1 The Cuckoo's Calling

For five minutes, Robin barely listened to the exploits of the pottery class, and
the sweetly understanding young man who taught them. Then the glass door
opened and Strike entered, unencumbered by boxes and smiling politely at Mrs.
Hook, who jumped up to greet him.
“Oh, Cormoran, your eye!” she said. “Has somebody punched you?”
“No,” said Strike. “If you’ll give me a moment, Mrs. Hook, I’ll get out your
file.”
“I know I’m early, Cormoran, and I’m awfully sorry…I couldn’t sleep at all
last night…”
“Let me take your cup, Mrs. Hook,” said Robin, and she successfully
distracted the client from glimpsing, in the seconds it took Strike to slip through
the inner door, the camp bed, the sleeping bag and the kettle.
A few minutes later, Strike re-emerged on a waft of artificial limes, and Mrs.
Hook vanished, with a terrified look at Robin, into his office. The door closed
behind them.
Robin sat down at her desk again. She had already opened the morning’s post.
She swung side to side on her swivel chair; then she moved to the computer and
casually brought up Wikipedia. Then, with a disengaged air, as though she was
unaware of what her fingers were up to, she typed in the two names: Rokeby
Strike.
The entry appeared at once, headed by a black-and-white photograph of an
instantly recognizable man, famous for four decades. He had a narrow
Harlequin’s face and wild eyes, which were easy to caricature, the left one
slightly off-kilter due to a weak divergent squint; his mouth was wide open,
sweat pouring down his face, hair flying as he bellowed into a microphone.
Jonathan Leonard “Jonny” Rokeby, b. August 1st 1948, is the lead
singer of 70s rock band The Deadbeats, member of the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame, multi–Grammy Award winner…
Strike looked nothing like him; the only slight resemblance was in the inequality
of the eyes, which in Strike was, after all, a transient condition.
Down the entry Robin scrolled:
…multi-platinum album Hold It Back in 1975. A record-breaking tour of
America was interrupted by a drugs bust in LA and the arrest of new
guitarist David Carr, with whom…
until she reached Personal Life: