1 The Cuckoo's Calling

7
THE FRICTION BETWEEN THE END of Strike’s amputated leg and the prosthesis was
becoming more painful with every step as he headed towards Kensington Gore.
Sweating a little in his heavy overcoat, while a weak sun made the park shimmer
in the distance, Strike asked himself whether the strange suspicion that had him
in its grip was anything more than a shadow moving in the depths of a muddy
pool: a trick of the light, an illusory effect of the wind-ruffled surface. Had these
minute flurries of black silt been flicked up by a slimy tail, or were they nothing
but meaningless gusts of algae-fed gas? Could there be something lurking,
disguised, buried in the mud, for which other nets had trawled in vain?
Heading for Kensington Tube station, he passed the Queen’s Gate into Hyde
Park; ornate, rust-red and embellished with royal insignia. Incurably observant,
he noted the sculpture of the doe and fawn on one pillar and the stag on the other.
Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed. The same,
yet profoundly different…Lula Landry’s laptop banged harder and harder into his
leg as his limp worsened.
In his sore, stymied and frustrated state, there was a dull inevitability about
Robin’s announcement, when he finally reached the office at ten to five, that she
was still unable to penetrate past the telephone receptionist of Freddie Bestigui’s
production company; and that she had had no success in finding anyone of the
name Onifade with a British Telecom number in the Kilburn area.
“Of course, if she’s Rochelle’s aunt, she could have a different surname,
couldn’t she?” Robin pointed out, as she buttoned her coat and prepared to leave.
Strike agreed to it wearily. He had dropped on to the sagging sofa the moment
he had come through the office door, something that Robin had never seen him
do before. His face was pinched.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. Any sign of Temporary Solutions this afternoon?”
“No,” said Robin, pulling her belt tight. “Perhaps they believed me when I said
I was Annabel? I did try and sound Australian.”
He grinned. Robin closed the interim report she had been reading while she
waited for Strike to return, set it neatly back on its shelf, bade Strike goodnight
and left him sitting there, the laptop lying beside him on the threadbare cushions.
When the sound of Robin’s footsteps was no longer audible, Strike stretched a
long arm sideways to lock the glass door; then broke his own weekday ban on
smoking in the office. Jamming the lit cigarette between his teeth, he pulled up
his trouser leg and unlaced the strap holding the prosthesis to his thigh. Then he