1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Part Four
Optimumque est, ut volgo dixere, aliena insania frui.
And the best plan is, as the popular saying was, to profit by the folly of others.
Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis
1
STRIKE VISITED ULU EARLY TO shower, and dressed with unusual care, on the
morning of his visit to the studio of Guy Somé. He knew, from his perusal of the
designer’s website, that Somé advocated the purchase and wear of such items as
chaps in degraded leather, ties of metal mesh and black-brimmed headbands that
seemed to have been made by cutting the tops out of old bowlers. With a faint
feeling of defiance, Strike put on the conventional, comfortable dark blue suit he
had worn to Cipriani.
The studio he sought had been a disused nineteenth-century warehouse, which
stood on the north bank of the Thames. The glittering river dazzled his eyes as he
tried to find the entrance, which was not clearly marked; nothing on the outside
proclaimed the use to which the building was being put.
At last he discovered a discreet, unmarked bell, and the door was opened
electronically from within. The stark but airy hallway was chilly with airconditioning.
A jingling and clacking noise preceded the entrance into the hall of
a girl with tomato-red hair, dressed in head-to-toe black and wearing many silver
bangles.
“Oh,” she said, seeing Strike.
“I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Somé at ten,” he told her. “Cormoran
Strike.”
“Oh,” she said again. “OK.”
She disappeared the same way she had come. Strike used the wait to call the
mobile telephone number of Rochelle Onifade, as he had been doing ten times a
day since he had met her. There was no response.
Another minute passed, and then a small black man was suddenly crossing the
floor towards Strike, catlike and silent on rubber soles. He walked with an
exaggerated swing of his hips, his upper body quite still except for a little
counterbalancing sway of the shoulders, his arms almost rigid.
Guy Somé was nearly a foot shorter than Strike and had perhaps a hundredth
of his body fat. The front of the designer’s tight black T-shirt was decorated with
hundreds of tiny silver studs which formed an apparently three-dimensional
image of Elvis’s face, as though his chest were a Pin Art toy. The eye was further
confused by the fact that a well-defined six-pack moved underneath the tight