In The Cuckoo’s Calling, Strike meets Detective Sergeant Eric Wardle in person for the first time at the Feathers, a pub convenient for Wardle since it’s near Scotland Yard. It’s here that Strike gives Wardle information that he hopes will be in exchange for Lula Landry’s case file.

In Career of Evil, Strike and Robin go to the Feathers after they’ve been to Scotland Yard to view the photos of the body (from which Robin had received a leg). Later in that book, Strike meets Wardle here to be updated about the Shacklewell Ripper investigation.

The Feathers is described thusly: “It was another Victorian pub, this time with enormous windows reaching almost from floor to ceiling, looking out on to a great grey 1920s building.” The bar “faced a wide dark-wood staircase with curving steps and shining brass handrails, leading up to the first floor.”

“Inside the Feathers, machines were clinking and jingling and flashing primary-coloured lights; the wall-mounted plasma TVs, surrounded with padded leather, were showing West Bromwich Albion versus Chelsea with the sound off, while Amy Winehouse throbbed and moaned from hidden speakers. The names of ales were painted on the cream wall above the long bar.”

Strike and Robin “took a table at the back of the large pub, away from a couple of plainclothes officers who were talking in soft voices near the window.”

“Strike bought himself a pint of Doom Bar.”

In The Cuckoo’s Calling, Strike saw through the pub windows that “a fierce seated deity was being embraced by his infant son, whose body was weirdly twisted back on itself, to show hit genitalia. Time had eroded all shock value.”

In the fifth novel, Troubled Blood, Strike meets with George Layborn of the Metropolitan Police in the Feathers. They discuss the Margot Bamborough case and Strike ask Layborn if he can get his hands on the old case files.

Want to buy yourself a pint of Doom Bar at the Feathers? You can find it here.