1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“I’m going to be on my way to Pinewood Studios for a few words with
Freddie Bestigui.”
“How?” said Robin. “They won’t let you near him.”
“Yeah, they will,” said Strike.
After Robin had hung up, Strike sat motionless for a while in his dark office.
The thought of the semi-digested McDonald’s meal lying inside Rochelle’s
bloated corpse had not prevented him consuming two Big Macs, a large box of
fries and a McFlurry on the way back from Scotland Yard. Gassy noises from his
stomach were now mingling with the muffled thuds of the bass from the 12 Bar
Café, which Strike barely noticed these days; the sound might have been his own
pulse.
Ciara Porter’s messy, girlish flat, her wide, groaning mouth, the long white
legs wrapped tightly around his back, belonged to a life lived long ago. All his
thoughts, now, were for squat and graceless Rochelle Onifade. He remembered
her talking fast into her phone, not five minutes after she had left him, dressed in
exactly the same clothes she had been wearing when they pulled her out of the
river.
He was sure he knew what had happened. Rochelle had called the killer to say
that she had just lunched with a private detective; a meeting had been arranged
over her glittering pink phone; that night, after a meal or a drink, they had
sauntered through the dark towards the river. He thought of Hammersmith
Bridge, sage green and gold, in the area where she claimed to have a new flat: a
famous suicide spot, with its low sides, and the fast-flowing Thames below. She
could not swim. Nighttime: two lovers play-fighting, a car sweeps by, a scream
and a splash. Would anyone have seen?
Not if the killer had iron-clad nerves and a liberal dash of luck; and this was a
murderer who had already demonstrated plenty of the former, and an unnerving,
reckless reliance on the latter. Defending counsel would undoubtedly argue
diminished responsibility, because of the vainglorious overreaching that made
Strike’s quarry unique in his experience; and perhaps, he thought, there was some
pathology there, some categorizable madness, but he was not much interested in
the psychology. Like John Bristow, he wanted justice.
In the darkness of his office, his thoughts veered suddenly and unhelpfully
back in time, to the most personal death of all; the one that Lucy assumed, quite
wrongly, haunted Strike’s every investigation, colored every case; the killing that
had fractured his and Lucy’s lives into two epochs, so that everything in their
memory was cleaved clearly into that which had happened before their mother
died, and that which had happened afterwards. Lucy thought he had run away to
join the RMP because of Leda’s death; that he had been driven to it by his
unsatisfied belief in his stepfather’s guilt; that every corpse he saw in the course