1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“He’s changed his narrow fuckwitted mind, then, because I heard he was
going round telling everyone it was me, before they ruled it as suicide. Only, I’ve
got a cast-iron fucking alibi, so fuck him. Fuck. Them. All.”
Restless and nervy, he got to his feet, added wine to his almost untouched
glass, then lit another cigarette.
“What can you tell me about the day Lula died?” Strike asked.
“The night, you mean.”
“The day leading up to it might be quite important too. There are a few things
I’d like to clear up.”
“Yeah? Go on, then.”
Duffield dropped back down into the chair, and pulled his knees up to his
chest again.
“Lula called you repeatedly between around midday and six in the evening,
but you didn’t answer your phone.”
“No,” said Duffield. He began picking, childishly, at a small hole in the knee
of his jeans. “Well, I was busy. I was working. On a song. Didn’t want to stem
the flow. The old inspiration.”
“So you didn’t know she was calling you?”
“Well, yeah. I saw her number coming up.” He rubbed his nose, stretched his
legs out on to the glass table, folded his arms and said, “I felt like teaching her a
little lesson. Let her wonder what I was up to.”
“Why did you think she needed a lesson?”
“That fucking rapper. I wanted her to move in with me while he was staying in
her building. ‘Don’t be silly, don’t you trust me?’ ” His imitation of Lula’s voice
and expression was disingenuously girlish. “I said to her, ‘Don’t you be fucking
silly. Show me I got nothing to worry about, and come and stay with me.’ But
she wouldn’t. So then I thought, two can play at that fucking game, darling. Let’s
see how you like it. So I got Ellie Carreira over to my place, and we did a bit of
writing together, and then I brought Ellie along to Uzi with me. Lu couldn’t
fucking complain. Just business. Just songwriting. Just friends, like her and that
rapper-gangster.”
“I didn’t think she’d ever met Deeby Macc.”
“She hadn’t, but he’d made his intentions pretty fucking public, hadn’t he?
Have you heard that song he wrote? She was creaming her panties over it.”