The Silkworm

‘Michael introduced him to me. Michael thought his stuff was first class, and it was, but he wasn’t a fast writer. He was partying hard, and also, which none of us knew for a couple of years, he was HIV-positive and not looking after himself. There came a point when he developed full-blown Aids.’ Elizabeth cleared her throat. ‘Well, you’ll remember how much hysteria there was about HIV when it first emerged.’

Strike was inured to people thinking that he was at least ten years older than he was. In fact, he had heard from his mother (never one to guard her tongue in deference to a child’s sensibilities) about the killer disease that was stalking those who fucked freely and shared needles.

‘Joe fell apart physically and all the people who’d wanted to know him when he was promising, clever and beautiful melted away, except – to do them credit—’ said Elizabeth grudgingly, ‘Michael and Owen. They rallied round Joe, but he died with his novel unfinished.

‘Michael was ill and couldn’t go to Joe’s funeral, but Owen was a pall bearer. In gratitude for the way they’d looked after him, Joe left the pair of them that rather lovely house, where they’d once partied and sat up all night discussing books. I was there for a few of those evenings. They were… happy times,’ said Elizabeth.

‘How much did they use the house after North died?’

‘I can’t answer for Michael, but I’d doubt he’s been there since he fell out with Owen, which was not long after Joe’s funeral,’ said Elizabeth with a shrug. ‘Owen never went there because he was terrified of running into Michael. The terms of Joe’s will were peculiar: I think they call it a restrictive covenant. Joe stipulated that the house was to be preserved as an artists’ refuge. That’s how Michael’s managed to block the sale all these years; the Quines have never managed to find another artist, or artists, to sell to. A sculptor rented it for a while, but that didn’t work out. Of course, Michael’s always been as picky as possible about tenants to stop Owen benefiting financially, and he can afford lawyers to enforce his whims.’

‘What happened to North’s unfinished book?’ asked Strike.

‘Oh, Michael abandoned work on his own novel and finished Joe’s posthumously. It’s called Towards the Mark and Harold Weaver published it: it’s a cult classic, never been out of print.’

She checked her watch again.

‘I need to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a meeting at two thirty. My coat, please,’ she called to a passing waiter.

‘Somebody told me,’ said Strike, who remembered perfectly well that it had been Anstis, ‘that you supervised work on Talgarth Road a while back?’

‘Yes,’ she said indifferently, ‘just one more of the unusual jobs Quine’s agent ended up doing for him. It was a matter of coordinating repairs, putting in workmen. I sent Michael a bill for half and he paid up through his lawyers.’

‘You had a key?’

‘Which I passed to the foreman,’ she said coldly, ‘then returned to the Quines.’

‘You didn’t go and see the work yourself?’

‘Of course I did; I needed to check it had been done. I think I visited twice.’

‘Was hydrochloric acid used in any of the renovation, do you know?’

‘The police asked me about hydrochloric acid,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘I can’t say.’

She glowered. He doubted that people often refused Elizabeth Tassel information.

‘Well, I can only tell you what I told the police: it was probably left there by Todd Harkness.’

‘Who?’

‘The sculptor I told you about who rented the studio space. Owen found him and Fancourt’s lawyers couldn’t find a reason to object. What nobody realised was that Harkness worked mainly in rusted metal and used some very corrosive chemicals. He did a lot of damage in the studio before being asked to leave. Fancourt’s side did that clean-up operation and sent us the bill.’

The waiter had brought her coat, to which a few dog hairs clung. Strike could hear a faint whistle from her labouring chest as she stood up. With a peremptory shake of the hand, Elizabeth Tassel left.

Strike took another taxi back to the office with the vague intention of being conciliatory to Robin; somehow they had rubbed each other up the wrong way that morning and he was not quite sure how it had happened. However, by the time he had finally reached the outer office he was sweating with the pain in his knee and Robin’s first words drove all thought of propitiation from his mind.

‘The car hire company just called. They haven’t got an automatic, but they can give you—’

‘It’s got to be an automatic!’ snapped Strike, dropping onto the sofa in an eruption of leathery flatulence that irritated him still further. ‘I can’t bloody drive a manual in this state! Have you rung—?’

‘Of course I’ve tried other places,’ said Robin coldly. ‘I’ve tried everywhere. Nobody can give you an automatic tomorrow. The weather forecast’s atrocious, anyway. I think you’d do better to—’

‘I’m going to interview Chard,’ said Strike.

Pain and fear were making him angry: fear that he would have to give up the prosthesis and resort to crutches again, his trouser leg pinned up, staring eyes, pity. He hated hard plastic chairs in disinfected corridors; hated his voluminous notes being unearthed and pored over, murmurs about changes to his prosthesis, advice from calm medical men to rest, to mollycoddle his leg as though it were a sick child he had to carry everywhere with him. In his dreams he was not one-legged; in his dreams he was whole.

Chard’s invitation had been an unlooked-for gift; he intended to seize it. There were many things he wanted to ask Quine’s publisher. The invitation itself was glaringly strange. He wanted to hear Chard’s reason for dragging him to Devon.

‘Did you hear me?’ asked Robin.

‘What?’

‘I said, “I could drive you.”’

‘No, you can’t,’ said Strike ungraciously.

‘Why not?’

‘You’ve got to be in Yorkshire.’

‘I’ve got to be at King’s Cross tomorrow night at eleven.’

‘The snow’s going to be terrible.’

‘We’ll set out early. Or,’ said Robin with a shrug, ‘you can cancel Chard. But the forecast for next week’s awful too.’

It was difficult to reverse from ingratitude to the opposite with Robin’s steely grey-blue eyes upon him.

‘All right,’ he said stiffly. ‘Thanks.’

‘Then I need to go and pick up the car,’ said Robin.

‘Right,’ said Strike through gritted teeth.

Owen Quine had not thought women had any place in literature: he, Strike, had a secret prejudice, too – but what choice did he have, with his knee screaming for mercy and no automatic car for hire?

28

… that (of all other) was the most fatal and dangerous exploit that ever I was ranged in, since I first bore arms before the face of the enemy…

Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour

At five o’clock the following morning, a muffled and gloved Robin boarded one of the first Tube trains of the day, her hair glistening with snowflakes, a small backpack over her shoulder and carrying a weekend bag into which she had packed the black dress, coat and shoes that she would need for Mrs Cunliffe’s funeral. She did not dare count on getting back home after the round trip to Devon, but intended to go straight to King’s Cross once she had returned the car to the hire company.

Sitting on the almost empty train she consulted her own feelings about the day ahead and found them mixed. Excitement was her dominant emotion, because she was convinced that Strike had some excellent reason for interviewing Chard that could not wait. Robin had learned to trust her boss’s judgement and his hunches; it was one of the things that so irritated Matthew.

Matthew… Robin’s black-gloved fingers tightened on the handle of the bag beside her. She kept lying to Matthew. Robin was a truthful person and never, in the nine years that they had been together, ha

d she lied, or not until recently. Some had been lies of omission. Matthew had asked her on the telephone on Wednesday night what she had done at work that day and she had given him a brief and heavily edited version of her activities, omitting her trip with Strike to the house where Quine had been murdered, lunch at the Albion and, of course, the walk across the bridge at West Brompton station with Strike’s heavy arm over her shoulder.

But there had been outright lies too. Just last night he had asked her, like Strike, whether she oughtn’t take the day off, get an earlier train.

‘I tried,’ she had said, the lie sliding easily from her lips before she considered it. ‘They’re all full. It’s the weather, isn’t it? I suppose people are taking the train instead of risking it in their cars. I’ll just have to stick with the sleeper.’

What else could I say? thought Robin as the dark windows reflected her own tense face back at her. He’d have gone ballistic.

The truth was that she wanted to go to Devon; she wanted to help Strike; she wanted to get out from behind her computer, however much quiet satisfaction her competent administration of the business gave her, and investigate. Was that wrong? Matthew thought so. It wasn’t what he’d counted on. He had wanted her to go with the advertising agency, into human resources, at nearly twice the salary. London was so expensive. Matthew wanted a bigger flat. He was, she supposed, carrying her…

Then there was Strike. A familiar frustration, a tight knot in her stomach: we’ll have to get someone else in. Constant mentions of this prospective partner, who was assuming mythical substance in Robin’s mind: a short-haired, shrew-faced woman like the police officer who had stood guard outside the crime scene in Talgarth Road. She would be competent and trained in all the ways that Robin was not, and unencumbered (for the very first time, in this half empty, brightly lit Tube carriage, with the world dark outside and her ears full of rumble and clatter, she said it openly to herself) by a fiancé like Matthew.

But Matthew was the axis of her life, the fixed centre. She loved him; she had always loved him. He had stuck with her through the worst time in her life, when many young men would have left. She wanted to marry him and she was going to marry him. It was just that they had never had fundamental disagreements before, never. Something about her job, her decision to stay with Strike, about Strike himself, had introduced a rogue element into their relationship, something threatening and new…

The Toyota Land Cruiser that Robin had hired had been parked overnight in the Q-Park in Chinatown, one of the nearest car parks to Denmark Street, where there was no parking at all. Slipping and sliding in her flattest smart shoes, the weekend bag swinging from her right hand, Robin hurried through the darkness to the multi-storey, refusing to think any more about Matthew, or what he would think or say if he could see her, heading off for six hours alone in the car with Strike. After placing her bag in the boot, Robin sat back in the driver’s seat, set up the sat nav, adjusted the heating and left the engine running to warm up the icy interior.

Strike was a little late, which was unlike him. Robin whiled away the wait by acquainting herself fully with the controls. She loved cars, had always loved driving. By the age of ten she had been able to drive the tractor on her uncle’s farm as long as someone helped her release the handbrake. Unlike Matthew, she had passed her test the first time. She had learned not to tease him about this.

Movement glimpsed in her rear-view mirror made her look up. A dark-suited Strike was making his way laboriously towards the car on crutches, his right trouser leg pinned up.

Robin felt a sick, swooping feeling in the pit of her stomach – not because of the amputated leg, which she had seen before, and in much more troubling circumstances, but because it was the first time that she had known Strike forsake the prosthesis in public.

She got out of the car, then wished she hadn’t when she caught his scowl.

‘Good thinking, getting a four-by-four,’ he said, silently warning her not to talk about his leg.

‘Yeah, I thought we’d better in this weather,’ said Robin.

He moved around to the passenger seat. Robin knew she must not offer help; she could feel an exclusion zone around him as though he were telepathically rejecting all offers of assistance or sympathy, but she was worried that he would not be able to get inside unaided. Strike threw his crutches onto the back seat and stood for a moment precariously balanced; then, with a show of upper body strength that she had never seen before, pulled himself smoothly into the car.

Robin jumped back in hastily, closed her door, put her seatbelt on and reversed out of the parking space. Strike’s pre-emptive rejection of her concern sat like a wall between them and to her sympathy was added a twist of resentment that he would not let her in to that tiny degree. When had she ever fussed over him or tried to mother him? The most she had ever done was pass him paracetamol…

Strike knew himself to be unreasonable, but the awareness merely increased his irritation. On waking it had been obvious that to try to force the prosthesis onto his leg, when the knee was hot, swollen and extremely painful, would be an act of idiocy. He had been forced to descend the metal stairs on his backside, like a small child. Traversing Charing Cross Road on ice and crutches had earned him the stares of those few early-morning pedestrians who were braving the sub-zero darkness. He had never wanted to return to this state but here he was, all because of a temporary forgetfulness that he was not, like the dream Strike, whole.

At least, Strike noted with relief, Robin could drive. His sister, Lucy, was distractible and unreliable behind the wheel. Charlotte had always driven her Lexus in a manner that caused Strike physical pain: speeding through red lights, turning up one-way streets, smoking and chatting on her mobile, narrowly missing cyclists and the opening doors of parked cars… Ever since the Viking had blown up around him on that yellow dirt road, Strike had found it difficult to be driven by anyone except a professional.

After a long silence, Robin said:

‘There’s coffee in the backpack.’

‘What?’

‘In the backpack – a flask. I didn’t think we should stop unless we really have to. And there are biscuits.’

The windscreen wipers were carving their way through flecks of snow.

‘You’re a bloody marvel,’ said Strike, his reserve crumbling. He had not had breakfast: trying and failing to attach his false leg, finding a pin for his suit trousers, digging out his crutches and getting himself downstairs had taken twice the time he had allowed. And in spite of herself, Robin gave a small smile.

Strike poured himself coffee and ate several bits of shortbread, his appreciation of Robin’s deft handling of the strange car increasing as his hunger decreased.

‘What does Matthew drive?’ he asked as they sped over the Boston Manor viaduct.

‘Nothing,’ said Robin. ‘We haven’t got a car in London.’

‘Yeah, no need,’ said Strike, privately reflecting that if he ever gave Robin the salary she deserved they might be able to afford one.

‘So what are you planning to ask Daniel Chard?’ Robin asked.

‘Plenty,’ said Strike, brushing crumbs off his dark jacket. ‘First off, whether he’d fallen out with Quine and, if so, what about. I can’t fathom why Quine – total dickhead though he clearly was – decided to attack the man who had his livelihood in his hands and who had the money to sue him into oblivion.’

Strike munched shortbread for a while, swallowed, then added:

‘Unless Jerry Waldegrave’s right and Quine was having a genuine breakdown when he wrote it and lashed out at anyone he thought he could blame for his lousy sales.’

Robin, who had finished reading Bombyx Mori while Strike had been having lunch with Elizabeth Tassel the previous day, said:

‘Isn’t the writing too coherent for somebody having a breakdown?’

‘The syntax might be sound, but I don’t think you’d find many people who’d disagree that the content’s bloody insane.’

‘His other writing’s very like it.’

‘None of his other stuff’s as crazy as Bombyx Mori,’ said Strike. ‘Hobart’s Sin and The Balzac Brothers both had plots.’

‘This has got a plot.’

‘Has it? Or is Bombyx’s little walking tour just a convenient way of stringing together a load of attacks on different people?’

The snow fell thick and fast as they passed the exit to Heathrow, talking about the novel’s various grotesqueries, laughing a little over its ludicrous jumps of logic, its absurdities. The trees on either side of the motorway looked as though they had been dusted with tons of icing sugar.

‘Maybe Quine was born four hundred years too late,’ said Strike, still eating shortbread. ‘Elizabeth Tassel told me there’s a Jacobean revenge play featuring a poisoned skeleton disguised as a woman. Presumably someone shags it and dies. Not a million miles away from Phallus Impudicus getting ready to—’

‘Don’t,’ said Robin, with a half laugh and a shudder.

But Strike had not broken off because of her protest, or because of any sense of repugnance. Something had flickered deep in his subconscious as he spoke. Somebody had told him… someone had said… but the memory was gone in a flash of tantalising silver, like a minnow vanishing in pondweed.

‘A poisoned skeleton,’ Strike muttered, trying to capture the elusive memory, but it was gone.

‘And I finished Hobart’s Sin last night as well,’ said Robin, overtaking a dawdling Prius.

‘You’re a sucker for punishment,’ said Strike, reaching for a sixth biscuit. ‘I didn’t think you were enjoying it.’

‘I wasn’t, and it didn’t improve. It’s all about—’

‘A hermaphrodite who’s pregnant and gets an abortion because a kid would interfere with his literary ambitions,’ said Strike.

‘You’ve read it!’

‘No, Elizabeth Tassel told me.’

‘There’s a bloody sack in it,’ said Robin.