The Cuckoo's Calling

shadow she had hunted for two weeks.
    Rush hour past, the crowds on the Tube had thinned. Strike was pleased, because the end of his stump was still smarting, to find a seat with ease. He had bought himself a pack of Extra Strong Mints at the station kiosk before boarding his train, and was now sucking four simultaneously, trying to conceal the fact that he had not had time to clean his teeth. His toothbrush and toothpaste were hidden inside his kitbag, even though it would have been much more convenient to leave them on the chipped sink in the bathroom. Catching sight of himself again, in the darkened train window, with his heavy stubble and his generally unkempt appearance, he asked himself why, when it was perfectly obvious that Robin knew he slept there, he maintained the fiction that he had some other home.
    Strike’s memory and map sense were more than adequate to the task of locating the entrance to the psychiatric unit at St. Thomas’s, and he proceeded there without mishap, arriving at shortly after ten. He spent five minutes checking that the automatic double doors were the only entrance on Grantley Road, before positioning himself on a stone wall in the car park, some twenty yards away from the entrance, giving him a clear view of everyone entering and leaving.
    Knowing only that the girl he sought was probably homeless, and certainly black, he had thought through his strategy for finding her on the Tube, and concluded that there was really only one option open to him. At twenty past ten, therefore, when he saw a tall, thin black girl walking briskly towards the entrance, he called out (even though she looked too well-groomed, too neatly dressed):
    “Rochelle!”
    She glanced up to see who had shouted, but kept walking without any sign that the name had a personal application, and disappeared into the building. Next came a couple, both white; then a group of people of assorted ages and races whom Strike guessed to be hospital workers; but on the mere off-chance he called again:
    “Rochelle!”
    Some of them glanced at him, but returned immediately to their conversations. Consoling himself that frequenters of this entrance were probably used to a degree of eccentricity in those they met in its vicinity, Strike lit a cigarette and waited.
    Half past ten passed, and no black girl went through the doors. Either she had missed her appointment, or she had used a different entrance. A feather-light breeze tickled the back of his neck as he sat smoking, watching, waiting. The hospital building was enormous, a vast concrete box with rectangular windows; there were surely numerous entrances on every side.
    Strike straightened his injured leg, which was still sore, and considered, again, the possibility that he would have to return to see his consultant. He found even this degree of proximity to a hospital slightly depressing. His stomach rumbled. He had passed a McDonald’s on the way here. If he had not found her by midday, he would go and eat there.
    Twice more he shouted “Rochelle!” at black women who entered and exited the building, and both times they glanced back, purely to see who had shouted, in one case giving him a look of disdain.
    Then, just after eleven, a short, stocky black girl emerged from the hospital with a slightly awkward, rocking, side-to-side gait. He knew quite well that he had not missed her going in, not only because of her distinctive walk, but because she wore a very noticeable short coat of magenta-colored fake fur, which flattered neither her height nor her breadth.
    “Rochelle!”
    The girl stopped, turned and stared around, scowling, looking for the person who had called her name. Strike limped towards her, and she glared at him with an understandable mistrust.
    “Rochelle? Rochelle Onifade? Hi. My name’s Cormoran Strike. Can I have a word?”
    “I always come in Redbourne Street entrance,” she told him five minutes later, after he had given a garbled and fictitious account of the way he had found her. “I come out this way ’cause I was gonna go to McDonald’s.”
    So that was where they went. Strike bought two coffees and two large cookies, and carried them to the window table where Rochelle was waiting, curious and suspicious.
    She was uncompromisingly plain. Her greasy skin, which was the color of burned earth, was covered in acne pustules and pits; her small eyes were deep-set and her teeth were crooked and rather yellow. The chemically straightened hair showed