The Cuckoo's Calling

enough. “No, I don’t.”
    Bristow’s undistinguished countenance brightened a little.
    “I’ll be in touch about Somé and Marlene Higson. Oh—and I nearly forgot. Lula’s laptop. I’ve charged it for you, but it’s password-protected. The police people found out the password, and they told my mother, but she can’t remember what it was, and I never knew. Perhaps it was in the police file?” he added hopefully.
    “Not as far as I can remember,” said Strike, “but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Where has this been since Lula died?”
    “In police custody, and since then, at my mother’s. Nearly all Lula’s things are lying around at Mum’s. She hasn’t worked herself up to making decisions about them.”
    Bristow handed Strike the case and bid him farewell; then, with a small bracing movement of his shoulders, he headed up the steps and disappeared through the doors of the family firm.

7
    THE FRICTION BETWEEN THE END of Strike’s amputated leg and the prosthesis was becoming more painful with every step as he headed towards Kensington Gore. Sweating a little in his heavy overcoat, while a weak sun made the park shimmer in the distance, Strike asked himself whether the strange suspicion that had him in its grip was anything more than a shadow moving in the depths of a muddy pool: a trick of the light, an illusory effect of the wind-ruffled surface. Had these minute flurries of black silt been flicked up by a slimy tail, or were they nothing but meaningless gusts of algae-fed gas? Could there be something lurking, disguised, buried in the mud, for which other nets had trawled in vain?
    Heading for Kensington Tube station, he passed the Queen’s Gate into Hyde Park; ornate, rust-red and embellished with royal insignia. Incurably observant, he noted the sculpture of the doe and fawn on one pillar and the stag on the other. Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed. The same, yet profoundly different…Lula Landry’s laptop banged harder and harder into his leg as his limp worsened.
    In his sore, stymied and frustrated state, there was a dull inevitability about Robin’s announcement, when he finally reached the office at ten to five, that she was still unable to penetrate past the telephone receptionist of Freddie Bestigui’s production company; and that she had had no success in finding anyone of the name Onifade with a British Telecom number in the Kilburn area.
    “Of course, if she’s Rochelle’s aunt, she could have a different surname, couldn’t she?” Robin pointed out, as she buttoned her coat and prepared to leave.
    Strike agreed to it wearily. He had dropped on to the sagging sofa the moment he had come through the office door, something that Robin had never seen him do before. His face was pinched.
    “Are you all right?”
    “Fine. Any sign of Temporary Solutions this afternoon?”
    “No,” said Robin, pulling her belt tight. “Perhaps they believed me when I said I was Annabel? I did try and sound Australian.”
    He grinned. Robin closed the interim report she had been reading while she waited for Strike to return, set it neatly back on its shelf, bade Strike goodnight and left him sitting there, the laptop lying beside him on the threadbare cushions.
    When the sound of Robin’s footsteps was no longer audible, Strike stretched a long arm sideways to lock the glass door; then broke his own weekday ban on smoking in the office. Jamming the lit cigarette between his teeth, he pulled up his trouser leg and unlaced the strap holding the prosthesis to his thigh. Then he unrolled the gel liner from the stump of his leg and examined the end of his amputated tibia.
    He was supposed to examine the skin surface for irritation every day. Now he saw that the scar tissue was inflamed and over-warm. There had been various creams and powders back in the bathroom cabinet at Charlotte’s dedicated to the care of this patch of skin, subject as it was these days to forces for which it had not been designed. Perhaps she had thrown the corn powder and Oilatum into one of the still unpacked boxes? But he could not muster the energy to go and find out, nor did he want to refit the prosthesis just yet; and so he sat smoking on the sofa with the lower trouser leg hanging empty towards the floor, lost in thought.
    His mind drifted. He thought about families, and names, and about the ways in which his and John Bristow’s childhoods, outwardly so different, had been