1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“I’d just got back, a couple of hours before.” Somé’s fingers twitched a little
on the cigarette. “I’d been in Tokyo, hardly any sleep for eight days. Touched
down at Heathrow at about ten thirty with the most fucking appalling jet lag. I
can’t sleep on planes. I wanna be awake if I’m going to crash.”
“How did you get home from the airport?”
“Cab. Elsa had fucked up my car booking. There should’ve been a driver there
to meet me.”
“Who’s Elsa?”
“The girl I sacked for fucking up my car booking. It was the last thing I
fucking wanted, to have to find a cab at that time of night.”
“Do you live alone?”
“No. By midnight I was tucked up in bed with Viktor and Rolf. My cats,” he
added with a flicker of a grin. “I took an Ambien, slept for a few hours, then
woke up at five in the morning. I switched on Sky News from the bed, and there
was a man in a horrible sheepskin hat, standing in the snow in Cuckoo’s street,
saying she was dead. The ticker-tape across the bottom of the screen was saying
it too.”
Somé inhaled heavily on the cigarette, and white smoke curled out of his
mouth with his next words.
“I nearly fucking died. I thought I was still asleep, or that I’d woken up in the
wrong fucking dimension or something…I started calling everyone…Ciara,
Bryony…all their phones were engaged. And all the time I was watching the
screen, thinking they’d flash up something saying there had been a mistake, that
it wasn’t her. I kept praying it was the bag lady. Rochelle.”
He paused, as though he expected some comment from Strike. The latter, who
had been making notes as Somé spoke, asked, still writing:
“You know Rochelle, do you?”
“Yeah. Cuckoo brought her in here once. In it for all she could get.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She hated Cuckoo. Jealous as fuck; I could see it, even if Cuckoo couldn’t.
She was in it for the freebies, she didn’t give a monkey’s whether Cuckoo lived
or died. Lucky for her, as it turned out…
“So, the longer I watched the news, I knew there wasn’t a mistake. I fell a-
fucking-part.”
His fingers trembled a little on the snow-white stick he was sucking.