The Cuckoo's Calling

then think about how it was when we saw it. It’ll be good for your detective training.”
    Robin experienced a great surge of excitement and happiness, immediately tempered by a cold pang of regret, because she would soon be leaving for human resources.
    “I need to change,” said Strike, standing up. “Please will you try Freddie Bestigui again for me?”
    He disappeared into the inner room, closed the door behind him and swapped his lucky suit (as he thought he might henceforth call it) for an old and comfortable shirt, and a roomier pair of trousers. When he passed Robin’s desk on the way to the bathroom, she was on the telephone, wearing that expression of disinterested attentiveness that betokens a person on hold. Strike cleaned his teeth in the cracked basin, reflecting on how much easier life with Robin would be, now that he had tacitly admitted that he lived in the office, and returned to find her off the telephone and looking exasperated.
    “I don’t think they’re even bothering to take my messages now,” she told Strike. “They say he’s out at Pinewood Studios and can’t be disturbed.”
    “Ah well, at least we know he’s back in the country,” said Strike.
    He took the interim report out of the filing cabinet, sank back down on the sofa and began to add his notes of yesterday’s conversations, in silence. Robin watched out of the corner of her eye, fascinated by the meticulousness with which Strike tabulated his findings, making a precise record of how, where and from whom he had gained each piece of information.
    “I suppose,” she asked, after a long stretch of silence, during which she had divided her time between covert observation of Strike at work, and examination of a photograph of the front of number 18, Kentigern Gardens on Google Earth, “you have to be very careful, in case you forget anything?”
    “It’s not only that,” said Strike, still writing, and not looking up. “You don’t want to give defending counsel any footholds.”
    He spoke so calmly, so reasonably that Robin considered the implication of his words for several moments, in case she could have misunderstood.
    “You mean…in general?” she said at last. “On principle?”
    “No,” said Strike, continuing his report. “I mean that I specifically do not want to allow the defending counsel in the trial of the person who killed Lula Landry to get off because he was able to show that I can’t keep records properly, thereby calling into question my reliability as a witness.”
    Strike was showing off again, and he knew it; but he could not help himself. He was, as he put it to himself, on a roll. Some might have questioned the taste of finding amusement in the midst of a murder inquiry, but he had found humor in darker places.
    “Couldn’t nip out for some sandwiches, Robin, could you?” he added, just so that he could glance up at her satisfyingly astonished expression.
    He finished his notes during her absence, and was just about to call an old colleague in Germany when Robin burst back in, holding two packs of sandwiches and a newspaper.
    “Your picture’s on the front of the Standard,” she panted.
    “What?”
    It was a photograph of Ciara following Duffield into his flat. Ciara looked stunning; for half a second Strike was transported back to half past two that morning, when she had lain, white and naked, beneath him, that long silky hair spread on the pillow like a mermaid’s as she whispered and moaned.
    Strike refocused: he was half cropped out of the picture; one arm raised to keep the paparazzi at bay.
    “That’s all right,” he told Robin with a shrug, handing her back the paper. “They think I was the minder.”
    “It says,” said Robin, turning to the inside page, “that she left Duffield’s with her security guard at two.”
    “There you go, then.”
    Robin stared at him. His account of the night had terminated with himself, Duffield and Ciara at Duffield’s flat. She had been so interested in the various pieces of evidence he had laid out before her, she had forgotten to wonder where he had slept. She had assumed that he had left the model and the actor together.
    He had arrived at the office still wearing the clothes in the photograph.
    She turned away, reading the story on page two. The clear implication of the piece was that Ciara and Duffield had enjoyed an amorous encounter while the supposed minder waited in the hall.
    “Is she stunning-looking in person?”