The Cuckoo's Calling

not for Bruno, but for the terrifying grief of her brother.
    Strike did not speak immediately. Then he said, with palpable difficulty:
    “Right. Thanks.”
    He walked into the inner office, and closed the door.
    Robin sat back down at her desk, feeling like an executioner. She could not settle to anything. She considered knocking on the door again, and offering a cup of tea, but decided against. For five minutes she restlessly reorganized the items on her desk, glancing regularly at the closed inner door, until it opened again, and she jumped, and pretended to be busy at the keyboard.
    “Robin, I’m just going to nip out,” he said.
    “OK.”
    “If I’m not back at five, you can lock up.”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “See you tomorrow.”
    He took down his jacket, and left with a purposeful tread that did not deceive her.
    The roadworks were spreading like a lesion; every day there was an extension of the mayhem, and of the temporary structures to protect pedestrians and enable them to pick their way through the devastation. Strike noticed none of it. He walked automatically over trembling wooden boards to the Tottenham, the place he associated with escape and refuge.
    Like the Ordnance Arms, it was empty but for one other drinker; an old man just inside the door. Strike bought a pint of Doom Bar and sat down on one of the low red leather seats against the wall, almost beneath the sentimental Victorian maid who scattered rosebuds, sweet and silly and simple. He drank as though his beer was medicine, without pleasure, intent on the result.
    Jago Ross. She must have been in touch with him, seeing him, while they were still living together. Even Charlotte, with all her mesmeric power over men, her astonishing sure-handed skill, could not have moved from reacquaintance to engagement in three weeks. She had been meeting Ross on the sly, while swearing undying love to Strike.
    This put a very different light on the bombshell she had dropped on him a month before the end, and the refusal to show him proof, and the shifting dates, and the sudden conclusion of it all.
    Jago Ross had been married once already. He had kids; Charlotte had heard on the grapevine that he was drinking hard. She had laughed with Strike about her lucky escape of so many years before; she had expressed pity for his wife.
    Strike bought a second pint, and then a third. He wanted to drown the impulses, crackling like electrical charges, to go and find her, to bellow, to rampage, to break Jago Ross’s jaw.
    He had not eaten at the Ordnance Arms, nor since, and it had been a long time since he had consumed so much alcohol in one sitting. It took him barely an hour of steady, solitary, determined beer consumption to become properly drunk.
    Initially, when the slim, pale figure appeared at his table, he told it thickly that it had the wrong man and the wrong table.
    “No I haven’t,” said Robin firmly. “I’m just going to get myself a drink too, all right?”
    She left him staring hazily at her handbag, which she had placed on the stool. It was comfortingly familiar, brown, a little shabby. She usually hung it up on a coat peg in the office. He gave it a friendly smile, and drank to it.
    Up at the bar, the barman, who was young and timid-looking, said to Robin: “I think he’s had enough.”
    “That’s hardly my fault,” she retorted.
    She had looked for Strike in the Intrepid Fox, which was nearest to the office, in Molly Moggs, the Spice of Life and the Cambridge. The Tottenham had been the last pub she was planning to try.
    “Whassamatter?” Strike asked her, when she sat down.
    “Nothing’s the matter,” said Robin, sipping her half-lager. “I just wanted to make sure you’re OK.”
    “Yez’m fine,” said Strike, and then, with an effort at clarity, “I yam fine.”
    “Good.”
    “Jus’ celebratin’ my fiancée zengagement,” he said, raising his eleventh pint in an unsteady toast. “She shou’ never’ve left’m. Never,” he said, loudly and clearly, “have. Left. The Hon’ble. Jago Ross. Who is’n outstanding cunt.”
    He virtually shouted the last word. There were more people in the pub than when Strike had arrived, and most of them seemed to have heard him. They had been casting him wary looks even before he shouted. The scale of him, with his drooping eyelids and his bellicose expression, had ensured a small no-go zone around him; people skirted his table on the way to the bathrooms as though it was three