1 The Cuckoo's Calling

and stepped outside. Robin did not like watching him do it; after a glance at
Wilson’s impassive face, she turned and stared at the cushions and the black-andwhite
prints, trying not to think about what had happened here three months
previously.
Strike was looking down into the street, and Robin might have been surprised
to know that his thoughts were not as clinical or dispassionate as she supposed.
He was visualizing someone who had lost control completely; someone
running at Landry as she stood, fine-boned and beautiful, in the outfit she had
thrown on to meet a much-anticipated guest; a killer lost in rage, half dragging,
half pushing her, and finally, with the brute strength of a highly motivated
maniac, throwing her. The seconds it took her to fall through the air towards the
concrete, smothered in its deceptively soft covering of snow, must have seemed
to last an eternity. She had flailed, trying to find handholds in the merciless
empty air; and then, without time to make amends, to explain, to bequeath or to
apologize, without any of the luxuries permitted those who are given notice of
their impending demise, she had broken on the road.
The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and
through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living
woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a
telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever
seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her. The truth was coming slowly into
focus out of the mass of disconnected detail. What he lacked was proof.
His mobile phone rang as he stood there. John Bristow’s name and number
were displayed; he took the call.
“Hi, John, thanks for getting back to me.”
“No problem. Any news?” asked the lawyer.
“Maybe. I’ve had an expert look at Lula’s laptop, and he found out a file of
photographs had been deleted from it after Lula died. Do you know anything
about that?”
His words were met by complete silence. The only reason Strike knew that
they had not been cut off was that he could hear a small amount of background
noise at Bristow’s end.
At last the lawyer said, in an altered voice:
“They were taken off after Lula died?”
“That’s what the expert says.”
Strike watched a car roll slowly down the street below, and pause halfway
along. A woman got out, swathed in fur.