1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Can you remember what you put away in Deeby Macc’s flat?”
She had to mime some of the items, but she managed to convey that she
remembered two tops, a belt, a hat, some gloves and (she made a fiddling mime
around her wrists) cufflinks.
After stowing these things in the open shelving area of the walk-in wardrobe,
so that Macc could not miss them, she had reset the alarm and gone home.
Strike thanked her very much, and lingered just long enough to admire once
more her tightly denimed backside as she straightened the duvet, before rejoining
Robin and Wilson in the hall.
As they proceeded up the third flight of stairs, Strike checked Lechsinka’s
story with Wilson, who agreed that he had instructed the repairman to set the
alarm to 1966, like the front door.
“I jus’ chose a number that’d be easy for Lechsinka to remember, because of
the front door. Macc coulda reset it to somethin’ different if he’d wanted.”
“Can you remember what the repairman looked like? You said he was new?”
“Really young guy. Hair to here.”
Wilson indicated the base of his neck.
“White?”
“Yeah, white. Didn’t even look like he was shaving yet.”
They had reached the front door of Flat Three, once the home of Lula Landry.
Robin felt a frisson of something—fear, excitement—as Wilson opened the third
smoothly painted white front door, with its glassy bullet-sized peephole.
The top flat was architecturally different from the other two: smaller and
airier. It had been recently decorated throughout in shades of cream and brown.
Guy Somé had told Strike that the flat’s famous previous inhabitant loved color;
but it was now as impersonal as any upmarket hotel room. Strike led the way in
silence to the sitting room.
The carpet here was not lush and woolen as in Bestigui’s flat, but made of
rough sand-colored jute. Strike ran his heel across it; it made no mark or track.
“Was the floor like this when Lula lived here?” he asked Wilson.
“Yeah. She chose it. It was nearly new, so they left it.”
Instead of the regularly spaced long windows of the lower flats, each with
three separate small balconies, the penthouse flat boasted a single pair of double
doors leading on to one wide balcony. Strike unlocked and opened these doors