1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“No, of course not. He was a most lovable child. Everyone always said so. The
sweetest boy, the very sweetest I have ever known. I miss him every single day.”
Outside the window, the children shrieked, and the plane trees rustled, and
Strike thought of how the room would have looked on a winter morning months
ago, when the trees must have been barelimbed, when Lula Landry had sat where
he was sitting, with her beautiful eyes perhaps fixed on the picture of dead
Charlie while her groggy mother told the horrible story.
“I had never really talked to Lula about it before. The boys had gone out on
their bikes. We heard John screaming, and then Tony shouting, shouting…”
Strike’s pen had not made contact with paper yet. He watched the dying
woman’s face as she talked.
“Alec wouldn’t let me look, wouldn’t let me anywhere near the quarry. When
he told me what had happened, I fainted. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I
could not understand how God could have let it happen.
“But since then, I’ve come to think that perhaps I have deserved all of it,” said
Lady Bristow distantly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I’ve wondered whether
I’m being punished. Because I loved them too much. I spoiled them. I couldn’t
say no. Charlie, Alec and Lula. I think it must be punishment, because otherwise
it would be too unspeakably cruel, wouldn’t it? To make me go through it again,
and again, and again.”
Strike had no answer to give. She invited pity, but he found he could not pity
her even as much as, perhaps, she deserved. She lay dying, wrapped in invisible
robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like
adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.
“I wanted Lula so much,” said Lady Bristow, “but I don’t think she ever…She
was a darling little thing. So beautiful. I would have done anything for that girl.
But she didn’t love me the way Charlie and John loved me. Maybe it was too
late. Maybe we got her too late.
“John was jealous when she first came to us. He had been devastated about
Charlie…but they ended up being very close friends. Very close.”
A tiny frown crumpled the paper-fine skin of her forehead.
“So Tony was quite wrong.”
“What was he wrong about?” asked Strike quietly.
Her fingers twitched upon the covers. She swallowed.
“Tony didn’t think we should have adopted Lula.”