The Cuckoo's Calling

could hear Robin and Wilson talking in the hall, where he had left them.
    “Do you set the alarms again after you’ve cleaned?”
    “Put alarm? Yes,” she said. “One nine six six, same as door, Derrick tells me.”
    “He told you the number before he left with the alarm man?”
    Again, it took a few tries to get the point across, and when she grasped it, she seemed impatient.
    “Yes, I already say this. One nine six six.”
    “So you set the alarm after you’d finished cleaning in here?”
    “Put alarm, yes.”
    “And the alarm man, what did he look like?”
    “Alarm man? Look?” She frowned attractively, her small nose wrinkling, and shrugged. “I not see he’s face. But blue—all blue…” she added, and with the hand not holding polythened dresses, she made a sweeping gesture down her body.
    “Overall?” he suggested, but she met the word with blank incomprehension. “OK, where did you clean after that?”
    “Number one,” said Lechsinka, returning to her task of hanging up the clothes, moving around him to find the correct rails. “Clean big windows. Miz Bestigui talking on telephone. Angry. Upset. She say she no want to lie no more.”
    “She didn’t want to lie ?” repeated Strike.
    Lechsinka nodded, standing on tiptoes to hang up a floor-length gown.
    “You heard her say,” he repeated clearly, “on the phone, that she didn’t want to lie anymore?”
    Lechsinka nodded again, her face blank, innocent.
    “Then she see me and she shout ‘Go away, go away!’ ”
    “Really?”
    Lechsinka nodded and continued to put away clothes.
    “Where was Mr. Bestigui?”
    “Not there.”
    “Do you know who she was speaking to? On the phone?”
    “No.” But then, a little slyly, she said, “Woman.”
    “A woman? How do you know?”
    “Shouting, shouting on telephone. I can hear woman.”
    “It was a row? An argument? They were yelling at each other? Loud, yeah?”
    Strike could hear himself lapsing into the absurd, overdeliberate language of the linguistically challenged Englishman. Lechsinka nodded again as she pulled open drawers in search of the place for the belt, the only item now remaining in her arms. When at last she had coiled it up and put it away, she straightened and walked away from him, into the bedroom. He followed.
    While she made the bed and neatened the bedside tables, he established that she had cleaned Lula Landry’s flat last that day, after the model had left to visit her mother. She had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nor had she spotted any blue writing paper, whether written on or blank. Guy Somé’s handbags, and the various items for Deeby Macc, had been delivered to the security desk by the time she had finished, and the last thing she had done at work that day had been to take the designer’s gifts up to Lula’s and Macc’s respective flats.
    “And you set the alarms again after putting the things in there?”
    “I put alarms, yes.”
    “Lula’s?”
    “Yes.”
    “And one nine six six in Flat Two?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can you remember what you put away in Deeby Macc’s flat?”
    She had to mime some of the items, but she managed to convey that she remembered two tops, a belt, a hat, some gloves and (she made a fiddling mime around her wrists) cufflinks.
    After stowing these things in the open shelving area of the walk-in wardrobe, so that Macc could not miss them, she had reset the alarm and gone home.
    Strike thanked her very much, and lingered just long enough to admire once more her tightly denimed backside as she straightened the duvet, before rejoining Robin and Wilson in the hall.
    As they proceeded up the third flight of stairs, Strike checked Lechsinka’s story with Wilson, who agreed that he had instructed the repairman to set the alarm to 1966, like the front door.
    “I jus’ chose a number that’d be easy for Lechsinka to remember, because of the front door. Macc coulda reset it to somethin’ different if he’d wanted.”
    “Can you remember what the repairman looked like? You said he was new?”
    “Really young guy. Hair to here.”
    Wilson indicated the base of his neck.
    “White?”
    “Yeah, white. Didn’t even look like he was shaving yet.”
    They had reached the front door of Flat Three, once the home of Lula Landry. Robin felt a frisson of something—fear, excitement—as Wilson opened the third smoothly painted white front door, with its glassy bullet-sized peephole.
    The top flat was architecturally different