1 The Cuckoo's Calling

minute adjustments to the prosthesis necessitating still more visits to that whitecoated,
confined world he had hoped he had left forever. He feared advice to rest
the leg, to desist from normal ambulation; a forced return to crutches, the stares
of passersby at his pinned-up trouser leg and the shrill inquiries of small children.
His mobile, charging as usual on the floor beside the camp bed, made the
buzzing noise that announced the arrival of a text. Glad for any minor distraction
from his throbbing leg, Strike groped in the dark and picked up the telephone
from the floor.
Please could you give me a quick call when convenient? Charlotte
Strike did not believe in clairvoyance or psychic ability, yet his immediate
irrational thought was that Charlotte had somehow sensed what he had just told
Spanner; that he had twitched the taut, invisible rope still binding them, by
placing their breakup on an official footing.
He stared at the message as though it was her face, as though he could read her
expression on the tiny gray screen.
Please. (I know you don’t have to: I’m asking you to, nicely.) A quick call. (I
have a legitimate reason for desiring speech with you, so we can do it swiftly and
easily; no rows.) When convenient. (I do you the courtesy of assuming that you
have a busy life without me.)
Or, perhaps: Please. (To refuse is to be a bastard, Strike, and you’ve hurt me
enough.) A quick call. (I know you’re expecting a scene; well, don’t worry, that
last one, when you were such an unbelievable shit, has finished me with you
forever.) When convenient. (Because, let’s be honest, I always had to slot in
around the army and every other damn thing that came first.)
Was it convenient now? he asked himself, lying in pain that the pills had yet to
touch. He glanced at the time: ten past eleven. She was clearly still awake.
He put the mobile back on the floor beside him, where it lay silently charging,
and raised a large hairy arm over his eyes, blotting out even the strips of light on
the ceiling cast by the street lamps through the window slats. Against his will, he
saw Charlotte the way that he had laid eyes on her for the first time in his life, as
she sat alone on a windowsill at a student party in Oxford. He had never seen
anything so beautiful in his life, and nor, judging by the sideways flickering of
countless male eyes, the overloud laughter and voices, the angling of extravagant
gestures towards her silent figure, had any of the rest of them.
Gazing across the room, the nineteen-year-old Strike had been visited by
precisely the same urge that had come over him as a child whenever snow had
fallen overnight in Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted’s garden. He wanted his footsteps to