The Cuckoo's Calling (7 page)

“AND YOU’RE
SURE
HE’S A
detective, are you? Because anyone can do that. Anyone can google people.”

Matthew was irritable after a long day, a disgruntled client and an unsatisfactory encounter with his new boss. He did not appreciate what struck him as naive and misplaced admiration for another man on the part of his fiancée.

“
He
wasn’t googling people,” said Robin. “
I
was the one doing the googling, while he was working on another case.”

“Well I don’t like the sound of the set-up. He’s sleeping in his office, Robin; don’t you think there’s something a bit fishy there?”

“I told you, I think he’s just split up with his partner.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet he has,” said Matthew.

Robin dropped his plate down on top of her own and stalked off into the kitchen. She was angry at Matthew, and vaguely annoyed with Strike, too. She had enjoyed tracking Lula Landry’s acquaintance across cyberspace that day; but seeing it retrospectively through Matthew’s eyes, it seemed to her that Strike had given her a pointless, time-filling job.

“Look, I’m not
saying
anything,” Matthew said, from the kitchen doorway. “I just think he sounds weird. And what’s with the little afternoon walks?”

“It wasn’t a
little afternoon walk,
Matt. We went to see the scene of the—we went to see the place where the client thinks something happened.”

“Robin, there’s no need to make such a bloody mystery about it,” Matthew laughed.

“I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement,” she snapped over her shoulder. “I can’t tell you about the case.”

“
The case.”

He gave another short, scoffing laugh.

Robin strode around the tiny kitchen, putting away ingredients, slamming cupboard doors. After a while, watching her figure as she moved around, Matthew came to feel that he might have been unreasonable. He came up behind her as she was scraping the leftovers into the bin, put his arms around her, buried his face in her neck and cupped and stroked the breast that bore the bruises Strike had accidentally inflicted, and which had irrevocably colored Matthew’s view of the man. He murmured conciliatory phrases into Robin’s honey-colored hair; but she pulled away from him to put the plates into the sink.

Robin felt as though her own worth had been impugned. Strike had seemed interested in the things she had found online. Strike expressed gratitude for her efficiency and initiative.

“How many proper interviews have you got next week?” Matthew asked, as she turned on the cold tap.

“Three,” she shouted over the noise of the gushing water, scrubbing the top plate aggressively.

She waited until he had walked away into the sitting room before turning off the tap. There was, she noticed, a fragment of frozen pea caught in the setting of her engagement ring.

STRIKE ARRIVED AT CHARLOTTE’S FLAT
at half past nine on Friday morning. This gave her, he reasoned, half an hour to be well clear of the place before he entered it, assuming that she really was intending to leave, rather than lie in wait for him. The grand and gracious white buildings that lined the wide street; the plane trees; the butcher’s shop that might have been stuck in the 1950s; the cafés bustling with the upper middle classes; the sleek restaurants; they had always felt slightly unreal and stagey to Strike. Perhaps he had always known, deep down, that he would not stay, that he did not belong.

Until the moment he unlocked the front door, he expected her to be there; yet as soon as he stepped over the threshold, he knew that the place was empty. The silence had that slack quality that speaks only of the indifference of uninhabited rooms, and his footsteps sounded alien and overloud as he made his way down the hall.

Four cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the sitting room, open for him to inspect. Here were his cheap and serviceable belongings, heaped together, like jumble-sale objects. He lifted a few things up to check the deeper levels, but nothing seemed to have been smashed, ripped or covered in paint. Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawn mowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.

The silent room in which he stood spoke of a confident good taste, with its antique rug and its pale flesh-pink walls; its fine dark-wood furniture and its overflowing bookcases. The only change he spotted since Sunday night stood on the glass end table beside the sofa. On Sunday night there had been a picture of himself and Charlotte, laughing on the beach at St. Mawes. Now a black-and-white studio portrait of Charlotte’s dead father smiled benignly at Strike from the same silver picture frame.

Over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of an eighteen-year-old Charlotte, in oils. It showed the face of a Florentine angel in a cloud of long dark hair. Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country. From Charlotte he had learned that the kind of money he had never known could coexist with unhappiness and savagery. Her family, for all their gracious manners, their suavity and flair, their erudition and occasional flamboyance, was even madder and stranger than his own. That had been a powerful link between them, when first he and Charlotte had come together.

A strange stray thought came to him now, as he looked up at that portrait: that this was the reason it had been painted, so that one day, its large hazel-green eyes would watch him leave. Had Charlotte known what it would feel like, to prowl the empty flat under the eyes of her stunning eighteen-year-old self? Had she realized that the painting would do her work better than her physical presence?

He turned away, striding through the other rooms, but she had left nothing for him to do. Every trace of him, from his tooth floss to his army boots, had been taken and deposited in the boxes. He studied the bedroom with particular attention, and the room looked back at him, with its dark floorboards, white curtains and delicate dressing table, calm and composed. The bed, like the portrait, seemed a living, breathing presence.
Remember what happened here, and what can never happen again.

He carried the four boxes one by one out on to the doorstep, on the last trip coming face to face with the smirking next-door neighbor, who was locking his own front door. He wore rugby shirts with the collars turned up, and always brayed with panting laughter at Charlotte’s lightest witticisms.

“Having a clear-out?” he asked.

Strike shut Charlotte’s door firmly on him.

He slid the door keys off his key ring in front of the hall mirror, and laid them carefully on the half-moon table, next to the bowl of potpourri. Strike’s face in the glass was creviced and dirty-looking; his right eye still puffy; yellow and mauve. A voice from seventeen years before came to him in the silence: “How the fuck did a pube-headed trog like you ever pull
that,
Strike?” And it seemed incredible that he ever had, as he stood there in the hall he would never see again.

One last moment of madness, the space between heartbeats, like the one that had sent him hurtling after her five days previously: he would stay here, after all, waiting for her to return; then cupping her perfect face in his hands and saying “Let’s try again.”

But they had already tried, again and again and again, and always, when the first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.

He closed the front door behind him for the last time. The braying neighbor had vanished. Strike lifted the four boxes down the steps on to the pavement, and waited to hail a black cab.

STRIKE HAD TOLD ROBIN THAT
he would be late into the office on her last morning. He had given her the spare key, and told her to let herself in.

She had been very slightly hurt by his casual use of the word “last.” It told her that however well they had got along, albeit in a guarded and professional way; however much more organized his office was, and how much cleaner the horrible washroom outside the glass door; however much better the bell downstairs looked, without that scrappy piece of paper taped beneath it, but a neatly typed name in the clear plastic holder (it had taken her half an hour, and cost her two broken nails, to prize the cover off); however efficient she had been at taking messages, however intelligently she had discussed the almost certainly nonexistent killer of Lula Landry, Strike had been counting down the days until he could get rid of her.

That he could not afford a temporary secretary was perfectly obvious. He had only two clients; he seemed (as Matthew kept mentioning, as though sleeping in an office was a mark of terrible depravity) to be homeless; Robin saw, of course, that from Strike’s point of view it made no sense to keep her on. But she was not looking forward to Monday. There would be a strange new office (Temporary Solutions had already telephoned through the address); a neat, bright, bustling place, no doubt, full of gossipy women as most of these offices were, all engaged in activities that meant less than nothing to her. Robin might not believe in a murderer; she knew that Strike did not believe either; but the process of proving one nonexistent fascinated her.

Robin had found the whole week more exciting than she would ever have confessed to Matthew. All of it, even calling Freddie Bestigui’s production company, BestFilms, twice a day, and receiving repeated refusals to her requests to be put through to the film producer, had given her a sense of importance she had rarely experienced during her working life. Robin was fascinated by the interior workings of other people’s minds: she had been halfway through a psychology degree when an unforeseen incident had finished her university career.

Half past ten, and Strike had still not returned to the office, but a large woman wearing a nervous smile, an orange coat and a purple knitted beret
had
arrived. This was Mrs. Hook, a name familiar to Robin because it was that of Strike’s only other client. Robin installed Mrs. Hook on the sagging sofa beside her own desk, and fetched her a cup of tea. (Acting on Robin’s awkward description of the lascivious Mr. Crowdy downstairs, Strike had bought cheap cups and a box of their own tea bags.)

“I know I’m early,” said Mrs. Hook, for the third time, taking ineffectual little sips of boiling tea. “I haven’t seen you before, are you new?”

“I’m temporary,” said Robin.

“As I expect you’ve guessed, it’s my husband,” said Mrs. Hook, not listening. “I suppose you see women like me all the time, don’t you? Wanting to know the worst. I dithered for ages and ages. But it’s best to know, isn’t it? Best to know. I thought Cormoran would be here. Is he out on another case?”

“That’s right,” said Robin, who suspected that Strike was actually doing something related to his mysterious personal life; there had been a caginess about him as he had told her he would be late.

“Do you know who his father is?” asked Mrs. Hook.

“No, I don’t,” said Robin, thinking that they were talking about the poor woman’s husband.

“Jonny Rokeby,” said Mrs. Hook, with a kind of dramatic relish.

“Jonny Roke—”

Robin caught her breath, realizing simultaneously that Mrs. Hook meant Strike, and that Strike’s massive frame was looming up outside the glass door. She could see that he was carrying something very large.

“Just one moment, Mrs. Hook,” she said.

“What?” asked Strike, peering around the edge of the cardboard box, as Robin darted out of the glass door and closed it behind her.

“Mrs. Hook’s here,” she whispered.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. She’s an hour early.”

“I know. I thought you might want to, um, organize your office a bit before you take her in there.”

Strike eased the cardboard box on to the metal floor.

“I’ve got to bring these in off the street,” he said.

“I’ll help,” offered Robin.

“No, you go and make polite conversation. She’s taking a pottery class and she thinks her husband’s sleeping with his accountant.”

Strike limped off down the stairs, leaving the box beside the glass door.

Jonny Rokeby; could it be true?

“He’s on his way, just coming,” Robin told Mrs. Hook brightly, resettling herself at her desk. “Mr. Strike told me you do pottery. I’ve always wanted to try…”

For five minutes, Robin barely listened to the exploits of the pottery class, and the sweetly understanding young man who taught them. Then the glass door opened and Strike entered, unencumbered by boxes and smiling politely at Mrs. Hook, who jumped up to greet him.

“Oh, Cormoran, your eye!” she said. “Has somebody punched you?”

“No,” said Strike. “If you’ll give me a moment, Mrs. Hook, I’ll get out your file.”

“I know I’m early, Cormoran, and I’m awfully sorry…I couldn’t sleep at all last night…”

“Let me take your cup, Mrs. Hook,” said Robin, and she successfully distracted the client from glimpsing, in the seconds it took Strike to slip through the inner door, the camp bed, the sleeping bag and the kettle.

A few minutes later, Strike re-emerged on a waft of artificial limes, and Mrs. Hook vanished, with a terrified look at Robin, into his office. The door closed behind them.

Robin sat down at her desk again. She had already opened the morning’s post. She swung side to side on her swivel chair; then she moved to the computer and casually brought up Wikipedia. Then, with a disengaged air, as though she was unaware of what her fingers were up to, she typed in the two names:
Rokeby Strike.

The entry appeared at once, headed by a black-and-white photograph of an instantly recognizable man, famous for four decades. He had a narrow Harlequin’s face and wild eyes, which were easy to caricature, the left one slightly off-kilter due to a weak divergent squint; his mouth was wide open, sweat pouring down his face, hair flying as he bellowed into a microphone.

Strike looked nothing like him; the only slight resemblance was in the inequality of the eyes, which in Strike was, after all, a transient condition.

Down the entry Robin scrolled:

until she reached
Personal Life:

A piercing scream rose in the inner office behind Robin. She jumped to her feet, her chair skittering away from her on its wheels. The scream became louder and shriller. Robin ran across the office to pull open the inner door.

Mrs. Hook, divested of orange coat and purple beret, and wearing what looked like a flowery pottery smock over jeans, had thrown herself on Strike’s chest and was punching it, all the while making a noise like a boiling kettle. On and on the one-note scream went, until it seemed that she must draw breath or suffocate.

“Mrs. Hook!” cried Robin, and she seized the woman’s flabby upper arms from behind, attempting to relieve Strike of the responsibility of fending her off. Mrs. Hook, however, was much more powerful than she looked; though she paused to breathe, she continued to punch Strike until, having no choice, he caught both her wrists and held them in midair.

At this, Mrs. Hook twisted free of his loose grip and flung herself on Robin instead, howling like a dog.

Patting the sobbing woman on the back, Robin maneuvered her, by minuscule increments, back into the outer office.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Hook, it’s all right,” she said soothingly, lowering her into the sofa. “Let me get you a cup of tea. It’s all right.”

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Hook,” said Strike formally, from the doorway into his office. “It’s never easy to get news like this.”

“I th-thought it was Valerie,” whimpered Mrs. Hook, her disheveled head in her hands, rocking backwards and forwards on the groaning sofa. “I th-thought it was Valerie, n-not my own—n-not my own
sister.”

“I’ll get tea!” whispered Robin, appalled.

She was almost out of the door with the kettle when she remembered that she had left Jonny Rokeby’s life story up on the computer monitor. It would look too odd to dart back to switch it off in the middle of this crisis, so she hurried out of the room, hoping that Strike would be too busy with Mrs. Hook to notice.

It took a further forty minutes for Mrs. Hook to drink her second cup of tea and sob her way through half the toilet roll Robin had liberated from the bathroom on the landing. At last she left, clutching the folder full of incriminating photographs, and the index detailing the time and place of their creation, her breast heaving, still mopping her eyes.

Strike waited until she was clear of the end of the street, then went out, humming cheerfully, to buy sandwiches for himself and Robin, which they enjoyed together at her desk. It was the friendliest gesture that he had made during their week together, and Robin was sure that this was because he knew that he would soon be free of her.

“You know I’m going out this afternoon to interview Derrick Wilson?” he asked.

“The security guard who had diarrhea,” said Robin. “Yes.”

“You’ll be gone when I get back, so I’ll sign your time sheet before I go. And listen, thanks for…”

Strike nodded at the now empty sofa.

“Oh, no problem. Poor woman.”

“Yeah. She’s got the good on him anyway. And,” he continued, “thanks for everything you’ve done this week.”

“It’s my job,” said Robin lightly.

“If I could afford a secretary…but I expect you’ll end up pulling down a serious salary as some fat cat’s PA.”

Robin felt obscurely offended.

“That’s not the kind of job I want,” she said.

There was a slightly strained silence.

Strike was undergoing a small internal struggle. The prospect of Robin’s desk being empty next week was a gloomy one; he found her company pleasantly undemanding, and her efficiency refreshing; but it would surely be pathetic, not to mention profligate, to pay for companionship, as though he were some rich, sickly Victorian magnate? Temporary Solutions were rapacious in their demand for commission; Robin was a luxury he could not afford. The fact that she had not questioned him about his father (for Strike had noticed Jonny Rokeby’s Wikipedia entry on the computer monitor) had impressed him further in her favor, for this showed unusual restraint, and was a standard by which he often judged new acquaintances. But it could make no difference to the cold practicalities of the situation: she had to go.

And yet he was close to feeling about her as he had felt towards a grass snake that he had succeeded in trapping in Trevaylor Woods when he was eleven, and about which he had had a long, pleading argument with his Auntie Joan: “
Please
let me keep it…
please
…”

“I’d better get going,” he said, after he had signed her time sheet, and thrown his sandwich wrappers and his empty water bottle into the bin underneath her desk. “Thanks for everything, Robin. Good luck with the job hunt.”

He took down his overcoat, and left through the glass door.

At the top of the stairs, on the precise spot where he had both nearly killed and then saved her, he came to a halt. Instinct was clawing at him like an importuning dog.

The glass door banged open behind him and he turned. Robin was pink in the face.

“Look,” she said. “We could come to a private arrangement. We could cut out Temporary Solutions, and you could pay me directly.”

He hesitated.

“They don’t like that, temping agencies. You’ll be drummed out of the service.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve got three interviews for permanent jobs next week. If you’d be OK about me taking time off to go to them—”

“Yeah, no problem,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Well then, I could stay for another week or two.”

A pause. Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.

“Yeah…all right. Well, in that case, will you try Freddie Bestigui again?”

“Yes, of course,” said Robin, masking her glee under a show of calm efficiency.

“I’ll see you Monday afternoon, then.”

It was the first grin he had ever dared give her. He supposed he ought to be annoyed with himself, and yet Strike stepped out into the cool early afternoon with no feeling of regret, but rather a curious sense of renewed optimism.