1 The Cuckoo's Calling

6
STRIKE HAD ONCE TRIED TO count the number of schools he had attended in his
youth, and had reached the figure of seventeen with the suspicion that he had
forgotten a couple. He did not include the brief period of supposed home
schooling which had taken place during the two months he had lived with his
mother and half-sister in a squat in Atlantic Road in Brixton. His mother’s then
boyfriend, a white Rastafarian musician who had rechristened himself Shumba,
felt that the school system reinforced patriarchal and materialistic values with
which his common-law stepchildren ought not to be tainted. The principal lesson
that Strike had learned during his two months of home-based education was that
cannabis, even if administered spiritually, could render the taker both dull and
paranoid.
He took an unnecessary detour through Brixton Market on the way to the café
where he was meeting Derrick Wilson. The fishy smell of the covered arcades;
the colorful open faces of the supermarkets, teeming with unfamiliar fruit and
vegetables from Africa and the West Indies; the halal butchers and the
hairdressers, with large pictures of ornate braids and curls, and rows and rows of
white polystyrene heads bearing wigs in the windows: all of it took Strike back
twenty-six years, to the months he had spent wandering the Brixton streets with
Lucy, his young half-sister, while his mother and Shumba lay dozily on dirty
cushions back at the squat, vaguely discussing the important spiritual concepts in
which the children ought to be instructed.
Seven-year-old Lucy had yearned for hair like the West Indian girls. On the
long drive back to St. Mawes that had terminated their Brixton life, she had
expressed a fervent desire for beaded braids from the back seat of Uncle Ted and
Aunt Joan’s Morris Minor. Strike remembered Aunt Joan’s calm agreement that
the style was very pretty, a frown line between her eyebrows reflected in the
rearview mirror. Joan had tried, with diminishing success through the years, not
to disparage their mother in front of the children. Strike had never discovered
how Uncle Ted had found out where they were living; all he knew was that he
and Lucy had let themselves into the squat one afternoon to find their mother’s
enormous brother standing in the middle of the room, threatening Shumba with a
bloody nose. Within two days, he and Lucy were back in St. Mawes, at the
primary school they attended intermittently for years, taking up with old friends
as though they had not left, and swiftly losing the accents they had adopted for
camouflage, wherever Leda had last taken them.
He had not needed the directions Derrick Wilson had given Robin, because he
knew the Phoenix Café on Coldharbour Lane of old. Occasionally Shumba and
his mother had taken them there: a tiny, brown-painted, shed-like place where
you could (if not a vegetarian, like Shumba and his mother) eat large and
delicious cooked breakfasts, with eggs and bacon piled high, and mugs of tea the
color of teak. It was almost exactly as he remembered: cozy, snug and dingy, its