The Cuckoo's Calling

cigarette.
    “R’bin,” he said, giving up and gazing down at her. “R’bin, d’you know wadda kairos mo…” He hiccoughed. “Mo…moment is?”
    “A kairos moment?” she repeated, hoping against hope it was not something sexual, something that she would not be able to forget afterwards, especially as the kebab shop owner was listening in and smirking behind them. “No, I don’t. Shall we go back to the office?”
    “You don’t know whadditis?” he asked, peering at her.
    “No.”
    “ ’SGreek,” he told her. “ Kairos. Kairos moment. An’ it means,” and from somewhere in his soused brain he dredged up words of surprising clarity, “the telling moment. The special moment. The supreme moment.”
    Oh please, thought Robin, please don’t tell me we’re having one.
    “An’ d’you know what ours was, R’bin, mine an’ Charlotte’s?” he said, staring into the middle distance, his unlit cigarette hanging from his hand. “It was when she walk’d into the ward—I was in hosp’tal f’long time an’ I hadn’ seen her f’two years—no warning—an’ I saw her in the door an’ ev’ryone turned an’ saw her too, an’ she walked down the ward an’ she never said a word an,” he paused to draw breath, and hiccoughed again, “an’ she kissed me aft’ two years, an’ we were back together. Nobody talkin’. Fuckin’ beautiful. Mos’ beaut’ful woman I’ve ’ver seen. Bes’ moment of the whole fuckin’—’fmy whole fuckin’ life, prob’bly. I’m sorry, R’bin,” he added, “f’r sayin’ ‘fuckin’.’ Sorry ’bout that.”
    Robin felt equally inclined to laughter and tears, though she did not know why she should feel so sad.
    “Shall I light that cigarette for you?”
    “Y’re a great person, Robin, y’know that?”
    Near the turning into Denmark Street he stopped dead, still swaying like a tree in the wind, and told her loudly that Charlotte did not love Jago Ross; it was all a game, a game to hurt him, Strike, as badly as she could.
    Outside the black door to the office he halted again, holding up both hands to stop her following him upstairs.
    “Y’ gotta go home now, R’bin.”
    “Let me just make sure you get upstairs OK.”
    “No. No. ’M fine now. An’ I might chunder. ’M legless. An’,” said Strike, “you don’ get that fuckin’ tired old fuckin’ joke. Or do you? Know most of it now. Did I tell you?”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Ne’r mind, R’bin. You go home now. I gotta be sick.”
    “Are you sure…?”
    “ ’M sorry I kep’ sayin’ fuck—swearin’. Y’re a nice pers’n, R’bin. G’bye now.”
    She looked back at him when she reached Charing Cross Road. He was walking with the awful, clumsy deliberation of the very drunk towards the dingy entrance to Denmark Place, there, no doubt, to vomit in the dark alleyway, before staggering upstairs to his camp bed and kettle.

6
    THERE WAS NO CLEAR MOMENT of moving from sleep to consciousness. At first he was lying facedown in a dreamscape of broken metal, rubble and screams, bloodied and unable to speak; then he was lying on his stomach, doused in sweat, his face pressed into the camp bed, his head a throbbing ball of pain and his open mouth dry and rank. The sun pouring in at the unblinded windows scoured his retinas even with his eyelids closed: raw red, with capillaries spread like fine black nets over tiny, taunting, popping lights.
    He was fully clothed, his prosthesis still attached, lying on top of his sleeping bag as though he had fallen there. Stabbing memories, like glass shards through his temple: persuading the barman that another pint was a good idea. Robin, across the table, smiling at him. Could he really have eaten a kebab in the state he was in? At some point he remembered wrestling his fly, desperate to piss but unable to extract the end of shirt caught in his zip. He slid a hand underneath himself—even this slight movement made him want to groan or vomit—and found, to his vague relief, that the zip was closed.
    Slowly, like a man balancing some fragile package on his shoulders, Strike moved himself into a sitting position and squinted around the brightly lit room with no idea what time it could be, or indeed what day it was.
    The door between inner and outer offices was closed, and he could not hear any movement on the other side. Perhaps his temp had left for good. Then he saw a white oblong lying on the floor, just inside the door,