1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Rochelle made as though to speak, then changed her mind and attempted to
drink her scalding coffee instead.
“So, what—’er brother’s trying to make out she never killed ’erself? What,
like she was pushed out the window?”
“He thinks it’s possible.”
She seemed to be trying to fathom something, to work it out in her head.
“I don’t ’ave to talk to you. You ain’t real police.”
“Yeah, that’s true. But wouldn’t you like to help find out what—”
“She jumped,” declared Rochelle Onifade firmly.
“What makes you so sure?” asked Strike.
“I jus’ know.”
“It seems to have come as a shock to nearly everyone else she knew.”
“She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus’
takes you over. It’s an illness,” she said, although she made the words sound like
“it’s uh nillness.”
Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. He had slept badly. Nillness,
that was where Lula Landry had gone, and where all of them, he and Rochelle
included, were headed. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was
happening to Bristow’s mother…sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of
nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.
He was sure that if he took out his notebook, she would clam up, or leave. He
therefore continued to ask questions as casually as he could manage, asking her
how she had come to attend the clinic, how she had first met Lula.
Still immensely suspicious, she gave monosyllabic answers at first, but slowly,
gradually, she became more forthcoming. Her own history was pitiful. Early
abuse, care, severe mental illness, foster homes and violent outbursts
culminating, at sixteen, in homelessness. She had secured proper treatment as the
indirect result of being hit by a car. Hospitalized when her bizarre behavior had
made treating her physical wounds nearly impossible, a psychiatrist had at last
been called in. She was on drugs now, which, when she took them, greatly eased
her symptoms. Strike found it pathetic, and touching, that the outpatient clinic
where she had met Lula Landry seemed to have become, for Rochelle, the
highlight of her week. She spoke with some affection of the young psychiatrist
who ran the group.
“So that’s where you met Lula?”