1 The Cuckoo's Calling

e the first to make deep, dark holes in that tantalizingly smooth surface: he
wanted to disturb and disrupt it.
“You’re pissed,” warned his friend, when Strike announced his intention to go
and talk to her.
Strike agreed, downed the dregs of his seventh pint and strode purposefully
over to the window ledge where she sat. He was vaguely aware of people nearby
watching, primed, perhaps, for laughter, because he was massive, and looked like
a boxing Beethoven, and had curry sauce all down his T-shirt.
She looked up at him when he reached her, with big eyes, and long dark hair,
and soft, pale cleavage revealed by the gaping shirt.
Strike’s strange, nomadic childhood, with its constant uprootings and graftings
on to motley groups of children and teenagers, had forged in him an advanced set
of social skills; he knew how to fit in, to make people laugh, to render himself
acceptable to almost anyone. That night, his tongue had become numb and
rubbery. He seemed to remember swaying slightly.
“Did you want something?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. He pulled his T-shirt away from his torso and showed her the
curry sauce. “What d’you reckon’s the best way to get this out?”
Against her will (he saw her trying to fight it), she giggled.
Sometime later, an Adonis called the Honorable Jago Ross, known to Strike by
sight and reputation, swung into the room with a posse of equally well-bred
friends, and discovered Strike and Charlotte sitting side by side on the
windowsill, deep in conversation.
“You’re in the wrong fucking room, Char, darling,” Ross had said, staking out
his rights by the caressing arrogance of his tone. “Ritchie’s party’s upstairs.”
“I’m not coming,” she said, turning a smiling face upon him. “I’ve got to go
and help Cormoran soak his T-shirt.”
Thus had she publicly dumped her Old Harrovian boyfriend for Cormoran
Strike. It had been the most glorious moment of Strike’s nineteen years: he had
publicly carried off Helen of Troy right under Menelaus’s nose, and in his shock
and delight he had not questioned the miracle, but simply accepted it.
Only later had he realized that what had seemed like chance, or fate, had been
entirely engineered by her. She had admitted it to him months later: that she had,
to punish Ross for some transgression, deliberately entered the wrong room, and
waited for a man, any man, to approach her; that he, Strike, had been a mere
instrument to torture Ross; that she had slept with him in the early hours of the