1 The Cuckoo's Calling

of his professional life must recall their mother to his mind; that every killer he
met must seem to be an echo of their stepfather; that he was driven to investigate
other deaths in an eternal act of personal exculpation.
But Strike had aspired to this career long before the last needle had entered
Leda’s body; long before he had understood that his mother (and every other
human) was mortal, and that killings were more than puzzles to be solved. It was
Lucy who never forgot, who lived in a swarm of memories like coffin flies; who
projected on to any and all unnatural deaths the conflicting emotions aroused in
her by their mother’s untimely demise.
Tonight, however, he found himself doing the very thing that Lucy was sure
must be habitual: he was remembering Leda and connecting her to this case.
Leda Strike, supergroupie. It was how they always captioned her in the most
famous photograph of all, and the only one that featured his parents together.
There she was, in black and white, with her heart-shaped face, her shining dark
hair and her marmoset eyes; and there, separated from each other by an art dealer,
an aristocratic playboy (one since dead by his own hand, the other of AIDS) and
Carla Astolfi, his father’s second wife, was Jonny Rokeby himself, androgynous
and wild: hair nearly as long as Leda’s. Martini glasses and cigarettes, smoke
curling out of the model’s mouth, but his mother more stylish than any of them.
Everyone but Strike had seemed to view Leda’s death as the deplorable but
unsurprising result of a life lived perilously, beyond societal norms. Even those
who had known her best and longest were satisfied that she herself had
administered the overdose they found in her body. His mother, by almost
unanimous consent, had walked too close to the unsavory edges of life, and it
was only to be expected that she would one day topple out of sight and fall to her
death, stiff and cold, on a filthy-sheeted bed.
Why she had done it, nobody could quite explain, not even Uncle Ted (silent
and shattered, leaning against the kitchen sink) or Aunt Joan (red-eyed but angry
at her little kitchen table, with her arms around nineteen-year-old Lucy, who was
sobbing into Joan’s shoulder). An overdose had simply seemed consistent with
the trend of Leda’s life; with the squats and the musicians and the wild parties;
with the squalor of her final relationship and home; with the constant presence of
drugs in her vicinity; with her reckless quest for thrills and highs. Strike alone
had asked whether anyone had known his mother had taken to shooting up; he
alone had seen a distinction between her predilection for cannabis and a sudden
liking for heroin; he alone had unanswered questions and saw suspicious
circumstances. But he had been a student of twenty, and nobody had listened.
After the trial and the conviction, Strike had packed up and left everything
behind: the short-lived burst of press, Aunt Joan’s desperate disappointment at
the end of his Oxford career, Charlotte, bereft and incensed by his disappearance
and already sleeping with someone new, Lucy’s screams and scenes. With the