1 The Cuckoo's Calling

4
STRIKE ARRIVED AT CHARLOTTE’S FLAT at half past nine on Friday morning. This
gave her, he reasoned, half an hour to be well clear of the place before he entered
it, assuming that she really was intending to leave, rather than lie in wait for him.
The grand and gracious white buildings that lined the wide street; the plane trees;
the butcher’s shop that might have been stuck in the 1950s; the cafés bustling
with the upper middle classes; the sleek restaurants; they had always felt slightly
unreal and stagey to Strike. Perhaps he had always known, deep down, that he
would not stay, that he did not belong.
Until the moment he unlocked the front door, he expected her to be there; yet
as soon as he stepped over the threshold, he knew that the place was empty. The
silence had that slack quality that speaks only of the indifference of uninhabited
rooms, and his footsteps sounded alien and overloud as he made his way down
the hall.
Four cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the sitting room, open for him to
inspect. Here were his cheap and serviceable belongings, heaped together, like
jumble-sale objects. He lifted a few things up to check the deeper levels, but
nothing seemed to have been smashed, ripped or covered in paint. Other people
his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and
gardens and mountain bikes and lawn mowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a
set of matchless memories.
The silent room in which he stood spoke of a confident good taste, with its
antique rug and its pale flesh-pink walls; its fine dark-wood furniture and its
overflowing bookcases. The only change he spotted since Sunday night stood on
the glass end table beside the sofa. On Sunday night there had been a picture of
himself and Charlotte, laughing on the beach at St. Mawes. Now a black-andwhite
studio portrait of Charlotte’s dead father smiled benignly at Strike from the
same silver picture frame.
Over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of an eighteen-year-old Charlotte, in oils.
It showed the face of a Florentine angel in a cloud of long dark hair. Hers was the
kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a
background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous
foreign country. From Charlotte he had learned that the kind of money he had
never known could coexist with unhappiness and savagery. Her family, for all
their gracious manners, their suavity and flair, their erudition and occasional
flamboyance, was even madder and stranger than his own. That had been a
powerful link between them, when first he and Charlotte had come together.
A strange stray thought came to him now, as he looked up at that portrait: that
this was the reason it had been painted, so that one day, its large hazel-green eyes
would watch him leave. Had Charlotte known what it would feel like, to prowl