The Silkworm

‘I don’t think Leonora gives any thought to the impression she makes on other people,’ said Strike.

‘N-no, well, you’re right there. She’s never been the brightest.’

Strike wondered what impression Elizabeth Tassel thought she made on the world; whether she realised how little she was liked. She allowed the cough that she had been trying to suppress free expression and he waited for the loud, seal-like barks to pass before asking:

‘You think she should have faked some grief?’

‘I don’t say it’s fake,’ snapped Elizabeth. ‘I’m sure she is upset in her own limited way. I’m just saying it wouldn’t hurt to play the grieving widow a bit more. It’s what people expect.’

‘I suppose you’ve talked to the police?’

‘Of course. We’ve been through the row in the River Café, over and over the reason I didn’t read the damn book properly. And they wanted to know my movements after I last saw Owen. Specifically, the three days after I saw him.’

She glared interrogatively at Strike, whose expression remained impassive.

‘I take it they think he died within three days of our argument?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ lied Strike. ‘What did you tell them about your movements?’

‘That I went straight home after Owen stormed out on me, got up at six next morning, took a taxi to Paddington and went to stay with Dorcus.’

‘One of your writers, I think you said?’

‘Yes, Dorcus Pengelly, she—’

Elizabeth noticed Strike’s small grin and, for the first time in their acquaintance, her face relaxed into a fleeting smile.

‘It’s her real name, if you can believe it, not a pseudonym. She writes pornography dressed up as historical romance. Owen was very sniffy about her books, but he’d have killed for her sales. They go,’ said Elizabeth, ‘like hot cakes.’

‘When did you get back from Dorcus’s?’

‘Late Monday afternoon. It was supposed to be a nice long weekend, but nice,’ said Elizabeth tensely, ‘thanks to Bombyx Mori, it was not.

‘I live alone,’ she continued. ‘I can’t prove I went home, that I didn’t murder Owen as soon as I got back to London. I certainly felt like doing it…’

She drank more water and continued:

‘The police were mostly interested in the book. They seem to think it’s given a lot of people a motive.’

It was her first overt attempt to get information out of him.

‘It looked like a lot of people at first,’ said Strike, ‘but if they’ve got the time of death right and Quine died within three days of your row in the River Café, the number of suspects will be fairly limited.’

‘How so?’ asked Elizabeth sharply, and he was reminded of one of his most scathing tutors at Oxford, who used this two-word question like a giant needle to puncture ill-founded theorising.

‘Can’t give you that information, I’m afraid,’ Strike replied pleasantly. ‘Mustn’t prejudice the police case.’

Her pallid skin, across the small table, was large-pored and coarse-grained, the olive-dark eyes watchful.

‘They asked me,’ she said, ‘to whom I had shown the manuscript during the few days I had it before sending it to Jerry and Christian – answer: nobody. And they asked me with whom Owen discusses his manuscripts while he’s writing them. I don’t know why that was,’ she said, her black eyes still fixed on Strike’s. ‘Do they think somebody egged him on?’

‘I don’t know,’ Strike lied again. ‘Does he discuss the books he’s working on?’

‘He might have confided bits in Jerry Waldegrave. He barely deigned to tell me his titles.’

‘Really? He never asked your advice? Did you say you’d studied English at Oxford—?’

‘I took a first,’ she said angrily, ‘but that counted for less than nothing with Owen, who incidentally was thrown off his course at Loughborough or some such place, and never got a degree at all. Yes, and Michael once kindly told Owen that I’d been “lamentably derivative” as a writer back when we were students, and Owen never forgot it.’ The memory of the old slight had given a purple tinge to her yellowish skin. ‘Owen shared Michael’s prejudice about women in literature. Neither of them minded women praising their work, of c-course—’ She coughed into her napkin and emerged red-faced and angry. ‘Owen was a bigger glutton for praise than any author I’ve ever met, and they are most of them insatiable.’

Their food arrived: tomato and basil soup for Elizabeth and cod and chips for Strike.

‘You told me when we last met,’ said Strike, having swallowed his first large mouthful, ‘that there came a point when you had to choose between Fancourt and Quine. Why did you choose Quine?’

She was blowing on a spoonful of soup and seemed to give her answer serious consideration before speaking.

‘I felt – at that time – that he was more sinned against than sinning.’

‘Did this have something to do with the parody somebody wrote of Fancourt’s wife’s novel?’

‘“Somebody” didn’t write it,’ she said quietly. ‘Owen did.’

‘Do you know that for sure?’

‘He showed it to me before he sent it to the magazine. I’m afraid,’ Elizabeth met Strike’s gaze with cold defiance, ‘it made me laugh. It was painfully accurate and very funny. Owen was always a good literary mimic.’

‘But then Fancourt’s wife killed herself.’

‘Which was a tragedy, of course,’ said Elizabeth, without noticeable emotion, ‘although nobody could have reasonably expected it. Frankly, anybody who’s going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place. But naturally enough, Michael was livid with Owen and I think the more so because Owen got cold feet and denied authorship once he heard about Elspeth’s suicide. It was, perhaps, a surprisingly cowardly attitude for a man who liked to be thought of as fearless and lawless.

‘Michael wanted me to drop Owen as a client. I refused. Michael hasn’t spoken to me since.’

‘Was Quine making more money for you than Fancourt at the time?’ Strike asked.

‘Good God, no,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t to my pecuniary advantage to stick with Owen.’

‘Then why—?’

‘I’ve just told you,’ she said impatiently. ‘I believe in freedom of speech, up to and including upsetting people. Anyway, days after Elspeth killed herself, Leonora gave birth to premature twins. Something went badly wrong at the birth; the boy died and Orlando is… I take it you’ve met her by now?’

As he nodded, Strike’s dream of the other night came back to him suddenly: the baby that Charlotte had given birth to, but that she would not let him see…

‘Brain damaged,’ Elizabeth went on. ‘So Owen was going through his own personal tragedy at the time, and unlike Michael, he hadn’t b-brought any of it on h-himself—’

Coughing again, she caught Strike’s look of faint surprise and made an impatient staying gesture with her hand, indicating that she would explain when the fit had passed. Finally, after another sip of water, she croaked:

‘Michael only encouraged Elspeth to write to keep her out of his hair while he worked. They had nothing in common. He married her because he’s terminally touchy about being lower middle class. She was an earl’s daughter who thought marrying Michael would mean non-stop literary parties and sparkling, intellectual chat. She didn’t realise she’d be alone most of the time while Michael worked. She was,’ said Elizabeth with disdain, ‘a woman of few resources.

‘But she got excited at the idea of being a writer. Have you any idea,’ said the agent harshly, ‘how many people think they can write? You cannot imagine the crap I am sent, day in, day out. Elspeth’s novel would have been rejected out of hand under normal circumstances, it was so pretentious and silly, but they weren’t normal circumstances. Having encouraged her to produce the damn thing, Michael didn’t have the balls to tell her it was awful. He gave it to his publishe

r and they took it to keep Michael happy. It had been out a week when the parody appeared.’

‘Quine implies in Bombyx Mori that Fancourt really wrote the parody,’ said Strike.

‘I know he does – and I wouldn’t want to provoke Michael Fancourt,’ she added in an apparent aside that begged to be heard.

‘What do you mean?’

There was a short pause in which he could almost see Elizabeth deciding what to tell him.

‘I met Michael,’ she said slowly, ‘in a tutorial group studying Jacobean revenge tragedies. Let’s just say it was his natural milieu. He adores those writers; their sadism and their lust for vengeance… rape and cannibalism, poisoned skeletons dressed up as women… sadistic retribution is Michael’s obsession.’

She glanced up at Strike, who was watching her.

‘What?’ she said curtly.

When, he wondered, were the details of Quine’s murder going to explode across the newspapers? The dam must already be straining, with Culpepper on the case.

‘Did Fancourt take sadistic retribution when you chose Quine over him?’

She looked down at the bowl of red liquid and pushed it abruptly away from her.

‘We were close friends, very close, but he’s never said a word to me from the day that I refused to sack Owen. He did his best to warn other writers away from my agency, said I was a woman of no honour or principle.

‘But I hold one principle sacred and he knew it,’ she said firmly. ‘Owen hadn’t done anything, in writing that parody, that Michael hadn’t done a hundred times to other writers. Of course I regretted the aftermath deeply, but it was one of the times – the few times – when I felt that Owen was morally in the clear.’

‘Must’ve hurt, though,’ Strike said. ‘You’d known Fancourt longer than Quine.’

‘We’ve been enemies longer than we’ve been friends, now.’

It was not, Strike noted, a proper answer.

‘You mustn’t think… Owen wasn’t always – he wasn’t all bad,’ Elizabeth said restlessly. ‘You know, he was obsessed with virility, in life and in his work. Sometimes it was a metaphor for creative genius, but at other times it’s seen as the bar to artistic fulfilment. The plot of Hobart’s Sin turns on Hobart, who’s both male and female, having to choose between parenthood and abandoning his aspirations as a writer: aborting his baby, or abandoning his brainchild.

‘But when it came to fatherhood in real life – you understand, Orlando wasn’t… you wouldn’t have chosen your child to… to… but he loved her and she loved him.’

‘Except for the times he walked out on the family to consort with mistresses or fritter away money in hotel rooms,’ suggested Strike.

‘All right, he wouldn’t have won Father of the Year,’ snapped Elizabeth, ‘but there was love there.’

A silence fell over the table and Strike decided not to break it. He was sure that Elizabeth Tassel had agreed to this meeting, as she had requested the last, for reasons of her own and he was keen to hear them. He therefore ate his fish and waited.

‘The police have asked me,’ she said finally, when his plate was almost clear, ‘whether Owen was blackmailing me in some way.’

‘Really?’ said Strike.

The restaurant clattered and chattered around them, and outside the snow fell thicker than ever. Here again was the familiar phenomenon of which he had spoken to Robin: the suspect who wished to re-explain, worried that they had not made a good enough job of it on their first attempt.

‘They’ve taken note of the large dollops of money passing from my account to Owen’s over the years,’ said Elizabeth.

Strike said nothing; her ready payment of Quine’s hotel bills had struck him as out of character in their previous meeting.

‘What do they think anyone could blackmail me for?’ she asked him with a twist to her scarlet mouth. ‘My professional life has been scrupulously honest. I have no private life to speak of. I’m the very definition of a blameless spinster, aren’t I?’

Strike, who judged it impossible to answer such a question, however rhetorical, without giving offence, said nothing.

‘It started when Orlando was born,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Owen had managed to get through all the money he’d ever made and Leonora was in intensive care for two weeks after the birth, and Michael Fancourt was screaming to anybody who’d listen that Owen had murdered his wife.

‘Owen was a pariah. Neither he nor Leonora had any family. I lent him money, as a friend, to get baby things. Then I advanced him money for a mortgage on a bigger house. Then there was money for specialists to look at Orlando when it was clear that she wasn’t developing quite as she should, and therapists to help her. Before I knew it, I was the family’s personal bank. Every time royalties came in Owen would make a big fuss about repaying me, and sometimes I’d get a few thousand back.

‘At heart,’ said the agent, the words tumbling out of her, ‘Owen was an overgrown child, which could make him unbearable or charming. Irresponsible, impulsive, egotistical, amazingly lacking in conscience, but he could also be fun, enthusiastic and engaging. There was a pathos, a funny fragility about him, however badly he behaved, that made people feel protective. Jerry Waldegrave felt it. Women felt it. I felt it. And the truth is that I kept on hoping, even believing, that one day he’d produce another Hobart’s Sin. There was always something, in every bloody awful book he’s written, something that meant you couldn’t completely write him off.’

A waiter came over to take away their plates. Elizabeth waved away his solicitous enquiry as to whether there had been something wrong with her soup and asked for a coffee. Strike accepted the offer of the dessert menu.

‘Orlando’s sweet, though,’ Elizabeth added gruffly. ‘Orlando’s very sweet.’

‘Yeah… she seemed to think,’ said Strike, watching her closely, ‘that she saw you going into Quine’s study the other day, while Leonora was in the bathroom.’

He did not think that she had expected the question, nor did she seem to like it.

‘She saw that, did she?’

She sipped water, hesitated, then said:

‘I’d challenge anyone depicted in Bombyx Mori, given the chance of seeing what other nasty jottings Owen might have left lying around, not to take the opportunity of having a look.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘because the place was a tip. I could see immediately that it would take far too long to search and,’ she raised her chin defiantly, ‘to be absolutely frank, I didn’t want to leave fingerprints. So I left as quickly as I walked in. It was the – possibly ignoble – impulse of a moment.’

She seemed to have said everything she had come to say. Strike ordered an apple and strawberry crumble and took the initiative.

‘Daniel Chard wants to see me,’ he told her. Her olive-dark eyes widened in surprise.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Unless the snow’s too bad, I’m going down to visit him in Devon tomorrow. I’d like to know, before I meet him, why he’s portrayed as the murderer of a young blond man in Bombyx Mori.’

‘I’m not providing a key to that filthy book for you,’ retorted Elizabeth with a return of all her former aggression and suspicion. ‘No. Not doing it.’

‘That’s a shame,’ said Strike, ‘because people are talking.’

‘Am I likely to compound my own egregious mistake in sending the damn thing out into the world by gossiping about it?’

‘I’m discreet,’ Strike assured her. ‘Nobody needs to know where I got my information.’

But she merely glared at him, cold and impassive.

‘What about Kathryn Kent?’

‘What about her?’

‘Why is the cave of her lair in Bombyx Mori full of rat skulls?’

Elizabeth said nothing.

‘I know Kathryn Kent’s Harpy, I’ve met her,’ said Strike patiently. ‘All you’re doing by explaining is saving me some time. I suppose y

ou want to find out who killed Quine?’

‘So bloody transparent,’ she said witheringly. ‘Does that usually work on people?’

‘Yeah,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘it does.’

She frowned, then said abruptly and not altogether to his surprise:

‘Well, after all, I don’t owe Kathryn Kent any loyalty. If you must know, Owen was making a fairly crude reference to the fact that she works at an animal-testing facility. They do disgusting things there to rats, dogs and monkeys. I heard all about it at one of the parties Owen brought her to. There she was, falling out of her dress and trying to impress me,’ said Elizabeth, with contempt. ‘I’ve seen her work. She makes Dorcus Pengelly look like Iris Murdoch. Typical of the dross – the dross—’

Strike managed several mouthfuls of his crumble while she coughed hard into her napkin.

‘—the dross the internet has given us,’ she finished, her eyes watering. ‘And almost worse, she seemed to expect me to be on her side against the scruffy students who’d attacked their laboratories. I’m a vet’s daughter: I grew up with animals and I like them much better than I like people. I found Kathryn Kent a horrible person.’

‘Any idea who Harpy’s daughter Epicoene’s supposed to be?’ asked Strike.

‘No,’ said Elizabeth.

‘Or the dwarf in the Cutter’s bag?’

‘I’m not explaining any more of the wretched book!’

‘Do you know if Quine knew a woman called Pippa?’

‘I never met a Pippa. But he taught creative writing courses; middle-aged women trying to find their raison d’être. That’s where he picked up Kathryn Kent.’

She sipped her coffee and glanced at her watch.

‘What can you tell me about Joe North?’ Strike asked.

She glanced at him suspiciously.

‘Why?’

‘Curious,’ said Strike.

He did not know why she chose to answer; perhaps because North was long dead, or because of that streak of sentimentality he had first divined back in her cluttered office.

‘He was from California,’ she said. ‘He’d come over to London to find his English roots. He was gay, a few years younger than Michael, Owen and me, and writing a very frank first novel about the life he’d led in San Francisco.