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1 The Cuckoo's Calling

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there,” said Landry, stonily. “On a weekend visit. Easter Sunday. I had been for a<br />

walk down to the village, and I came back to find them all looking for him. I<br />

headed straight for the quarry. I knew, you see. It was the place he’d been<br />

forbidden to go—so there he was.”<br />

“You found the body, did you?”<br />

“Yes, I did.”<br />

“That must have been highly distressing.”<br />

“Yes,” said Landry, his lips barely moving. “It was.”<br />

“And it was after Charlie died, wasn’t it, that your sister and Sir Alec adopted<br />

Lula?”<br />

“Which was probably the single most stupid thing Alec Bristow ever agreed<br />

to,” said Landry. “Yvette had already proven herself a disastrous mother; was she<br />

likely to be any more successful while in a state of abandoned grief? Of course,<br />

she’d always wanted a daughter, a baby to dress in pink, and Alec thought it<br />

would make her happy. He always gave Yvette anything she wanted. He was<br />

besotted with her from the moment she joined his typing pool, and he was an<br />

unvarnished East Ender. Yvette has always had a predilection for a bit of rough.”<br />

Strike wondered what the real source of Landry’s anger could be.<br />

“You don’t get along with your sister, Mr. Landry?” asked Strike.<br />

“We get along perfectly well; it is simply that I am not blind to what Yvette is,<br />

Mr. Strike, nor how much of her misfortune is her own damn fault.”<br />

“Was it difficult for them to get approved for another adoption after Charlie<br />

died?” asked Strike.<br />

“I daresay it would have been, if Alec hadn’t been a multimillionaire,” snorted<br />

Landry. “I know the authorities were concerned about Yvette’s mental health,<br />

and they were both a bit long in the tooth by then. It’s a great pity that they<br />

weren’t turned down. But Alec was a man of infinite resourcefulness and he had<br />

all sorts of strange contacts from his barrow-boy days. I don’t know the details,<br />

but I’d be prepared to bet money changed hands somewhere. Even so, he<br />

couldn’t manage a Caucasian. He brought another child of completely unknown<br />

provenance into the family, to be raised by a depressed and hysterical woman of<br />

no judgment. It was hardly a surprise to me that the result was catastrophic. Lula<br />

was as unstable as John and as wild as Charlie, and Yvette had just as little idea<br />

how to manage her.”<br />

Scribbling away for Landry’s benefit, Strike wondered whether his belief in<br />

genetic predetermination accounted for some of Bristow’s preoccupation with<br />

Lula’s black relatives. Doubtless Bristow had been privy to his uncle’s views

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