1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Spanner hesitated for a moment, trying to read Strike’s expression. Finally he
began:
“Password’s Agyeman, and it was reset five days before she died.”
“Spell it?”
Spanner did so, adding, to Strike’s surprise: “It’s a surname. Ghanaian. She
bookmarked the homepage of SOAS—School of Oriental and African Studies—
and it was on there. Look here.”
As he spoke, Spanner’s nimble fingers were clacking keyboard keys; he had
brought up the home page he described, bordered with bright green, with sections
on the school, news, staff, students, library and so on.
“When she died, though, it looked like this.”
And with another outburst of clicking, he retrieved an almost identical page,
featuring, as the rapidly darting cursor soon revealed, a link to the obituary of one
Professor J. P. Agyeman, Emeritus Professor of African Politics.
“She saved this version of the page,” said Spanner. “And her internet history
shows she’d browsed Amazon for his books in the month before she died. She
was looking at a lot of books on African history and politics round then.”
“Any evidence she applied to SOAS?”
“Not on here.”
“Anything else of interest?”
“Well, the only other thing I noticed was that a big photo file was deleted off it
on the seventeenth of March.”
“How d’you know that?”
“There’s software that’ll help you recover even stuff people think’s gone from
the hard drive,” said Spanner. “How d’you think they keep catching all those
pedos?”
“Did you get it back?”
“Yeah. I’ve put it on here.” He handed Strike a memory stick. “I didn’t think
you’d want me to put it back on.”
“No—so the photographs were…?”
“Nothing fancy. Just deleted. Like I say, your average punter doesn’t realize
you’ve got to work a damn sight harder than pressing ‘delete’ if you really want
to hide something.”