The Silkworm

Solid wood-backed chairs, snowy tablecloths, silver salvers on which enormous joints of beef reposed; as Strike sat down at a table for two beside the wall he found himself wondering what Robin would make of the place, whether she would be amused or irritated by its ostentatious traditionalism.

He had been seated for ten minutes before Waldegrave appeared, peering myopically around the dining room. Strike raised a hand and Waldegrave made his way with a shambling walk towards their table.

‘Hello, hello. Nice to see you again.’

His light brown hair was as messy as ever and his crumpled jacket had a smear of toothpaste on the lapel. A faint gust of vinous fumes reached Strike across the small table.

‘Good of you to see me,’ said Strike.

‘Not at all. Want to help. Hope you don’t mind coming here. I chose it,’ said Waldegrave, ‘because we won’t run into anyone I know. My father brought me here once, years ago. Don’t think they’ve changed a thing.’

Waldegrave’s round eyes, framed by his horn-rimmed glasses, travelled over the heavily moulded plasterwork at the top of the dark wood panelling. It was stained ochre, as though tarnished by long years of cigarette smoke.

‘Get enough of your co-workers during office hours, do you?’ Strike asked.

‘Nothing wrong with them,’ said Jerry Waldegrave, pushing his glasses up his nose and waving at a waiter, ‘but the atmosphere’s poisonous just now. Glass of red, please,’ he told the young man who had answered his wave. ‘I don’t care, anything.’

But the waiter, on whose front a small knight chess piece was embroidered, answered repressively:

‘I’ll send over the wine waiter, sir,’ and retreated.

‘See the clock over the doors as you come in here?’ Waldegrave asked Strike, pushing his glasses up his nose again. ‘They say it stopped when the first woman came in here in 1984. Little in-joke. And on the menu, it says “bill of fare”. They wouldn’t use “menu”, you see, because it was French. My father loved that stuff. I’d just got into Oxford, that’s why he brought me here. He hated foreign food.’

Strike could feel Waldegrave’s nervousness. He was used to having that effect on people. Now was not the moment to ask whether Waldegrave had helped Quine write the blueprint for his murder.

‘What did you do at Oxford?’

‘English,’ said Waldegrave with a sigh. ‘My father was putting a brave face on it; he wanted me to do medicine.’

The fingers of Waldegrave’s right hand played an arpeggio on the tablecloth.

‘Things tense at the office, are they?’ asked Strike.

‘You could say that,’ replied Waldegrave, looking around again for the wine waiter. ‘It’s sinking in, now we know how Owen was killed. People erasing emails like idiots, pretending they never looked at the book, don’t know how it ends. It’s not so funny now.’

‘Was it funny before?’ asked Strike.

‘Well… yeah, it was, when people thought Owen had just done a runner. People love seeing the powerful ridiculed, don’t they? They aren’t popular men, either of them, Fancourt and Chard.’

The wine waiter arrived and handed the list to Waldegrave.

‘I’ll get a bottle, shall I?’ said Waldegrave, scanning it. ‘I take it this is on you?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, not without trepidation.

Waldegrave ordered a bottle of Château Lezongars, which Strike saw with profound misgiving cost nearly fifty quid, though there were bottles on the list that cost nearly two hundred.

‘So,’ said Waldegrave with sudden bravado, as the wine waiter retreated, ‘any leads yet? Know who did it?’

‘Not yet,’ said Strike.

An uncomfortable beat followed. Waldegrave pushed his glasses up his sweaty nose.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Crass – defence mechanism. It’s – I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it happened.’

‘No one ever can,’ said Strike.

On a rush of confidence, Waldegrave said:

‘I can’t shake this mad bloody idea that Owen did it to himself. That he staged it.’

‘Really?’ said Strike, watching Waldegrave closely.

‘I know he can’t have done, I know that.’ The editor’s hands were playing a deft scale on the edge of the table now. ‘It’s so – so theatrical, how he was – how he was killed. So – so grotesque. And… the awful thing… best publicity any author ever got his book. God, Owen loved publicity. Poor Owen. He once told me – this isn’t a joke – he once told me in all seriousness that he liked to get his girlfriend to interview him. Said it clarified his thought processes. I said, “What do you use as a mic?”, taking the mickey, you know, and you know what the silly sod said? “Biros mostly. Whatever’s around.”’

Waldegrave burst into panting chuckles that sounded very like sobs.

‘Poor bastard,’ he said. ‘Poor silly bastard. Lost it completely at the end, didn’t he? Well, I hope Elizabeth Tassel’s happy. Winding him up.’

Their original waiter returned with a notebook.

‘What are you having?’ the editor asked Strike, focusing short-sightedly on his bill of fare.

‘The beef,’ said Strike, who had had time to watch it being carved from the silver salver on a trolley that circulated the tables. He had not had Yorkshire pudding in years; not, in fact, since the last time he had gone back to St Mawes to see his aunt and uncle.

Waldegrave ordered Dover sole, then craned his neck again to see whether the wine waiter was returning. When he caught sight of the man approaching with the bottle he noticeably relaxed, sinking more comfortably into his chair. His glass filled, he drank several mouthfuls before sighing like a man who had received urgent medical treatment.

‘You were saying Elizabeth Tassel wound Quine up,’ Strike said.

‘Eh?’ said Waldegrave, cupping his right hand around his ear.

Strike remembered his one-sided deafness. The restaurant was indeed filling up, becoming noisier. He repeated his question more loudly.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Waldegrave. ‘Yeah, about Fancourt. The pair of them liked brooding on the wrongs Fancourt did them.’

‘What wrongs?’ asked Strike, and Waldegrave swigged more wine.

‘Fancourt’s been badmouthing them both for years.’ Waldegrave scratched his chest absent-mindedly through his creased shirt and drank more wine. ‘Owen, because of that parody of his dead wife’s novel; Liz, because she stuck by Owen – mind you, nobody’s ever blamed Fancourt for leaving Liz Tassel. The woman’s a bitch. Down to about two clients now. Twisted. Probably spends her evenings working out how much she lost: fifteen per cent of Fancourt’s royalties is big money. Booker dinners, film premieres… instead she gets Quine interviewing himself with a biro and burnt sausages in Dorcus Pengelly’s back garden.’

‘How do you know there were burnt sausages?’ asked Strike.

‘Dorcus told me,’ said Waldegrave, who had already finished his first glass of wine and was pouring a second. ‘She wanted to know why Liz wasn’t at the firm’s anniversary party. When I told her about Bombyx Mori, Dorcus assured me Liz was a lovely woman. Lovely. Couldn’t have known what was in Owen’s book. Never have hurt anyone’s feelings – wouldn’t hurt a bloody fly – ha!’

‘You disagree?’

‘Bloody right I disagree. I’ve met people who got their start in Liz Tassel’s office. They talk like kidnap victims who’ve been ransomed. Bully. Scary temper.’

‘You think she put Quine up to writing the book?’

‘Well, not directly,’ said Waldegrave. ‘But you take a deluded writer who was convinced he wasn’t a bestseller because people were jealous of him or not doing their jobs right and lock him in with Liz, who’s always angry, bitter as sin, banging on about Fancourt doing them both down, and is it a surprise he gets wound up to fever pitch?

‘She couldn’t even be bothered to read his book properly. If he hadn’t died, I’d say she got what she deserved. Silly mad b

astard didn’t just do over Fancourt, did he? Went after her as well, ha ha! Went after bloody Daniel, went after me, went after ev’ryone. Ev’ryone.’

In the manner of other alcoholics Strike had known, Jerry Waldegrave had crossed the line into drunkenness with two glasses of wine. His movements were suddenly clumsier, his manner more flamboyant.

‘D’you think Elizabeth Tassel egged Quine on to attack Fancourt?’

‘Not a doubt of it,’ said Waldegrave. ‘Not a doubt.’

‘But when I met her, Elizabeth Tassel said that what Quine wrote about Fancourt was a lie,’ Strike told Waldegrave.

‘Eh?’ said Waldegrave again, cupping his ear.

‘She told me,’ said Strike loudly, ‘that what Quine writes in Bombyx Mori about Fancourt is false. That Fancourt didn’t write the parody that made his wife kill himself – that Quine wrote it.’

‘I’m not talking about that,’ said Waldegrave, shaking his head as though Strike were being obtuse. ‘I don’t mean – forget it. Forget it.’

He was more than halfway down the bottle already; the alcohol had induced a degree of confidence. Strike held back, knowing that to push would only induce the granite stubbornness of the drunk. Better to let him drift where he wanted to go, keeping one light hand on the tiller.

‘Owen liked me,’ Waldegrave told Strike. ‘Oh yeah. I knew how to handle him. Stoke that man’s vanity and you could get him to do anything you wanted. Half an hour’s praise before you asked him to change anything in a manuscript. ’Nother half hour’s praise before you asked him to make another change. Only way.

‘He didn’t really wanna hurt me. Wasn’t thinking straight, silly bastard. Wanted to get back on the telly. Thought ev’ryone was against him. Didn’t realise he was playing with fire. Mentally ill.’

Waldegrave slumped in his seat and the back of his head collided with that of a large overdressed woman sitting behind him. ‘Sorry! Sorry!’

While she glared over her shoulder he pulled in his chair, causing the cutlery to rattle on the tablecloth.

‘So what,’ Strike asked, ‘was the Cutter all about?’

‘Huh?’ said Waldegrave.

This time, Strike felt sure that the cupped ear was a pose.

‘The Cutter—’

‘Cutter: editor – obvious,’ said Waldegrave.

‘And the bloody sack and the dwarf you try and drown?’

‘Symbolic,’ said Waldegrave, with an airy wave of the hand that nearly upset his wine glass. ‘Some idea of his I stifled, some bit of lovingly crafted prose I wanted to kill off. Hurt his feelings.’

Strike, who had heard a thousand rehearsed answers, found the response too pat, too fluent, too fast.

‘Just that?’

‘Well,’ said Waldegrave, with a gasp of a laugh, ‘I’ve never drowned a dwarf, if that’s what you’re implying.’

Drunks were always tricky interviewees. Back in the SIB, intoxicated suspects or witnesses had been a rarity. He remembered the alcoholic major whose twelve-year-old daughter had disclosed sexual abuse at her school in Germany. When Strike had arrived at the family house the major had taken a swing at him with a broken bottle. Strike had laid him out. But here in the civilian world, with the wine waiter hovering, this drunken, mild-mannered editor could choose to walk away and there would be nothing Strike could do about it. He could only hope for a chance to double back to the subject of the Cutter, to keep Waldegrave in his seat, to keep him talking.

The trolley now wended its stately way to Strike’s side. A rib of Scottish beef was carved with ceremony while Waldegrave was presented with Dover sole.

No taxis for three months, Strike told himself sternly, salivating as his plate was heaped with Yorkshire puddings, potatoes and parsnips. The trolley trundled away again. Waldegrave, who was now two-thirds of the way down his bottle of wine, contemplated his fish as though he was not quite sure how it had ended up in front of him, and put a small potato in his mouth with his fingers.

‘Did Quine discuss what he was writing with you, before he handed in his manuscripts?’ asked Strike.

‘Never,’ said Waldegrave. ‘The only thing he ever told me about Bombyx Mori was that the silkworm was a metaphor for the writer, who has to go through agonies to get at the good stuff. That was it.’

‘He never asked for your advice or input?’

‘No, no, Owen always thought he knew best.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘Writers vary,’ said Waldegrave. ‘But Owen was always up the secretive end of the scale. He liked the big reveal, you know. Appealed to his sense of drama.’

‘Police will have asked you about your movements after you got the book, I suppose,’ said Strike casually.

‘Yeah, been through all that,’ said Waldegrave indifferently. He was attempting, without much success, to prise spines out of the Dover sole he had recklessly asked to be left on the bone. ‘Got the manuscript on Friday, didn’t look at it until the Sunday—’

‘You were meant to be away, weren’t you?’

‘Paris,’ said Waldegrave. ‘Anniversary weekend. Di’n’t happen.’

‘Something came up?’

Waldegrave emptied the last of the wine into his glass. Several drops of the dark liquid fell onto the white tablecloth and spread.

‘Had a row, a bloody awful row, on the way to Heathrow. Turned round, went back home.’

‘Rough,’ said Strike.

‘On the rocks for years,’ said Waldegrave, abandoning his unequal struggle with the sole and throwing down his knife and fork with a clatter that made nearby diners look round. ‘JoJo’s grown up. No point any more. Splitting up.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Strike.

Waldegrave shrugged lugubriously and took more wine. The lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses were covered in fingerprints and his shirt collar was grubby and frayed. He had the look, thought Strike, who was experienced in such matters, of a man who has slept in his clothes.

‘You went straight home after the row, did you?’

‘’S a big house. No need to see each other if we don’t want to.’

The drops of wine were spreading like crimson blossoms on the snowy tablecloth.

‘Black spot, that’s what this reminds me of,’ said Waldegrave. ‘Treasure Island, y’know… black spot. Suspicion on everyone who read that bloody book. Ev’ryone looking sideways at ev’ryone else. Ev’ryone who knows the ending’s suspect. Police in my bloody office, ev’ryone staring…

‘I read it on Sunday,’ he said, lurching back to Strike’s question, ‘’n I told Liz Tassel what I thought of her – and life went on. Owen not answering his phone. Thought he was probably having a breakdown – had my own bloody problems. Daniel Chard going berserk…

‘Fuck him. Resigned. Had enough. Accusations. No more. Being bloody bawled out in front of the whole office. No more.’

‘Accusations?’ asked Strike.

His interview technique was starting to feel like the dexterous flicking of Subbuteo football figures; the wobbling interviewee directed by the right, light touch. (Strike had had an Arsenal set in the seventies; he had played Dave Polworth’s custom-painted Plymouth Argyles, both boys lying belly-down on Dave’s mum’s hearthrug.)

‘Dan thinks I gossiped about him to Owen. Bloody idiot. Thinks the world doesn’t know… been gossip for years. Didn’t have to tell Owen. Ev’ryone knows.’

‘That Chard’s gay?’

‘Gay, who cares… repressed. Not sure Dan even knows he’s gay. But he likes pretty young men, likes painting ’em in the nude. Common knowledge.’

‘Did he offer to paint you?’ asked Strike.

‘Christ, no,’ said Waldegrave. ‘Joe North told me, years ago. Ah!’

He had caught the wine waiter’s eye.

‘’Nother glass of this, please.’

Strike was only grateful he had not asked for a bottle.

‘I’m sorry, sir, we don’t do that by the—??

?

‘Anything, then. Red. Anything.

‘Years ago, this was,’ Waldegrave went on, picking up where he had left off. ‘Dan wanted Joe to pose for him; Joe told him to piss off. Common knowledge, f’years.’

He leaned back, ramming the large woman behind him again, who unfortunately was now eating soup. Strike watched her angry dining companion summon a passing waiter to complain. The waiter bent down to Waldegrave and said apologetically, yet with firmness:

‘Would you mind pulling in your chair, sir? The lady behind you—’

‘Sorry, sorry.’

Waldegrave tugged himself nearer Strike, placed his elbows on the table, pushed his tangled hair out of his eyes and said loudly:

‘Head up his bloody arse.’

‘Who?’ asked Strike, finishing with regret the best meal he had had in a long time.

‘Dan. Handed the bloody company on a plate… rolling in it all his life… let him live in the country and paint his houseboy if that’s what he wants… had enough of it. Start my own… start my own bloody company.’

Waldegrave’s mobile phone rang. It took him a while to locate it. He peered over his glasses at the caller’s number before answering.

‘What’s up, JoJo?’

Busy though the restaurant was, Strike heard the response: shrill, distant screaming down the line. Waldegrave looked horrified.

‘JoJo? Are you—?’

But then the doughy, amiable face became tauter than Strike could have believed. Veins stood out on Waldegrave’s neck and his mouth stretched in an ugly snarl.

‘Fuck you!’ he said, and his voice carried loudly to all the surrounding tables so that fifty heads jerked upwards, conversations stalled. ‘Do not call me on JoJo’s number! No, you drunken fucking – you heard me – I drink because I’m fucking married to you, that’s why!’

The overweight woman behind Waldegrave looked around, outraged. Waiters were glaring; one had so far forgotten himself as to have paused with a Yorkshire pudding halfway to a Japanese businessman’s plate. The decorous gentleman’s club had doubtless seen other drunken brawls, but they could not fail to shock among the dark wood panels, the glass chandeliers and the bills of fare, where everything was stolidly British, calm and staid.