1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Will you wait in the sitting room while I check whether Lady Bristow is
ready to see you?”
“Yeah, of course.”
He walked through the door she indicated into a charming room with primrose
walls, lined with bookcases bearing photographs. An old-fashioned dial
telephone sat on an end table beside a comfortable chintz-covered sofa. Strike
checked that the nurse was out of sight before slipping the receiver off the hook
and repositioning it, unobtrusively skewed on its rests.
Close by the bay window on a bonheur du jour stood a large photograph,
framed in silver, showing the wedding of Sir and Lady Alec Bristow. The groom
looked much older than his wife, a rotund, beaming, bearded man; the bride was
thin, blonde and pretty in an insipid way. Ostensibly admiring the photograph,
Strike stood with his back to the door, and slid open a little drawer in the delicate
cherrywood desk. Inside was a supply of fine pale blue writing paper and
matching envelopes. He slid the drawer shut again.
“Mister Strike? You can come through.”
Back through the red-papered hall, a short passage, and into a large bedroom,
where the dominant colors were duck-egg blue and white, and everywhere gave
an impression of elegance and taste. Two doors on the left, both ajar, led to a
small en-suite bathroom, and what seemed to be a large walk-in wardrobe. The
furniture was delicate and Frenchified; the props of serious illness—the drip on
its metal stand, the bedpan lying clean and shiny on a chest of drawers, with an
array of medications—were glaring impostors.
The dying woman wore a thick ivory-colored bed jacket and reclined, dwarfed
by her carved wooden bed, on many white pillows. No trace of Lady Bristow’s
youthful prettiness remained. The raw bones of the skeleton were clearly
delineated now, beneath fine skin that was shiny and flaking. Her eyes were
sunken, filmy and dim, and her wispy hair, fine as a baby’s, was gray against
large expanses of pink scalp. Her emaciated arms lay limp on top of the covers, a
catheter protruded. Her death was an almost palpable presence in the room, as
though it stood waiting patiently, politely, behind the curtains.
A faint smell of lime blossom pervaded the atmosphere, but did not entirely
eclipse that of disinfectant and bodily decay; smells that recalled, to Strike, the
hospital where he had lain helpless for months. A second large bay window had
been raised a few inches, so that the warm fresh air and the distant cries of the
sports-playing children could enter the room. The view was of the topmost
branches of the leafy sunlit plane trees.
“Are you the detective?”