1 The Cuckoo's Calling

animal instinct for survival that jettisoned babies in its wake, for they demanded
skills that Marlene had never developed.
“So you don’t know where your two sons are now?” Strike repeated, twenty
minutes later.
“No, how the fuck could I?” said Marlene, who had talked herself into
bitterness. “She weren’ int’rested anyway. She already had a white brother, di’n’t
she? She wuz after black family. That’s what she reely wanted.”
“Did she ask you about her father?”
“Yeah, an’ I told ’er ev’rything I knew. ’E was an African student. Lived
upstairs from me, jus’ along the road ’ere, Barking Road, wiv two others. There’s
the bookie’s downstairs now. Very good-looking boy. ’Elped me with me
shopping a couple of times.”
To hear Marlene Higson tell it, the courtship had proceeded with an almost
Victorian respectability; she and the African student seemed barely to have
progressed past handshakes during the first months of their acquaintance.
“And then, ’cos ’e’d ’elped me all them times, one day I asked ’im in, y’know,
jus’ as a thank-you, really. I’m not a prejudiced person. Ev’ryone’s the same to
me. Fancy a cuppa, I sez, that were all. And then,” said Marlene, harsh reality
clanging down amidst the vague impressions of teacups and doilies, “I finds out
I’m expecting.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Oh yeah, an’ ’e was full of ’ow ’e was gonna ’elp, an’ shoulder ’is
respons’bilities, an’ make sure I wuz all right. An’ then it was the college
’olidays. ’E said ’e was coming back,” said Marlene, contemptuously. “Then ’e
ran a mile. Don’t they all? And what was I gonna do, run off to Africa to find
’im?
“It was no skin off my nose, anyway. I wasn’t breaking me ’eart; I was seeing
Dez by then. ’E didn’t mind the baby. I moved in with Dez not long after Joe
left.”
“Joe?”
“That was his name. Joe.”
She said it with conviction, but perhaps, thought Strike, that was because she
had repeated the lie so often that the story had become easy, automatic.
“What was his surname?”
“I can’ fuckin’ remember. You’re like her. It was twenny-odd years ago.
Mumumba,” said Marlene Higson, unabashed. “Or something like that.”