The Cuckoo's Calling

Panting and hiccoughing, he dabbed beneath his glasses with a wadded handkerchief, trying to regain control.

The office door opened and Robin backed in, carrying a tray. Bristow turned his face away, his shoulders heaving and shaking. Through the open door Strike caught another glimpse of the besuited woman in the outer office; she was now scowling at him from over the top of a copy of the Daily Express.

Robin laid out two cups, a milk jug, a sugar bowl and a plate of chocolate biscuits, none of which Strike had ever seen before, smiled in perfunctory fashion at his thanks and made to leave.

“Hang on a moment, Sandra,” said Strike. “Could you…?”

He took a piece of paper from his desk and slid it on to his knee. While Bristow made soft gulping noises, Strike wrote, very swiftly and as legibly as he could manage:

Please google Lula Landry and find out whether she was adopted, and if so, by whom. Do not discuss what you are doing with the woman outside (what is she doing here?). Write down the answers to questions above and bring them to me here, without saying what you’ve found.

He handed the piece of paper to Robin, who took it wordlessly and left the room.

“Sorry—I’m so sorry,” Bristow gasped, when the door had closed. “This is—I’m not usually—I’ve been back at work, seeing clients…” He took several deep breaths. With his pink eyes the resemblance to an albino rabbit was heightened. His right knee was still jiggling up and down.

“It’s just been a dreadful time,” he whispered, taking deep breaths. “Lula…and my mother’s dying…”

Strike’s mouth was watering at the sight of the chocolate biscuits, because he had eaten nothing for what felt like days; but he felt it would strike an unsympathetic note to start snacking while Bristow jiggled and sniffed and mopped his eyes. The pneumatic drill was still hammering like a machine gun down in the street.

“She’s given up completely since Lula died. It’s broken her. Her cancer was supposed to be in remission, but it’s come back, and they say there’s nothing more they can do. I mean, this is the second time. She had a sort of breakdown after Charlie. My father thought another child would make it better. They’d always wanted a girl. It wasn’t easy for them to be approved, but Lula was mixed race, and harder to place, so,” he finished, on a strangled sob, “they managed to get her.

“She was always b-beautiful. She was d-discovered in Oxford Street, out shopping with my mother. Taken on by Athena. It’s one of the most prestigious agencies. She was modeling f-full time by seventeen. By the time she died, she was worth around ten million. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You probably know it all. Everyone knew—thought they knew—all about Lula.”

He picked up his cup clumsily; his hands were trembling so much that coffee slopped over the edge on to his sharply pressed suit trousers.

“What exactly is it that you would like me to do for you?” Strike asked.

Bristow replaced the cup shakily on the desk, then gripped his hands together tightly.

“They say my sister killed herself. I don’t believe it.”

Strike remembered the television pictures: the black body bag on a stretcher, flickering in a storm of camera flashes as it was loaded into an ambulance, the photographers clustering around as it started to move, holding up their cameras to the dark windows, white lights bouncing off the black glass. He knew more about the death of Lula Landry than he had ever meant or wanted to know; the same would be true of virtually any sentient being in Britain. Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts of the case, you would have been unfit to sit on a jury.

“There was an inquest, wasn’t there?”

“Yes, but the detective in charge of the case was convinced from the outset that it was suicide, purely because Lula was on lithium. The things he overlooked—they’ve even spotted some of them on the internet.”

Bristow jabbed a nonsensical finger at Strike’s bare desktop, where a computer might have been expected to stand.

A perfunctory knock and the door opened; Robin strode in, handed Strike a folded note and withdrew.

“Sorry, d’you mind?” said Strike. “I’ve been waiting for this message.”

He unfolded the note against his knee, so that Bristow could not see through the back, and read: