1 The Cuckoo's Calling

8
THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE WOULD be sharing his office again on Monday added
piquancy to Strike’s weekend solitude, rendering it less irksome, more valuable.
The camp bed could stay out; the door between inner and outer offices could
remain open; he was able to attend to bodily functions without fear of causing
offense. Sick of the smell of artificial limes, he managed to force open the
painted-shut window behind his desk, which allowed a cold, clean breeze to wipe
the fusty corners of the two small rooms. Avoiding every CD, every track, that
transported him back to those excruciating, exhilarating periods he had shared
with Charlotte, he selected Tom Waits to play loudly on the small CD player he
had thought he would never see again, and which he had found at the bottom of
one of the boxes he had brought from Charlotte’s. He busied himself setting up
his portable television, with its paltry indoor aerial; he loaded his worn clothes
into a black bin bag and walked to a launderette half a mile away; back at the
office, he hung up his shirts and underwear on a rope he slung across one side of
the inner office, then watched the three o’clock match between Arsenal and
Spurs.
Through all these mundane acts, he felt as though he was accompanied by the
specter that had haunted him during his months in hospital. It lurked in the
corners of his shabby office; he could hear it whispering to him whenever his
attention on the task in hand grew slack. It urged him to consider how far he had
fallen; his age; his penury; his shattered love life; his homelessness. Thirty-five, it
whispered, and nothing to show for all your years of graft except a few
cardboard boxes and a massive debt. The specter directed his eyes to cans of
beer in the supermarket, where he bought more Pot Noodles; it mocked him as he
ironed shirts on the floor. As the day wore on, it jeered at him for his selfimposed
habit of smoking outside in the street, as though he were still in the
army, as though this petty self-discipline could impose form and order on the
amorphous, disastrous present. He began to smoke at his desk, with the butts
mounting in a cheap tin ashtray he had swiped, long ago, from a bar in Germany.
But he had a job, he kept reminding himself; a paid job. Arsenal beat Spurs,
and Strike was cheered; he turned off the television and, defying the specter,
moved straight to his desk and resumed work.
At liberty, now, to collect and collate evidence in whatever way he chose,
Strike continued to conform to the protocols of the Criminal Procedure and
Investigation Act. The fact that he believed himself to be hunting a figment of
John Bristow’s disturbed imagination made no difference to the thoroughness
and accuracy with which he now wrote up the notes he had made during his
interviews with Bristow, Wilson and Kolovas-Jones.
Lucy telephoned him at six in the evening, while he was hard at work. Though
his sister was younger than Strike by two years, she seemed to feel herself older.