The Cuckoo's Calling

Bristow was barely breathing.

“I think you must have dropped the roses at her front door. You ran back out, picked them up, sprinted down the stairs and back into Flat Two, where you rammed them back into their vase. Fuck me, you were lucky. That vase got smashed accidentally by a copper, and those roses were the one clue to show that someone had been in that flat; you can’t have replaced them the way the florist had arranged them, not when you knew you had minutes to get clear of that building.

“The next bit took nerve. I doubt you expected anyone to raise the alarm straight away, but Tansy Bestigui had been on the balcony below you. You heard her screaming, and realized you had even less time to get out of there than you’d been counting on. Wilson ran out to the street to check Lula, and then, waiting at the door, staring through the peephole, you saw him run upstairs to the top floor.

“You reset the alarm, let yourself out of the flat and edge down the stairwell. The Bestiguis are bellowing at each other in their own flat. You run downstairs—heard by Freddie Bestigui, though he had other preoccupations at the time—the lobby’s empty—you run through it and out on to the street, where it’s snowing thick and fast.

“And you ran, didn’t you; hoodie up, face covered, gloved hands pumping. And at the end of the street, you saw another man running, running for his life, away from the corner where he’d just seen his sister fall to her death. You didn’t know each other. I don’t think you had a thought to spare for who he was, not then. You ran as fast as you could, in Deeby Macc’s borrowed clothes, past the CCTV camera that caught you both on film, and off down Halliwell Street, where your luck caught up with you again, and there were no more cameras.

“I expect you chucked the hoodie and the gloves in a bin and grabbed a taxi, did you? The police never bothered looking for a suited white man who was out and about that night. You went home to your mother’s, you made food for her, you changed the time on her clock and you woke her up. She’s still convinced that the two of you were talking about Charlie—nice touch, John—at the precise moment that Lula plunged to her death.

“You got away with it, John. You could have afforded to keep paying Rochelle for life. With your luck, Jonah Agyeman might even have died in Afghanistan; you’ve been getting your hopes up every time you’ve seen a picture of a black soldier in the paper, haven’t you? But you didn’t want to trust to luck. You’re a twisted, arrogant fucker, and you thought you could arrange things better.”

There was a long silence.

“No proof,” said Bristow, at last. It was so dark in the office now that he was barely more than a silhouette to Strike. “No proof at all.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong there,” said Strike. “The police should have got a warrant by now.”

“For what?” asked Bristow, and he finally felt confident enough to laugh. “To search the bins of London for a hoodie that you say was thrown away three months ago?”

“No, to look in your mother’s safe, of course.”

Strike was wondering whether he could raise the blind quickly enough. He was a long way from a light switch, and the office was very dark, but he did not want to take his eyes off Bristow’s shadowy figure. He was sure that this triple murderer would not have come unprepared.

“I’ve given them a few combinations to try,” Strike went on. “If they don’t work, I suppose they’ll have to call in an expert to open it. But if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on 030483.”

A rustle, the blur of a pale hand, and Bristow lunged. The knife point grazed Strike’s chest as he slammed Bristow sideways; the lawyer slid off the desk, rolled over and attacked again, and this time Strike fell over backwards in his chair, with Bristow on top of him, trapped between the wall and the desk.

Strike had one of Bristow’s wrists, but he couldn’t see where the knife was: all was darkness, and he threw a punch that hit Bristow hard under the chin, knocking his head back and sending his glasses flying; Strike punched again, and Bristow hit the wall; Strike tried to sit up, with Bristow’s lower body pinning his agonizing half-leg to the ground, and the knife struck him hard in the upper arm: he felt it pierce the flesh, and the flow of warm blood, and the white-hot stinging pain.

He saw Bristow raise his arm in dim silhouette against the faint window; forcing himself up against the lawyer’s weight, he deflected the second knife blow, and with an almighty effort managed to throw the lawyer off, and the prosthesis slid out of his trouser leg as he tried to pin Bristow down, with his hot blood spattering over everything, and no knowledge of where the knife was now.

The desk was knocked over by Strike’s wrestling weight, and then, as he knelt with his good knee on Bristow’s thin chest, groping with his good hand to find the knife, light split his retinas in two, and a woman was screaming.

Dazzled, Strike glimpsed the knife rising to his stomach; he seized the prosthetic leg beside him and brought it down like a club on Bristow’s face, once, twice—

“Stop! Cormoran, STOP! YOU’RE GOING TO KILL HIM!”

Strike rolled off Bristow, who was no longer moving, dropped the prosthetic leg and lay on his back, clutching his bleeding arm beside the overturned desk.

“I thought,” he panted, unable to see Robin, “I told you to go home?”

But she was already on the telephone.

“Police and ambulance!”

“And get a taxi,” Strike croaked from the floor, his throat dry from so much talking. “I’m not traveling to hospital with this piece of shit.”

He stretched out an arm and retrieved the mobile that lay several feet away. The face was smashed, but it was still recording.

Epilogue

Nihil est ab omni

Parte beatum.

Nothing is an unmixed blessing.

Horace, Odes, Book 2

Ten Days Later

THE BRITISH ARMY REQUIRES OF its soldiers a subjugation of individual needs and ties that is almost incomprehensible to the civilian mind. It recognizes virtually no claims higher than its own; and the unpredictable crises of human life—births and deaths, weddings, divorces and illness—generally cause no more deviation to the military’s plans than pebbles pinging on the underbelly of a tank. Nevertheless, there are exceptional circumstances, and it was due to one such circumstance that Lieutenant Jonah Agyeman’s second tour of duty in Afghanistan was cut short.

His presence in Britain was urgently required by the Metropolitan Police, and while the army does not generally rate the claims of the Met higher than its own, in this case it was prepared to be helpful. The circumstances surrounding the death of Agyeman’s sister were garnering international attention, and a media storm around a hitherto obscure Sapper was deemed unhelpful both to the individual and the army he served. And so Jonah was put on a plane back to Britain, where the army did its impressive best to shield him from the ravenous press.

It was assumed by considerable numbers of the news-reading public that Lieutenant Agyeman would be delighted, firstly to be home from combat, and secondly to have returned in the expectation of wealth beyond his wildest imaginings. However, the young soldier that Cormoran Strike met in the Tottenham pub one lunchtime, ten days after the arrest of his sister’s murderer, was almost truculent, and seemed still to be in a state of shock.

The two men had, for different periods of time, lived the same life, and risked the same death. It was a bond that no civilian could understand, and for half an hour they talked about nothing but the army.

“You were a Suit, yeah?” Agyeman said. “Trust a Suit to fuck up my whole life.”

Strike smiled. He saw no ingratitude in Agyeman, even though the stitches in his arm pulled painfully every time he raised his pint.

“My mother wants me to come out,” said the soldier. “She keeps saying, that’ll be one good thing to come out of this mess.”

It was the first, oblique reference to the reason they were here, and that Jonah was not where he belonged, with his regiment

, in the life he had chosen.

Then, quite suddenly, he began to talk, as though he had been waiting for Strike for months.

“She never knew my dad had another kid. He never told her. He was never even sure that Marlene woman was telling the truth about being pregnant. Right before he died, when he knew he had days left, he told me. ‘Don’t upset your mother,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you this because I’m dying, and I don’t know whether you’ve got a half-brother or sister out there.’ He said the mother had been white, and that she’d disappeared. She might have aborted it. Fuck me. If you’d known my dad. Never missed a Sunday at church. Took communion on his deathbed. I’d never expected anything like that, never.

“I was never even going to say anything to her about Dad and this woman. But then, out of the blue, I get this phone call. Thank Christ I was there, on leave. Only, Lula,” he said her name tentatively, as though he was not sure whether he had the right to it, “said she’d’ve hung up if it’d been my mum. She said she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She sounded all right.”

“I think she was,” said Strike.

“Yeah…but fuck me, it was weird. Would you believe it if some supermodel called you up and told you she was your sister?”

Strike thought of his own bizarre family history.

“Probably,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I suppose. Why would she lie? That’s what I thought, anyway. So I gave her my mobile number and we talked a few times, when she could hook up with her friend Rochelle. She had it all figured out, so the press wouldn’t find out. Suited me. I didn’t want my mother upset.”

Agyeman had pulled out a packet of Lambert and Butler cigarettes and was turning the box nervously in his fingers. They would have been bought cheap, Strike thought, with a small pang of remembrance, at the NAAFI.

“So she phones me up the day before it—it happened,” Jonah continued, “and she was begging me to come over. I’d already told her I couldn’t meet her that leave. Man, the situation was doing my head in. My sister the supermodel. Mum was worried about me leaving for Helmand. I couldn’t spring it on her, that Dad had had another kid. Not then. So I told Lula I couldn’t see her.

“She begged me to meet her before I left. She sounded upset. I said maybe I could get out later, you know, after Mum was in bed. I’d tell her I was going out for a quick drink with a mate or something. She told me to come really late, like at half one.

“So,” said Jonah, scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably, “I went. I was on the corner of her road…and I saw it happen.”

He wiped his hand across his mouth.

“I ran. I just ran. I didn’t know what the hell to think. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to have to explain anything to anyone. I knew she’d had mental problems, and I remembered how upset she’d been on the phone, and I thought, did she lure me here to see her jump?

“I couldn’t sleep. I was glad to leave, to tell you the truth. To get away from all the fucking news coverage.”

The pub buzzed around them, crowded with lunchtime customers.

“I think the reason she wanted to meet you so badly was because of what her mother had just told her,” Strike said. “Lady Bristow had taken a lot of Valium. I’m guessing she wanted to make the girl feel too bad to leave her, so she told Lula what Tony had said about John all those years before: that he pushed his younger brother Charlie into that quarry, and killed him.

“That’s why Lula was in such a state when she left her mother’s flat, and that’s why she kept trying to call her uncle and find out whether there was any truth in the story. And I think she was desperate to see you, because she wanted someone, anyone, she could love and trust. Her mother was difficult and dying, she hated her uncle, and she’d just been told her adoptive brother was a killer. She must have been desperate. And I think she was scared. The day before she died, Bristow had tried to force her to give him money. She must have been wondering what he’d do next.”

The pub clattered and rang with talk and clinking glasses, but Jonah’s voice sounded clearly over all of it.

“I’m glad you broke the bastard’s jaw.”

“And his nose,” said Strike cheerfully. “It’s lucky he’d stuck a knife in me, or I might not have got off with ‘reasonable force.’ ”

“He came armed,” said Jonah thoughtfully.

“ ’Course he did,” said Strike. “I’d had my secretary tip him off, at Rochelle’s funeral, that I was getting death threats from a nutter who wanted to slit me open. That planted the seed in his head. He thought, if it came to it, he’d try and pass off my death as the work of poor old Brian Mathers. Then, presumably, he’d have gone home, doctored his mother’s clock and tried to pull the same trick all over again. He’s not sane. Which isn’t to say he’s not a clever fucker.”

There seemed little more to say. As they left the pub, Agyeman, who had bought the drinks with nervous insistence, made what might have been a tentative offer of money to Strike, whose impecunious existence had padded out much of the media coverage. Strike cut the offer short, but he was not offended. He could see that the young Sapper was struggling to deal with the idea of his enormous new wealth; that he was buckling under the responsibility of it, the demands it made, the appeals it attracted, the decisions it entailed; that he was much more overawed than glad. There was also, of course, the horrible and ever-present knowledge of how his millions had come to him. Strike guessed that Jonah Agyeman’s thoughts were flitting wildly between his comrades back in Afghanistan, visions of sports cars and of his half-sister lying dead in the snow. Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?

“He won’t get off, will he?” asked Agyeman suddenly, as they were about to part.

“No, of course not,” said Strike. “The papers haven’t got it yet, but the police found Rochelle’s mobile phone in his mother’s safe. He didn’t dare get rid of it. He’d reset the code of the safe so that no one could get in but him: 030483. Easter Sunday, nineteen eighty-three: the day he killed my mate Charlie.”

It was Robin’s last day. Strike had invited her to come with him to meet Jonah Agyeman, whom she had done so much to find, but she had refused. Strike had the feeling that she was deliberately withdrawing from the case, from the work, from him. He had an appointment at the Amputee Center at Queen Mary’s Hospital that afternoon; she would be gone by the time he returned from Roehampton. Matthew was taking her to Yorkshire for the weekend.

As Strike limped back to the office through the continuing chaos of the building work, he wondered whether he would ever see his temporary secretary again after today, and doubted it. Not so very long ago, the impermanence of their arrangement had been the only thing that reconciled him to her presence, but now he knew that he would miss her. She had come with him in the taxi to the hospital, and wrapped her trench coat around his bleeding arm.

The explosion of publicity around Bristow’s arrest had done Strike’s business no harm at all. He might even genuinely need a secretary before long; and indeed, as he made his way painfully up the stairs to his office, he heard Robin’s voice on the telephone.

“…an appointment for Tuesday, I’m afraid, because Mr. Strike’s busy all day Monday…Yes…absolutely…I’ll put you down for eleven o’clock, then. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.”

She swung around on her swivel chair as Strike entered.

“What was Jonah like?” she demanded.

“Nice guy,” said Strike, lowering himself into the collapsed sofa. “Situation’s doing his head in. But the alternative was Bristow winding up with ten mill, so he’ll have to cope.”

“Three prospective clients phoned while you were out,” she said, “but I’m a bit worried about that last one. He could be another journalist. He was much more interested in discussing you than his own problem.”

There had been quite a few such calls. The press had seized with glee upon a story that had angles aplenty, and

everything they loved best. Strike himself had featured heavily in the coverage. The photograph they had used most, and he was glad of it, was ten years old and had been taken while he was still a Red Cap; but they had also dug out the picture of the rock star, his wife and the supergroupie.

There had been plenty written about police incompetence; Carver had been snapped hurrying down the street, his jacket flying, the sweat patches just visible on his shirt; but Wardle, handsome Wardle, who had helped Strike bring Bristow in, had so far been treated with indulgence, especially by female journalists. Mostly, however, the news media had feasted all over again on the corpse of Lula Landry; every version of the story sparkling with pictures of the dead model’s flawless face, and her lithe and sculpted body.

Robin was talking; Strike had not been listening, his attention diverted by the throbbing in his arm and leg.

“…a note of all the files and your diary. Because you’ll need someone, now, you know; you’re not going to be able to take care of all this on your own.”

“No,” he agreed, struggling to his feet; he had intended to do this later, at the moment of her departure, but now was as good a moment as any, and it made an excuse to leave the sofa, which was extremely uncomfortable. “Listen, Robin, I haven’t ever said a proper thank-you…”

“Yes you have,” she said hurriedly. “In the cab on the way to the hospital—and anyway, there’s no need. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve loved it, actually.”

He was hobbling away into the inner office, and did not hear the catch in her voice. The present was hidden at the bottom of his kitbag. It was very badly wrapped.

“Here,” he said. “This is for you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Oh,” said Robin, on a strangled note, and Strike was both touched and faintly alarmed to see tears spill down her cheeks. “You didn’t have to…”

“Open it at home,” he said, but too late; the package was literally coming apart in her hands. Something slithered, poison-green, out of the split in the paper, on to the desk in front of her. She gasped.