1 The Cuckoo's Calling

9
ON SUNDAY MORNING, WHICH WAS fine, Strike headed back to the ULU to shower.
Once again, by consciously filling out his own bulk and allowing his features to
slide, as they did naturally, into a scowl, he made himself sufficiently
intimidating to repel challenges as he marched, eyes down, past the desk. He
hung around the changing rooms, waiting for a quiet moment so that he would
not have to shower in full view of any of the changing students, for the sight of
his false leg was a distinguishing feature he did not want to impress on anybody’s
memory.
Clean and shaven, he caught the Tube to Hammersmith Broadway, enjoying
the tentative sunshine gleaming through the glass-covered shopping precinct
through which he emerged on to the street. The distant shops on King Street were
heaving with people; it might have been a Saturday. This was a bustling and
essentially soulless commercial center, and yet Strike knew it to be a bare ten
minutes’ walk to a sleepy, countrified stretch of the Thames embankment.
While he walked, traffic rumbling past him, he remembered Sundays in
Cornwall in his childhood, when everything closed down except the church and
the beach. Sunday had had a particular flavor in those days; an echoing,
whispering quiet, the gentle chink of china and the smell of gravy, the TV as dull
as the empty high street, and the relentless rush of the waves on the beach when
he and Lucy had run down on to the shingle, forced back on to primitive
resources.
His mother had once said to him: “If Joan’s right, and I end up in hell, it’ll be
eternal Sunday in bloody St. Mawes.”
Strike, who was heading away from the commercial center towards the
Thames, phoned his client as he walked.
“John Bristow?”
“Yeah, sorry to disturb you at the weekend, John…”
“Cormoran?” said Bristow, immediately friendly. “Not a problem, not a
problem at all! How did it go with Wilson?”
“Very good, very useful, thanks. I wanted to know whether you can help me
find a friend of Lula’s. It’s a girl she met in therapy. Her Christian name begins
with an R—something like Rachel or Raquelle—and she was living at the St.
Elmo hostel in Hammersmith when Lula died. Does that ring any bells?”
There was a moment’s silence. When Bristow spoke again, the disappointment
in his voice verged on annoyance.