The Cuckoo's Calling

God, this is…it’s a bit embarrassing; it isn’t the way I’d have chosen…Well, anyway. Could you please just tell him that Charlotte Campbell called, and that I’m engaged to Jago Ross? I didn’t want him to hear about it from anyone else, or read about it. Jago’s parents have gone and put it in the bloody Times. Mortifying.”
    “Oh. All right,” said Robin, her mind suddenly paralyzed like her pen.
    “Thanks very much—Robin, did you say? Thanks. ’Bye.”
    Charlotte rang off first. Robin replaced the receiver in slow motion, feeling acutely anxious. She did not want to deliver this news. She might be only the messenger, but she would feel as though she were delivering an assault on Strike’s determination to keep his private life under wraps, on his firm avoidance of the subject of the boxes of possessions, the camp bed, the detritus of his evening meals in the bins every morning.
    Robin pondered her options. She could forget to relay the message, and simply tell him to call Charlotte and get her to do her own dirty work (as Robin put it to herself). What, though, if Strike refused to call, and somebody else told him about the engagement? Robin had no means of knowing whether Strike and his ex (girlfriend? fiancée? wife?) had legions of mutual friends. If she and Matthew ever split up, if he became engaged to another woman (it gave her a twisting feeling in her chest to even think of it), all her closest friends and family would feel involved, and would undoubtedly stampede to tell her; she would, she supposed, prefer to be forewarned in as low-key and private a way as possible.
    When she heard Strike ascending the stair nearly an hour later, apparently talking on his mobile and in good spirits, Robin experienced a sharp stab of panic to the stomach as though she were about to sit an exam. When he pushed open the glass door, and she saw that he was not holding a mobile at all, but rapping under his breath, she felt even worse.
    “Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari,” muttered Strike, who was holding a boxed electric fan in his arms. “Afternoon.”
    “Hello.”
    “Thought we could use this. It’s stuffy in here.”
    “Yes, that would be good.”
    “Just heard Deeby Macc playing in the shop,” Strike informed her, setting down the fan in a corner and peeling off his jacket. ‘Something something and Ferrari, Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari.’ Wonder who Johari was. Some rapper he was having a feud with, d’you think?”
    “No,” said Robin, wishing that he was not so cheerful. “It’s a psychological term. The Johari window. It’s all to do with how well we know ourselves, and how well other people know us.”
    Strike paused in the act of hanging up his jacket and stared at her.
    “You didn’t get that out of Heat magazine.”
    “No. I was doing psychology at university. I dropped out.”
    She felt, obscurely, that it might somehow even the playing field to tell him about one of her own personal failures, before delivering the bad news.
    “You dropped out of university?” He seemed uncharacteristically interested. “That’s a coincidence. I did, too. So why ‘fuck Johari’?”
    “Deeby Macc had therapy in prison. He became interested and did a lot of reading on psychology. I got that bit out of the papers,” she added.
    “You’re a mine of useful information.”
    She experienced another elevator-drop in the pit of her stomach.
    “There was a call, when you were out. From a Charlotte Campbell.”
    He looked up quickly, frowning.
    “She asked me to give you a message, which was,” Robin’s gaze slid sideways, to hover momentarily on Strike’s ear, “that she’s engaged to Jago Ross.”
    Her eyes were drawn, irresistibly, back to his face, and she felt a horrible chill.
    One of the earliest and most vivid memories of Robin’s childhood was of the day that the family dog had been put down. She herself had been too young to understand what her father was saying; she took the continuing existence of Bruno, her oldest brother’s beloved Labrador, for granted. Confused by her parents’ solemnity, she had turned to Stephen for a clue as to how to react, and all security had crumbled, for she had seen, for the first time in her short life, happiness and comfort drain out of his small and merry face, and his lips whiten as his mouth fell open. She had heard oblivion howling in the silence that preceded his awful scream of anguish, and then she had cried, inconsolably,