1 The Cuckoo's Calling

unrolled the gel liner from the stump of his leg and examined the end of his
amputated tibia.
He was supposed to examine the skin surface for irritation every day. Now he
saw that the scar tissue was inflamed and over-warm. There had been various
creams and powders back in the bathroom cabinet at Charlotte’s dedicated to the
care of this patch of skin, subject as it was these days to forces for which it had
not been designed. Perhaps she had thrown the corn powder and Oilatum into one
of the still unpacked boxes? But he could not muster the energy to go and find
out, nor did he want to refit the prosthesis just yet; and so he sat smoking on the
sofa with the lower trouser leg hanging empty towards the floor, lost in thought.
His mind drifted. He thought about families, and names, and about the ways in
which his and John Bristow’s childhoods, outwardly so different, had been
similar. There were ghostly figures in Strike’s family history, too: his mother’s
first husband, for instance, of whom she had rarely spoken, except to say that she
had hated being married from the first. Aunt Joan, whose memory had always
been sharpest where Leda’s had been most vague, said that the eighteen-year-old
Leda had run out on her husband after only two weeks; that her sole motivation
in marrying Strike Snr (who, according to Aunt Joan, had arrived in St. Mawes
with the fair) had been a new dress, and a change of name. Certainly, Leda had
remained more faithful to her unusual married moniker than to any man. She had
passed it to her son, who had never met its original owner, long gone before his
unconnected birth.
Strike smoked, lost in thought, until the daylight in his office began to soften
and dim. Then, at last, he struggled up on his one foot and, using the doorknob
and the dado rail on the wall beyond the glass door to steady himself, hopped out
to examine the boxes still stacked on the landing outside his office. At the bottom
of one of them he found those dermatological products designed to assuage the
burning and prickling in the end of his stump, and set to work to try and repair
the damage first done by the long walk across London with his kitbag over his
shoulder.
It was lighter now than it had been at eight o’clock two weeks ago; still
daylight when Strike was seated, for the second time in ten days, in Wong Kei,
the tall, white-fronted Chinese restaurant with a window view of an arcade center
called Play to Win. It had been extremely painful to reattach the prosthetic leg,
and still more to walk down Charing Cross Road on it, but he had disdained the
use of the gray metal sticks he had also found in the box, relics of his release
from Selly Oak Hospital.
While Strike ate Singapore noodles one-handed, he examined Lula Landry’s
laptop, which lay open on the table, beside his beer. The dark pink computer
casing was patterned with cherry blossom. It did not occur to Strike that he
presented an incongruous appearance to the world as he hunched, large and hairy,