Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling

Strike allowed his aching body to float in the water. The racing students were still thrashing their way up and down the fast lane.

Strike knew Charlotte. She was waiting for him to rescue her. It was the final, cruelest test.

He did not swim back down the pool, but hopped sideways through the water, using his arms to grip the long side of the pool as he had done during physiotherapy in the hospital.

The second shower was more pleasurable than the first; he made the water as hot as he could stand, lathered himself all over, then turned the dial to cold to rinse himself.

The prosthesis reattached, he shaved over a sink with a towel tied around his waist, then dressed with unusual care. He had never worn the most expensive suit and shirt that he owned. They had been gifts from Charlotte on his last birthday: raiment suitable for her fiancé; he remembered her beaming at him as he stared at his unfamiliarly well-styled self in a full-length mirror. The suit and shirt had hung in their carry case ever since, because he and Charlotte had not gone out much after last November; because his birthday had been the last truly happy day they had spent together. Soon afterwards, the relationship had begun to stagger back into the old familiar grievances, into the same mire in which it had foundered before, but which, this time, they had sworn to avoid.

He might have incinerated the suit. Instead, in a spirit of defiance, he chose to wear it, to strip it of its associations and render it mere pieces of cloth. The tailoring of the jacket made him look slimmer and fitter. He left the white shirt open at the throat.

Strike had had a reputation, in the army, for being able to bounce back from excessive alcohol consumption with unusual speed. The man staring at him out of the small mirror was pale, with purple shadows under his eyes, yet in the sharp Italian suit he looked better than he had done in weeks. His black eye had vanished at last, and his scratches had healed.

A cautiously light meal, copious amounts of water, another evacuatory trip to the restaurant bathroom, more painkillers; then, at five o’clock, a prompt arrival at number 1, Arlington Place.

The door was answered, after his second knock, by a cross-looking woman in black-framed glasses and a short gray bob. She let him in with an appearance of reluctance, then walked briskly away across a stone-floored hall which incorporated a magnificent staircase with a wrought-iron banister, calling “Guy! Somebody Strike?”

There were rooms on both sides of the hall. To the left, a small knot of people, all of whom seemed to be dressed in black, were staring in the direction of some powerful light source that Strike could not see, but which illuminated their rapt faces.

Somé appeared, striding through this door into the hall. He too was wearing glasses, which made him look older; his jeans were baggy and ripped and his white T-shirt was emblazoned with an eye that appeared to be weeping glittering blood, which on closer examination proved to be red sequins.

“You’ll have to wait,” he said curtly. “Bryony’s busy and Ciara’s going to be hours. You can park yourself in there if you want,” he pointed towards the right-hand room, where the edge of a tray-laden table was visible, “or you can stand around and watch like these useless fuckers,” he went on, suddenly raising his voice and glaring at the huddle of elegant young men and women who were staring towards the light source. They dispersed at once, without protest, some of them crossing the hall into the room opposite.

“Better suit, by the way,” Somé added, with a flash of his old archness. He marched back into the room from which he had come.

Strike followed the designer, and took up the space vacated by the roughly dispatched onlookers. The room was long and almost bare, but its ornate cornices, pale blank walls and curtainless windows gave it an atmosphere of mournful grandeur. A further group of people, including a long-haired male photographer bent over his camera, stood between Strike and the scene at the far end of the room, which was dazzlingly illuminated by a series of arc lights and light screens. Here was an artful arrangement of tattered old chairs, one on its side, and three models. They were a breed apart, with faces and bodies in rare proportions that fell precisely between the categories of strange and impressive. Fine-boned and recklessly slim, they had been chosen, Strike assumed, for the dramatic contrast in their coloring and features. Sitting like Christine Keeler on a back-to-front chair, long legs splayed in spray-on white leggings, but apparently naked from the waist up, was a black girl as dark-skinned as Somé himself, with an Afro and slanting, seductive eyes. Standing over her in a white vest decorated in chains, which just covered her pubis, was a Eurasian beauty with flat black hair cut into an asymmetric fringe. To one side, leaning alone and sideways on the back of another chair, was Ciara Porter; alabaster fair, with long baby-blonde hair, wearing a white semitransparent jumpsuit through which her pale, pointed nipples were clearly visible.

The makeup artist, almost as tall and thin as the models, was bending over the black girl, pressing a pad into the sides of her nose. The three models waited silently in position, still as portraits, all three faces blank and empty, waiting to be called to attention. The other people in the room (the photographer appeared to have two assistants; Somé, now biting his fingernails on the sidelines, was accompanied by the cross-looking woman in glasses) all spoke in low mutters, as though frightened of disturbing some delicate equilibrium.

At last the makeup artist joined Somé, who talked inaudibly and rapidly to her, gesticulating; she stepped back into the bright light and, without speaking to the model, ruffled and rearranged Ciara Porter’s long mane of hair; Ciara showed no sign that she knew she was being touched, but waited in patient silence. Bryony retreated into the shadows once more, and asked Somé something; he responded with a shrug and gave her some inaudible instruction that had her look around until her eyes rested on Strike.

They met at the foot of the magnificent staircase.

“Hi,” she whispered. “Let’s go through here.”

She led him across the hall into the opposite room, which was slightly smaller than the first, and dominated by the large table covered with buffet-style food. Several long, wheeled clothing racks, jammed with sequined, ruffled and feathered creations arranged according to color, stood in front of a marble fireplace. The displaced onlookers, all of them in their twenties, were gathered in here; talking quietly, picking in desultory fashion at the half-empty platters of mozzarella and Parma ham and talking into, or playing with, their phones. Several of them subjected Strike to appraising looks as he followed Bryony into a small back room which had been turned into a makeshift makeup station.

Two tables with big portable mirrors stood in front of the large single window, which looked out on to a spruce garden. The black plastic boxes standing around reminded Strike of those his Uncle Ted had taken fly-fishing, except that Bryony’s drawers were crammed with colored powders and paints; tubes and brushes lay lined up on towels spread across the table tops.

“Hi,” she said, in a normal voice. “ God. Talk about cutting the tension with a knife, eh? Guy’s always a perfectionist, but this is his first proper shoot since Lula died, so he’s, you know, seriously uptight.”

She had dark, choppy hair; her skin was sallow, her features, though large, were attractive. She was wearing tight jeans on long, slightly bandy legs, a black vest, several fine gold chains around her neck, rings on her fingers and thumbs, and also what looked like black leather ballet shoes. This kind of footwear always had a slightly anaphrodisiac effect on Strike, because it reminded him of the fold-up slippers his Aunt Joan used to carry in her handbag, and therefore of bunions and corns.