1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“But you remember Lula coming to see you?” asked Strike.
“Oh yes,” she said. “She woke me up, I had been sleeping.”
“Can you remember what you talked about?”
“My operation, of course,” she said, with just a touch of asperity. “And then, a
little bit, about her big brother.”
“Her big…?”
“Charlie,” said Lady Bristow, pitifully. “I told her about the day he died. I had
never really talked to her about it before. The worst, the very worst day of my
life.”
Strike could imagine her, prostrate and a little groggy, but no less resentful for
all that, holding her unwilling daughter there at her side by talking about her
pain, and her dead son.
“How could I have known that that would be the last time I would ever see
her?” breathed Lady Bristow. “I didn’t realize that I was about to lose a second
child.”
Her bloodshot eyes filled. She blinked, and two fat tears fell down on to her
hollow cheeks.
“Could you please look in that drawer,” she whispered, pointing a withered
finger at the bedside table, “and get me out my pills?”
Strike slid it open and saw many white boxes inside, of varying types and with
various labels upon them.
“Which…?”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,” she said.
He took one out; it was clearly labeled Valium. She had enough in there to
overdose ten times.
“If you could pop a couple out for me?” she said. “I’ll take them with some
tea, if it’s cool enough.”
He handed her her pills and the cup; her hands trembled; he had to support the
saucer and he thought, inappropriately, of a priest offering communion.
“Thank you,” she murmured, relaxing back on to her pillows as he replaced
her tea on the table, and fixing him with her plaintive eyes. “Didn’t John tell me
you knew Charlie?”
“Yes, I did,” said Strike. “I’ve never forgotten him.”