The Cuckoo's Calling: List 6

He had, however, been planning an eloquent speech of apology for his excesses of two nights before, an avowal of gratitude, and an exposition of all the interesting conclusions he had drawn from yesterday’s interviews.

He had, however, been planning an eloquent speech of apology for his excesses of two nights before, an avowal of gratitude, and an exposition of all the interesting conclusions he had drawn from yesterday’s interviews.

“Well, I went in there and pretended I was writing a dissertation on African politics, and I wanted some information on Professor Agyeman. I ended up speaking to this really helpful secretary in the politics department, who’d actually worked for him, and she gave me loads of information on him, including a bibliography and a brief biography. He studied at SOAS as an undergraduate.”

To Strike’s surprise, she immediately affected a very stilted Australian accent.

When he passed Robin’s desk on the way to the bathroom, she was on the telephone, wearing that expression of disinterested attentiveness that betokens a person on hold.

An Impressionist print hung on the bare brick walls of the small anteroom to the morgue.

Helping police with their inquiries: as a five-year-old, Strike had imagined a noble and disinterested citizen volunteering to give up his time and energy to assist the police, who issued him with magnifying glass and truncheon and allowed him to operate under a cloak of glamorous anonymity.

Carver had the bright blue, bloodshot eyes that Strike had always (since meeting a major in the Paras with just such eyes, who was subsequently cashiered for serious bodily harm) associated with a choleric, violent nature.

“Why,” said Strike, leaning forwards on his arms into the miasma of body odor that surrounded Carver, “did Lula Landry make a detour to that shop for fifteen minutes?”

Defending counsel would undoubtedly argue diminished responsibility, because of the vainglorious overreaching that made Strike’s quarry unique in his experience; and perhaps, he thought, there was some pathology there, some categorizable madness, but he was not much interested in the psychology.

After the trial and the conviction, Strike had packed up and left everything behind: the short-lived burst of press, Aunt Joan’s desperate disappointment at the end of his Oxford career, Charlotte, bereft and incensed by his disappearance and already sleeping with someone new, Lucy’s screams and scenes.

Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as “tragic,” in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives.

Bestigui looked up, his eyes tiny between pouches of flesh, black moles sprinkled over the swarthy skin.

Strike allowed several moments to elapse, but when it became clear that Bestigui was not going to avail himself of the opportunity to speak, he continued: “Tansy must’ve started hammering on the window immediately after Landry fell past her..."

To Strike’s surprise, a satyr’s grin impressed itself on Bestigui’s pouchy face. “Who told you that?”

She led the way outside, as if brooking no opposition, up the street to the Red Lion, the six other mourners following in her wake, heads bowed slightly against the rain.

The psychiatrist parried all Strike's attempts to engage him in conversation about the outpatients’ group he had run, finally countering a question about disclosures Rochelle might have made with a polite but firm reminder about patient confidentiality.

Alison threw him an unfriendly look, then resumed her contemplation of Bristow, who was still being harangued by Rochelle’s aunt.

She met his facetiousness with more disdainful silence.

Robin emerged from the Ladies, and was instantly suborned by Bristow, who seemed eager for assistance in coping with Aunt Winifred.

In spite of what seemed to be lukewarm feelings for Bristow, he thought that she was proud of his overtures; they were a kind of trophy.

“He went back to Oxford so that he could attend the conference in the afternoon,” she said doggedly.

The groom looked much older than his wife, a rotund, beaming, bearded man; the bride was thin, blonde and pretty in an insipid way.

Ostensibly admiring the photograph, Strike stood with his back to the door, and slid open a little drawer in the delicate cherrywood desk.

Her sense of ill-usage wafted gently towards him like the smell of the bedridden she exuded: a little fusty, a little overripe.

Strike could imagine her, prostrate and a little groggy, but no less resentful for all that, holding her unwilling daughter there at her side by talking about her pain, and her dead son.

“Thank you,” she murmured, relaxing back on to her pillows as he replaced her tea on the table, and fixing him with her plaintive eyes.

...he moaned under his breath, as he pulled himself back to his feet on the newel post, scared to put his full weight on the prosthesis.

“Somebody,” he said furiously, “called my secretary up this morning, purporting to be a very important client of ours in Rye, who was requesting an urgent meeting..."

Agyeman’s handsome face shone out of the monitor, with his sardonic smile, pristine in his dress uniform.

You probably just had some idea of waylaying her again when she came back.

The dying Yvette Bristow was of the same opinion as the news-reading public: if anyone was to inherit a fortune it ought to be the young soldier, not the uncle who was now known to have concealed crucial evidence in his niece’s murder and to be a philanderer to boot.

However much the public might assume this prospect to gladden the young Sapper’s heart, the soldier whom Cormoran Strike met in the Tottenham pub one lunchtime, ten days after the arrest of his sister’s killer, was almost truculent, and seemed still to be in a state of shock.

As they left the pub, Agyeman, who had bought the drinks with nervous insistence, made what might have been a tentative offer of money to Strike, whose impecunious existence had padded out much of the media coverage.

Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?