1 The Cuckoo's Calling

felt really bad with it. So I said I’d stay on, work through the next shift. He’d
swapped with me the previous month so I could sort out a bit of fambly business.
I owed him.
“So it shouldn’ta been me there,” said Wilson, and for a moment he sat in
silence, contemplating the way things should have been.
“The other guards got on OK with Lula, did they?”
“Yeah, they’d tell yuh same as me. Nice girl.”
“Anyone else work there?”
“We gotta couple of Polish cleaners. They both got bad English. You won’t
get much outta them.”
Wilson’s testimony, Strike thought, as he scribbled into one of the SIB
notebooks he had filched on one of his last visits to Aldershot, was of an
unusually high quality: concise, precise and observant. Very few people
answered the question they had been posed; even fewer knew how to organize
their thoughts so that no follow-up questions were needed to prize information
out of them. Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s
traumatized memories; he had made himself the confidant of thugs; he had
bullied the terrified, baited the dangerous and laid traps for the cunning. None of
these skills were required with Wilson, who seemed almost wasted on a pointless
trawl through John Bristow’s paranoia.
Nevertheless, Strike had an incurable habit of thoroughness. It would no more
have occurred to him to skimp on the interview than to spend the day lying in his
underpants on his camp bed, smoking. Both by inclination and by training,
because he owed himself respect quite as much as the client, he proceeded with
the meticulousness for which, in the army, he had been both feted and detested.
“Can we back up briefly and go through the day preceding her death? What
time did you arrive for work?”
“Nine, same as always. Took over from Colin.”
“Do you keep a log of who goes in and out of the building?”
“Yeah, we sign everyone in and out, ’cept residents. There’s a book at the
desk.”
“Can you remember who went in and out that day?”
Wilson hesitated.
“John Bristow came to see his sister early that morning, didn’t he?” prompted
Strike. “But she’d told you not to let him up?”