1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Could it have been Agyeman?”
“No.”
“Owusu?”
“I toldya,” she said aggressively, “it were Mumumba or something.”
“Not Macdonald? Or Wilson?”
“You takin’ the piss? Macdonald? Wilson? From Africa?”
Strike concluded that her relationship with the African had never progressed to
the exchange of surnames.
“And he was a student, you said? Where was he studying?”
“College,” said Marlene.
“Which one, can you remember?”
“I don’t bloody know. All right if I cadge a ciggie?” she added, in a slightly
more conciliatory tone.
“Yeah, help yourself.”
She lit her cigarette with her own plastic lighter, puffed enthusiastically, then
said, mellowed by the free tobacco:
“It mighta bin somethin’ to do with a museum. Attached, like.”
“Attached to a museum?”
“Yeah, ’cause I remember ’im sayin’, ‘Ay sometimes visit the museum in my
free ahrs.’ ” Her imitation made the African student sound like an upper-class
Englishman. She was smirking, as though this choice of recreation was absurd,
ludicrous.
“Can you remember which museum it was that he visited?”
“The—the Museum of England or summit,” she said; and then, irritably,
“You’re like her. How the fuck am I s’posedta remember after all this time?”
“And you never saw him again after he went home?”
“Nope,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to.” She drank lager. “He’s probably
dead,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Africa, innit?” she said. “He coulda bin shot, couldn’t ’e? Or starved.
Anythin’. Y’know what it’s like out there.”
Strike did know. He remembered the teeming streets of Nairobi; the aerial
view of Angola’s rainforest, mist hanging over the treetops, and the sudden
breathtaking beauty, as the chopper turned, of a waterfall in the lush green
mountainside; and the Masai woman, baby at her breast, sitting on a box while