1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Robin, I need you to check something.”
She already had the pen in her hand, waiting.
“There was a legal conference in Oxford on the seventh of January. Lula
Landry’s uncle Tony attended it. International family law. Anything you can find
out. Specifically about him being there.”
“Right,” said Robin, scribbling.
“Cheers. You’re a genius.”
And he was gone, with uneven steps, down the metal stairs.
Though she hummed to herself as she settled down at her desk, a little of
Robin’s cheerfulness drained away as she drank her tea. She had half hoped that
Strike would invite her along to meet Rochelle Onifade, whose shadow she had
hunted for two weeks.
Rush hour past, the crowds on the Tube had thinned. Strike was pleased,
because the end of his stump was still smarting, to find a seat with ease. He had
bought himself a pack of Extra Strong Mints at the station kiosk before boarding
his train, and was now sucking four simultaneously, trying to conceal the fact that
he had not had time to clean his teeth. His toothbrush and toothpaste were hidden
inside his kitbag, even though it would have been much more convenient to leave
them on the chipped sink in the bathroom. Catching sight of himself again, in the
darkened train window, with his heavy stubble and his generally unkempt
appearance, he asked himself why, when it was perfectly obvious that Robin
knew he slept there, he maintained the fiction that he had some other home.
Strike’s memory and map sense were more than adequate to the task of
locating the entrance to the psychiatric unit at St. Thomas’s, and he proceeded
there without mishap, arriving at shortly after ten. He spent five minutes
checking that the automatic double doors were the only entrance on Grantley
Road, before positioning himself on a stone wall in the car park, some twenty
yards away from the entrance, giving him a clear view of everyone entering and
leaving.
Knowing only that the girl he sought was probably homeless, and certainly
black, he had thought through his strategy for finding her on the Tube, and
concluded that there was really only one option open to him. At twenty past ten,
therefore, when he saw a tall, thin black girl walking briskly towards the
entrance, he called out (even though she looked too well-groomed, too neatly
dressed):
“Rochelle!”