1 The Cuckoo's Calling

“It was just blue. Like airmail paper.”
He looked down at his watch.
“I gotta go in ten.”
“So that was the last time you ever saw Lula?”
“Yeah, it was.”
He picked at the corner of a fingernail.
“What was your first thought, when you heard she was dead?”
“I dunno,” said Kolovas-Jones, chewing at the hangnail he had been picking.
“I was fucking shocked. You don’t expect that, do you? Not when you’ve just
seen someone hours before. The press were all saying it was Duffield, because
they’d had a row in that nightclub and stuff. I thought it might’ve been him, to
tell you the truth. Bastard.”
“You knew him, did you?”
“I drove them a coupla times,” said Kolovas-Jones. A flaring of his nostrils, a
tightness around the lines of his mouth, together suggested a bad smell.
“What did you think of him?”
“I thought he was a talentless tosser.” With unexpected virtuosity, he suddenly
adopted a flat, drawling voice: “Are we gonna need him later, Lules? He’d better
wait, yeah?” said Kolovas-Jones, crackling with temper. “Never once spoke to
me directly. Ignorant, sponging piece of shit.”
Derrick said, sotto voce, “Kieran’s an actor.”
“Just bit parts,” said Kolovas-Jones. “So far.”
And he digressed into a brief exposition of the television dramas in which he
had appeared, exhibiting, in Strike’s estimation, a marked desire to be considered
more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that
unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame. To have had it so
often in the back of his car and not yet to have caught it from his passengers must
(thought Strike) have been tantalizing and, perhaps, infuriating.
“Kieran auditioned for Freddie Bestigui,” said Wilson. “Didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a lack of enthusiasm that told the outcome
plainly.
“How did that come about?” asked Strike.
“Usual way,” said Kolovas-Jones, with a hint of hauteur. “Through my agent.”