1 The Cuckoo's Calling

Robin drew herself up a little, blew her nose again and told Strike, with
calmness slightly undermined by a small hiccough, the figure for which she
would be happy to stay.
It took Strike a few seconds to respond. He could just afford to pay what she
had suggested; it was within five hundred pounds of what he himself had
calculated that he could manage. She was, whichever way you looked at it, an
asset that it would be impossible to replace at the price. There was only one tiny
fly in the ointment…
“I could manage that,” he said. “Yeah. I could pay you that.”
The telephone rang. Beaming at him, she answered it, and the delight in her
voice was such that it sounded as though she had been eagerly anticipating the
call for days.
“Oh, hullo, Mr. Gillespie! How are you? Mr. Strike’s just sent you a check, I
put it in the post myself this morning…All the arrears, yes, and a little bit
more…Oh no, Mr. Strike’s adamant he wants to pay off the loan…Well, that’s
very kind of Mr. Rokeby, but Mr. Strike would rather pay. He’s hopeful he’ll be
able to clear the full amount within the next few months…”
An hour later, as Strike sat on a hard plastic chair at the Amputee Center, his
injured leg stretched in front of him, he reflected that if he had known that Robin
was going to stay, he would not have bought her the green dress. The gift would
not, he was sure, find favor with Matthew, especially once he had seen her in it,
and heard that she had previously modeled it for Strike.
With a sigh, he reached for a copy of Private Eye lying on the table beside
him. When the consultant first called him, Strike did not respond; he was
immersed in the page headed “LandryBalls,” crammed with examples of
journalistic excess relating to the case that he and Robin had solved. So many
columnists had mentioned Cain and Abel that the magazine had run a special
feature.
“Mr. Strick?” shouted the consultant, for the second time. “Mr. Cameron
Strick?”
He looked up, grinning.
“Strike,” he said clearly. “My name’s Cormoran Strike.”
“Oh, I do apologize…this way…”
As Strike limped after the doctor, a phrase floated up out of his subconscious,
a phrase he had read long before he had seen his first dead body, or marveled at a