1 The Cuckoo's Calling

ecovery. Perhaps the blunt, unnuanced prose of the recording officer was to
blame, but Strike took from Lady Bristow’s recollections the impression of a
determined denial. She alone suggested that Lula’s death had been an accident,
that she had somehow slipped over the balcony without meaning to; it had been,
said Lady Bristow, an icy night.
Strike skim-read Bristow’s statement, which tallied in all respects with the
account he had given Strike in person, and proceeded to that of Tony Landry,
John and Lula’s uncle. He had visited Yvette Bristow at the same time as Lula on
the day before the latter’s death, and asserted that his niece had seemed “normal.”
Landry had then driven to Oxford, where he had attended a conference on
international developments in family law, staying overnight in the Malmaison
Hotel. His account of his whereabouts was followed by some incomprehensible
comments about telephone calls. Strike turned, for elucidation, to the annotated
copies of phone records.
Lula had barely used her landline in the week prior to her death, and not at all
on the day before she died. From her mobile, however, she had made no fewer
than sixty-six calls on her last day of life. The first, at 9:15 in the morning, had
been to Evan Duffield; the second, at 9:35, to Ciara Porter. There followed a gap
of hours, in which she had spoken to nobody on the mobile, and then, at 1:21, she
had begun a positive frenzy of telephoning two numbers, almost alternately. One
of these was Duffield’s; the other belonged, according to the crabbed scribble
beside the number’s first appearance, to Tony Landry. Again and again she had
telephoned these two men. Here and there were gaps of twenty minutes or so,
during which she made no calls; then she would begin telephoning again,
doubtless hitting “redial.” All of this frenetic calling, Strike deduced, must have
taken place once she was back in her flat with Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter,
though neither of the two women’s statements made mention of repeated
telephoning.
Strike turned back to Tony Landry’s statement, which cast no light on the
reason his niece had been so anxious to contact him. He had turned off the sound
on his mobile while at the conference, he said, and had not realized until much
later that his niece had called him repeatedly that afternoon. He had no idea why
she had done so and had not called her back, giving as his reason that by the time
he realized that she had been trying to reach him, she had stopped calling, and he
had guessed, correctly as it turned out, that she would be in a nightclub
somewhere.
Strike was now yawning every few minutes; he considered making himself
coffee, but could not muster the energy. Wanting his bed, but driven on by habit
to complete the job in hand, he turned to the copies of security logbook pages
showing the entrances and exits of visitors to number 18 on the day preceding
Lula Landry’s death. A careful perusal of signatures and initials revealed that
Wilson had not been as meticulous in his record-keeping as his employers might