1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Lycra. Somé’s snug gray jeans bore a faint dark pinstripe, and his trainers seemed
to be made out of black suede and patent leather.
His face contrasted strangely with his taut, lean body, for it abounded in
exaggerated curves: the eyes exophthalmic so that they appeared fishlike, looking
out of the sides of his head. The cheeks were round, shining apples and the fulllipped
mouth was a wide oval: his small head was almost perfectly spherical.
Somé looked as though he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand
that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the
grotesque.
He held out a hand with a slight crook of the wrist.
“Yeah, I can see a bit of Jonny,” he said, looking up into Strike’s face; his
voice was camp and faintly cockney. “Much butcher, though.”
Strike shook hands. There was surprising strength in the fingers. The redhaired
girl came jingling back.
“I’ll be busy for an hour, Trudie, no calls,” Somé told her. “Bring us some tea
and bicks, darling.”
He executed a dancer’s turn, beckoning to Strike to follow him.
Down a whitewashed corridor they passed an open door, and a flat-faced
middle-aged oriental woman stared back at Strike through the gauzy film of gold
stuff she was throwing over a dummy; the room around her was as brilliantly lit
as a surgical theater, but full of workbenches, cramped and cluttered with bolts of
fabric, the walls a collage of fluttering sketches, photographs and notes. A tiny
blonde woman, dressed in what appeared to Strike to be a giant black tubular
bandage, opened a door and crossed the corridor in front of them; she gave him
precisely the same cold, blank stare as the red-haired Trudie. Strike felt
abnormally huge and hairy; a woolly mammoth attempting to blend in among
capuchin monkeys.
He followed the strutting designer to the end of the corridor and up a spiral
staircase of steel and rubber, at the top of which was a large white rectangular
office space. Floor-to-ceiling windows all along the right-hand side showed a
stunning view of the Thames and the south bank. The rest of the whitewashed
walls were hung with photographs. What arrested Strike’s attention was an
enormous twelve-foot-tall blowup of the infamous “Fallen Angels” on the wall
opposite Somé’s desk. On closer inspection, however, he realized that it was not
the shot with which the world was familiar. In this version, Lula had thrown back
her head in laughter: the strong column of her throat rose vertically out of the
long hair, which had become disarranged in her amusement, so that a single dark
nipple protruded. Ciara Porter was looking up at Lula, the beginnings of laughter