1 The Cuckoo's Calling

yelping with excitement; and then the flashes stopped, and they were inside,
where there was an industrial roar of noises, and a loud insistent bass line.
“Wow, you’ve got a great sense of direction,” said Ciara. “I usually, like,
ricochet off the bouncers and they have to push me in.”
Streaks and blazes of purple and yellow light were still burned across Strike’s
field of vision. He dropped her arm. She was so pale that she looked almost
luminous in the gloom. Then they were jostled further inside the club by the entry
of another dozen people behind them.
“C’mon,” said Ciara, and she slipped a soft, long-fingered hand inside his and
tugged him along behind her.
Faces turned as they walked through the packed crowd, both of them taller by
far than the majority of clubbers. Strike could see what looked like long glass fish
tanks set into the walls, containing what seemed to be great floating blobs of
wax, reminding him of his mother’s old lava lamps. There were long black
leather banquettes along the walls, and, further in, nearer the dance floor, booths.
It was hard to tell how big the club was, because of judiciously placed mirrors; at
one point, Strike caught a glimpse of himself, head-on, looking like a sharply
dressed heavy behind the silvery sylph that was Ciara. The music pounded
through every part of him, vibrating through his head and body; the crowd on the
dance floor was so dense that it seemed miraculous that they were managing even
to stamp and sway.
They had reached a padded doorway, guarded by a bald bouncer who grinned
at Ciara, revealing two gold teeth, and pushed open the concealed entrance.
They entered a quieter, though hardly less crowded bar area that was evidently
reserved for the famous and their friends. Strike noticed a miniskirted television
presenter, a soap actor, a comedian primarily famous for his sexual appetite; and
then, in a distant corner, Evan Duffield.
He was wearing a skull-patterned scarf wound around his neck and skintight
black jeans, sitting at the join of two black leather banquettes with arms stretched
at right angles along the backs of the benches on either side, where his
companions, mostly women, were crammed. His dark shoulder-length hair had
been dyed blonde; he was pallid and bony-faced, and the smudges around his
bright turquoise eyes were dark purple.
The group containing Duffield was emanating an almost magnetic force over
the room. Strike saw it in the sneaking sidelong glances other occupants were
shooting them; in the respectful space left around them, a wider orbit than
anybody else had been granted. Duffield and his cohorts’ apparent
unselfconsciousness was, Strike recognized, nothing but expert artifice; they had,
all of them, the hyper-alertness of the prey animal combined with the casual