1 The Cuckoo's Calling

then ascended the stairs, her bucket swinging, her tightly bejeaned backside
swelling and swaying seductively. Strike, conscious of Robin’s sideways glance,
withdrew his gaze from it reluctantly.
Strike and Robin followed Wilson upstairs to Flat 1, which he opened up with
a master key. The door on to the stairwell, Strike noted, had an old-fashioned
peephole.
“Mister Bestigui’s place,” announced Wilson, stifling the alarm by entering
the code on a pad to the right of the door. “Lechsinka’s already bin in this
morning.”
Strike could smell polish and see the track marks of a vacuum cleaner on the
white carpet of the hallway, with its brass wall lights and its five immaculate
white doors. He noticed the discreet alarm keypad on the right wall, at right
angles to a painting in which dreamy goats and peasants floated over a blue-toned
village. Tall vases of orchids stood on a black japanned table beneath the
Chagall.
“Where’s Bestigui?” Strike asked Wilson.
“LA,” said the security guard. “Back in two days.”
The light, bright sitting room had three tall windows, each of them with a
shallow stone balcony beyond; its walls were Wedgwood blue and nearly
everything else was white. All was pristine, elegant and beautifully proportioned.
Here, too, there was a single superb painting: macabre, surreal, with a spearbearing
man masked as a blackbird, arm in arm with a gray-toned headless
female torso.
It was from this room that Tansy Bestigui maintained she had heard a
screaming match two floors above. Strike moved up close to the long windows,
noting the modern catches, the thickness of the panes, the complete lack of noise
from the street, though his ear was barely half an inch from the cold glass. The
balcony beyond was narrow, and filled with potted shrubs trimmed into pointed
cones.
Strike moved off towards the bedroom. Robin remained in the sitting room,
turning slowly where she stood, taking in the chandelier of Venetian glass, the
muted rug in shades of pale blue and pink, the enormous plasma TV, the modern
glass and iron dining table and silk-cushioned iron chairs; the small silver objets
d’art on glass side tables and on the white marble mantelpiece. She thought, a
little sadly, of the IKEA sofa of which she had, until now, felt so proud; then she
remembered Strike’s camp bed in the office with a twinge of shame. Catching
Wilson’s eye, she said, unconsciously echoing Eric Wardle:
“It’s a different world, isn’t it?”