The Cuckoo's Calling

of an urgent nature to communicate to her temporary boss. She hesitated, considering her options. The easiest route would be to try and wake Strike by clattering around the outer office, thereby giving him time to organize himself and the inner room, but that might take too long: her news would not keep. Robin therefore took a deep breath and rapped on the door.
    Strike woke instantly. For one disoriented moment he lay there, registering the reproachful daylight pouring through the window. Then he remembered setting down the mobile phone after reading Charlotte’s text, and knew that he had forgotten to set the alarm.
    “Don’t come in!” he bellowed.
    “Would you like a cup of tea?” Robin called through the door.
    “Yeah—yeah, that’d be great. I’ll come out there for it,” Strike added loudly, wishing, for the first time, that he had fitted a lock on the inner door. His false foot and calf was standing propped against the wall, and he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts.
    Robin hurried away to fill the kettle, and Strike fought his way out of his sleeping bag. He dressed at speed, making a clumsy job of putting on the prosthesis, folding the camp bed into its corner, pushing the desk back into place. Ten minutes after she had knocked on the door, he limped into the outer office smelling strongly of deodorant, to find Robin at her desk, looking very excited about something.
    “Your tea,” she said, indicating a steaming mug.
    “Great, thanks. Just give me a moment,” he said, and he left to pee in the bathroom on the landing. As he zipped up his fly, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, crumpled-looking and unshaven. Not for the first time, he consoled himself that his hair looked the same whether brushed or unbrushed.
    “I’ve got news,” said Robin, when he had re-entered the office through the glass door and, with reiterated thanks, picked up his mug of tea.
    “Yeah?”
    “I’ve found Rochelle Onifade.”
    He lowered the mug.
    “You’re kidding. How the hell…?”
    “I saw in the file that she was supposed to attend an outpatient clinic at St. Thomas’s,” said Robin excitedly, flushed and talking fast, “so I rang up the hospital yesterday evening, pretending to be her, and I said I’d forgotten the time of my appointment, and they told me it’s at ten thirty on Thursday morning. You’ve got,” she glanced at her computer monitor, “fifty-five minutes.”
    Why had he not thought to tell her to do this?
    “You genius, you bloody genius…”
    He had slopped hot tea over his hand, and put the mug down on her desk.
    “D’you know exactly…?”
    “It’s in the psychiatric unit round the back of the main building,” said Robin, exhilarated. “See, you go in off Grantley Road, there’s a second car park…”
    She had turned the monitor towards him to show him the map of St. Thomas’s. He checked his wrist, but his watch was still in the inner room.
    “You’ll have time if you leave now,” Robin urged him.
    “Yeah—I’ll get my stuff.”
    Strike hurried to fetch his watch, wallet, cigarettes and phone. He was almost through the glass door, cramming his wallet into his back pocket, when Robin said:
    “Er—Cormoran…”
    She had never called him by his first name before. Strike assumed that this accounted for her slight air of bashfulness; then he realized that she was pointing meaningfully at his navel. Looking down, he saw that he had done up the buttons on his shirt wrongly, and was exposing a patch of belly so hairy that it resembled black coconut matting.
    “Oh—right—cheers…”
    Robin turned her attention politely to her monitor while he undid and refastened the buttons.
    “See you later.”
    “Yeah, ’bye,” she said, smiling at him as he departed at speed; but within seconds he was back, panting slightly.
    “Robin, I need you to check something.”
    She already had the pen in her hand, waiting.
    “There was a legal conference in Oxford on the seventh of January. Lula Landry’s uncle Tony attended it. International family law. Anything you can find out. Specifically about him being there.”
    “Right,” said Robin, scribbling.
    “Cheers. You’re a genius.”
    And he was gone, with uneven steps, down the metal stairs.
    Though she hummed to herself as she settled down at her desk, a little of Robin’s cheerfulness drained away as she drank her tea. She had half hoped that Strike would invite her along to meet Rochelle Onifade, whose