1 The Cuckoo's Calling

And I bet you’ve paid him to do it, Strike thought, noting the security guard’s
telephone number beneath these concluding words.
He laid down the pen with which he had been intending to add his own notes,
and clipped Bristow’s jottings into the file. Then he turned off the desk lamp and
limped out to pee in the toilet on the landing. After brushing his teeth over the
cracked basin, he locked the glass door, set his alarm clock and undressed.
By the neon glow of the street lamp outside, Strike undid the straps of his
prosthetic, easing it from the aching stump, removing the gel liner that had
become an inadequate cushion against pain. He laid the false leg beside his
recharging mobile phone, maneuvered himself into his sleeping bag and lay with
his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. Now, as he had feared, the
leaden fatigue of the body was not enough to still the misfiring mind. The old
infection was active again; tormenting him, dragging at him.
What would she be doing now?
Yesterday evening, in a parallel universe, he had lived in a beautiful apartment
in a most desirable part of London, with a woman who made every man who laid
eyes on her treat Strike with a kind of incredulous envy.
“Why don’t you just move in with me? Oh, for God’s sake, Bluey, doesn’t it
make sense? Why not?”
He had known, from the very first, that it was a mistake. They had tried it
before, and each time it had been more calamitous than the last.
“We’re engaged, for God’s sake, why won’t you live with me?”
She had said things that were supposed to be proofs that, in the process of
almost losing him forever, she had been as irrevocably changed as he had, with
his one and a half legs.
“I don’t need a ring. Don’t be ridiculous, Bluey. You need all your money for
the new business.”
He closed his eyes. There could be no going back from this morning. She had
lied once too often, about something too serious. But he went over it all again,
like a sum he had long since solved, afraid he had made some elementary
mistake. Painstakingly he added together the constantly shifting dates, the refusal
to check with chemist or doctor, the fury with which she had countered any
request for clarification, and then the sudden announcement that it was over, with
never a shred of proof that it had been real. Along with every other suspicious
circumstance, there was his hard-won knowledge of her mythomania, her need to
provoke, to taunt, to test.