The Cuckoo's Calling

Strike.”
    “Oh,” she said again. “OK.”
    She disappeared the same way she had come. Strike used the wait to call the mobile telephone number of Rochelle Onifade, as he had been doing ten times a day since he had met her. There was no response.
    Another minute passed, and then a small black man was suddenly crossing the floor towards Strike, catlike and silent on rubber soles. He walked with an exaggerated swing of his hips, his upper body quite still except for a little counterbalancing sway of the shoulders, his arms almost rigid.
    Guy Somé was nearly a foot shorter than Strike and had perhaps a hundredth of his body fat. The front of the designer’s tight black T-shirt was decorated with hundreds of tiny silver studs which formed an apparently three-dimensional image of Elvis’s face, as though his chest were a Pin Art toy. The eye was further confused by the fact that a well-defined six-pack moved underneath the tight Lycra. Somé’s snug gray jeans bore a faint dark pinstripe, and his trainers seemed to be made out of black suede and patent leather.
    His face contrasted strangely with his taut, lean body, for it abounded in exaggerated curves: the eyes exophthalmic so that they appeared fishlike, looking out of the sides of his head. The cheeks were round, shining apples and the full-lipped mouth was a wide oval: his small head was almost perfectly spherical. Somé looked as though he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the grotesque.
    He held out a hand with a slight crook of the wrist.
    “Yeah, I can see a bit of Jonny,” he said, looking up into Strike’s face; his voice was camp and faintly cockney. “Much butcher, though.”
    Strike shook hands. There was surprising strength in the fingers. The red-haired girl came jingling back.
    “I’ll be busy for an hour, Trudie, no calls,” Somé told her. “Bring us some tea and bicks, darling.”
    He executed a dancer’s turn, beckoning to Strike to follow him.
    Down a whitewashed corridor they passed an open door, and a flat-faced middle-aged oriental woman stared back at Strike through the gauzy film of gold stuff she was throwing over a dummy; the room around her was as brilliantly lit as a surgical theater, but full of workbenches, cramped and cluttered with bolts of fabric, the walls a collage of fluttering sketches, photographs and notes. A tiny blonde woman, dressed in what appeared to Strike to be a giant black tubular bandage, opened a door and crossed the corridor in front of them; she gave him precisely the same cold, blank stare as the red-haired Trudie. Strike felt abnormally huge and hairy; a woolly mammoth attempting to blend in among capuchin monkeys.
    He followed the strutting designer to the end of the corridor and up a spiral staircase of steel and rubber, at the top of which was a large white rectangular office space. Floor-to-ceiling windows all along the right-hand side showed a stunning view of the Thames and the south bank. The rest of the whitewashed walls were hung with photographs. What arrested Strike’s attention was an enormous twelve-foot-tall blowup of the infamous “Fallen Angels” on the wall opposite Somé’s desk. On closer inspection, however, he realized that it was not the shot with which the world was familiar. In this version, Lula had thrown back her head in laughter: the strong column of her throat rose vertically out of the long hair, which had become disarranged in her amusement, so that a single dark nipple protruded. Ciara Porter was looking up at Lula, the beginnings of laughter on her own face, but slower to get the joke: the viewer’s attention was drawn, as in the more famous version of the picture, immediately to Lula.
    She was represented elsewhere; everywhere. There on the left, among a group of models all wearing transparent shifts in rainbow colors; further along, in profile, with gold leaf on her lips and eyelids. Had she learned how to compose her face into its most photogenic arrangement, to project emotion so beautifully? Or had she simply been a pellucid surface through which her feelings naturally shone?
    “Park your arse anywhere,” said Somé, dropping into a seat behind a dark wood and steel desk covered in sketches; Strike pulled up a chair composed of a single length of contorted perspex. There was a T-shirt lying on the desk, which carried a picture of Princess Diana as a garish Mexican