The Silkworm

Now, on this cold winter’s morning, sitting in his office with her picture in the bin beside him, Strike found himself craving orders, a case abroad, an enforced sojourn on another continent. He did not want to trail after unfaithful husbands and girlfriends, or insert himself into the petty disputes of shoddy businessmen. Only one subject had ever matched Charlotte for the fascination it exercised over him: unnatural death.

‘Morning,’ he said, limping into the outer office, where Robin was making two mugs of tea. ‘We’ll have to be quick with these. We’re going out.’

‘Where?’ asked Robin in surprise.

The sleet was sliding wetly down their windows. She could still feel how it had burned her face as she hurried over the slippery pavements, desperate to get inside.

‘Got stuff to do on the Quine case.’

It was a lie. The police had all the power; what could he do that they were not doing better? And yet he knew in his gut that Anstis lacked the nose for the strange and the warped that would be needed to find this killer.

‘You’ve got Caroline Ingles at ten.’

‘Shit. Well, I’ll put her off. Thing is, forensics reckon Quine died very soon after he disappeared.’

He took a mouthful of hot, strong tea. He seemed more purposeful, more energised than she had seen him for a while.

‘That puts the spotlight right back on the people who had early access to the manuscript. I want to find out where they all live, and whether they live alone. Then we’re going to recce their houses. Find out how hard it would’ve been to get in and out carrying a bag of guts. Whether they might have places they could bury or burn evidence.’

It was not much, but it was all he could do today, and he was desperate to do something.

‘You’re coming,’ he added. ‘You’re always good at this stuff.’

‘What, being your Watson?’ she said, apparently indifferent. The anger she had carried with her out of the Cambridge the previous day had not quite burned out. ‘We could find out about their houses online. Look at them on Google Earth.’

‘Yeah, good thinking,’ rejoined Strike. ‘Why case locations when you could just look at out-of-date photos?’

Stung, she said:

‘I’m more than happy—’

‘Good. I’ll cancel Ingles. You get online and find out addresses for Christian Fisher, Elizabeth Tassel, Daniel Chard, Jerry Waldegrave and Michael Fancourt. We’ll nip along to Clem Attlee Court and have another look from the point of view of hiding evidence; from what I saw in the dark there were a lot of bins and bushes… Oh, and call the Bridlington Bookshop in Putney. We can have a word with the old bloke who claims he met Quine there on the eighth.’

He strode back into his office and Robin sat down at her computer. The scarf she had just hung up was dripping icily onto the floor, but she did not care. The memory of Quine’s mutilated body continued to haunt her, yet she was possessed of an urge (concealed from Matthew like a dirty secret) to find out more, to find out everything.

What infuriated her was that Strike, who of all people should have understood, could not see in her what so obviously burned in him.

25

Thus ’tis when a man will be ignorantly officious, do services, and not know his why…

Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman

They left the office in a sudden flurry of feathery snowflakes, Robin with the various addresses she had taken from an online directory on her mobile phone. Strike wanted to revisit Talgarth Road first, so Robin told him the results of her directory searches while standing in a Tube carriage that, at the tail end of the rush hour, was full but not packed. The smell of wet wool, grime and Gore-Tex filled their nostrils as they talked, holding the same pole as three miserable-looking Italian backpackers.

‘The old man who works in the bookshop’s on holiday,’ she told Strike. ‘Back next Monday.’

‘All right, we’ll leave him till then. What about our suspects?’

She raised an eyebrow at the word, but said:

‘Christian Fisher lives in Camden with a woman of thirty-two – a girlfriend, do you think?’

‘Probably,’ agreed Strike. ‘That’s inconvenient… our killer needed peace and solitude to dispose of bloodstained clothing – not to mention a good stone’s worth of human intestine. I’m looking for somewhere you can get in and out of without being seen.’

‘Well, I looked at pictures of the place on Google Street View,’ said Robin with a certain defiance. ‘The flat’s got a common entrance with three others.’

‘And it’s miles away from Talgarth Road.’

‘But you don’t really think Christian Fisher did it, do you?’ asked Robin.

‘Strains credulity a bit,’ Strike admitted. ‘He barely knew Quine – he’s not in the book – can’t see it.’

They alighted at Holborn, where Robin tactfully slowed her pace to Strike’s, not commenting on his limp or the way he was using his upper body to propel himself along.

‘What about Elizabeth Tassel?’ he asked as he walked.

‘Fulham Palace Road, alone.’

‘Good,’ said Strike. ‘We’ll go and have a look at that, see if she’s got any freshly dug flower beds.’

‘Won’t the police be doing this?’ Robin asked.

Strike frowned. He was perfectly aware that he was a jackal slinking on the periphery of the case, hoping the lions might leave a scrap on a minor bone.

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe not. Anstis thinks Leonora did it and he doesn’t change his mind easily; I know, I worked with him on a case in Afghanistan. Speaking of Leonora,’ he added casually, ‘Anstis has found out she used to work in a butcher’s.’

‘Oh bugger,’ said Robin.

Strike grinned. At times of tension, her Yorkshire accent became more pronounced: he had heard ‘boogger’.

They got onto a much emptier Piccadilly line train to Barons Court; relieved, Strike fell into a seat.

‘Jerry Waldegrave lives with his wife, right?’ he asked Robin.

‘Yes, if she’s called Fenella. In Hazlitt Road, Kensington. A Joanna Waldegrave lives in the basement—’

‘Their daughter,’ said Strike. ‘Budding novelist, she was at the Roper Chard party. And Daniel Chard?’

‘Sussex Street, Pimlico, with a couple called Nenita and Manny Ramos—’

‘Sound like servants.’

‘—and he’s got a property in Devon as well: Tithebarn House.’

‘Which is presumably where he’s currently laid up with his broken leg.’

‘And Fancourt’s ex-directory,’ she finished, ‘but there’s loads of biographical stuff about him online. He owns an Elizabethan place just outside Chew Magna called Endsor Court.’

‘Chew Magna?’

‘It’s in Somerset. He lives there with his third wife.’

‘Bit far to go today,’ said Strike regretfully. ‘No bachelor pad near Talgarth Road where he could stash guts in the freezer?’

‘Not that I could find.’

‘So where was he staying when he went to stare at the crime scene? Or had he come up for the day for a spot of nostalgia?’

‘If it really was him.’

‘Yeah, if it was him… and there’s Kathryn Kent too. Well, we know where she lives and we know it’s alone. Quine got dropped off in her vicinity on the night of the fifth, Anstis says, but she was away. Maybe Quine had forgotten she was at her sister’s,’ Strike mused, ‘and maybe when he found out she wasn’t home he went to Talgarth Road instead? She could have come back from the hospice to meet him there. We’ll have a look round her place second.’

As they moved west Strike told Robin about the different witnesses who claimed to have seen a woman in a burqa entering the building on the fourth of November and Quine himself leaving the building in the early hours of the sixth.

‘But one or both of them could be mistaken or lying,’ he concluded.

‘A woman in a burqa. You don’t th

ink,’ said Robin tentatively, ‘the neighbour might be a mad Islamophobe?’

Working for Strike had opened her eyes to the array and intensity of phobias and grudges she had never realised burned in the public’s breast. The tide of publicity surrounding the solving of the Landry case had washed onto Robin’s desk a number of letters that had alternately disturbed and amused her.

There had been the man who had begged Strike to turn his clearly considerable talents to an investigation of the stranglehold of ‘international Jewry’ on the world banking system, a service for which he regretted he would not be able to pay but for which he did not doubt that Strike would receive worldwide acclaim. A young woman had written a twelve-page letter from a secure psychiatric unit, begging Strike to help her prove that everybody in her family had been spirited away and replaced with identical impostors. An anonymous writer of unknown gender had demanded that Strike help them expose a national campaign of satanic abuse which they knew to be operating through the offices of the Citizens Advice Bureau.

‘They could be loons,’ Strike agreed. ‘Nutters love murder. It does something to them. People have to listen to them, for a start.’

A young woman wearing a hijab was watching them talk from an opposite seat. She had large, sweet, liquid-brown eyes.

‘Assuming somebody really did enter the house on the fourth, I’ve got to say a burqa’s a bloody good way of getting in and out without being recognised. Can you think of another way of totally concealing your face and body that wouldn’t make people challenge you?’

‘And they were carrying a halal takeaway?’

‘Allegedly. Was his last meal halal? Is that why the killer removed the guts?’

‘And this woman—’

‘Could’ve been a man…’

‘—was seen leaving the house an hour later?’

‘That’s what Anstis said.’

‘So they weren’t lying in wait for Quine?’

‘No, but they could have been laying in plates,’ said Strike and Robin winced.

The young woman in the hijab got off at Gloucester Road.

‘I doubt there’d be closed-circuit cameras in a bookshop,’ sighed Robin. She had become quite preoccupied with CCTV since the Landry case.

‘I’d’ve thought Anstis would have mentioned it,’ agreed Strike.

They emerged at Barons Court into another squall of snow. Squinting against the feathery flakes they proceeded, under Strike’s direction, up to Talgarth Road. He was feeling the need for a stick ever more strongly. On his release from hospital, Charlotte had given him an elegant antique Malacca cane that she claimed had belonged to a great-grandfather. The handsome old stick had been too short for Strike, causing him to list to the right as he walked. When she had packaged up his things to remove from her flat, the cane had not been among them.

It was clear, as they approached the house, that the forensics team was still busy in number 179. The entrance was taped up and a single police officer, arms folded tightly against the cold, stood guard outside. She turned her head as they approached. Her eyes fixed on Strike and narrowed.

‘Mr Strike,’ she said sharply.

A male plain-clothes officer with ginger hair who had been standing in the doorway talking to somebody just inside whipped around, caught sight of Strike and descended the slippery steps at speed.

‘Morning,’ said Strike brazenly. Robin was torn between admiration for his cheek and trepidation; she had an innate respect for the law.

‘What are you doing back here, Mr Strike?’ asked the ginger-haired man suavely. His eyes wandered over Robin in a way that she found vaguely offensive. ‘You can’t come in.’

‘Pity,’ said Strike. ‘We’ll just have to peruse the perimeter, then.’

Ignoring the pair of officers watching his every move, Strike limped past them to number 183 and proceeded through the gates and up the front steps. Robin could think of nothing to do but follow him; she did it self-consciously, aware of the eyes on her back.

‘What are we doing?’ she muttered as they reached the shelter of the brick canopy and were hidden from the staring police. The house seemed empty, but she was a little worried that someone might be about to open the front door.

‘Gauging whether the woman who lives here could’ve seen a cloaked figure carrying a holdall leaving 179 at two in the morning,’ said Strike. ‘And you know what? I think she could, unless that street lamp’s out. OK, let’s try the other side.

‘Parky, isn’t it?’ Strike said to the frowning constable and her companion as he and Robin walked back past them. ‘Four doors down, Anstis said,’ he added quietly to Robin. ‘So that’ll be 171…’

Again, Strike marched up the front steps, Robin walking foolishly after him.

‘You know, I was wondering whether he could’ve mistaken the house, but 177’s got that red plastic dustbin in front. Burqa would’ve walked up the steps right behind it, which would’ve made it easy to tell—’

The front door opened.

‘Can I help you?’ said a well-spoken man in thick-lensed glasses.

As Strike began to apologise for coming to the wrong house, the ginger-haired officer shouted something incomprehensible from the pavement outside 179. When nobody responded, he climbed over the plastic tape blocking entrance to the property and began to jog towards them.

‘That man,’ he shouted absurdly, pointing at Strike, ‘is not a policeman!’

‘He didn’t say he was,’ replied the spectacled man in meek surprise.

‘Well, I think we’re done here,’ Strike told Robin.

‘Aren’t you worried,’ Robin asked him as they walked back towards the Tube station, a little amused but mostly eager to leave the scene, ‘what your friend Anstis is going to say about you skulking around the crime scene like this?’

‘Doubt he’ll be happy,’ Strike said, looking around for CCTV cameras, ‘but keeping Anstis happy isn’t in my job description.’

‘It was decent of him to share the forensic stuff with you,’ Robin said.

‘He did that to try and warn me off the case. He thinks everything points to Leonora. Trouble is, at the moment, everything does.’

The road was packed with traffic, which was watched by a single camera as far as Strike could see, but there were many side roads leading off it down which a person wearing Owen Quine’s Tyrolean cloak, or a burqa, might slide out of sight without anyone being the wiser as to their identity.

Strike bought two takeaway coffees in the Metro Café that stood in the station building, then they passed back through the pea-green ticket hall and set off for West Brompton.

‘What you’ve got to remember,’ said Strike as they stood at Earl’s Court waiting to change trains, Robin noticing how Strike kept all his weight on his good leg, ‘is that Quine disappeared on the fifth. Bonfire night.’

‘God, of course!’ said Robin.

‘Flashes and bangs,’ said Strike, gulping coffee fast so as to empty his cup before they had to get on; he did not trust himself to balance coffee and himself on the wet, icy floors. ‘Rockets going off in every direction, drawing everyone’s attention. No big surprise that nobody saw a figure in a cloak entering the building that night.’

‘You mean Quine?’

‘Not necessarily.’

Robin pondered this for a while.

‘Do you think the man in the bookshop’s lying about Quine going in there on the eighth?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Strike. ‘Too early to say, isn’t it?’

But that, he realised, was what he believed. The sudden activity around a deserted house on the fourth and fifth was strongly suggestive.

‘Funny, the things people notice,’ said Robin as they climbed the red-and-green stairs at West Brompton, Strike now grimacing every time he put down his right leg. ‘Memory’s an odd thing, isn’t—’

Strike’s knee suddenly felt red hot and he slumped against the railings along the bridge over the tracks.

A suited man behind him swore impatiently at finding a sudden, sizeable impediment in his path and Robin walked on a few paces, still talking, before realising that Strike was no longer beside her. She hurried back to find him pale, sweating and obliging commuters to take a detour around him as he stood slumped against the railings.

‘Felt something go,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘in my knee. Shit… shit!’

‘We’ll get a taxi.’

‘Never get one in this weather.’

‘Then let’s get back on the train and go back to the office.’

‘No, I want—’

He had never felt his dearth of resources more keenly than at this moment, standing on the iron lattice bridge beneath the arched glass ceiling where snow was settling. In the old days there had always been a car for him to drive. He could have summoned witnesses to him. He had been Special Investigation Branch, in charge, in control.

‘If you want to do this, we need a taxi,’ Robin said firmly. ‘It’s a long walk up Lillie Road from here. Haven’t—’

She hesitated. They never mentioned Strike’s disability except obliquely.

‘Haven’t you got a stick or something?’

‘Wish I had,’ he said through numb lips. What was the point in pretending? He was dreading having to walk even to the end of the bridge.

‘We can get one,’ said Robin. ‘Chemists sometimes sell them. We’ll find one.’

And then, after another momentary hesitation, she said:

‘Lean on me.’

‘I’m too heavy.’

‘To balance. Use me like a stick. Do it,’ she said firmly.

He put his arm around her shoulders and they made their way slowly over the bridge and paused beside the exit. The snow had temporarily passed, but the cold was, if anything, worse than it had been.