Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

Wilson stopped dead on the stair. Strike, who seemed to have anticipated something like this, stopped too; Robin careered straight into him, with a flustered apology that he cut off with a raised hand, as though, she thought, Wilson was in a trance.

“And I slipped,” said Wilson. He sounded shocked. “I forgot that. I slipped. Here. Backwards. Sat down hard. There was water. Here. Drops. Here.”

He was pointing at the stairs.

“Drops of water,” repeated Strike.

“Yeah.”

“Not snow.”

“No.”

“Not wet footprints.”

“Drops. Big drops. Here. Mi foot skidded and I slipped. And I just got up and kept running.”

“Did you tell the police about the drops of water?”

“No. I forgot. Till now. I forgot.”

Something that had bothered Strike all along had at last been made clear. He let out a great satisfied sigh and grinned. The other two stared.

THE WEEKEND STRETCHED AHEAD, WARM and empty. Strike sat at his open window again, smoking and watching the hordes of shoppers passing along Denmark Street, the case report open on his lap, the police file on the desk, making a list for himself of points still to be clarified, and sifting the morass of information he had collected.

For a while he contemplated a photograph of the front of number 18 as it had been on the morning after Lula died. There was a small, but to Strike significant, difference between the frontage as it had been then, and as it was now. From time to time he moved to the computer; once to find out the agent who represented Deeby Macc; then to look at the share price for Albris. His notebook lay open beside him at a page full of truncated sentences and questions, all in his dense, spiky handwriting. When his mobile rang, he raised it to his ear without checking who was on the other end.

“Ah, Mr. Strike,” said Peter Gillespie’s voice. “How nice of you to pick up.”

“Oh, hello, Peter,” said Strike. “Got you working weekends now, has he?”

“Some of us have no option but to work at weekends. You haven’t returned any of my weekday phone calls.”

“I’ve been busy. Working.”

“I see. Does that mean we can expect a repayment soon?”

“I expect so.”

“You expect so?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “I should be in a position to give you something in the next few weeks.”

“Mr. Strike, your attitude astounds me. You undertook to repay Mr. Rokeby monthly, and you are now in arrears to the tune of—”

“I can’t pay you what I haven’t got. If you hold tight, I should be able to give you all of it back. Maybe even in a oner.”

“I’m afraid that simply isn’t good enough. Unless you bring these repayments up to date—”

“Gillespie,” said Strike, his eyes on the bright sky beyond the window, “we both know old Jonny isn’t going to sue his one-legged war-hero son for repayment of a loan that wouldn’t keep his butler in fucking bath salts. I’ll give him back his money, with interest, within the next couple of months, and he can stick it up his arse and set fire to it, if he likes. Tell him that, from me, and now get off my fucking back.”

Strike hung up, interested to note that he had not really lost his temper at all, but still felt mildly cheerful.

He worked on, in what he had come to think of as Robin’s chair, late into the night. The last thing he did before turning in was to underline, three times, the words “Malmaison Hotel, Oxford” and to circle in heavy ink the name “J. P. Agyeman.”

The country was lumbering towards election day. Strike turned in early on Sunday and watched the day’s gaffes, counterclaims and promises being tabulated on his portable TV. There was an air of joylessness in every news report he watched. The national debt was so huge that it was difficult to comprehend. Cuts were coming, whoever won; deep, painful cuts; and sometimes, with their weasel words, the party leaders reminded Strike of the surgeons who had told him cautiously that he might experience a degree of discomfort; they who would never personally feel the pain that was about to be inflicted.

On Monday morning Strike set out for a rendezvous in Canning Town, where he was to meet Marlene Higson, Lula Landry’s biological mother. The arrangement of this interview had been fraught with difficulty. Bristow’s secretary, Alison, had telephoned Robin with Marlene Higson’s number, and Strike had called her personally. Though clearly disappointed that the stranger on the phone was not a journalist, she had initially expressed herself willing to meet Strike. She had then called the office back, twice: firstly to ask Robin whether the detective would pay her expenses to travel into the center of town, to which a negative answer was given; next, in high dudgeon, to cancel the meeting. A second call from Strike had secured a tentative agreement to meet in her local pub; then an irritable voicemail message cancelled once more.

Strike had then telephoned her for a third time, and told her that he believed his investigation to be in its final phase, after which evidence would be laid to the police, resulting, he had no doubt, in a further explosion of publicity. Now that he came to think about it, he said, if she was unable to help, it might be just as well for her to be protected from another deluge of press inquiry. Marlene Higson had immediately clamored for her right to tell everything she knew, and Strike condescended to meet her, as she had already suggested, in the beer garden of the Ordnance Arms on Monday morning.

He took the train out to Canning Town station. It was overlooked by Canary Wharf, whose sleek, futuristic buildings resembled a series of gleaming metal blocks on the horizon; their size, like that of the national debt, impossible to gauge from such a distance. But a few minutes’ walk later, he was as far from the shining, suited corporate world as it was possible to be. Crammed up alongside dockside developments where many of those financiers lived in neat designer pods, Canning Town exhaled poverty and deprivation. Strike knew it of old, because it had once been home to the old friend who had given him Brett Fearney’s location. Down Barking Road he walked, his back to Canary Wharf, past a building with a sign that advertised “Kills 4 Communities,” at which he frowned for a moment before realizing that somebody had swiped the “S.”

The Ordnance Arms sat beside the English Pawnbroking Company Ltd. It was a large, low-slung, off-white-painted pub. The interior was no-nonsense and utilitarian, with a selection of wooden clocks on a terracotta-colored wall and a lividly patterned piece of red carpet the only gesture to anything as frivolous as decoration. Otherwise, there were two large pool tables, a long and accessible bar and plenty of empty space for milling drinkers. Just now, at eleven in the morning, it was empty except for one little old man in the corner and a cheery serving girl, who addressed her only customer as “Joey” and gave Strike directions through the back.

The beer garden turned out to be the grimmest of concrete backyards, containing bins and a solitary wooden table, at which a woman was sitting on a white plastic chair, with her fat legs crossed and her cigarette held at right angles to her cheek. There was barbed wire on top of the high wall, and a plastic bag had caught in it and was rustling in the breeze. Beyond the wall there rose a vast block of flats, yellow-painted and with evidence of squalor bulging over many of the balconies.

“Mrs. Higson?”

“Call me Marlene, love.”

She looked him up and down, with a slack smile and a knowing gaze. She was wearing a pink Lycra vest top under a zip-up gray hoodie, and leggings that ended inches above her bare gray-white ankles. There were grubby flip-flops on her feet and many gold rings on her fingers; her yellow hair, with its inches of graying brown root, was pulled back into a dirty toweling scrunchie.