Read Online The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Galbraith
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the bathroom after Lula fell, when he heard Tansy Bestigui screaming.
This window of opportunity tallies exactly with the time the Runner would have reached 18 Kentigern Gardens if he passed the security camera on the junction of Alderbrook and Bellamy Roads at 1:39.
“And how,” murmured Strike, massaging his forehead, “did he see through the front door, to know the guard was in the bog?”
I have spoken to Derrick Wilson, who is happy to be interviewed.
And I bet you’ve paid him to do it, Strike thought, noting the security guard’s telephone number beneath these concluding words.
He laid down the pen with which he had been intending to add his own notes, and clipped Bristow’s jottings into the file. Then he turned off the desk lamp and limped out to pee in the toilet on the landing. After brushing his teeth over the cracked basin, he locked the glass door, set his alarm clock and undressed.
By the neon glow of the street lamp outside, Strike undid the straps of his prosthetic, easing it from the aching stump, removing the gel liner that had become an inadequate cushion against pain. He laid the false leg beside his recharging mobile phone, maneuvered himself into his sleeping bag and lay with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. Now, as he had feared, the leaden fatigue of the body was not enough to still the misfiring mind. The old infection was active again; tormenting him, dragging at him.
What would she be doing now?
Yesterday evening, in a parallel universe, he had lived in a beautiful apartment in a most desirable part of London, with a woman who made every man who laid eyes on her treat Strike with a kind of incredulous envy.
“Why don’t you just move in with me? Oh, for God’s sake, Bluey, doesn’t it make sense? Why not?”
He had known, from the very first, that it was a mistake. They had tried it before, and each time it had been more calamitous than the last.
“We’re engaged, for God’s sake, why won’t you live with me?”
She had said things that were supposed to be proofs that, in the process of almost losing him forever, she had been as irrevocably changed as he had, with his one and a half legs.
“I don’t need a ring. Don’t be ridiculous, Bluey. You need all your money for the new business.”
He closed his eyes. There could be no going back from this morning. She had lied once too often, about something too serious. But he went over it all again, like a sum he had long since solved, afraid he had made some elementary mistake. Painstakingly he added together the constantly shifting dates, the refusal to check with chemist or doctor, the fury with which she had countered any request for clarification, and then the sudden announcement that it was over, with never a shred of proof that it had been real. Along with every other suspicious circumstance, there was his hard-won knowledge of her mythomania, her need to provoke, to taunt, to test.
“Don’t you dare fucking investigate me. Don’t you dare treat me like some drugged-up squaddie. I am not a fucking case to be solved; you’re supposed to love me and you won’t take my word even on this …”
But the lies she told were woven into the fabric of her being, her life; so that to live with her and love her was to become slowly enmeshed by them, to wrestle her for the truth, to struggle to maintain a foothold on reality. How could it have happened, that he, who from his most extreme youth had needed to investigate, to know for sure, to winkle the truth out of the smallest conundrums, could have fallen in love so hard, and for so long, with a girl who spun lies as easily as other women breathed?
“It’s over,” he told himself. “It had to happen.”
But he had not wanted to tell Anstis, and he could not face telling anyone else, not yet. There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and
This window of opportunity tallies exactly with the time the Runner would have reached 18 Kentigern Gardens if he passed the security camera on the junction of Alderbrook and Bellamy Roads at 1:39.
“And how,” murmured Strike, massaging his forehead, “did he see through the front door, to know the guard was in the bog?”
I have spoken to Derrick Wilson, who is happy to be interviewed.
And I bet you’ve paid him to do it, Strike thought, noting the security guard’s telephone number beneath these concluding words.
He laid down the pen with which he had been intending to add his own notes, and clipped Bristow’s jottings into the file. Then he turned off the desk lamp and limped out to pee in the toilet on the landing. After brushing his teeth over the cracked basin, he locked the glass door, set his alarm clock and undressed.
By the neon glow of the street lamp outside, Strike undid the straps of his prosthetic, easing it from the aching stump, removing the gel liner that had become an inadequate cushion against pain. He laid the false leg beside his recharging mobile phone, maneuvered himself into his sleeping bag and lay with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. Now, as he had feared, the leaden fatigue of the body was not enough to still the misfiring mind. The old infection was active again; tormenting him, dragging at him.
What would she be doing now?
Yesterday evening, in a parallel universe, he had lived in a beautiful apartment in a most desirable part of London, with a woman who made every man who laid eyes on her treat Strike with a kind of incredulous envy.
“Why don’t you just move in with me? Oh, for God’s sake, Bluey, doesn’t it make sense? Why not?”
He had known, from the very first, that it was a mistake. They had tried it before, and each time it had been more calamitous than the last.
“We’re engaged, for God’s sake, why won’t you live with me?”
She had said things that were supposed to be proofs that, in the process of almost losing him forever, she had been as irrevocably changed as he had, with his one and a half legs.
“I don’t need a ring. Don’t be ridiculous, Bluey. You need all your money for the new business.”
He closed his eyes. There could be no going back from this morning. She had lied once too often, about something too serious. But he went over it all again, like a sum he had long since solved, afraid he had made some elementary mistake. Painstakingly he added together the constantly shifting dates, the refusal to check with chemist or doctor, the fury with which she had countered any request for clarification, and then the sudden announcement that it was over, with never a shred of proof that it had been real. Along with every other suspicious circumstance, there was his hard-won knowledge of her mythomania, her need to provoke, to taunt, to test.
“Don’t you dare fucking investigate me. Don’t you dare treat me like some drugged-up squaddie. I am not a fucking case to be solved; you’re supposed to love me and you won’t take my word even on this …”
But the lies she told were woven into the fabric of her being, her life; so that to live with her and love her was to become slowly enmeshed by them, to wrestle her for the truth, to struggle to maintain a foothold on reality. How could it have happened, that he, who from his most extreme youth had needed to investigate, to know for sure, to winkle the truth out of the smallest conundrums, could have fallen in love so hard, and for so long, with a girl who spun lies as easily as other women breathed?
“It’s over,” he told himself. “It had to happen.”
But he had not wanted to tell Anstis, and he could not face telling anyone else, not yet. There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and
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