allowed his aching body to float in the water. The racing students were still thrashing their way up and down the fast lane.

  Strike knew Charlotte. She was waiting for him to rescue her. It was the final, cruelest test.

  He did not swim back down the pool, but hopped sideways through the water, using his arms to grip the long side of the pool as he had done during physiotherapy in the hospital.

  The second shower was more pleasurable than the first; he made the water as hot as he could stand, lathered himself all over, then turned the dial to cold to rinse himself.

  The prosthesis reattached, he shaved over a sink with a towel tied around his waist, then dressed with unusual care. He had never worn the most expensive suit and shirt that he owned. They had been gifts from Charlotte on his last birthday: raiment suitable for her fiancé; he remembered her beaming at him as he stared at his unfamiliarly well-styled self in a full-length mirror. The suit and shirt had hung in their carry case ever since, because he and Charlotte had not gone out much after last November; because his birthday had been the last truly happy day they had spent together. Soon afterwards, the relationship had begun to stagger back into the old familiar grievances, into the same mire in which it had foundered before, but which, this time, they had sworn to avoid.

  He might have incinerated the suit. Instead, in a spirit of defiance, he chose to wear it, to strip it of its associations and render it mere pieces of cloth. The tailoring of the jacket made him look slimmer and fitter. He left the white shirt open at the throat.

  Strike had had a reputation, in the army, for being able to bounce back from excessive alcohol consumption with unusual speed. The man staring at him out of the small mirror was pale, with purple shadows under his eyes, yet in the sharp Italian suit he looked better than he had done in weeks. His black eye had vanished at last, and his scratches had healed.

  A cautiously light meal, copious amounts of water, another evacuatory trip to the restaurant bathroom, more painkillers; then, at five o’clock, a prompt arrival at number 1, Arlington Place.

  The door was answered, after his second knock, by a cross-looking woman in black-framed glasses and a short gray bob. She let him in with an appearance of reluctance, then walked briskly away across a stone-floored hall which incorporated a magnificent staircase with a wrought-iron banister, calling “Guy! Somebody Strike?”


  There were rooms on both sides of the hall. To the left, a small knot of people, all of whom seemed to be dressed in black, were staring in the direction of some powerful light source that Strike could not see, but which illuminated their rapt faces.

  Somé appeared, striding through this door into the hall. He too was wearing glasses, which made him look older; his jeans were baggy and ripped and his white T-shirt was emblazoned with an eye that appeared to be weeping glittering blood, which on closer examination proved to be red sequins.

  “You’ll have to wait,” he said curtly. “Bryony’s busy and Ciara’s going to be hours. You can park yourself in there if you want,” he pointed towards the right-hand room, where the edge of a tray-laden table was visible, “or you can stand around and watch like these useless fuckers,” he went on, suddenly raising his voice and glaring at the huddle of elegant young men and women who were staring towards the light source. They dispersed at once, without protest, some of them crossing the hall into the room opposite.

  “Better suit, by the way,” Somé added, with a flash of his old archness. He marched back into the room from which he had come.

  Strike followed the designer, and took up the space vacated by the roughly dispatched onlookers. The room was long and almost bare, but its ornate cornices, pale blank walls and curtainless windows gave it an atmosphere of mournful grandeur. A further group of people, including a long-haired male photographer bent over his camera, stood between Strike and the scene at the far end of the room, which was dazzlingly illuminated by a series of arc lights and light screens. Here was an artful arrangement of tattered old chairs, one on its side, and three models. They were a breed apart, with faces and bodies in rare proportions that fell precisely between the categories of strange and impressive. Fine-boned and recklessly slim, they had been chosen, Strike assumed, for the dramatic contrast in their coloring and features. Sitting like Christine Keeler on a back-to-front chair, long legs splayed in spray-on white leggings, but apparently naked from the waist up, was a black girl as dark-skinned as Somé himself, with an Afro and slanting, seductive eyes. Standing over her in a white vest decorated in chains, which just covered her pubis, was a Eurasian beauty with flat black hair cut into an asymmetric fringe. To one side, leaning alone and sideways on the back of another chair, was Ciara Porter; alabaster fair, with long baby-blonde hair, wearing a white semitransparent jumpsuit through which her pale, pointed nipples were clearly visible.

  The makeup artist, almost as tall and thin as the models, was bending over the black girl, pressing a pad into the sides of her nose. The three models waited silently in position, still as portraits, all three faces blank and empty, waiting to be called to attention. The other people in the room (the photographer appeared to have two assistants; Somé, now biting his fingernails on the sidelines, was accompanied by the cross-looking woman in glasses) all spoke in low mutters, as though frightened of disturbing some delicate equilibrium.

  At last the makeup artist joined Somé, who talked inaudibly and rapidly to her, gesticulating; she stepped back into the bright light and, without speaking to the model, ruffled and rearranged Ciara Porter’s long mane of hair; Ciara showed no sign that she knew she was being touched, but waited in patient silence. Bryony retreated into the shadows once more, and asked Somé something; he responded with a shrug and gave her some inaudible instruction that had her look around until her eyes rested on Strike.

  They met at the foot of the magnificent staircase.

  “Hi,” she whispered. “Let’s go through here.”

  She led him across the hall into the opposite room, which was slightly smaller than the first, and dominated by the large table covered with buffet-style food. Several long, wheeled clothing racks, jammed with sequined, ruffled and feathered creations arranged according to color, stood in front of a marble fireplace. The displaced onlookers, all of them in their twenties, were gathered in here; talking quietly, picking in desultory fashion at the half-empty platters of mozzarella and Parma ham and talking into, or playing with, their phones. Several of them subjected Strike to appraising looks as he followed Bryony into a small back room which had been turned into a makeshift makeup station.

  Two tables with big portable mirrors stood in front of the large single window, which looked out on to a spruce garden. The black plastic boxes standing around reminded Strike of those his Uncle Ted had taken fly-fishing, except that Bryony’s drawers were crammed with colored powders and paints; tubes and brushes lay lined up on towels spread across the table tops.

  “Hi,” she said, in a normal voice. “God. Talk about cutting the tension with a knife, eh? Guy’s always a perfectionist, but this is his first proper shoot since Lula died, so he’s, you know, seriously uptight.”

  She had dark, choppy hair; her skin was sallow, her features, though large, were attractive. She was wearing tight jeans on long, slightly bandy legs, a black vest, several fine gold chains around her neck, rings on her fingers and thumbs, and also what looked like black leather ballet shoes. This kind of footwear always had a slightly anaphrodisiac effect on Strike, because it reminded him of the fold-up slippers his Aunt Joan used to carry in her handbag, and therefore of bunions and corns.

  Strike began to explain what he wanted from her, but she cut him off.

  “Guy’s told me everything. Want a ciggie? We can smoke in here if we open this.”

  So saying, she wrenched open the door that led directly on to a paved area of the garden.

  She made a small space on one of the cluttered makeup tables and perched herself on it; Strike took one of the vacated chairs and drew out his notebook.

  “OK, fire away,” she said, and then, without giving him time to speak, “I’ve been thinking about that afternoon nonstop ever since, actually. So, so sad.”

  “Did you know Lula well?” asked Strike.

  “Yeah, pretty well. I’d done her makeup for a couple of shoots, made her up for the Rainforest Benefit. When I told her I can thread eyebrows…”

  “You can what?”

  “Thread eyebrows. It’s like plucking, but with threads?”

  Strike could not imagine how this worked.

  “Right…”

  “…she asked me to do them for her at home. The paps were all over her, all the time, even if she was going to the salon. It was insane. So I helped her out.”

  She had a habit of tossing back her head to flick her overlong fringe out of her eyes, and a slightly breathy manner. Now she threw her hair over to one side, raked it with her fingers and peered at him through her fringe.

  “I got there about three. She and Ciara were all excited about Deeby Macc arriving. Girlie gossip, you know. I’d never have guessed what was coming. Never.”

  “Lula was excited, was she?”

  “Oh God, yeah, what d’you think? How would you feel if someone had written songs about…Well,” she said, with a breathy little laugh, “maybe it’s a girl thing. He’s so charismatic. Ciara and I were having a laugh about it while I did Lula’s eyebrows. Then Ciara asked me to do her nails. I ended up making them both up, as well, so I was there for, must’ve been three hours. Yeah, I left about six.”

  “So you’d describe Lula’s mood as excited, would you?”

  “Yeah. Well, you know, she was a bit distracted; she kept checking her phone; it was lying in her lap while I was doing her eyebrows. I knew what that meant: Evan was messing her around again.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “No, but I knew she was really pissed off at him. Why do you think she said that to Ciara about her brother? About leaving him everything?”

  This seemed a stretch to Strike.

  “Did you hear her say that too?”

  “What? No, but I heard about it. I mean, afterwards. Ciara told us all. I think I was in the loo when she actually said it. Anyway, I totally believe it. Totally.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She looked confused.

  “Well—she really loved her
brother, didn’t she? God, that was always obvious. He was probably the only person she could really rely on. Months before, around the time she and Evan split up the first time, I was making her up for the Stella show, and she was telling everyone her brother was really pissing her off, going on and on about what a freeloader Evan was. And you know, Evan was jacking her around again, that last afternoon, so she was thinking that James—is it James?—had had him right all along. She always knew he had her interests at heart, even if he was a bit bossy sometimes. This is a really, really exploitative business, you know. Everyone’s got an agenda.”

  “Who do you think had an agenda for Lula?”

  “Oh my God, everyone,” said Bryony, making a wide sweeping gesture with her cigarette-holding hand, which encompassed all of the inhabited rooms outside. “She was the hottest model out there, everyone wanted a piece of her. I mean, Guy—” But Bryony broke off. “Well, Guy’s a businessman, but he did adore her; he wanted her to go and live with him after that stalker business. He’s still not right about her dying. I heard he tried to contact her through some spiritualist. Margo Leiter told me. He’s still devastated, he can barely hear her name without crying. Anyway,” said Bryony, “that’s all I know. I never dreamed that afternoon would be the last time I saw her. I mean, my God.”

  “Did she talk about Duffield at all, while you were—er—threading her eyebrows?”

  “No,” said Bryony, “but she wouldn’t, would she, if he was really hacking her off?”

  “So as far as you can remember, she mainly spoke about Deeby Macc?”

  “Well…it was more Ciara and me talking about him.”

  “But you think she was excited to meet him?”

  “God, yeah, of course.”

  “Tell me, did you see a blue piece of paper with Lula’s handwriting on it when you were in the flat?”

  Bryony shook her hair over her face again, and combed it with her fingers.