1 The Cuckoo's Calling

would be able to persuade her to talk to Strike, there was not yet a secured
interview with Tansy Bestigui.
With a faint sense of impotence, and with almost as much contempt for the
occupation as Robin’s fiancé felt for it, Strike fought off his lowering sense of
gloom by resorting to more internet searches connected with the case. He found
Kieran Kolovas-Jones online: the driver had been telling the truth about the
episode of The Bill in which he had had two lines (Gang Member Two…Kieran
Kolovas-Jones). He had a theatrical agent, too, whose website featured a small
photograph of Kieran, and a short list of credits including walk-on parts in East
Enders and Casualty. Kieran’s photograph on the Execars home page was much
larger. Here, he stood alone in a peaked hat and uniform, looking like a film star,
evidently the handsomest driver on their books.
Evening shaded into night beyond the windows; while Tom Waits growled
and moaned from the portable CD player in the corner, Strike chased the shadow
of Lula Landry across cyberspace, occasionally adding to the notes he had
already taken while speaking to Bristow, Wilson and Kolovas-Jones.
He could find no Facebook page for Landry, nor did she ever seem to have
joined Twitter. Her refusal to feed her fans’ ravenous appetite for personal
information seemed to have inspired others to fill the void. There were countless
websites dedicated to the reproduction of her pictures, and to obsessive
commentary on her life. If half of the information here was factual, Bristow had
given Strike but a partial and sanitized version of his sister’s drive towards selfdestruction,
a tendency which seemed to have revealed itself first in early
adolescence, when her adoptive father, Sir Alec Bristow, a genial-looking
bearded man who had founded his own electronics company, Albris, had dropped
dead of a heart attack. Lula had subsequently run away from two schools, and
been expelled from a third, all of them expensive private establishments. She had
slit her own wrist and been found in a pool of blood by a dormitory friend; she
had lived rough, and been tracked to a squat by the police. A fan site called
LulaMyInspirationForeva.com, run by a person of unknown sex, asserted that the
model had briefly supported herself, during this time, as a prostitute.
Then had come sectioning under the Mental Health Act, the secure ward for
young people with severe illnesses, and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Barely a
year later, while shopping in a clothing store on Oxford Street with her mother,
there had come the fairy-tale approach from a scout for a modeling agency.
Landry’s early photographs showed a sixteen-year-old with the face of
Nefertiti, who managed to project to the lens an extraordinary combination of
worldliness and vulnerability, with long thin legs like a giraffe’s and a jagged
scar running down the inside of her left arm that fashion editors seemed to have
found an interesting adjunct to her spectacular face, for it was sometimes given
prominence in photographs. Lula’s extreme beauty was on the very edge of