The Cuckoo's Calling

with Bristow’s lower body pinning his agonizing half-leg to the ground, and the knife struck him hard in the upper arm: he felt it pierce the flesh, and the flow of warm blood, and the white-hot stinging pain.
    He saw Bristow raise his arm in dim silhouette against the faint window; forcing himself up against the lawyer’s weight, he deflected the second knife blow, and with an almighty effort managed to throw the lawyer off, and the prosthesis slid out of his trouser leg as he tried to pin Bristow down, with his hot blood spattering over everything, and no knowledge of where the knife was now.
    The desk was knocked over by Strike’s wrestling weight, and then, as he knelt with his good knee on Bristow’s thin chest, groping with his good hand to find the knife, light split his retinas in two, and a woman was screaming.
    Dazzled, Strike glimpsed the knife rising to his stomach; he seized the prosthetic leg beside him and brought it down like a club on Bristow’s face, once, twice—
    “Stop! Cormoran, STOP! YOU’RE GOING TO KILL HIM!”
    Strike rolled off Bristow, who was no longer moving, dropped the prosthetic leg and lay on his back, clutching his bleeding arm beside the overturned desk.
    “I thought,” he panted, unable to see Robin, “I told you to go home?”
    But she was already on the telephone.
    “Police and ambulance!”
    “And get a taxi,” Strike croaked from the floor, his throat dry from so much talking. “I’m not traveling to hospital with this piece of shit.”
    He stretched out an arm and retrieved the mobile that lay several feet away. The face was smashed, but it was still recording.

Epilogue
Nihil est ab omni
Parte beatum.
Nothing is an unmixed blessing.
    Horace, Odes, Book 2

Ten Days Later
    THE BRITISH ARMY REQUIRES OF its soldiers a subjugation of individual needs and ties that is almost incomprehensible to the civilian mind. It recognizes virtually no claims higher than its own; and the unpredictable crises of human life—births and deaths, weddings, divorces and illness—generally cause no more deviation to the military’s plans than pebbles pinging on the underbelly of a tank. Nevertheless, there are exceptional circumstances, and it was due to one such circumstance that Lieutenant Jonah Agyeman’s second tour of duty in Afghanistan was cut short.
    His presence in Britain was urgently required by the Metropolitan Police, and while the army does not generally rate the claims of the Met higher than its own, in this case it was prepared to be helpful. The circumstances surrounding the death of Agyeman’s sister were garnering international attention, and a media storm around a hitherto obscure Sapper was deemed unhelpful both to the individual and the army he served. And so Jonah was put on a plane back to Britain, where the army did its impressive best to shield him from the ravenous press.
    It was assumed by considerable numbers of the news-reading public that Lieutenant Agyeman would be delighted, firstly to be home from combat, and secondly to have returned in the expectation of wealth beyond his wildest imaginings. However, the young soldier that Cormoran Strike met in the Tottenham pub one lunchtime, ten days after the arrest of his sister’s murderer, was almost truculent, and seemed still to be in a state of shock.
    The two men had, for different periods of time, lived the same life, and risked the same death. It was a bond that no civilian could understand, and for half an hour they talked about nothing but the army.
    “You were a Suit, yeah?” Agyeman said. “Trust a Suit to fuck up my whole life.”
    Strike smiled. He saw no ingratitude in Agyeman, even though the stitches in his arm pulled painfully every time he raised his pint.
    “My mother wants me to come out,” said the soldier. “She keeps saying, that’ll be one good thing to come out of this mess.”
    It was the first, oblique reference to the reason they were here, and that Jonah was not where he belonged, with his regiment, in the life he had chosen.
    Then, quite suddenly, he began to talk, as though he had been waiting for Strike for months.
    “She never knew my dad had another kid. He never told her. He was never even sure that Marlene woman was telling the truth about being pregnant. Right before he died, when he knew he had days left, he told me. ‘Don’t upset your mother,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you this because I’m dying, and I don’t know whether you’ve got a half-brother