1 The Cuckoo's Calling

He felt his mobile phone vibrate in his trouser pocket, and drew it out. The
sight of Charlotte’s name attached to a new text caused a surge of adrenalin
through his body, as though he had just sighted a crouching beast of prey.
I will be out on Friday morning between 9 and 12 if you want to collect
your things.
“What?” He had the impression that Robin had just spoken.
“I said, there’s a horrible piece here about her birth mother.”
“OK. Read it out.”
He slid his mobile back into his pocket. As he bent his large head again over
Mrs. Hook’s file, his thoughts seemed to reverberate as though a gong had been
struck inside his skull.
Charlotte was behaving with sinister reasonableness; feigning adult calm. She
had taken their endlessly elaborate duel to a new level, never before reached or
tested: “Now let’s do it like grown-ups.” Perhaps a knife would plunge between
his shoulder blades as he walked through the front door of her flat; perhaps he
would walk into the bedroom to discover her corpse, wrists slit, lying in a puddle
of congealing blood in front of the fireplace.
Robin’s voice was like the background drone of a vacuum cleaner. With an
effort, he refocused his attention.
“ ‘…sold the romantic story of her liaison with a young black man to as many
tabloid journalists as were prepared to pay. There is nothing romantic, however,
about Marlene Higson’s story as it is remembered by her old neighbors.
“ ‘ “She was turning tricks,” says Vivian Cranfield, who lived in the flat above
Higson’s at the time she fell pregnant with Landry. “There were men coming in
and out of her place every hour of the day and night. She never knew who that
baby’s father was, it could have been any of them. She never wanted the baby. I
can still remember her out in the hall, crying, on her own, while her mum was
busy with a punter. Tiny little thing in her nappy, hardly walking…someone must
have called Social Services, and not before time. Best thing that ever happened to
that girl, getting adopted.”
“ ‘The truth will, no doubt, shock Landry, who has talked at length in the press
about her reunion with her long-lost birth mother…’—this was written,”
explained Robin, “before Lula died.”
“Yeah,” said Strike, closing the folder abruptly. “D’ you fancy a walk?”