The Cuckoo's Calling(6)

“What can I do for you, Mr. Bristow?” he asked, back in his own chair.

“It’s—um—actually, I wonder whether I could just check…I think we’ve met before.”

“Really?”

“You wouldn’t remember me, it was years and years ago…but I think you were friends with my brother Charlie. Charlie Bristow? He died—in an accident—when he was nine.”

“Bloody hell,” said Strike. “Charlie…yeah, I remember.”

And, indeed, he remembered perfectly. Charlie Bristow had been one of many friends Strike had collected during a complicated, peripatetic childhood. A magnetic, wild and reckless boy, pack leader of the coolest gang at Strike’s new school in London, Charlie had taken one look at the enormous new boy with the thick Cornish accent, and appointed him his best friend and lieutenant. Two giddy months of bosom friendship and bad behavior had followed. Strike, who had always been fascinated by the smooth workings of other children’s homes, with their sane, well-ordered families, and the bedrooms they were allowed to keep for years and years, retained a vivid memory of Charlie’s house, which had been large and luxurious. There had been a long sunlit lawn, a tree house, and iced lemon squash served by Charlie’s mother.

And then had come the unprecedented horror of the first day back at school after Easter break, when their form teacher had told them that Charlie would never return, that he was dead, that he had ridden his bike over the edge of a quarry, while holidaying in Wales. She had been a mean old bitch, that teacher, and she had not been able to resist telling the class that Charlie, who as they would remember often disobeyed grown-ups, had been expressly forbidden to ride anywhere near the quarry, but that he had done so anyway, perhaps showing off—but she had been forced to stop there, because two little girls in the front row were sobbing.

From that day onwards, Strike had seen the face of a laughing blond boy fragmenting every time he looked at, or imagined, a quarry. He would not have been surprised if every member of Charlie Bristow’s old class had been left with the same lingering fear of the great dark pit, the sheer drop and the unforgiving stone.

“Yeah, I remember Charlie,” he said.

Bristow’s Adam’s apple bobbed a little.

“Yes. Well it’s your name, you see. I remember so clearly Charlie talking about you, on holiday, in the days before he died; ‘my friend Strike,’ ‘Cormoran Strike.’ It’s unusual, isn’t it? Where does ‘Strike’ come from, do you know? I’ve never met it anywhere else.”

Bristow was not the first person Strike had known who would snatch at any procrastinatory subject—the weather, the congestion charge, their preferences in hot drinks—to postpone discussion of what had brought them to his office.

“I’ve been told it’s something to do with corn,” he said, “measuring corn.”

“Really, is it? Nothing to do with hitting, or walkouts, ha ha…no…Well you see, when I was looking for someone to help me with this business, and I saw your name in the book,” Bristow’s knee began jiggling up and down, “you can perhaps imagine how it—well, it felt like—like a sign. A sign from Charlie. Saying I was right.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

“OK,” said Strike cautiously, hoping that he had not been mistaken for a medium.

“It’s my sister, you see,” said Bristow.

“Right. Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“She’s dead.”

Strike just stopped himself saying, “What, her too?”

“I’m sorry,” he said carefully.

Bristow acknowledged the condolence with a jerky inclination of the head.

“I—this isn’t easy. Firstly, you should know that my sister is—was—Lula Landry.”

Hope, so briefly re-erected at the news that he might have a client, fell slowly forwards like a granite tombstone and landed with an agonizing blow in Strike’s gut. The man sitting opposite him was delusional, if not actually unhinged. It was an impossibility akin to two identical snowflakes that this whey-faced, leporine man could have sprung from the same genetic pool as the bronze-skinned, colt-limbed, diamond-cut beauty that had been Lula Landry.

“My parents adopted her,” said Bristow meekly, as though he knew what Strike was thinking. “We were all adopted.”

“Uh huh,” said Strike. He had an exceptionally accurate memory; thinking back to that huge, cool, well-ordered house, and the blazing acres of garden, he remembered a languid blonde mother presiding at the picnic table, the distant booming voice of an intimidating father; a surly older brother picking at the fruit cake, Charlie himself making his mother laugh as he clowned; but no little girl.

“You wouldn’t have met Lula,” Bristow went on, again as though Strike had spoken his thoughts aloud. “My parents didn’t adopt her until after Charlie had died. She was four years old when she came to us; she’d been in care for a couple of years. I was nearly fifteen. I can still remember standing at the front door and watching my father carrying her up the drive. She was wearing a little red knitted hat. My mother’s still got it.”

And suddenly, shockingly, John Bristow burst into tears. He sobbed into his hands, hunch-shouldered, quaking, while tears and snot slid through the cracks in his fingers. Every time he seemed to have himself under some kind of control, more sobs burst forth.