1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“He’s Lieutenant Jonah Francis Agyeman, Royal Engineers. Aged twenty-one,
unmarried, last tour of duty started eleventh of January. He’s back in June. Next
of kin, a mother. No siblings, no kids.”
Strike scribbled it all down in his notebook, with the mobile phone held
between jaw and shoulder.
“I owe you one, Hardy,” he said, putting the notebook away. “Haven’t got a
picture, have you?”
“I could email you one.”
Strike gave Hardacre the office email address, and, after routine inquiries
about each other’s lives, and mutual expressions of goodwill, terminated the call.
It was five to eleven. Strike waited, phone in hand, in the peaceful, leafy
square, while the gamboling children played with their hoops and their beanbags,
and a tiny silver plane drew a thick white line across the periwinkle sky. At last,
with a small chirrup clearly audible in the quiet street, Bristow’s texted reply
arrived:
No chance today. I’ve been forced to go out to Rye. Maybe tomorrow?
Strike sighed.
“Sorry, John,” he muttered, and he climbed the steps and rang Lady Bristow’s
doorbell.
The entrance hall, quiet, spacious and sunny, nevertheless had a faintly
depressing air of communality that a bucket-shaped vase of dried flowers and a
dull green carpet and pale yellow walls, probably chosen for their
inoffensiveness, could not dissipate. As at Kentigern Gardens, there was a lift,
this one with wooden doors. Strike chose to walk upstairs. The building had a
faint shabbiness that in no way diminished its quiet aura of wealth.
The door of the top flat was opened by the smiling West Indian Macmillan
nurse who had buzzed him through the front door.
“You’re not Mister Bristow,” she said brightly.
“No, I’m Cormoran Strike. John’s on his way.”
She let him in. Lady Bristow’s hallway was pleasantly cluttered, papered in
faded red and covered in watercolors in old gilt frames; an umbrella stand was
full of walking sticks, and coats hung on a row of pegs. Strike glanced right, and
saw a sliver of the study at the end of the corridor: a heavy wooden desk and a
swivel chair with its back to the door.