1 The Cuckoo's Calling

10
ROBIN STOOD SWAYING WITH THE REST of the tightly packed commuters on a
northbound Bakerloo Tube train, everyone wearing the tense and doleful
expressions appropriate to a Monday morning. She felt the phone in her coat
pocket buzz, and extricated it with difficulty, her elbow pressing unpleasantly
into some unspecified flabby portion of a suited, bad-breathed man beside her.
When she saw that the message was from Strike, she felt momentarily excited,
nearly as excited as she had been to see Duffield in the paper yesterday. Then she
scrolled down, and read:
Out. Key behind cistern of toilet. Strike.
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. She was disgruntled. The previous day, she and Matthew had
eaten lunch, in company with two university friends of Matthew’s, at his favorite
gastropub, the Windmill on the Common. When Robin had spotted the picture of
Evan Duffield in an open copy of the News of the World at a nearby table, she
had made a breathless excuse, right in the middle of one of Matthew’s stories,
and hurried outside to text Strike.
Matthew had said, later, that she had shown bad manners, and even worse not
to explain what she was up to, in favor of maintaining that ludicrous air of
mystery.
Robin gripped the hand strap tightly, and as the train slowed, and her heavy
neighbor leaned into her, she felt both a little foolish, and resentful towards the
two men, most particularly the detective, who was evidently uninterested in the
unusual movements of Lula Landry’s ex-boyfriend.
By the time she had marched through the usual chaos and debris to Denmark
Street, extracted the key from behind the cistern as instructed, and been snubbed
yet again by a superior-sounding girl in Freddie Bestigui’s office, Robin was in a
thoroughly bad temper.
Though he did not know it, Strike was, at that very moment, passing the scene
of the most romantic moments of Robin’s life. The steps below the statue of Eros
were swarming with Italian teenagers this morning, as Strike went by on the St.
James’s side, heading for Glasshouse Street.
The entrance to Barrack, the nightclub which had so pleased Deeby Macc that
he had remained there for hours, fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, was only
a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. The facade looked as if it was made out of
industrial concrete, and the name was picked out in shining black letters,
vertically placed. The club extended up over four floors. As Strike had expected,