The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike, #1)

by Robert Galbraith

Why were you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster For their far off flying From summer dying. Why did you die when the lambs were cropping? You should have died at the apples’ dropping, When the grasshopper comes to trouble, And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble, And all winds go sighing For sweet things dying. Christina G. Rossetti, “A Dirge”

Unhappy is he whose fame makes his misfortunes famous.

Please google Lula Landry and find out whether she was adopted, and if so, by whom. Do not discuss what you are doing with the woman outside (what is she doing here?). Write down the answers to questions above and bring them to me here, without saying what you’ve found.

Lula Landry was adopted by Sir Alec and Lady Yvette Bristow when she was four. She grew up as Lula Bristow but took her mother’s maiden name when she started modeling. She has an older brother called John, who is a lawyer. The girl waiting outside is Mr. Bristow’s girlfriend and a secretary at his firm. They work for Landry, May, Patterson, the firm started by Lula and John’s maternal grandfather. The photograph of John Bristow on LMP’s home page is identical to the man you’re talking to.

couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.

First, allow the witness to tell their story in their own way: the untrammeled flow often revealed details, apparent inconsequentialities, that would later prove invaluable nuggets of evidence.

while the heavens turned indigo above him, Strike found solace in vastness and anonymity.

there was his hard-won knowledge of her mythomania, her need to provoke, to taunt, to test.

However, Strike knew that the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.

Laymen, in Strike’s experience, were obsessed with motive: opportunity topped the professional’s list.

Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawn mowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.

he had learned that the kind of money he had never known could coexist with unhappiness and savagery.

One last moment of madness, the space between heartbeats, like the one that had sent him hurtling after her five days previously: he would stay here, after all, waiting for her to return; then cupping her perfect face in his hands and saying “Let’s try again.” But they had already tried, again and again and again, and always, when the first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.

Robin was fascinated by the interior workings of other people’s minds:

unusually high quality: concise, precise and observant. Very few people answered the question they had been posed; even fewer knew how to organize their thoughts so that no follow-up questions were needed to prize information out of them.

Press and public seemed to have both loved her, and loved loathing her. One female journalist found her “strangely sweet, possessed of an unexpected naiveté”; another, “at bottom, a calculating little diva, shrewd and tough.”

“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”

Robin, following in the two men’s wake, noticed a subtle change in the way that Strike was talking to the security man. He was asking simple, deft questions, focusing on what Wilson had felt, touched, seen and heard at each step of his way through the flat. Under Strike’s guidance, Wilson’s body language started to change. He began to enact the way he had held the doorjambs, leaning into rooms, casting a rapid look around. When he crossed to the only bedroom, he did it at a slow-motion run, responding to the spotlight of Strike’s undivided attention; he dropped to his knees to demonstrate how he had looked under the bed, and at Strike’s prompting remembered that a dress had lain crumpled beneath his legs; he led them, face set with concentration, to the bathroom, and showed them how he had swiveled to check behind the door before sprinting (he almost mimed it, arms moving exaggeratedly as he walked) back to the front door. “And then,” said Strike, opening it and gesturing Wilson through, “you came out…” “I came out,” agreed Wilson, in his bass voice, “an’ I jabbed the lift button.” He pretended to do it, and feigned pushing open the doors in his anxiety to see what was inside. “Nothing—so I started running back down again.” “What could you hear now?” Strike asked, following him; neither of them were paying any attention to Robin, who closed the flat door behind her. “Very distant—the Bestiguis yelling—and I turn round this corner and—” Wilson stopped dead on the stair. Str...

Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari.’ Wonder who Johari was. Some rapper he was having a feud with, d’you think?” “No,” said Robin, wishing that he was not so cheerful. “It’s a psychological term. The Johari window. It’s all to do with how well we know ourselves, and how well other people know us.”

“But Looly was like that; she could go a bit dark and dramatic sometimes. Guy used to say, ‘Less of the cuckoo, Cuckoo.’

How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.