1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Understand what?”
“Well…anything. She had lots of issues. Issues with being adopted. Issues
with being black in a white family. She used to say I had it easy…I don’t know.
Perhaps she was right.”
He blinked rapidly behind his glasses. “The row was really the continuation of
a row we’d had on the telephone the night before. I just couldn’t believe she’d
been so stupid as to go back to Duffield. The relief we all felt when they split
up…I mean, given her own history with drugs, hooking up with an addict…” He
drew breath. “She didn’t want to hear it. She never did. She was furious with me.
She’d actually given instructions to the security man at the flats not to let me past
the front desk next morning, but—well, Wilson waved me through anyway.”
Humiliating, thought Strike, to have to rely on the pity of doormen.
“I wouldn’t have gone up,” said Bristow miserably, blotches of color dappling
his thin neck again, “but I had the contract with Somé to give back to her; she’d
asked me to look over it and she needed to sign it…She could be quite blasé
about things like that. Anyway, she wasn’t too happy that they’d let me upstairs,
and we rowed again, but it burned itself out quite quickly. She calmed down.
“So then I told her that Mum would appreciate a visit. Mum had just got out of
hospital, you see. She’d had a hysterectomy. Lula said she might pop in and see
her later, at her flat, but that she couldn’t be sure. She had things on.”
Bristow took a deep breath; his right knee started jiggling up and down again
and his knobble-knuckled hands washed each other in dumb show.
“I don’t want you to think badly of her. People thought her selfish, but she’d
been the youngest in the family and rather indulged, and then she was ill and,
naturally, the center of attention, and then she was plunged into this extraordinary
life where things, people, revolved around her, and she was pursued everywhere
by the paparazzi. It wasn’t a normal existence.”
“No,” said Strike.
“So, anyway, I told Lula how groggy and sore Mum was feeling, and she said
she might look in on her later. I left; I nipped into my office to get some files
from Alison, because I wanted to work from Mum’s flat that day and keep her
company. I next saw Lula at Mum’s, mid-morning. She sat with Mum for a while
in the bedroom until my uncle arrived to visit, and then nipped into the study
where I was working, to say goodbye. She hugged me before she…”
Bristow’s voice cracked, and he stared down into his lap.