1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Yeah?” said Strike, sitting down in one of the squashy ponyskin cube-shaped
armchairs.
“Yeah. Met him a couple of times,” said Duffield. “Cool dude.”
He picked up a guitar, began to pick out a twiddling tune on it, thought better
of it and put the instrument back against the wall.
Ciara returned, carrying a bottle of wine and three glasses.
“Couldn’t you get a cleaner, dearie?” she asked Duffield reprovingly.
“They give up,” said Duffield. He vaulted over the back of a chair and landed
with his legs sprawled over the side. “No fucking stamina.”
Strike pushed aside the mess on the coffee table so that Ciara could set down
the bottle and glasses.
“I thought you’d moved in with Mo Innes,” she said, pouring out wine.
“Yeah, that didn’t work out,” said Duffield, raking through the detritus on the
table for cigarettes. “Ol’ Freddie’s rented me this place just for a month, while
I’m going out to Pinewood. He wants to keep me away from me old haunts.”
His grubby fingers passed over a string of what seemed to be rosary beads;
numerous empty cigarette packets with bits of card torn out of them; three
lighters, one of them an engraved Zippo; Rizla papers; tangled leads unattached
to appliances; a pack of cards; a sordid stained handkerchief; sundry crumpled
pieces of grubby paper; a music magazine featuring a picture of Duffield in
moody black and white on the cover; opened and unopened mail; a pair of
crumpled black leather gloves; a quantity of loose change and, in a clean china
ashtray on the edge of the debris, a single cufflink in the form of a tiny silver gun.
At last he unearthed a soft packet of Gitanes from under the sofa; lit up, blew a
long jet of smoke at the ceiling, then addressed Ciara, who had placed herself on
the sofa at right angles to the two men, sipping her wine.
“They’ll say we’re fucking each other, again, Ci,” he said, pointing out of the
window at the prowling shadows of the waiting photographers.
“And what’ll they say Cormoran’s here for?” asked Ciara, with a sidelong
glance at Strike. “A threesome?”
“Security,” said Duffield, appraising Strike through narrowed eyes. “He looks
like a boxer. Or a cage fighter. Don’t you want a proper drink, Cormoran?”
“No, thanks,” said Strike.
“What’s that, AA or being on duty?”
“Duty.”