1 The Cuckoo's Calling

John’s mother, who is now a terminal case. Our out-of-hours conversations
usually concern Yvette.”
“John strikes me as a dutiful son.”
“Yvette’s all he has left now, and the fact that she’s dying isn’t helping his
mental condition either.”
“She’s hardly all he’s got left. There’s Alison, isn’t there?”
“I am not aware that that is a very serious relationship.”
“Perhaps one of John’s motives, in employing me, is a desire to give his
mother the truth before she dies?”
“The truth won’t help Yvette. Nobody enjoys accepting that they have reaped
what they have sown.”
Strike said nothing. As he had expected, the lawyer could not resist the
temptation to clarify, and after a moment he continued:
“Yvette has always been morbidly maternal. She adores babies.” He spoke as
though this was faintly disgusting, a kind of perversion. “She would have been
one of those embarrassing women who have twenty children if she could have
found a man of sufficient virility. Thank God Alec was sterile—or hasn’t John
mentioned that?”
“He told me Sir Alec Bristow wasn’t his natural father, if that’s what you
mean.”
If Landry was disappointed not to be first with the information, he rallied at
once.
“Yvette and Alec adopted the two boys, but she had no idea how to manage
them. She is, quite simply, an atrocious mother. No control, no discipline;
complete overindulgence and a point-blank refusal to see what is under her nose.
I don’t say it was all down to her parenting—who knows what the genetic
influences were—but John was whiny, histrionic and clingy and Charlie was
completely delinquent, with the result—”
Landry stopped talking abruptly, patches of color high in his cheeks.
“With the result that he rode over the edge of a quarry?” Strike suggested.
He had said it to watch Landry’s reaction, and was not disappointed. He had
the impression of a tunnel contracting, a distant door closing: a shutting down.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. And it was a bit late, then, for Yvette to
start screaming and clawing at Alec, and passing out cold on the floor. If she’d
had an iota of control, the boy wouldn’t have set out expressly to defy her. I was