1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Don’t you dare fucking investigate me. Don’t you dare treat me like some
drugged-up squaddie. I am not a fucking case to be solved; you’re supposed to
love me and you won’t take my word even on this…”
But the lies she told were woven into the fabric of her being, her life; so that to
live with her and love her was to become slowly enmeshed by them, to wrestle
her for the truth, to struggle to maintain a foothold on reality. How could it have
happened, that he, who from his most extreme youth had needed to investigate, to
know for sure, to winkle the truth out of the smallest conundrums, could have
fallen in love so hard, and for so long, with a girl who spun lies as easily as other
women breathed?
“It’s over,” he told himself. “It had to happen.”
But he had not wanted to tell Anstis, and he could not face telling anyone else,
not yet. There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to
their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to
condole and to help. The price of all of those comfortable beds and home-cooked
meals, however, would be to sit at kitchen tables, once the clean-pajamaed
children were in bed, and relive the filthy final battle with Charlotte, submitting
to the outraged sympathy and pity of his friends’ girlfriends and wives. To this he
preferred grim solitude, a Pot Noodle and a sleeping bag.
He could still feel the missing foot, ripped from his leg two and a half years
before. It was there, under the sleeping bag; he could flex the vanished toes if he
wanted to. Exhausted as Strike was, it took a while for him to fall asleep, and
when he did, Charlotte wove in and out of every dream, gorgeous, vituperative
and haunted.