1 The Cuckoo's Calling

10
IT WAS THE FIRST TAXI that Strike had felt justified in taking since the day he had
moved his belongings out of Charlotte’s flat. He watched the charges mount with
detachment, as the cab rolled towards Wapping. The taxi driver was determined
to tell him why Gordon Brown was a fucking disgrace. Strike sat in silence for
the entire trip.
This would not be the first morgue Strike had visited, and far from the first
corpse he had viewed. He had become almost immune to the despoliation of
gunshot wounds; bodies ripped, torn and shattered, innards revealed like the
contents of a butcher’s shop, shining and bloody. Strike had never been
squeamish; even the most mutilated corpses, cold and white in their freezer
drawers, became sanitized and standardized to a man with his job. It was the
bodies he had seen in the raw, unprocessed and unprotected by officialdom and
procedure, that rose again and crawled through his dreams. His mother in the
funeral parlor, in her favorite floor-length bell-sleeved dress, gaunt yet young,
with no needle marks on view. Sergeant Gary Topley lying in the blood-spattered
dust of that Afghanistan road, his face unscathed, but with no body below the
upper ribs. As Strike had lain in the hot dirt, he had tried not to look at Gary’s
empty face, afraid to glance down and see how much of his own body was
missing…but he had slid so swiftly into the maw of oblivion that he did not find
out until he woke up in the field hospital…
An Impressionist print hung on the bare brick walls of the small anteroom to
the morgue. Strike fixed his gaze on it, wondering where he had seen it before,
and finally remembering that it hung over the mantelpiece at Lucy and Greg’s.
“Mr. Strike?” said the gray-haired mortician, peering around the inner door, in
white coat and latex gloves. “Come on in.”
They were almost always cheerful, pleasant men, these curators of corpses.
Strike followed the mortician into the chilly glare of the large, windowless inner
room, with its great steel freezer doors all along the right-hand wall. The gently
sloping tiled floor ran down to a central drain; the lights were dazzling. Every
noise echoed off the hard and shiny surfaces, so that it sounded as though a small
group of men was marching into the room.
A metal trolley stood ready in front of one of the freezer doors, and beside it
were the two CID officers, Wardle and Carver. The former greeted Strike with a
nod and a muttered greeting; the latter, paunchy and mottle-faced, with suit
shoulders covered in dandruff, merely grunted.
The mortician wrenched down the thick metal arm on the freezer door. The
tops of three anonymous heads were revealed, stacked one above the other, each
draped in a white sheet worn limp and fine through repeated washings. The
mortician checked the tag pinned to the cloth covering the central head; it bore no