The Silkworm (41 page)

Fancourt said nothing, but merely watched Strike over his wine glass.

‘You said “Eff” then corrected yourself, and said “Ellie”,’ said Strike.

‘Well, as you say – I misspoke. It can happen to the most articulate of us.’

‘In
Bombyx Mori
, your late wife—’

‘—is called “Effigy”.’

‘Which is a coincidence,’ said Strike.

‘Obviously,’ said Fancourt.

‘Because you couldn’t yet have known that Quine had called her “Effigy” on the seventh.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘Quine’s mistress got a copy of the manuscript fed through her letter box right after he disappeared,’ said Strike. ‘You didn’t get sent an early copy, by any chance?’

The ensuing pause became over-long. Strike felt the fragile thread that he had managed to spin between them snap. It did not matter. He had saved this question for last.

‘No,’ said Fancourt. ‘I didn’t.’

He pulled out his wallet. His declared intention of picking Strike’s brains for a character in his next novel seemed, not at all to Strike’s regret, forgotten. Strike pulled out some cash, but Fancourt held up a hand and said, with unmistakable offensiveness:

‘No, no, allow me. Your press coverage makes much of the fact that you have known better times. In fact, it puts me in mind of Ben Jonson: “I am a poor gentleman, a soldier; one that, in the better state of my fortunes, scorned so mean a refuge”.’

‘Really?’ said Strike pleasantly, returning his cash to his pocket. ‘I’m put more in mind of

He looked unsmilingly upon Fancourt’s astonishment. The writer rallied quickly.

‘Ovid?’

‘Catullus,’ said Strike, heaving himself off the low pouffe with the aid of the table. ‘Translates roughly:

‘Well, I expect we’ll see each other around,’ said Strike pleasantly.

He limped off towards the stairs, Fancourt’s eyes upon his back.

Strike sat for a long time on the sofa in his kitchen-sitting room that night, barely hearing the rumble of the traffic on Charing Cross Road and the occasional muffled shouts of more early Christmas party-goers. He had removed his prosthesis; it was comfortable sitting there in his boxers, the end of his injured leg free of pressure, the throbbing of his knee deadened by another double dose of painkillers. Unfinished pasta congealed on the plate beside him on the sofa, the sky beyond his small window achieved the dark blue velvet depth of true night, and Strike did not move, though wide awake.

It felt like a very long time since he had seen the picture of Charlotte in her wedding dress. He had not given her another thought all day. Was this the start of true healing? She had married Jago Ross and he was alone, mulling the complexities of an elaborate murder in the dim light of his chilly attic flat. Perhaps each of them was, at last, where they really belonged.

On the table in front of him in the clear plastic evidence bag, still half wrapped in the photocopied cover of
Upon the Wicked Rocks
, sat the dark grey typewriter cassette that he had taken from Orlando. He had been staring at it for what seemed like half an hour at least, feeling like a child on Christmas morning confronted by a mysterious, inviting package, the largest under the tree. And yet he ought not to look, or touch, lest he interfere with whatever forensic evidence might be gleaned from the tape. Any suspicion of tampering…

He checked his watch. He had promised himself not to make the call until half past nine. There were children to be wrestled into bed, a wife to placate after another long day on the job. Strike wanted time to explain fully…

But his patience had limits. Getting up with some difficulty, he took the keys to his office and moved laboriously downstairs, clutching the handrail, hopping and occasionally sitting down. Ten minutes later he re-entered his flat and returned to the still-warm spot on the sofa carrying his penknife and wearing another pair of the latex gloves he had earlier given to Robin.

He lifted the typewriter tape and the crumpled cover illustration gingerly out of the evidence bag and set the cassette, still resting on the paper, on the rickety Formica-topped table. Barely breathing, he pulled out the toothpick attachment from his knife and inserted it delicately behind the two inches of fragile tape that were exposed. By dint of careful manipulation he managed to pull out a little more. Reversed words were revealed, the letters back to front.

YOB
EIDDE
WENK
I
THGUOHT
DAH
I
DN
 

His sudden rush of adrenalin was expressed only in Strike’s quiet sigh of satisfaction. He deftly tightened the tape again, using the knife’s screwdriver attachment in the cog at the top of the cassette, the whole untouched by his hands, then, still wearing the latex gloves, slipped it back into the evidence bag. He checked his watch again. Unable to wait any longer, he picked up his mobile and called Dave Polworth.

‘Bad time?’ he asked when his old friend answered.

‘No,’ said Polworth, sounding curious. ‘What’s up, Diddy?’

‘Need a favour, Chum. A big one.’

The engineer, over a hundred miles away in his sitting room in Bristol, listened without interrupting while the detective explained what it was he wanted done. When finally he had finished, there was a pause.

‘I know it’s a big ask,’ Strike said, listening anxiously to the line crackling. ‘Dunno if it’ll even be possible in this weather.’

‘Course it will,’ said Polworth. ‘I’d have to see when I could do it, though, Diddy. Got two days off coming up… not sure Penny’s going to be keen…’

‘Yeah, I thought that might be a problem,’ said Strike, ‘I know it’d be dangerous.’

‘Don’t insult me, I’ve done worse than this,’ said Polworth. ‘Nah, she wanted me to take her and her mother Christmas shopping… but fuck it, Diddy, did you say this is life or death?’

‘Close,’ said Strike, closing his eyes and grinning. ‘Life and liberty.’

‘And no Christmas shopping, boy, which suits old Chum. Consider it done, and I’ll give you a ring if I’ve got anything, all right?’

‘Stay safe, mate.’

‘Piss off.’

Strike dropped the mobile beside him on the sofa and rubbed his face in his hands, still grinning. He might just have told Polworth to do something even crazier and more pointless than grabbing a passing shark, but Polworth was a man who enjoyed danger, and the time had come for desperate measures.

The last thing Strike did before turning out the light was to re-read the notes of his conversation with Fancourt and to underline, so heavily that he sliced through the page, the word ‘Cutter’.

Both the family home and Talgarth Road continued to be combed for forensic evidence. Leonora remained in Holloway. It had become a waiting game.

Strike was used to standing for hours in the cold, watching darkened windows, following faceless strangers; to unanswered phones and doors, blank faces, clueless bystanders; to enforced, frustrating inaction. What was different and distracting on this occasion was the small whine of anxiety that formed a backdrop to everything he did.

You had to maintain a distance, but there were always people who got to you, injustices that bit. Leonora in prison, white-faced and weeping, her daughter confused, vulnerable and bereft of both parents. Robin had pinned up Orlando’s picture over her desk, so that a merry red-bellied bird gazed down upon the detective and his assistant as they busied themselves with other cases, reminding them that a curly-haired girl in Ladbroke Grove was still waiting for her mother to come home.

Robin, at least, had a meaningful job to do, although she felt that she was letting Strike down. She had returned to the office two days running with nothing to show for her efforts, her evidence bag empty. The detective had warned her to err on the side of caution, to bail at the least sign that she might have been noticed or remembered. He did not like to be explicit about how recognisable he thought her, even with her red-gold hair piled under a beanie hat. She was very good-looking.

‘I’m not sure I need to be quite so cautious,’ she said, having followed his instructions to the letter.

‘Let’s remember what we’re dealing with here, Robin,’ he snapped, anxiety continuing to whine in his gut. ‘Quine didn’t rip out his own guts.’

Some of his fears were strangely amorphous. Naturally he worried that the killer would yet escape, that there were great, gaping holes in the fragile cobweb of a case he was building, a case that just now was built largely out of his own reconstructive imaginings, that needed physical evidence to anchor it down lest the police and defence counsel blew it clean away. But he had other worries.

Much as he had disliked the Mystic Bob tag with which Anstis had saddled him, Strike had a sense of approaching danger now, almost as strongly as when he had known, without question, that the Viking was about to blow up around him. Intuition, they called it, but Strike knew it to be the reading of subtle signs, the subconscious joining of dots. A clear picture of the killer was emerging out of the mass of disconnected evidence, and the image was stark and terrifying: a case of obsession, of violent rage, of a calculating, brilliant but profoundly disturbed mind.

The longer he hung around, refusing to let go, the closer he circled, the more targeted his questioning, the greater the chance that the killer might wake up to the threat he posed. Strike had confidence in his own ability to detect and repel attack, but he could not contemplate with equanimity the solutions that might occur to a diseased mind that had shown itself fond of Byzantine cruelty.

The days of Polworth’s leave came and went without tangible results.

‘Don’t give up now, Diddy,’ he told Strike over the phone. Characteristically, the fruitlessness of his endeavours seemed to have stimulated rather than discouraged Polworth. ‘I’m going to pull a sickie Monday. I’ll have another bash.’

‘I can’t ask you to do that,’ muttered Strike, frustrated. ‘The drive—’

‘I’m offering, you ungrateful peg-legged bastard.’

‘Penny’ll kill you. What about her Christmas shopping?’

‘What about my chance to show up the Met?’ said Polworth, who disliked the capital and its inhabitants on long-held principle.

‘You’re a mate, Chum,’ said Strike.

When he had hung up, he saw Robin’s grin.

‘What’s funny?’

‘“Chum”,’ she said. It sounded so public school, so unlike Strike.

‘It’s not what you think,’ said Strike. He was halfway through the story of Dave Polworth and the shark when his mobile rang again: an unknown number. He picked up.

‘Is that Cameron – er – Strike?’

‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Jude Graham ’ere. Kath Kent’s neighbour. She’s back,’ said the female voice happily.

‘That’s good news,’ said Strike, with a thumbs-up to Robin.

‘Yeah, she got back this morning. Got a friend staying with ’er. I asked ’er where she’d been, but she wouldn’t say,’ said the neighbour.

Strike remembered that Jude Graham thought him a journalist.

‘Is the friend male or female?’

‘Female,’ she answered regretfully. ‘Tall skinny dark girl, she’s always hanging around Kath.’

‘That’s very helpful, Ms Graham,’ said Strike. ‘I’ll – er – put something through your door later for your trouble.’

‘Great,’ said the neighbour happily. ‘Cheers.’

She rang off.

‘Kath Kent’s back at home,’ Strike told Robin. ‘Sounds like she’s got Pippa Midgley staying with her.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin, trying not to smile. ‘I, er, suppose you’re regretting you put her in a headlock now?’

Strike grinned ruefully.

‘They’re not going to talk to me,’ he said.

‘No,’ Robin agreed. ‘I don’t think they will.’

‘Suits them fine, Leonora in the clink.’

‘If you told them your whole theory, they might cooperate,’ suggested Robin.

Strike stroked his chin, looking at Robin without seeing her.

‘I can’t,’ he said finally. ‘If it leaks out that I’m sniffing up that tree, I’ll be lucky not to get a knife in the back one dark night.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Robin,’ said Strike, mildly exasperated, ‘Quine was tied up and disembowelled.’

He sat down on the arm of the sofa, which squeaked less than the cushions but groaned under his weight, and said:

‘Pippa Midgley liked you.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Robin at once.

‘Not alone,’ he said, ‘but maybe you could get me in? How about this evening?’

‘Of course!’ she said, elated.

Hadn’t she and Matthew established new rules? This was the first time she had tested him, but she went to the telephone with confidence. His reaction when she told him that she did not know when she would be home that night could not have been called enthusiastic, but he accepted the news without demur.

So, at seven o’clock that evening, having discussed at length the tactics that they were about to employ, Strike and Robin proceeded separately through the icy night, ten minutes apart with Robin in the lead, to Stafford Cripps House.

A gang of youths stood again in the concrete forecourt of the block and they did not permit Robin to pass with the wary respect they had accorded Strike two weeks previously. One of them danced backwards ahead of her as she approached the inner stairs, inviting her to party, telling her she was beautiful, laughing derisively at her silence, while his mates jeered behind her in the darkness, discussing her rear view. As they entered the concrete stairwell her taunter’s jeers echoed strangely. She thought he might be seventeen at most.

‘I need to go upstairs,’ she said firmly as he slouched across the stairwell for his mates’ amusement, but sweat had prickled on her scalp.
He’s a kid
, she told herself.
And Strike’s right behind you.
The thought gave her courage. ‘Get out of the way, please,’ she said.

He hesitated, dropped a sneering comment about her figure, and moved. She half expected him to grab her as she passed but he loped back to his mates, all of them calling filthy names after her as she climbed the stairs and emerged with relief, without being followed, on to the balcony leading to Kath Kent’s flat.

The lights inside were on. Robin paused for a second, gathering herself, then rang the doorbell.

After some seconds the door opened a cautious six inches and there stood a middle-aged woman with a long tangle of red hair.

‘Kathryn?’

‘Yeah?’ said the woman suspiciously.

‘I’ve got some very important information for you,’ said Robin. ‘You need to hear this.’

(‘Don’t say “I need to talk to you”,’ Strike had coached her, ‘or “I’ve got some questions”. You frame it so that it sounds like it’s to her advantage. Get as far as you can without telling her who you are; make it sound urgent, make her worry she’s going to miss something if she lets you go. You want to be inside before she can think it through. Use her name. Make a personal connection. Keep talking.’)

‘What?’ demanded Kathryn Kent.

‘Can I come in?’ asked Robin. ‘It’s very cold out here.’

‘Who are you?’

‘You need to hear this, Kathryn.’

‘Who—?’

‘Kath?’ said someone behind her.

‘Are you a journalist?’

‘I’m a friend,’ Robin improvised, her toes over the threshold. ‘I want to help you, Kathryn.’

‘Hey—’

A familiar long pale face and large brown eyes appeared beside Kath’s.

‘It’s her I told you about!’ said Pippa. ‘She works with him—’

‘Pippa,’ said Robin, making eye contact with the tall girl, ‘you know I’m on your side – there’s something I need to tell you both, it’s urgent—’

Her foot was two thirds of the way across the threshold. Robin put every ounce of earnest persuasiveness that she could muster into her expression as she looked into Pippa’s panicked eyes.

‘Pippa, I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think it was really important—’

‘Let her in,’ Pippa told Kathryn. She sounded scared.

The hall was cramped and seemed full of hanging coats. Kathryn led Robin into a small, lamp-lit sitting room with plain magnolia-painted walls. Brown curtains hung at the windows, the fabric so thin that the lights of buildings opposite and distant, passing cars shone through them. A slightly grubby orange throw covered the old sofa, which sat on a rug patterned with swirling abstract shapes, and the remains of a Chinese takeaway sat on the cheap pine coffee table. In the corner was a rickety computer table bearing a laptop. The two women, Robin saw, with a pang of something like remorse, had been decorating a small fake Christmas tree together. A string of lights lay on the floor and there were a number of decorations on the only armchair. One of them was a china disc reading
Future Famous Writer!

‘What d’you want?’ demanded Kathryn Kent, her arms folded.

She was glaring at Robin through small, fierce eyes.

‘May I sit down?’ said Robin and she did so without waiting for Kathryn’s answer. (‘Make yourself at home as much as you can without being rude, make it harder for her to dislodge you,’ Strike had said.)

‘What d’you want?’ Kathryn Kent repeated.

Pippa stood in front of the windows, staring at Robin, who saw that she was fiddling with a tree ornament: a mouse dressed as Santa.

‘You know that Leonora Quine’s been arrested for murder?’ said Robin.

‘Of course I do. I’m the one,’ Kathryn pointed at her own ample chest, ‘who found the Visa bill with the ropes, the burqa and the overalls on it.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘I know that.’

‘Ropes and a burqa!’ ejaculated Kathryn Kent. ‘Got more than he bargained for, didn’t he? All those years thinking she was just some dowdy little… boring little – little
cow
–
and look what she did to him!’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘I know it looks that way.’

‘What d’you mean, “looks that”—?’

‘Kathryn, I’ve come here to warn you: they don’t think she did it.’

(‘No specifics. Don’t mention the police explicitly if you can avoid it, don’t commit to a checkable story, keep it vague,’ Strike had told her.)

‘What d’you mean?’ repeated Kathryn sharply. ‘The police don’t—?’

‘And you had access to his card, more opportunities to copy it—’

Kathryn looked wildly from Robin to Pippa, who was clutching the Santa-mouse, white-faced.

‘But Strike doesn’t think you did it,’ said Robin.

‘Who?’ said Kathryn. She appeared too confused, too panicked, to think straight.

‘Her boss,’ stage-whispered Pippa.

‘Him!’ said Kathryn, rounding on Robin again. ‘He’s working for
Leonora
!’

‘He doesn’t think you did it,’ repeated Robin, ‘even with the credit card bill – the fact you even had it. I mean, it looks odd, but he’s sure you had it by acci—’

‘She gave it me!’ said Kathryn Kent, flinging out her arms, gesticulating furiously. ‘His daughter – she gave it me, I never even looked on the back for weeks, never thought to. I was being
nice
, taking her crappy bloody picture and acting like it was good – I was being
nice
!’

‘I understand that,’ said Robin. ‘We believe you, Kathryn, I promise. Strike wants to find the real killer, he’s not like the police.’ (‘Insinuate, don’t state.’) ‘
He’s
not interested in just grabbing the next woman Quine might’ve – you know—’

The words
let tie him up
hung in the air, unspoken.

Pippa was easier to read than Kathryn. Credulous and easily panicked, she looked at Kathryn, who seemed furious.

‘Maybe I don’t care who killed him!’ Kathryn snarled through clenched teeth.

‘But you surely don’t want to be arrest—?’

‘I’ve only got your word for it they’re interested in me! There’s been nothing on the news!’

‘Well… there wouldn’t be, would there?’ said Robin gently. ‘The police don’t hold press conferences to announce that they think they might have the wrong pers—’

‘Who had the credit card?
Her.
’

‘Quine usually had it himself,’ said Robin, ‘and his wife’s not the only person who had access.’

‘How d’you know what the police are thinking any more than I do?’

‘Strike’s got good contacts at the Met,’ said Robin calmly. ‘He was in Afghanistan with the investigating officer, Richard Anstis.’

The name of the man who had interrogated her seemed to carry weight with Kathryn. She glanced at Pippa again.