1 The Cuckoo's Calling

in the freezing cold and the snow, and then he recited this poem he’d written to
her, and put the bangle on her wrist. Looly was laughing her head off, but then
she just, like, recited a poem she knew back to him. Walt Whitman. It was,” said
Ciara, with an air of sudden seriousness, “honestly, like, so impressive, just to
have the perfect poem to say, just like that. People think models are dumb, you
know.” She threw her hair back again and offered Strike a cigarette before taking
another herself. “I get so bored of telling people I’ve got a deferred place to read
English at Cambridge.”
“Have you?” asked Strike, unable to suppress the surprise in his voice.
“Yeah,” she said, blowing out smoke prettily, “but, you know, the modeling’s
going so well, I’m going to give it another year. It’s opening doors, you know?”
“So this commitment ceremony was when—a week before Lula died?”
“Yeah,” said Ciara, “the Saturday before.”
“And it was just an exchange of poems and bangles. No vows, no officiant?”
“No, it wasn’t legally binding or anything, it was just, like, this lovely, this
perfect moment. Well, except for Freddie Bestigui, he was being a bit of a pain.
But at least,” Ciara drew hard on her cigarette, “his bloody wife wasn’t there.”
“Tansy?”
“Tansy Chillingham, yeah. She’s a bitch. It’s so not a surprise they’re
divorcing; they led, like, totally separate lives, you never saw them out together.
“To tell you the truth, Freddie wasn’t too bad that weekend, seeing what a
nasty rep he’s got. He was just a bore, the way he kept trying to suck up to Looly,
but he wasn’t awful like they say he can be. I heard a story about this, like, totally
naive girl he promised a bit part in a film…Well, I don’t know whether it was
true.” Ciara squinted for a moment at the end of her cigarette. “She never
reported it, anyway.”
“You said Freddie was being a pain; in what way?”
“Oh God, he kept, like, cornering Looly and going on about how great she’d
be on screen, and like, what a great bloke her dad was.”
“Sir Alec?”
“Yeah, Sir Alec, of course. Oh my God,” said Ciara, wide-eyed, “if he’d
known her real father, Looly would’ve, like, flipped out completely! That would
have been, like, the dream of her life! No, he just said he’d known Sir Alec years
and years ago, and they came from, like, the same East End manor or something,
so he should be considered, like, her godfather or something. I think he was
trying to be funny, but not. Anyway, everyone could tell he was just trying to
work out how to get her into a film. He was a jerk about the commitment
ceremony; he kept shouting ‘I’ll give away the bride.’ He was pissed; he drank
like crazy all through dinner. Dickie had to shut him up. Then after the ceremony,
we all had champagne back at the house and Freddie had, like, another two