1 The Cuckoo's Calling

y the glass door, and resumed his contemplation of the printed material
contained within the ring-binder, his notebook open beside him.
Night descended outside the office, and a pool of golden light fell from the
desk lamp on to each page as Strike methodically read the documents that had
added up to a conclusion of suicide. Here, amid the statements shorn of
superfluity, minutely detailed timings, the copied labels from the bottles of drugs
found in Landry’s bathroom cabinet, Strike tracked the truth he had sensed
behind Tansy Bestigui’s lies.
The autopsy indicated that Lula had been killed on impact with the road, and
that she had died from a broken neck and internal bleeding. There was a certain
amount of bruising to the upper arms. She had fallen wearing only one shoe. The
photographs of the corpse confirmed LulaMyInspirationForeva’s assertion that
Landry had changed her clothes on coming home from the nightclub. Instead of
the dress in which she had been photographed entering her building, the corpse
wore a sequined top and trousers.
Strike turned to the shifting statements that Tansy had given to the police; the
first simply claiming a trip to the bathroom from the bedroom; the second adding
the opening of her sitting-room window. Freddie, she said, had been in bed
throughout. The police had found half a line of cocaine on the flat marble rim of
the bath, and a small plastic bag of the drug hidden inside a box of Tampax in the
cabinet above the sink.
Freddie’s statement confirmed that he had been asleep when Landry fell, and
that he had been woken by his wife’s screams; he said that he had hurried into the
sitting room in time to see Tansy run past him in her underwear. The vase of
roses he had sent to Macc, and which a clumsy policeman had smashed, were
intended, he admitted, as a gesture of welcome and introduction; yes, he would
have been glad to strike up an acquaintance with the rapper, and yes, it had
crossed his mind that Macc might be perfect in a thriller now in development. His
shock at Landry’s death had undoubtedly made him overreact to the ruin of his
floral gift. He had initially believed his wife when she said she had overheard the
argument upstairs; he had subsequently come, reluctantly, to accept the police
view that Tansy’s account was indicative of cocaine consumption. Her drug habit
had placed great strain on the marriage, and he had admitted to the police that he
was aware that his wife habitually used the stimulant, though he had not known
that she had a supply in the flat that night.
Bestigui further stated that he and Landry had never visited each other’s flats,
and that their simultaneous stay at Dickie Carbury’s (which the police appeared
to have heard about on a subsequent occasion, for Freddie had been
reinterviewed after the initial statement) had barely advanced their acquaintance.
“She associated mainly with the younger guests, while I spent most of the