The Silkworm (18 page)

Robin ate her salad without tasting it.

‘And does Leonora Quine seem…’ she began tentatively.

‘Like the kind of woman who’d disembowel her husband? No, but the police fancy her and if you’re looking for motive, she’s lousy with it. He was a crap husband: unreliable, adulterous and he liked depicting her in disgusting ways in his books.’

‘
You
don’t think she did it, do you?’

‘No,’ Strike said, ‘but we’re going to need a lot more than my opinion to keep her out of jail.’

Robin took their empty glasses back to the bar for refills without asking; Strike felt very fond of her as she set another pint in front of him.

‘We’ve also got to look at the possibility that somebody got the wind up that Quine was going to self-publish over the internet,’ said Strike, shovelling chips into his mouth, ‘a threat he allegedly made to a packed restaurant. That might constitute a motive for killing Quine, under the right conditions.’

‘You mean,’ said Robin slowly, ‘if the killer recognised something in the manuscript that they didn’t want to get a wider audience?’

‘Exactly. The book’s pretty cryptic in parts. What if Quine had found out something serious about somebody and put a veiled reference in the book?’

‘Well, that would make sense,’ said Robin slowly, ‘because I keep thinking,
Why
kill him?
The fact is, nearly all of these people had more effective means of dealing with the problem of a libellous book, didn’t they? They could have told Quine they wouldn’t represent it or publish it, or they could have threatened him with legal action, like this Chard man. His death’s going to make the situation much worse for anyone who’s a character in the book, isn’t it? There’s already much more publicity than there would have been otherwise.’

‘Agreed,’ said Strike. ‘But you’re assuming the killer’s thinking rationally.’

‘This wasn’t a crime of passion,’ retorted Robin. ‘They planned it. They really thought it through. They must have been ready for the consequences.’

‘True again,’ said Strike, eating chips.

‘I’ve been having a bit of a look at
Bombyx Mori
this morning.’

‘After you got bored with
Hobart’s Sin
?’

‘Yes… well, it was there in the safe and…’

‘Read the whole thing, the more the merrier,’ said Strike. ‘How far did you get?’

‘I skipped around,’ said Robin. ‘I read the bit about Succuba and the Tick. It’s spiteful, but it doesn’t feel as though there’s anything… well…
hidden
there. He’s basically accusing both his wife and his agent of being parasites on him, isn’t he?’

Strike nodded.

‘But later on, when you get to Epi – Epi – how do you say it?’

‘Epicoene? The hermaphrodite?’

‘Is that a real person, do you think? What’s with the singing? It doesn’t feel as though it’s really
singing
he’s talking about, does it?’

‘And why does his girlfriend Harpy live in a cave full of rats? Symbolism, or something else?’

‘And the bloodstained bag over the Cutter’s shoulder,’ said Robin, ‘and the dwarf he tries to drown…’

‘And the brands in the fire at Vainglorious’s house,’ said Strike, but she looked puzzled. ‘You haven’t got that far? But Jerry Waldegrave explained that to a bunch of us at the Roper Chard party. It’s about Michael Fancourt and his first—’

Strike’s mobile rang. He pulled it out and saw Dominic Culpepper’s name. With a small sigh, he answered.

‘Strike?’

‘Speaking.’

‘What the fuck’s going on?’

Strike did not waste time pretending not to know what Culpepper was talking about.

‘Can’t discuss it, Culpepper. Could prejudice the police case.’

‘Fuck that – we’ve got a copper talking to us already. He says this Quine’s been slaughtered exactly the way a bloke’s killed in his latest book.’

‘Yeah? And how much are you paying the stupid bastard to shoot his mouth off and screw up the case?’

‘Bloody hell, Strike, you get mixed up in a murder like this and you don’t even think of ringing me?’

‘I don’t know what you think our relationship is about, mate,’ said Strike, ‘but as far as I’m concerned, I do jobs for you and you pay me. That’s it.’

‘I put you in touch with Nina so you could get in that publisher’s party.’

‘The least you could do after I handed you a load of extra stuff you’d never asked for on Parker,’ said Strike, spearing stray chips with his free hand. ‘I could’ve withheld that and shopped it all round the tabloids.’

‘If you want paying—’

‘No, I don’t want paying, dickhead,’ said Strike irritably, as Robin turned her attention tactfully to the BBC website on her own phone. ‘I’m not going to help screw up a murder investigation by dragging in the
News of the World
.’

‘I could get you ten grand if you throw in a personal interview.’

‘Bye, Cul—’

‘Wait! Just tell me which book it is – the one where he describes the murder.’

Strike pretended to hesitate.

‘
The Brothers Balls
…
Balzac
,’ he said.

Smirking, he cut the call and reached for the menu to examine the puddings. Hopefully Culpepper would spend a long afternoon wading through tortured syntax and palpated scrotums.

‘Anything new?’ Strike asked as Robin looked up from her phone.

‘Not unless you count the
Daily Mail
saying that family friends thought Pippa Middleton would make a better marriage than Kate.’

Strike frowned at her.

‘I was just looking at random things while you were on the phone,’ said Robin, a little defensively.

‘No,’ said Strike, ‘not that. I’ve just remembered – Pippa2011.’

‘I don’t—’ said Robin, confused, and still thinking of Pippa Middleton.

‘Pippa2011 – on Kathryn Kent’s blog. She claimed to have heard a bit of
Bombyx Mori
.’

Robin gasped and set to work on her mobile.

‘It’s here!’ she said, a few minutes later. ‘“What would you say if I told you he’d read it to me”! And that was…’ Robin scrolled upwards, ‘on October the twenty-first. October the twenty-first! She might’ve known the ending before Quine even disappeared.’

‘That’s right,’ said Strike. ‘I’m having apple crumble, want anything?’

When Robin had returned from placing yet another order at the bar, Strike said:

‘Anstis has asked me to dinner tonight. Says he’s got some preliminary stuff in from forensics.’

‘Does he know it’s your birthday?’ asked Robin.

‘Christ, no,’ said Strike, and he sounded so revolted by the idea that Robin laughed.

‘Why would that be bad?’

‘I’ve already had one birthday dinner,’ said Strike darkly. ‘Best present I could get from Anstis would be a time of death. The earlier they set it, the smaller the number of likely suspects: the ones who got their hands on the manuscript early. Unfortunately, that includes Leonora, but you’ve got this mysterious Pippa, Christian Fisher—’

‘Why Fisher?’

‘Means and opportunity, Robin: he had early access, he’s got to go on the list. Then there’s Elizabeth Tassel’s assistant Ralph, Elizabeth Tassel herself and Jerry Waldegrave. Daniel Chard presumably saw it shortly after Waldegrave. Kathryn Kent denies reading it, but I’m taking that with a barrel of salt. And then there’s Michael Fancourt.’

Robin looked up, startled.

‘How can he—?’

Strike’s mobile rang again; it was Nina Lascelles. He hesitated, but the reflection that her cousin might have told her he had just spoken to Strike persuaded him to take the call.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi, Famous Person,’ she said. He heard an edge, inexpertly covered by breathy high spirits. ‘I’ve been too scared to call you in case you’re being inundated with press calls and groupies and things.’

‘Not so much,’ said Strike. ‘How’re things at Roper Chard?’

‘Insane. Nobody’s doing any work; it’s all we can talk about. Was it really, honestly murder?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘God, I can’t believe it… I don’t suppose you can tell me anything, though?’ she asked, barely suppressing the interrogative note.

‘The police won’t want details getting out at this stage.’

‘It was to do with the book, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘
Bombyx Mori
.’

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘And Daniel Chard’s broken his leg.’

‘Sorry?’ he said, thrown by the non sequitur.

‘Just so many odd things happening,’ she said. She sounded keyed up, overwrought. ‘Jerry’s all over the place. Daniel rang him up from Devon just now and was yelling at him again – half the office heard because Jerry put him on speakerphone by accident and then couldn’t find the button to turn him off. He can’t leave his weekend house because of his broken leg. Daniel, I mean.’

‘Why was he yelling at Waldegrave?’

‘Security on
Bombyx
,’ she said. ‘The police have got a full copy of the manuscript from somewhere and Daniel’s
not
happy about it.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I just thought I’d ring and say congrats – I suppose you congratulate a detective when they find a body, or don’t you? Call me when you’re not so busy.’

She rang off before he could say anything else.

‘Nina Lascelles,’ he said as the waiter reappeared with his apple crumble and a coffee for Robin. ‘The girl—’

‘Who stole the manuscript for you,’ said Robin.

‘Your memory would’ve been wasted in HR,’ said Strike, picking up his spoon.

‘Are you serious about Michael Fancourt?’ she asked quietly.

‘Course,’ said Strike. ‘Daniel Chard must’ve told him what Quine had done – he wouldn’t have wanted Fancourt to hear it from anyone else, would he? Fancourt’s a major acquisition for them. No, I think we’ve got to assume that Fancourt knew, early on, what was in—’

Now Robin’s mobile rang.

‘Hi,’ said Matthew.

‘Hi, how are you?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Not great.’

Somewhere in the background, someone turned up the music: ‘
First day that I saw you, thought you were beautiful
…’

‘Where are you?’ asked Matthew sharply.

‘Oh… in a pub,’ said Robin.

Suddenly the air seemed full of pub noises; clinking glasses, raucous laughter from the bar.

‘It’s Cormoran’s birthday,’ she said anxiously. (After all, Matthew and his colleagues went to the pub on each other’s birthdays…)

‘That’s nice,’ said Matthew, sounding furious. ‘I’ll call you later.’

‘Matt, no – wait—’

Mouth full of apple crumble, Strike watched out of the corner of his eye as she got up and moved away to the bar without explanation, evidently trying to redial Matthew. The accountant was unhappy that his fiancée had gone out to lunch, that she was not sitting shiva for his mother.

Robin redialled and redialled. She got through at last. Strike finished both his crumble and his third pint and realised that he needed the bathroom.

His knee, which had not troubled him much while he ate, drank and talked to Robin, complained violently when he stood. By the time he got back to his seat he was sweating a little with the pain. Judging by the expression on her face, Robin was still trying to placate Matthew. When at last she hung up and rejoined him, he returned a short answer to whether or not he was all right.

‘You know, I could follow the Brocklehurst girl for you,’ she offered again, ‘if your leg’s too—?’

‘No,’ snapped Strike.

He felt sore, angry with himself, irritated by Matthew and suddenly a bit nauseous. He ought not to have eaten the chocolate before having steak, chips, crumble and three pints.

‘I need you to go back to the office and type up Gunfrey’s last invoice. And text me if those bloody journalists are still around, because I’ll go straight from here to Anstis’s, if they are.

‘We really need to be thinking about taking someone else on,’ he added under his breath.

Robin’s expression hardened.

‘I’ll go and get typing, then,’ she said. She snatched up her coat and bag and left. Strike caught a glimpse of her angry expression, but an irrational vexation prevented him from calling her back.

An afternoon in the pub with his leg propped up had not much reduced the swelling in Strike’s knee. After buying painkillers and a cheap bottle of red on the way to the Tube, he set out for Greenwich where Anstis lived with his wife Helen, commonly known as Helly. The journey to their house in Ashburnham Grove took him over an hour due to a delay on the Central line; he stood the whole way, keeping his weight on his left leg, regretting anew the hundred pounds he had spent on taxis to and from Lucy’s house.

By the time he got off the Docklands Light Railway spots of rain were again peppering his face. He turned up his collar and limped away into the darkness for what should have been a five-minute walk, but which took him nearly fifteen.

Only as he turned the corner into the neat terraced street with its well-tended front gardens did it occur to Strike that he ought, perhaps, to have brought a gift for his godson. He felt as little enthusiasm for the social part of the evening ahead as he felt eager to discuss with Anstis the forensic information.

Strike did not like Anstis’s wife. Her nosiness was barely concealed beneath a sometimes cloying warmth; it emerged from time to time like a flick knife flashing suddenly from beneath a fur coat. She gushed gratitude and solicitousness every time Strike swam into her orbit, but he could tell that she itched for details of his chequered past, for information about his rock star father, his dead, drug-taking mother, and he could well imagine that she would yearn for details of his break-up with Charlotte, whom she had always treated with an effusiveness that failed to mask dislike and suspicion.

At the party following the christening of Timothy Cormoran Anstis – which had been postponed until he was eighteen months old, because his father and his godfather had to be airlifted out of Afghanistan and discharged from their respective hospitals – Helly had insisted on making a tearful, tipsy speech about how Strike had saved her baby’s daddy’s life, and how much it meant to her to have him agree to be Timmy’s guardian angel, too. Strike, who had not been able to think of any valid reason to refuse being the boy’s godfather, had stared at the tablecloth while Helly spoke, careful not to meet Charlotte’s eye in case she made him laugh. She had been wearing – he remembered it vividly – his favourite peacock blue wrap-over dress, which had clung to every inch of her perfect figure. Having a woman that beautiful on his arm, even while he was still on crutches, had acted as a counterweight to the half a leg still not yet fit for a prosthesis. It had transformed him from the Man With Only One Foot to the man who had managed – miraculously, as he knew nearly every man who came into contact with her must think – to snag a fiancée so stunning that men stopped talking in mid-sentence when she entered the room.

‘Cormy, darling,’ crooned Helly when she opened the door. ‘Look at you, all famous… we thought you’d forgotten us.’

Nobody else ever called him Cormy. He had never bothered to tell her he disliked it.

She treated him, without encouragement, to a tender hug that he knew was intended to suggest pity and regret for his single status. The house was warm and brightly lit after the hostile winter night outside and he was glad to see, as he extricated himself from Helly, Anstis stride into view, holding a pint of Doom Bar as a welcoming gift.

‘Ritchie, let him get inside. Honestly…’

But Strike had accepted the pint and taken several grateful mouthfuls before he bothered to take off his coat.

Strike’s three-and-a-half-year-old godson burst into the hall, making shrill engine noises. He was very like his mother, whose features, small and pretty though they were, were oddly bunched up in the middle of her face. Timothy sported Superman pyjamas and was swiping at the walls with a plastic lightsaber.

‘Oh, Timmy, darling,
don’t
, our lovely new paintwork… He wanted to stay up and see his Uncle Cormoran. We tell him about you all the time,’ said Helly.

Strike contemplated the small figure without enthusiasm, detecting very little reciprocal interest from his godson. Timothy was the only child Strike knew whose birthday he had a hope of remembering, not that this had ever led Strike to buy him a present. The boy had been born two days before the Viking had exploded on that dusty road in Afghanistan, taking with it Strike’s lower right leg and part of Anstis’s face.

Strike had never confided in anyone how, during long hours in his hospital bed, he had wondered why it had been Anstis he had grabbed and pulled towards the back of the vehicle. He had gone over it in his mind: the strange presentiment, amounting almost to certainty, that they were about to explode, and the reaching out and seizing of Anstis, when he could equally have grabbed Sergeant Gary Topley.

Was it because Anstis had spent most of the previous day Skyping Helen within earshot of Strike, looking at the newborn son he might otherwise never have met? Was that why Strike’s hand had reached without hesitation for the older man, the Territorial Army policeman, and not Red Cap Topley, engaged but childless? Strike did not know. He was not sentimental about children and he disliked the wife he had saved from widowhood. He knew himself to be merely one among millions of soldiers, dead and living, whose split-second actions, prompted by instinct as much as training, had forever altered other men’s fates.

‘Do you want to read Tim his bedtime story, Cormy? We’ve got a new book, haven’t we, Timmy?’

Strike could think of little he wanted to do less, especially if it involved the hyperactive boy sitting on his lap and perhaps kicking his right knee.

Anstis led the way into the open-plan kitchen and dining area. The walls were cream, the floorboards bare, a long wooden table stood near French windows at the end of the room, surrounded by chairs upholstered in black. Strike had the vague idea that they had been a different colour when he had last been here, with Charlotte. Helly bustled in behind them and thrust a highly coloured picture book into Strike’s hands. He had no choice but to sit down on a dining-room chair, with his godson placed firmly beside him, and to read the story of
Kyla the Kangaroo Who Loved to
Bounce
which was (as he would not usually have noticed) published by Roper Chard. Timothy did not appear remotely interested in Kyla’s antics and played with his lightsaber throughout.

‘Bedtime Timmy, give Cormy a kiss,’ Helly told her son, who, with Strike’s silent blessing, merely wriggled off his chair and ran out of the kitchen yelling protests. Helly followed. Mother and son’s raised voices grew muffled as they thumped upstairs.

‘He’ll wake Tilly,’ predicted Anstis and, sure enough, when Helly reappeared it was with a howling one-year-old in her arms, whom she thrust at her husband before turning to the oven.

Strike sat stolidly at the kitchen table, growing steadily hungrier, and feeling profoundly grateful that he did not have children. It took nearly three quarters of an hour for the Anstises to persuade Tilly back into her bed. At last the casserole reached the table and, with it, another pint of Doom Bar. Strike could have relaxed but for the sense that Helly Anstis was now gearing up for the attack.

‘I was so, so sorry to hear about you and Charlotte,’ she told him.

His mouth was full, so he mimed vague appreciation of her sympathy.

‘Ritchie!’ she said playfully as her husband made to pour her a glass of wine. ‘I don’t think so! We’re expecting again,’ she told Strike proudly, one hand on her stomach.

He swallowed.

‘Congratulations,’ he said, staggered that they looked so pleased at the prospect of another Timothy or Tilly.

Right on cue, their son reappeared and announced that he was hungry. To Strike’s disappointment, it was Anstis who left the table to deal with him, leaving Helly staring beadily at Strike over a forkful of
boeuf bourguignon
.

‘So she’s getting married on the fourth. I can’t even
imagine
what that feels like for you.’

‘Who’s getting married?’ Strike asked.

Helly looked amazed.

‘Charlotte,’ she said.

Dimly, down the stairs, came the sound of his godson wailing.

‘Charlotte’s getting married on the fourth of December,’ said Helly, and with her realisation that she was the first to give him the news came a look of burgeoning excitement; but then something in Strike’s expression seemed to unnerve her.

‘I… I heard,’ she said, dropping her gaze to her plate as Anstis returned.

‘Little bugger,’ he said. ‘I’ve told him I’ll smack his bum for him if he gets out of bed again.’

‘He’s just excited,’ said Helly, who still seemed flustered by the anger she had sensed in Strike, ‘because Cormy’s here.’

The casserole had turned to rubber and polystyrene in Strike’s mouth. How could Helly Anstis know when Charlotte was getting married? The Anstises hardly moved in the same circles as her or her future husband, who (as Strike despised himself for remembering) was the son of the Fourteenth Viscount of Croy. What did Helly Anstis know about the world of private gentlemen’s clubs, of Savile Row tailoring and coked-up supermodels of which the Hon. Jago Ross had been a habitué all his trust-funded life? She knew no more than Strike himself. Charlotte, to whom it was native territory, had joined Strike in a social no-man’s-land when they had been together, a place where neither was comfortable with the other’s social set, where two utterly disparate norms collided and everything became a struggle for common ground.

Timothy was back in the kitchen, crying hard. Both his parents stood up this time and jointly moved him back towards his bedroom while Strike, hardly aware that they had gone, was left to disappear into a fug of memories.

Charlotte had been volatile to the point that one of her stepfathers had once tried to have her committed. She lied as other women breathed; she was damaged to her core. The longest consecutive period that she and Strike had ever managed together was two years, yet as often as their trust in each other had splintered they had been drawn back together, each time (so it seemed to Strike) more fragile than they had been before, but with the longing for each other strengthening. For sixteen years Charlotte had defied the disbelief and disdain of her family and friends to return, over and over again, to a large, illegitimate and latterly disabled soldier. Strike would have advised any friend to leave and not look back, but he had come to see her like a virus in his blood that he doubted he would ever eradicate; the best he could hope for was to control its symptoms. The final breach had come eight months previously, just before he had become newsworthy through the Landry case. She had finally told an unforgivable lie, he had left her for good and she had retreated into a world where men still went grouse shooting and women had tiaras in the family vault; a world she had told him she despised (although it looked as though that had been a lie too…).

The Anstises returned, minus Timothy but with a sobbing and hiccupping Tilly.

‘Bet you’re glad you haven’t got any, aren’t you?’ said Helly gaily, sitting back down at the table with Tilly on her lap. Strike grinned humourlessly and did not contradict her.

There had been a baby: or more accurately the ghost, the promise of a baby and then, supposedly, the death of a baby. Charlotte had told him that she was pregnant, refused to consult a doctor, changed her mind about dates, then announced that all was over without a shred of proof that it had ever been real. It was a lie most men would have found impossible to forgive and for Strike it had been, as surely she must have known, the lie to end all lies and the death of that tiny amount of trust that had survived years of her mythomania.

Marrying on the fourth of December, in eleven days’ time… how could Helly Anstis know?

He was perversely grateful, now, for the whining and tantrums of the two children, which effectively disrupted conversation all through a pudding of rhubarb flan and custard. Anstis’s suggestion that they take fresh beers into his study to go over the forensic report was the best Strike had heard all day. They left a slightly sulky Helly, who clearly felt that she had not had her money’s worth out of Strike, to manage the now very sleepy Tilly and the unnervingly wide-awake Timothy, who had reappeared to announce that he had spilled his drinking water all over his bed.

Anstis’s study was a small, book-lined room off the hall. He offered Strike the computer chair and sat on an old futon. The curtains were not drawn; Strike could see a misty rain falling like dust motes in the light of an orange street lamp.

‘Forensics say it’s as hard a job as they’ve ever had,’ Anstis began, and Strike’s attention was immediately all his. ‘All this is unofficial, mind, we haven’t got everything in yet.’

‘Have they been able to tell what actually killed him?’

‘Blow to the head,’ said Anstis. ‘The back of his skull’s been stoved in. It might not’ve been instantaneous, but the brain trauma alone would’ve killed him. They can’t be sure he was dead when he was carved open, but he was almost certainly unconscious.’

‘Small mercies. Any idea whether he was tied up before or after he was knocked out?’

‘There’s some argument about that. There’s a patch of skin under the ropes on one of his wrists that’s bruised, which they think indicates he was tied up before he was killed, but we’ve no indication whether he was still conscious when the ropes were put on him. The problem is, all that bloody acid everywhere’s taken away any marks on the floor that might’ve shown a struggle, or the body being dragged. He was a big, heavy guy—’

‘Easier to handle if he was trussed up,’ agreed Strike, thinking of short, thin Leonora, ‘but it’d be good to know the angle he was hit at.’