1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Wardle, replacing his notebook in his pocket, laughed.
“What you’ve just given me might be a crock of shit.”
“It isn’t. Play fair, Wardle.”
The policeman eyed Strike for a moment, apparently torn between amusement
and suspicion.
“What are you after, then?”
“I told you on the phone: bit of inside information on Lula Landry.”
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“Inside information, I said. My client thinks there was foul play.”
Wardle’s expression hardened.
“Hooked up with a tabloid, have we?”
“No,” said Strike. “Her brother.”
“John Bristow?”
Wardle took a long pull on his pint, his eyes on the upper thighs of the nearest
girl, his wedding ring reflecting red lights from the pinball machine.
“Is he still fixated on the CCTV footage?”
“He mentioned it,” admitted Strike.
“We tried to trace them,” said Wardle, “those two black guys. We put out an
appeal. Neither of them turned up. No big surprise—a car alarm went off just
about the time they would have been passing it—or trying to get into it. Maserati.
Very tasty.”
“Reckon they were nicking cars, do you?”
“I don’t say they went there specifically to nick cars; they might have spotted
an opportunity, seeing it parked there—what kind of tosser leaves a Maserati
parked on the street? But it was nearly two in the morning, the temperature was
below zero, and I can’t think of many innocent reasons why two men would
choose to meet at that time, in a Mayfair street where neither of them, as far as
we could find out, lived.”
“No idea where they came from, or where they went afterwards?”
“We’re pretty sure the one Bristow’s obsessed with, the one who was walking
towards her flat just before she fell, got off the number thirty-eight bus in Wilton
Street at a quarter past eleven. There’s no saying what he did before he passed the