1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“That all?” she asked aggressively, and she proceeded across the road as far as
an island, where the lights changed again. Strike limped after her. She looked
both angry and perturbed by his continuing presence.
“What?”
“I think you know something you’re not telling me, Rochelle.”
She glared at him.
“Take this,” said Strike, pulling a second card out of his overcoat pocket. “If
you think of anything you’d like to tell me, call, all right? Call that mobile
number.”
She did not answer.
“If Lula was murdered,” said Strike, while the cars whooshed by them, and
rain glittered in the gutters at their feet, “and you know something, you could be
in danger from the killer too.”
This evoked a tiny, complacent, scathing smile. Rochelle did not think she was
in danger. She thought she was safe.
The green man had appeared. Rochelle gave a toss of her dry, wiry hair and
moved away across the road, ordinary, squat and plain, still clutching her mobile
in one hand and Strike’s card in the other. Strike stood alone on the island,
watching her with a feeling of impotence and unease. She might never have sold
her story to the newspapers, but he could not believe that she had bought that
designer jacket, ugly though he found it, from the proceeds of a job in a shop.