Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

Was it convenient now? he asked himself, lying in pain that the pills had yet to touch. He glanced at the time: ten past eleven. She was clearly still awake.

He put the mobile back on the floor beside him, where it lay silently charging, and raised a large hairy arm over his eyes, blotting out even the strips of light on the ceiling cast by the street lamps through the window slats. Against his will, he saw Charlotte the way that he had laid eyes on her for the first time in his life, as she sat alone on a windowsill at a student party in Oxford. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, and nor, judging by the sideways flickering of countless male eyes, the overloud laughter and voices, the angling of extravagant gestures towards her silent figure, had any of the rest of them.

Gazing across the room, the nineteen-year-old Strike had been visited by precisely the same urge that had come over him as a child whenever snow had fallen overnight in Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted’s garden. He wanted his footsteps to be the first to make deep, dark holes in that tantalizingly smooth surface: he wanted to disturb and disrupt it.

“You’re pissed,” warned his friend, when Strike announced his intention to go and talk to her.

Strike agreed, downed the dregs of his seventh pint and strode purposefully over to the window ledge where she sat. He was vaguely aware of people nearby watching, primed, perhaps, for laughter, because he was massive, and looked like a boxing Beethoven, and had curry sauce all down his T-shirt.

She looked up at him when he reached her, with big eyes, and long dark hair, and soft, pale cleavage revealed by the gaping shirt.

Strike’s strange, nomadic childhood, with its constant uprootings and graftings on to motley groups of children and teenagers, had forged in him an advanced set of social skills; he knew how to fit in, to make people laugh, to render himself acceptable to almost anyone. That night, his tongue had become numb and rubbery. He seemed to remember swaying slightly.

“Did you want something?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled his T-shirt away from his torso and showed her the curry sauce. “What d’you reckon’s the best way to get this out?”

Against her will (he saw her trying to fight it), she giggled.

Sometime later, an Adonis called the Honorable Jago Ross, known to Strike by sight and reputation, swung into the room with a posse of equally well-bred friends, and discovered Strike and Charlotte sitting side by side on the windowsill, deep in conversation.

“You’re in the wrong fucking room, Char, darling,” Ross had said, staking out his rights by the caressing arrogance of his tone. “Ritchie’s party’s upstairs.”

“I’m not coming,” she said, turning a smiling face upon him. “I’ve got to go and help Cormoran soak his T-shirt.”

Thus had she publicly dumped her Old Harrovian boyfriend for Cormoran Strike. It had been the most glorious moment of Strike’s nineteen years: he had publicly carried off Helen of Troy right under Menelaus’s nose, and in his shock and delight he had not questioned the miracle, but simply accepted it.

Only later had he realized that what had seemed like chance, or fate, had been entirely engineered by her. She had admitted it to him months later: that she had, to punish Ross for some transgression, deliberately entered the wrong room, and waited for a man, any man, to approach her; that he, Strike, had been a mere instrument to torture Ross; that she had slept with him in the early hours of the following morning in a spirit of vengefulness and rage that he had mistaken for passion.

There, in that first night, had been everything that had subsequently broken them apart and pulled them back together: her self-destructiveness, her recklessness, her determination to hurt; her unwilling but genuine attraction to Strike, and her secure place of retreat in the cloistered world in which she had grown up, whose values she simultaneously despised and espoused. Thus had begun the relationship that had led to Strike lying here on his camp bed fifteen years later, racked with more than physical pain, and wishing that he could rid himself of her memory.

WHEN ROBIN ARRIVED NEXT MORNING, it was, for the second time, to a locked glass door. She let herself in with the spare key that Strike had now entrusted to her, approached the closed inner door and stood silent, listening. After a few seconds, she heard the faintly muffled but unmistakable sound of deep snoring.

This presented her with a delicate problem, because of their tacit agreement not to mention Strike’s camp bed, or any of the other signs of habitation lying around the place. On the other hand, Robin had something of an urgent nature to communicate to her temporary boss. She hesitated, considering her options. The easiest route would be to try and wake Strike by clattering around the outer office, thereby giving him time to organize himself and the inner room, but that might take too long: her news would not keep. Robin therefore took a deep breath and rapped on the door.

Strike woke instantly. For one disoriented moment he lay there, registering the reproachful daylight pouring through the window. Then he remembered setting down the mobile phone after reading Charlotte’s text, and knew that he had forgotten to set the alarm.

“Don’t come in!” he bellowed.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Robin called through the door.

“Yeah—yeah, that’d be great. I’ll come out there for it,” Strike added loudly, wishing, for the first time, that he had fitted a lock on the inner door. His false foot and calf was standing propped against the wall, and he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts.

Robin hurried away to fill the kettle, and Strike fought his way out of his sleeping bag. He dressed at speed, making a clumsy job of putting on the prosthesis, folding the camp bed into its corner, pushing the desk back into place. Ten minutes after she had knocked on the door, he limped into the outer office smelling strongly of deodorant, to find Robin at her desk, looking very excited about something.

“Your tea,” she said, indicating a steaming mug.

“Great, thanks. Just give me a moment,” he said, and he left to pee in the bathroom on the landing. As he zipped up his fly, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, crumpled-looking and unshaven. Not for the first time, he consoled himself that his hair looked the same whether brushed or unbrushed.

“I’ve got news,” said Robin, when he had re-entered the office through the glass door and, with reiterated thanks, picked up his mug of tea.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve found Rochelle Onifade.”

He lowered the mug.

“You’re kidding. How the hell…?”

“I saw in the file that she was supposed to attend an outpatient clinic at St. Thomas’s,” said Robin excitedly, flushed and talking fast, “so I rang up the hospital yesterday evening, pretending to be her, and I said I’d forgotten the time of my appointment, and they told me it’s at ten thirty on Thursday morning. You’ve got,” she glanced at her computer monitor, “fifty-five minutes.”

Why had he not thought to tell her to do this?

“You genius, you bloody genius…”

He had slopped hot tea over his hand, and put the mug down on her desk.

“D’you know exactly…?”

“It’s in the psychiatric unit round the back of the main building,” said Robin, exhilarated. “See, you go in off Grantley Road, there’s a second car park…”

She had turned the monitor towards him to show him the map of St. Thomas’s. He checked his wrist, but his watch was still in the inner room.

“You’ll have time if you leave now,” Robin urged him.