The Cuckoo's Calling

from the other two: smaller and airier. It had been recently decorated throughout in shades of cream and brown. Guy Somé had told Strike that the flat’s famous previous inhabitant loved color; but it was now as impersonal as any upmarket hotel room. Strike led the way in silence to the sitting room.
    The carpet here was not lush and woolen as in Bestigui’s flat, but made of rough sand-colored jute. Strike ran his heel across it; it made no mark or track.
    “Was the floor like this when Lula lived here?” he asked Wilson.
    “Yeah. She chose it. It was nearly new, so they left it.”
    Instead of the regularly spaced long windows of the lower flats, each with three separate small balconies, the penthouse flat boasted a single pair of double doors leading on to one wide balcony. Strike unlocked and opened these doors and stepped outside. Robin did not like watching him do it; after a glance at Wilson’s impassive face, she turned and stared at the cushions and the black-and-white prints, trying not to think about what had happened here three months previously.
    Strike was looking down into the street, and Robin might have been surprised to know that his thoughts were not as clinical or dispassionate as she supposed.
    He was visualizing someone who had lost control completely; someone running at Landry as she stood, fine-boned and beautiful, in the outfit she had thrown on to meet a much-anticipated guest; a killer lost in rage, half dragging, half pushing her, and finally, with the brute strength of a highly motivated maniac, throwing her. The seconds it took her to fall through the air towards the concrete, smothered in its deceptively soft covering of snow, must have seemed to last an eternity. She had flailed, trying to find handholds in the merciless empty air; and then, without time to make amends, to explain, to bequeath or to apologize, without any of the luxuries permitted those who are given notice of their impending demise, she had broken on the road.
    The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her. The truth was coming slowly into focus out of the mass of disconnected detail. What he lacked was proof.
    His mobile phone rang as he stood there. John Bristow’s name and number were displayed; he took the call.
    “Hi, John, thanks for getting back to me.”
    “No problem. Any news?” asked the lawyer.
    “Maybe. I’ve had an expert look at Lula’s laptop, and he found out a file of photographs had been deleted from it after Lula died. Do you know anything about that?”
    His words were met by complete silence. The only reason Strike knew that they had not been cut off was that he could hear a small amount of background noise at Bristow’s end.
    At last the lawyer said, in an altered voice:
    “They were taken off after Lula died?”
    “That’s what the expert says.”
    Strike watched a car roll slowly down the street below, and pause halfway along. A woman got out, swathed in fur.
    “I—I’m sorry,” Bristow said, sounding thoroughly shaken. “I’m just—just shocked. Perhaps the police removed this file?”
    “When did you get the laptop back from them?”
    “Oh…sometime in February, I suppose, early February.”
    “This file was removed on March the seventeenth.”
    “But—but this just doesn’t make sense. Nobody knew the password.”
    “Well, evidently somebody did. You said the police told your mother what it was.”
    “My mother certainly wouldn’t have removed—”
    “I’m not suggesting she did. Is there any chance she could have left the laptop open, and running? Or that she gave somebody else the password?”
    He thought that Bristow must be in his office. He could hear faint voices in the background, and, distantly, a woman laughing.
    “I suppose that’s possible,” said Bristow slowly. “But who would have removed photographs? Unless…but God, that’s horrible…”
    “What is?”
    “You don’t think one of the nurses could have taken the pictures? To sell to a newspaper? But that’s a dreadful thought…a nurse…”
    “All the expert knows is that they were deleted; there’s no evidence that they were copied and stolen. But as you