1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Well?”
“It’s you they’ll try and get money from, not me! They’ll try and make you
pay a recruitment fee!”
He smiled at her genuine anxiety that he would have to pay money he could
not afford. He had been intending to ask her to telephone the office of Freddie
Bestigui again, and to begin a search through online telephone directories for
Rochelle Onifade’s Kilburn-based aunt. Instead he said:
“OK, we’ll vacate the premises. I was going to check out a place called Vashti
this morning, before I meet Bristow. Maybe it’d look more natural if we both
went.”
“Vashti? The boutique?” said Robin, at once.
“Yeah. You know it, do you?”
It was Robin’s turn to smile. She had read about it in magazines: it epitomized
London glamour to her; a place where fashion editors found items of fabulous
clothing to show their readers, pieces that would have cost Robin six months’
salary.
“I know of it,” she said.
He took down her trench coat and handed it to her.
“We’ll pretend you’re my sister, Annabel. You can be helping me pick out a
present for my wife.”
“What’s the death-threat man’s problem?” asked Robin, as they sat side by
side on the Tube. “Who is he?”
She had suppressed her curiosity about Jonny Rokeby, and about the dark
beauty who had fled Strike’s building on her first day at work, and the camp bed
they never mentioned; but she was surely entitled to ask questions about the
death threats. It was she, after all, who had so far slit open three pink envelopes,
and read the unpleasant and violent outpourings scrawled between gamboling
kittens. Strike never even looked at them.
“He’s called Brian Mathers,” said Strike. “He came to see me last June
because he thought his wife was sleeping around. He wanted her followed, so I
put her under surveillance for a month. Very ordinary woman: plain, frumpy, bad
perm; worked in the accounts department of a big carpet warehouse. Spent her
weekdays in a poky little office with three female colleagues, went to bingo every
Thursday, did the weekly shop on Fridays at Tesco, and on Saturdays went to the
local Rotary Club with her husband.”
“When did he think she was sleeping around?” asked Robin.