1 The Cuckoo's Calling

absurdity, and the charm for which she was celebrated (in both newspaper
obituaries and hysterical blogs) sat alongside a reputation for sudden outbursts of
temper and a dangerously short fuse. Press and public seemed to have both loved
her, and loved loathing her. One female journalist found her “strangely sweet,
possessed of an unexpected naiveté”; another, “at bottom, a calculating little diva,
shrewd and tough.”
At nine o’clock Strike walked to Chinatown and bought himself a meal; then
he returned to the office, swapped Tom Waits for Elbow, and searched out online
accounts of Evan Duffield, the man who, by common consent, even that of
Bristow, had not killed his girlfriend.
Until Kieran Kolovas-Jones had displayed professional jealousy, Strike could
not have said why Duffield was famous. He now discovered that Duffield had
been elevated from obscurity by his participation in a critically acclaimed
independent film, in which he had played a character indistinguishable from
himself: a heroin-addicted musician stealing to support his habit.
Duffield’s band had released a well-reviewed album on the back of their lead
singer’s newfound fame, and split up in considerable acrimony around the time
that he had met Lula. Like his girlfriend, Duffield was extraordinarily
photogenic, even in the unretouched long-lens photographs of him sloping along
a street in filthy clothes, even in those shots (and there were several) where he
was lunging in fury at photographers. The conjunction of these two damaged and
beautiful people seemed to have supercharged the fascination with both; each
reflecting more interest on to the other, which rebounded on themselves; it was a
kind of perpetual motion.
The death of his girlfriend had fixed Duffield more securely than ever in that
firmament of the idolized, the vilified, the deified. A certain darkness, a fatalism,
hung around him; both his most fervent admirers and his detractors seemed to
take pleasure in the idea that he had one booted foot in the afterworld already;
that there was an inevitability about his descent into despair and oblivion. He
seemed to make a veritable parade of his frailties, and Strike lingered for some
minutes over another of those tiny, jerky YouTube videos, in which Duffield,
patently stoned, talked on and on, in the voice Kolovas-Jones had so accurately
parodied, about dying being no more than checking out of the party, and making
a confused case for there being little need to cry if you had to leave early.
On the night that Lula had died, according to a multitude of sources, Duffield
had left the nightclub shortly after his girlfriend, wearing—and Strike found it
hard to see this as anything other than deliberate showmanship—a wolf’s mask.
His account of what he had got up to for the rest of the night might not have
satisfied online conspiracy theorists, but the police seemed to have been
convinced that he had had nothing to do with subsequent events at Kentigern
Gardens.