1 The Cuckoo's Calling

5
STRIKE TURNED TO ROBIN, WHO had sat back down at the computer. His coffee was
sitting beside the piles of neatly sorted mail lined up on the desk beside her.
“Thanks,” he said, taking a sip, “and for the note. Why are you a temp?”
“What d’you mean?” she asked, looking suspicious.
“You can spell and punctuate. You catch on quick. You show initiative—
where did the cups and the tray come from? The coffee and biscuits?”
“I borrowed them all from Mr. Crowdy. I told him we’d return them by
lunchtime.”
“Mr. who?”
Mr. Crowdy, the man downstairs. The graphic designer.”
“And he just let you have them?”
“Yes,” she said, a little defensively. “I thought, having offered the client
coffee, we ought to provide it.”
Her use of the plural pronoun was like a gentle pat to his morale.
“Well, that was efficiency way beyond anything Temporary Solutions has sent
here before, take it from me. Sorry I kept calling you Sandra; she was the last
girl. What’s your real name?”
“Robin.”
“Robin,” he repeated. “That’ll be easy to remember.”
He had some notion of making a jocular allusion to Batman and his
dependable sidekick, but the feeble jest died on his lips as her face turned
brilliantly pink. Too late, he realized that the most unfortunate construction could
be put on his innocent words. Robin swung the swivel chair back towards the
computer monitor, so that all Strike could see was an edge of a flaming cheek. In
one frozen moment of mutual mortification, the room seemed to have shrunk to
the size of a telephone kiosk.
“I’m going to nip out for a bit,” said Strike, putting down his virtually
untouched coffee and moving crabwise towards the door, taking down the
overcoat hanging beside it. “If anyone calls…”
“Mr. Strike—before you go, I think you ought to see this.”
Still flushed, Robin took, from on top of the pile of opened letters beside her
computer, a sheet of bright pink writing paper and a matching envelope, both of