1 The Cuckoo's Calling

she run downstairs and tell the security guard if she’d just pushed Lula over the
balcony?”
Strike did not answer directly; he seemed to be following his own train of
thought, and after a moment or two replied:
“Bristow’s fixated on the quarter of an hour after his sister went inside, after
the photographers had left and the security guard had abandoned the desk
because he was ill. That meant the lobby became briefly navigable—but how was
anyone outside the building supposed to know that Wilson had left his post? The
front door’s not made of glass.”
“Plus,” interjected Robin intelligently, “they’d have needed to know the key
code to open the front door.”
“People get slack. Unless the security people change it regularly, loads of
undesirables could have known that code. Let’s have a look down here.”
They walked in silence right to the end of Kentigern Gardens, where they
found a narrow alleyway which ran, at a slightly oblique angle, along the rear of
Landry’s block of houses. Strike was amused to note that the alley was called
Serf’s Way. Wide enough to allow a single car to pass, it had plentiful lighting
and was devoid of hiding places, with long, high, smooth walls on either side of
the cobbled passageway. They came in due course to a pair of large, electrically
operated garage doors, with an enormous PRIVATE sign affixed to the wall
beside them, which guarded the entrance to the underground cache of parking
spaces for the Kentigern Gardeners.
When he judged that they were roughly level with the back of number 18,
Strike made a leap, caught hold of the top of the wall and heaved himself up to
look into a long row of small, carefully manicured gardens. Between each patch
of smooth and well-tended lawn and the house to which it belonged was a
shadowy stairwell to basement level. Anyone wishing to climb the rear of the
house would, in Strike’s opinion, require ladders, or a partner to belay him, and
some sturdy ropes.
He let himself slide back down the wall, emitting a stifled grunt of pain as he
landed on the prosthetic leg.
“It’s nothing,” he said, when Robin made a concerned noise; she had noticed
the vestige of a limp, and wondered whether he had sprained an ankle.
The chafing on the end of the stump was not helped by hobbling off over the
cobbles. It was much harder, given the rigid construction of his false ankle, to
navigate uneven surfaces. Strike asked himself ruefully whether he had really
needed to hoist himself up on the wall at all. Robin might be a pretty girl, but she
could not hold a candle to the woman he had just left.