1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“Get on with it,” said Strike. “Her, not you,” he added hastily. “It’s a woman
writing, right?”
“Yes, a Melanie Telford,” said Robin, scrolling back to the top of the screen to
reveal the head shot of a jowly middle-aged blonde. “Do you want me to skip the
rest?”
“No, no, keep going.”
Robin cleared her throat once more and continued.
“ ‘The answer, surely, is no.’ That’s the bit about aspiring models being
deterred.”
“Yeah, got that.”
“Right, well…‘A hundred years after Emmeline Pankhurst, a generation of
pubescent females seeks nothing better than to be reduced to the status of a cutout
paper doll, a flat avatar whose fictionalized adventures mask such disturbance
and distress that she threw herself from a third-story window. Appearance is all:
the designer Guy Somé was quick to inform the press that she jumped wearing
one of his dresses, which sold out in the twenty-four hours after her death. What
better advert could there be than that Lula Landry chose to meet her maker in
Somé?
“ ‘No, it is not the young woman whose loss we bemoan, for she was no more
real to most of us than the Gibson girls who dripped from Dana’s pen. What we
mourn is the physical image flickering across a multitude of red-tops and celeb
mags; an image that sold us clothes and handbags and a notion of celebrity that,
in her demise, proved to be empty and transient as a soap bubble. What we
actually miss, were we honest enough to admit it, are the entertaining antics of
that paper-thin good-time girl, whose strip-cartoon existence of drug abuse,
riotous living, fancy clothes and dangerous on-off boyfriend we can no longer
enjoy.
“ ‘Landry’s funeral was covered as lavishly as any celebrity wedding in the
tawdry magazines who feed on the famous, and whose publishers will surely
mourn her demise longer than most. We were permitted glimpses of various
celebrities in tears, but her family were given the tiniest picture of all; they were a
surprisingly unphotogenic lot, you see.
“ ‘Yet the account of one mourner genuinely touched me. In response to the
inquiry of a man who she may not have realized was a reporter, she revealed that
she had met Landry at a treatment facility, and that they had become friends. She
had taken her place in a rear pew to say farewell, and slipped as quietly away
again. She has not sold her story, unlike so many others who consorted with
Landry in life. It may tell us something touching about the real Lula Landry, that
she inspired genuine affection in an ordinary girl. As for the rest of us—’ ”