The Cuckoo's Calling

be the last time I would ever see her?” breathed Lady Bristow. “I didn’t realize that I was about to lose a second child.”
    Her bloodshot eyes filled. She blinked, and two fat tears fell down on to her hollow cheeks.
    “Could you please look in that drawer,” she whispered, pointing a withered finger at the bedside table, “and get me out my pills?”
    Strike slid it open and saw many white boxes inside, of varying types and with various labels upon them.
    “Which…?”
    “It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,” she said.
    He took one out; it was clearly labeled Valium. She had enough in there to overdose ten times.
    “If you could pop a couple out for me?” she said. “I’ll take them with some tea, if it’s cool enough.”
    He handed her her pills and the cup; her hands trembled; he had to support the saucer and he thought, inappropriately, of a priest offering communion.
    “Thank you,” she murmured, relaxing back on to her pillows as he replaced her tea on the table, and fixing him with her plaintive eyes. “Didn’t John tell me you knew Charlie?”
    “Yes, I did,” said Strike. “I’ve never forgotten him.”
    “No, of course not. He was a most lovable child. Everyone always said so. The sweetest boy, the very sweetest I have ever known. I miss him every single day.”
    Outside the window, the children shrieked, and the plane trees rustled, and Strike thought of how the room would have looked on a winter morning months ago, when the trees must have been barelimbed, when Lula Landry had sat where he was sitting, with her beautiful eyes perhaps fixed on the picture of dead Charlie while her groggy mother told the horrible story.
    “I had never really talked to Lula about it before. The boys had gone out on their bikes. We heard John screaming, and then Tony shouting, shouting…”
    Strike’s pen had not made contact with paper yet. He watched the dying woman’s face as she talked.
    “Alec wouldn’t let me look, wouldn’t let me anywhere near the quarry. When he told me what had happened, I fainted. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I could not understand how God could have let it happen.
    “But since then, I’ve come to think that perhaps I have deserved all of it,” said Lady Bristow distantly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I’ve wondered whether I’m being punished. Because I loved them too much. I spoiled them. I couldn’t say no. Charlie, Alec and Lula. I think it must be punishment, because otherwise it would be too unspeakably cruel, wouldn’t it? To make me go through it again, and again, and again.”
    Strike had no answer to give. She invited pity, but he found he could not pity her even as much as, perhaps, she deserved. She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.
    “I wanted Lula so much,” said Lady Bristow, “but I don’t think she ever…She was a darling little thing. So beautiful. I would have done anything for that girl. But she didn’t love me the way Charlie and John loved me. Maybe it was too late. Maybe we got her too late.
    “John was jealous when she first came to us. He had been devastated about Charlie…but they ended up being very close friends. Very close.”
    A tiny frown crumpled the paper-fine skin of her forehead.
    “So Tony was quite wrong.”
    “What was he wrong about?” asked Strike quietly.
    Her fingers twitched upon the covers. She swallowed.
    “Tony didn’t think we should have adopted Lula.”
    “Why not?” asked Strike.
    “Tony never liked any of my children,” said Yvette Bristow. “My brother is a very hard man. Very cold. He said dreadful things after Charlie died. Alec hit him. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true—what Tony said.”
    Her milky gaze slid to Strike’s face, and he thought he glimpsed the woman she must have been when she still had her looks: a little clingy, a little childish, prettily dependent, an ultra-feminine creature, protected and petted by Sir Alec, who strove to satisfy her every whim and wish.
    “What did Tony say?”
    “Horrible things about John and Charlie. Awful things. I don’t,” she said weakly, “want to repeat them. And then he phoned Alec, when he heard that we were adopting a little girl, and told him we ought not to do it. Alec was furious,” she whispered. “He forbade Tony our house.”
    “Did you tell Lula about all this when she