The Cuckoo's Calling

Alternatively, of course, Strike had gone to Charlotte and she had turned him away. In that case, the matter of his current whereabouts became a matter of more pressing, less personal concern. What if he had gone out, unchecked and unprotected, hell-bent on intoxication again? Robin’s busy fingers slowed and stopped, mid-sentence. She swiveled on her computer chair to look at the silent office telephone.

She might well be the only person who knew that Cormoran Strike was not where he was supposed to be. Perhaps she ought to call him on his mobile? And if he did not pick up? How many hours ought she to let elapse before contacting the police? The idea of ringing Matthew at his office and asking his advice came to her, only to be swatted away.

She and Matthew had rowed when Robin arrived home, very late, after walking a drunken Strike back to the office from the Tottenham. Matthew had told her yet again that she was naive, impressionable and a sucker for a hard-luck story; that Strike was after a secretary on the cheap, and using emotional blackmail to achieve his ends; that there was probably no Charlotte at all, that it was all an extravagant ploy to engage Robin’s sympathy and services. Then Robin had lost her temper, and told Matthew that if anybody was blackmailing her it was he, with his constant harping on the money she ought to be bringing in, and his insinuation that she was not pulling her weight. Hadn’t he noticed that she was enjoying working for Strike; hadn’t it crossed his insensitive, obtuse accountant’s mind that she might be dreading the tedious bloody job in human resources? Matthew had been aghast, and then (though reserving the right to deplore Strike’s behavior) apologetic; but Robin, usually conciliatory and amiable, had remained aloof and angry. The truce effected the following morning had prickled with antagonism, mainly Robin’s.

Now, in the silence, watching the telephone, some of her anger at Matthew spilled over on to Strike. Where was he? What was he doing? Why was he acting up to Matthew’s accusations of irresponsibility? She was here, holding the fort, and he was presumably off chasing his ex-fiancée, and never mind their business…

…his business…

Footsteps on the stairwell: Robin thought she recognized the very slight unevenness in Strike’s tread. She waited, glaring towards the stairs, until she was sure that the footfalls were proceeding beyond the first landing; then she turned her chair resolutely back to face the monitor and began pounding at the keys again, while her heart raced.

“Morning.”

“Hi.”

She accorded Strike a fleeting glance while continuing to type. He looked tired, unshaven and unnaturally well dressed. She was instantly confirmed in her view that he had attempted a reconciliation with Charlotte; by the looks of it, successfully. The next two sentences were pockmarked with typos.

“How’re things?” asked Strike, noting Robin’s clench-jawed profile, her cold demeanor.

“Fine,” said Robin.

She now intended to lay her perfectly typed report in front of him, and then, with icy calm, discuss the arrangements for her departure. She might suggest that he hire another temp this week, so that she could instruct her replacement in the day-to-day management of the office before she left.

Strike, whose run of appalling luck had been broken in fabulous style just a few hours previously, and who was feeling as close to buoyant as he had been for many months, had been looking forward to seeing his secretary. He had no intention of regaling her with an account of his night’s activities (or at least, not those that had done so much to restore his battered ego), for he was instinctively close-lipped about such matters, and he was hoping to shore up as much as remained of the boundaries that had been splintered by his copious consumption of Doom Bar. He had, however, been planning an eloquent speech of apology for his excesses of two nights before, an avowal of gratitude, and an exposition of all the interesting conclusions he had drawn from yesterday’s interviews.

“Fancy a cup of tea?”

“No thanks.”

He looked at his watch.

“I’m only eleven minutes late.”

“It’s up to you when you arrive. I mean,” she attempted to backtrack, for her tone had been too obviously hostile, “it’s none of my business what you—when you get here.”

From having mentally rehearsed a number of soothing and magnanimous responses to Strike’s imagined apologies for his drunken behavior of forty-eight hours previously, she now felt that his attitude was distastefully free of shame or remorse.

Strike busied himself with kettle and cups, and a few minutes later set down a mug of steaming tea beside her.

“I said I didn’t—”

“Could you leave that important document for a minute while I say something to you?”

She saved the report with several thumps of the keys and turned to face him, her arms folded across her chest. Strike sat down on the old sofa.

“I wanted to say sorry about the night before last.”

“There’s no need,” she said, in a small, tight voice.

“Yeah, there is. I can’t remember much of what I did. I hope I wasn’t obnoxious.”

“You weren’t.”

“You probably got the gist. My ex-fiancée’s just got engaged to an old boyfriend. It took her three weeks after we split to get another ring on her finger. That’s just a figure of speech; I never actually bought her a ring; I never had the money.”

Robin gathered, from his tone, that there had been no reconciliation; but in that case, where had he spent the night? She unfolded her arms and unthinkingly picked up her tea.

“It wasn’t your responsibility to come and find me like that, but you probably stopped me collapsing in a gutter or punching someone, so thanks very much.”

“No problem,” said Robin.

“And thanks for the Alka-Seltzer,” said Strike.

“Did it help?” asked Robin, stiffly.

“I nearly puked all over this,” said Strike, dealing the sagging sofa a gentle punch with his fist, “but once it kicked in, it helped a lot.”

Robin laughed, and Strike remembered, for the first time, the note she had pushed under the door while he slept, and the excuse she had given for her tactful absence.

“Right, well, I’ve been looking forward to hearing how you got on yesterday,” he lied. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

Robin expanded like a water blossom.

“I was just typing it up…”

“Let’s have it verbally, and you can put it into the file later,” said Strike, with the mental reservation that it would be easy to remove if useless.

“OK,” said Robin, both excited and nervous. “Well, like I said in my note, I saw that you wanted to look into Professor Agyeman, and the Malmaison Hotel in Oxford.”

Strike nodded, grateful for the reminder, because he had not been able to remember the details of the note, read once in the depths of his blinding hangover.

“So,” said Robin, a little breathlessly, “first of all I went along to Russell Square, to SOAS; the School of Oriental and African Studies. That’s what your notes meant, isn’t it?” she added. “I checked a map: it’s walking distance from the British Museum. Isn’t that what all those scribbles meant?”

Strike nodded again.

“Well, I went in there and pretended I was writing a dissertation on African politics, and I wanted some information on Professor Agyeman. I ended up speaking to this really helpful secretary in the politics department, who’d actually worked for him, and she gave me loads of information on him, including a bibliography and a brief biography. He studied at SOAS as an undergraduate.”

“He did?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “And I got a picture.”

From inside the notebook she pulled out a photocopy, and passed it across to Strike.

He saw a black man with a long, high-cheekboned face; close-cropped graying hair and beard and gold-rimmed glasses supported by overlarge ears. He stared at it for several long moments, and when at last he spoke, he said:



; “Christ.”

Robin waited, elated.

“Christ,” said Strike again. “When did he die?”

“Five years ago. The secretary got upset talking about it. She said he was so clever, and the nicest, kindest man. A committed Christian.”

“Any family?”

“Yes. He left a widow and a son.”

“A son,” repeated Strike.

“Yes,” said Robin. “He’s in the army.”

“In the army,” said Strike, her deep and doleful echo. “Don’t tell me.”

“He’s in Afghanistan.”

Strike got up and started pacing up and down, the picture of Professor Josiah Agyeman in his hand.

“Didn’t get a regiment, did you? Not that it matters. I can find out,” he said.

“I did ask,” said Robin, consulting her notes, “but I don’t really understand—is there a regiment called the Sappers or some—”

“Royal Engineers,” said Strike. “I can check up on all that.”

He stopped beside Robin’s desk, and stared again at the face of Professor Josiah Agyeman.

“He was from Ghana originally,” she said. “But the family lived in Clerkenwell until he died.”

Strike handed her back the picture.

“Don’t lose that. You’ve done bloody well, Robin.”

“That’s not all,” she said, flushed, excited and trying to keep from smiling. “I took the train out to Oxford in the afternoon, to the Malmaison. Do you know, they’ve made a hotel out of an old prison?”

“Really?” said Strike, sinking back on to the sofa.

“Yes. It’s quite nice, actually. Well, anyway, I thought I’d pretend to be Alison and check whether Tony Landry had left something there or something…”

Strike sipped his tea, thinking that it was highly implausible that a secretary would be dispatched in person for such an inquiry three months after the event.

“Anyway, that was a mistake.”

“Really?” he said, his tone carefully neutral.

“Yes, because Alison actually did go to the Malmaison on the seventh, to try and find Tony Landry. It was incredibly embarrassing, because one of the girls on reception had been there that day, and she remembered her.”

Strike lowered his mug.

“Now that,” he said, “is very interesting indeed.”

“I know,” said Robin excitedly. “So then I had to think really fast.”

“Did you tell them your name was Annabel?”

“No,” she said, on a half-laugh. “I said, well, OK then, I’ll tell the truth, I’m his girlfriend. And I cried a bit.”

“You cried?”

“It wasn’t actually that hard,” said Robin, with an air of surprise. “I got right into character. I said I thought he was having an affair.”

“Not with Alison? If they’ve seen her, they wouldn’t believe that…”

“No, but I said I didn’t think he’d really been at the hotel at all…Anyway, I made a bit of a scene and the girl who’d spoken to Alison took me aside and tried to calm me down; she said they couldn’t give out information about people without a good reason, they had a policy, blah blah…you know. But just to stop me crying, in the end she told me that he had checked in on the evening of the sixth, and checked out on the morning of the eighth. He made a fuss about being given the wrong newspaper while he was checking out, that’s why she remembered. So he was definitely there. I even asked her a bit, you know, hysterically, how she knew it was him, and she described him to a T. I know what he looks like,” she added, before Strike could ask. “I checked before I left; his picture’s on the Landry, May, Patterson website.”

“You’re brilliant,” said Strike, “and this is all bloody fishy. What did she tell you about Alison?”

“That she arrived and asked to see him, but he wasn’t there. They confirmed that he was staying with them, though. And then she left.”

“Very odd. She should have known he was at the conference; why didn’t she go there first?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did this helpful hotel employee say she’d seen him at any times other than check-in and check-out?”

“No,” said Robin. “But we know he went to the conference, don’t we? I checked that, remember?”

“We know he signed in, and probably picked up a name tag. And then he drove back to Chelsea to see his sister, Lady Bristow. Why?”

“Well…she was ill.”

“Was she? She’d just had an operation that was supposed to cure her.”

“A hysterectomy,” said Robin. “I don’t imagine you’d feel wonderful after that.”

“So we’ve got a man who doesn’t like his sister very much—I’ve had that from his own lips—who believes she’s just had a life-saving operation and knows she’s got two of her children in attendance. Why the urgency to see her?”

“Well,” said Robin, with less certainty, “I suppose…she’d just got out of hospital…”

“Which he presumably knew was going to happen before he drove off to Oxford. So why not stay in town, visit her if he felt that strongly about it, and then head out to the afternoon session of the conference? Why drive fifty-odd miles, stay overnight in this plush prison, go to the conference, sign in and then double back to town?”

“Maybe he got a call saying she was feeling bad, something like that? Maybe John Bristow rang him and asked him to come?”

“Bristow’s never mentioned asking his uncle to drop in. I’d say they were on bad terms at the time. They’re both shifty about that visit of Landry’s. Neither of them likes talking about it.”

Strike stood up and began to walk up and down, limping slightly, barely noticing the pain in his leg.

“No,” he said, “Bristow asking his sister, who by all accounts was the apple of his mother’s eye, to drop by—that makes sense. Asking his mother’s brother, who was out of town and by no means her biggest fan, to make a massive detour to see her…that doesn’t smell right. And now we find out that Alison went looking for Landry at his hotel in Oxford. It was a workday. Was she checking up on him on her own account, or did someone send her?”

The telephone rang. Robin picked up the receiver. To Strike’s surprise, she immediately affected a very stilted Australian accent.

“Oy’m sorry, shiz not here…Naoh…Naoh…I dunnaoh where she iz…Naoh…My nem’s Annabel…”

Strike laughed quietly. Robin threw him a look of mock anguish. After nearly a minute of strangled Australian, she hung up.

“Temporary Solutions,” she said.

“I’m getting through a lot of Annabels. That one sounded more South African than Australian.”

“Now I want to hear what happened to you yesterday,” said Robin, unable to conceal her impatience any longer. “Did you meet Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter?”

Strike told her everything that had happened, omitting only the aftermath of his excursion to Evan Duffield’s flat. He placed particular emphasis on Bryony Radford’s insistence that it was dyslexia that had caused her to listen to Ursula May’s voicemail messages; on Ciara Porter’s continuing assertion that Lula had told her she would leave everything to her brother; on Evan Duffield’s annoyance that Lula had kept checking the time while she was in Uzi; and on the threatening email that Tansy Bestigui had sent her estranged husband.

“So where was Tansy?” asked Robin, who had listened to every word of Strike’s story with gratifying attention. “If we can just find out…”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I know where she was,” said Strike. “It’s getting her to admit it, when it might blow her chances of a multimillion-pound settlement from Freddie, that’s going to be the difficult bit. You’ll be able to work it out too, if you just look through the police photographs again.”

“But…”

“Have a look at the pictures of the front of the building on the morning Lula died, and then think about how it was when we saw it. It’ll be good for your dete

ctive training.”

Robin experienced a great surge of excitement and happiness, immediately tempered by a cold pang of regret, because she would soon be leaving for human resources.

“I need to change,” said Strike, standing up. “Please will you try Freddie Bestigui again for me?”

He disappeared into the inner room, closed the door behind him and swapped his lucky suit (as he thought he might henceforth call it) for an old and comfortable shirt, and a roomier pair of trousers. When he passed Robin’s desk on the way to the bathroom, she was on the telephone, wearing that expression of disinterested attentiveness that betokens a person on hold. Strike cleaned his teeth in the cracked basin, reflecting on how much easier life with Robin would be, now that he had tacitly admitted that he lived in the office, and returned to find her off the telephone and looking exasperated.

“I don’t think they’re even bothering to take my messages now,” she told Strike. “They say he’s out at Pinewood Studios and can’t be disturbed.”

“Ah well, at least we know he’s back in the country,” said Strike.

He took the interim report out of the filing cabinet, sank back down on the sofa and began to add his notes of yesterday’s conversations, in silence. Robin watched out of the corner of her eye, fascinated by the meticulousness with which Strike tabulated his findings, making a precise record of how, where and from whom he had gained each piece of information.

“I suppose,” she asked, after a long stretch of silence, during which she had divided her time between covert observation of Strike at work, and examination of a photograph of the front of number 18, Kentigern Gardens on Google Earth, “you have to be very careful, in case you forget anything?”

“It’s not only that,” said Strike, still writing, and not looking up. “You don’t want to give defending counsel any footholds.”

He spoke so calmly, so reasonably that Robin considered the implication of his words for several moments, in case she could have misunderstood.