1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Little waves, outrunners sent by the young athletes on the other side of the
pool, tickled his chest. The terrible pain in his head was receding into the
distance; a fiery red light viewed through mist. The chlorine was sharp and
clinical in his nostrils, but it no longer made him want to be sick. Deliberately,
like a man ripping off a bandage on a congealing wound. Strike turned his
attention to the thing he had attempted to drown in alcohol.
Jago Ross; in every respect the antithesis of Strike: handsome in the manner of
an Aryan prince, possessor of a trust fund, born to fulfill a preordained place in
his family and the world; a man with all the confidence twelve generations of
well-documented lineage can give. He had quit a succession of high-flying jobs,
developed a persistent drinking problem, and was vicious in the manner of an
overbred, badly disciplined animal.
Charlotte and Ross belonged to that tight, interconnected network of publicschooled
blue bloods who all knew each other’s families, connected through
generations of interbreeding and old-school ties. While the water lapped his
thickly hairy chest, Strike seemed to see himself, Charlotte and Ross at a great
distance, from the wrong end of a telescope, so that the arc of their story became
clear: it mirrored Charlotte’s restless day-to-day behavior, that craving for
heightened emotion that expressed itself most typically in destructiveness. She
had secured Jago Ross as a prize when eighteen, the most extreme example she
could find of his type and the very epitome of eligibility, as her parents had seen
it. Perhaps that had been too easy, and certainly too expected, because she had
then dumped him for Strike, who, for all his brains, was anathema to Charlotte’s
family; an uncategorizable mongrel. What was left, after all these years, to a
woman who craved emotional storms, but to leave Strike again and again, until at
last the only way to leave with real éclat was to move full circle, back to the place
where he had found her?
Strike allowed his aching body to float in the water. The racing students were
still thrashing their way up and down the fast lane.
Strike knew Charlotte. She was waiting for him to rescue her. It was the final,
cruelest test.
He did not swim back down the pool, but hopped sideways through the water,
using his arms to grip the long side of the pool as he had done during
physiotherapy in the hospital.
The second shower was more pleasurable than the first; he made the water as
hot as he could stand, lathered himself all over, then turned the dial to cold to
rinse himself.
The prosthesis reattached, he shaved over a sink with a towel tied around his
waist, then dressed with unusual care. He had never worn the most expensive suit
and shirt that he owned. They had been gifts from Charlotte on his last birthday: