1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“I can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“I’d rather not say that, either.”
Robin no longer saw Strike through Matthew’s eyes; no longer wondered
whether he was faking, or showing off, or pretending to be cleverer than he was.
She did him the credit, now, of discounting the possibility that he was being
deliberately mysterious. All the same, she repeated, as though she must have
heard him wrongly:
“Brian Mathers.”
“Yeah.”
“The Death Threat Man.”
“Yeah.”
“But,” said Robin, “what on earth can he have to do with Lula Landry’s
death?”
“Nothing,” said Strike, honestly enough. “Yet.”
The north London crematorium where Rochelle’s funeral was held three days
later was chilly, anonymous and depressing. Everything was smoothly
nondenominational; from the dark-wood pews and blank walls, carefully devoid
of any religious device; to the abstract-stained glass window, a mosaic of little
jewel-bright squares. Sitting on hard wood, while a whiny-voiced minister called
Rochelle “Roselle” and the fine rain speckled the gaudy patchwork window
above him, Strike understood the appeal of gilded cherubs and plaster saints, of
gargoyles and Old Testament angels, of gem-set golden crucifixes; anything that
might give an aura of majesty and grandeur, a firm promise of an afterlife, or
retrospective worth to a life like Rochelle’s. The dead girl had had her glimpse of
earthly paradise: littered with designer goods, and celebrities to sneer at, and
handsome drivers to joke with, and the yearning for it had brought her to this:
seven mourners, and a minister who did not know her name.
There was a tawdry impersonality about the whole affair; a feeling of faint
embarrassment; a painful avoidance of the facts of Rochelle’s life. Nobody
seemed to feel that they had the right to sit in the front row. Even the obese black
woman wearing thick-lensed glasses and a knitted hat, who Strike assumed was
Rochelle’s aunt, had chosen to sit three benches from the front of the
crematorium, keeping her distance from the cheap coffin. The balding worker
whom Strike had met at the homeless hostel had come, in an open shirt and a
leather jacket; behind him was a fresh-faced, neatly suited young Asian man who