The Cuckoo's Calling

fishnets; she was arranging a display of hats.
    To Strike’s surprise, Robin marched boldly over to this girl.
    “Hi,” she said brightly. “There’s a fabulous sequined coat in your middle window. I wonder whether I could try it on?”
    The assistant had a mass of fluffy white hair the texture of cotton candy, gaudily painted eyes and no eyebrows.
    “Yeah, no probs,” she said.
    As it turned out, however, she had lied: retrieving the coat from the window was distinctly problematic. It needed to be taken off the mannequin that was wearing it, and disentangled from its electronic tag; ten minutes later, the coat had still not emerged, and the original assistant had called two of her colleagues into the window display to help her. Robin, meanwhile, was drifting around without talking to Strike, picking out an assortment of dresses and belts. By the time the sequined coat was carried out from the window, all three assistants involved in its retrieval seemed somehow invested in its future, and all accompanied Robin towards the changing room, one volunteering to help her carry the pile of extras she had chosen, the other two bearing the coat.
    The curtained changing rooms consisted of ironwork frames draped with thick cream silk, like tents. As he positioned himself close enough to listen to what went on inside, Strike felt that he was only now starting to appreciate the full range of his temporary secretary’s talents.
    Robin had taken over ten thousand pounds’ worth of goods into the changing room with her, of which the sequined coat cost half. She would never have had the nerve to do this under normal circumstances, but something had got into her this morning: recklessness and bravado; she was proving something to herself, to Matthew, and even to Strike. The three assistants fussed around her, hanging up dresses and smoothing out the heavy folds of the coat, and Robin felt no shame that she could not have afforded even the cheapest of the belts now draped over the arm of the redhead with tattoos up both arms, and that none of the girls would ever receive the commission for which they were, undoubtedly, vying. She even allowed the assistant with pink hair to go and find a gold jacket she assured Robin would suit her admirably, and go wonderfully well with the green dress she had picked out.
    Robin was taller than any of the shop girls, and when she had swapped her trench coat for the sequined one, they cooed and gasped.
    “I must show my brother,” she told them, after surveying her reflection with a critical eye. “It isn’t for me, you see, it’s for his wife.”
    And she strode back out through the changing-room curtains with the three assistants hovering behind her. The rich girls over by the clothing rack all turned to stare at Robin through narrow eyes as she asked boldly:
    “What do you think?”
    Strike had to admit that the coat he had thought so vile looked better on Robin than on the mannequin. She twirled on the spot for him, and the thing glittered like a lizard’s skin.
    “It’s all right,” he said, masculinely cautious, and the assistants smiled indulgently. “Yeah, it’s quite nice. How much is it?”
    “Not that much, by your standards,” said Robin, with an arch look at her handmaidens. “Sandra would love this, though,” she said firmly to Strike, who, caught off guard, grinned. “And it is her fortieth.”
    “She could wear it with anything,” the cotton candy girl assured Strike eagerly. “So versatile.”
    “OK, I’ll try that Cavalli dress,” said Robin blithely, turning back to the changing room.
    “Sandra told me to come with him,” she told the three assistants, as they helped her out of the coat, and unzipped the dress to which she had pointed. “To make sure he doesn’t make another stupid mistake. He bought her the world’s ugliest earrings for her thirtieth; they cost an arm and a leg and she’s never had them out of the safe.”
    Robin did not know where the invention was coming from; she felt inspired. Stepping out of her jumper and skirt, she began to wriggle into a clinging poison-green dress. Sandra was becoming real to her as she talked: a little spoiled, somewhat bored, confiding in her sister-in-law over wine that her brother (a banker, Robin thought, though Strike did not really look like her idea of a banker) had no taste at all.
    “So she said to me, take him to Vashti and get him to crack open his wallet. Oh yes, this is nice.”
    It was