1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Jago Ross had been married once already. He had kids; Charlotte had heard on
the grapevine that he was drinking hard. She had laughed with Strike about her
lucky escape of so many years before; she had expressed pity for his wife.
Strike bought a second pint, and then a third. He wanted to drown the
impulses, crackling like electrical charges, to go and find her, to bellow, to
rampage, to break Jago Ross’s jaw.
He had not eaten at the Ordnance Arms, nor since, and it had been a long time
since he had consumed so much alcohol in one sitting. It took him barely an hour
of steady, solitary, determined beer consumption to become properly drunk.
Initially, when the slim, pale figure appeared at his table, he told it thickly that
it had the wrong man and the wrong table.
“No I haven’t,” said Robin firmly. “I’m just going to get myself a drink too, all
right?”
She left him staring hazily at her handbag, which she had placed on the stool.
It was comfortingly familiar, brown, a little shabby. She usually hung it up on a
coat peg in the office. He gave it a friendly smile, and drank to it.
Up at the bar, the barman, who was young and timid-looking, said to Robin: “I
think he’s had enough.”
“That’s hardly my fault,” she retorted.
She had looked for Strike in the Intrepid Fox, which was nearest to the office,
in Molly Moggs, the Spice of Life and the Cambridge. The Tottenham had been
the last pub she was planning to try.
“Whassamatter?” Strike asked her, when she sat down.
“Nothing’s the matter,” said Robin, sipping her half-lager. “I just wanted to
make sure you’re OK.”
“Yez’m fine,” said Strike, and then, with an effort at clarity, “I yam fine.”
“Good.”
“Jus’ celebratin’ my fiancée zengagement,” he said, raising his eleventh pint in
an unsteady toast. “She shou’ never’ve left’m. Never,” he said, loudly and
clearly, “have. Left. The Hon’ble. Jago Ross. Who is’n outstanding cunt.”
He virtually shouted the last word. There were more people in the pub than
when Strike had arrived, and most of them seemed to have heard him. They had
been casting him wary looks even before he shouted. The scale of him, with his
drooping eyelids and his bellicose expression, had ensured a small no-go zone