1 The Cuckoo's Calling

ecause it had once been home to the old friend who had given him Brett
Fearney’s location. Down Barking Road he walked, his back to Canary Wharf,
past a building with a sign that advertised “Kills 4 Communities,” at which he
frowned for a moment before realizing that somebody had swiped the “S.”
The Ordnance Arms sat beside the English Pawnbroking Company Ltd. It was
a large, low-slung, off-white-painted pub. The interior was no-nonsense and
utilitarian, with a selection of wooden clocks on a terracotta-colored wall and a
lividly patterned piece of red carpet the only gesture to anything as frivolous as
decoration. Otherwise, there were two large pool tables, a long and accessible bar
and plenty of empty space for milling drinkers. Just now, at eleven in the
morning, it was empty except for one little old man in the corner and a cheery
serving girl, who addressed her only customer as “Joey” and gave Strike
directions through the back.
The beer garden turned out to be the grimmest of concrete backyards,
containing bins and a solitary wooden table, at which a woman was sitting on a
white plastic chair, with her fat legs crossed and her cigarette held at right angles
to her cheek. There was barbed wire on top of the high wall, and a plastic bag had
caught in it and was rustling in the breeze. Beyond the wall there rose a vast
block of flats, yellow-painted and with evidence of squalor bulging over many of
the balconies.
“Mrs. Higson?”
“Call me Marlene, love.”
She looked him up and down, with a slack smile and a knowing gaze. She was
wearing a pink Lycra vest top under a zip-up gray hoodie, and leggings that
ended inches above her bare gray-white ankles. There were grubby flip-flops on
her feet and many gold rings on her fingers; her yellow hair, with its inches of
graying brown root, was pulled back into a dirty toweling scrunchie.
“Can I get you a drink?”
“I’ll have a pint of Carling, if you twist my arm.”
The way she bent her body towards him, the way she pushed straw-like strands
of hair out of her pouchy eyes, even the way she held her cigarette; all were
grotesquely coquettish. Perhaps she knew no other way of relating to anything
male. Strike found her simultaneously pathetic and repulsive.
“Shock?” said Marlene Higson, after Strike had bought them both beer, and
joined her at the table. “You can say that again, when I’d gave ’er up for lost. It
near broke my ’eart when she wen’, but I fort I was giving ’er a better life. I
wouldna ’ad the strenf to do it uvverwise. Fort I was giving ’er all the fings I
never ’ad. I grew up poor, proper poor. We ’ad nothing. Nothing.”