1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Strike hung up, interested to note that he had not really lost his temper at all,
but still felt mildly cheerful.
He worked on, in what he had come to think of as Robin’s chair, late into the
night. The last thing he did before turning in was to underline, three times, the
words “Malmaison Hotel, Oxford” and to circle in heavy ink the name “J. P.
Agyeman.”
The country was lumbering towards election day. Strike turned in early on
Sunday and watched the day’s gaffes, counterclaims and promises being
tabulated on his portable TV. There was an air of joylessness in every news
report he watched. The national debt was so huge that it was difficult to
comprehend. Cuts were coming, whoever won; deep, painful cuts; and
sometimes, with their weasel words, the party leaders reminded Strike of the
surgeons who had told him cautiously that he might experience a degree of
discomfort; they who would never personally feel the pain that was about to be
inflicted.
On Monday morning Strike set out for a rendezvous in Canning Town, where
he was to meet Marlene Higson, Lula Landry’s biological mother. The
arrangement of this interview had been fraught with difficulty. Bristow’s
secretary, Alison, had telephoned Robin with Marlene Higson’s number, and
Strike had called her personally. Though clearly disappointed that the stranger on
the phone was not a journalist, she had initially expressed herself willing to meet
Strike. She had then called the office back, twice: firstly to ask Robin whether the
detective would pay her expenses to travel into the center of town, to which a
negative answer was given; next, in high dudgeon, to cancel the meeting. A
second call from Strike had secured a tentative agreement to meet in her local
pub; then an irritable voicemail message cancelled once more.
Strike had then telephoned her for a third time, and told her that he believed
his investigation to be in its final phase, after which evidence would be laid to the
police, resulting, he had no doubt, in a further explosion of publicity. Now that he
came to think about it, he said, if she was unable to help, it might be just as well
for her to be protected from another deluge of press inquiry. Marlene Higson had
immediately clamored for her right to tell everything she knew, and Strike
condescended to meet her, as she had already suggested, in the beer garden of the
Ordnance Arms on Monday morning.
He took the train out to Canning Town station. It was overlooked by Canary
Wharf, whose sleek, futuristic buildings resembled a series of gleaming metal
blocks on the horizon; their size, like that of the national debt, impossible to
gauge from such a distance. But a few minutes’ walk later, he was as far from the
shining, suited corporate world as it was possible to be. Crammed up alongside
dockside developments where many of those financiers lived in neat designer
pods, Canning Town exhaled poverty and deprivation. Strike knew it of old,