The Silkworm

On a trip to the bathroom Strike checked his phone and saw, in tiny thumbnail pictures, Leonora being led in and out of Wood Green Crown Court. She had been charged and driven away in a police van. There had been plenty of press photographers but no members of the public baying for her blood; she was not supposed to have murdered anyone that the public much cared about.

A text from Robin arrived just as he was about to re-enter the conference room:

Could get you in to see Leonora at 6 this evening?

Great, he texted back.

‘I thought,’ said his flirtatious client, once he had sat back down, ‘that Cormoran might be rather impressive on the witness stand.’

Strike had already shown her lawyer the meticulous notes and photographs he had compiled, detailing Mr Burnett’s every covert transaction, the attempted sale of the apartment and the palming of the emerald necklace included. To Mrs Burnett’s evident disappointment, neither man saw any reason for Strike to attend court in person given the quality of his records. Indeed, the lawyer could barely conceal his resentment of the reliance she seemed to place upon the detective. No doubt he thought this wealthy divorcée’s discreet caresses and batted eyelashes might be better directed towards him, in his bespoke pinstripe suit, with his distinguished salt-and-pepper hair, instead of a man who looked like a limping prize fighter.

Relieved to quit the rarefied atmosphere, Strike caught the Tube back to his office, glad to take off his suit in his flat, happy to think that he would soon be rid of that particular case and in possession of the fat cheque that had been the only reason he had taken it. He was free now to focus on that thin, grey-haired fifty-year-old woman in Holloway who was touted as WRITER’S MOUSY WIFE EXPERT WITH CLEAVER on page two of the Evening Standard he had picked up on the journey.

‘Was her lawyer happy?’ Robin asked when he reappeared in the office.

‘Reasonably,’ said Strike, staring at the miniature tinsel Christmas tree she had placed on her tidy desk. It was decorated with tiny baubles and LED lights.

‘Why?’ he asked succinctly.

‘Christmas,’ said Robin, with a faint grin but without apology. ‘I was going to put it up yesterday, but after Leonora was charged I didn’t feel very festive. Anyway, I’ve got you an appointment to see her at six. You’ll need to take photo ID—’

‘Good work, thanks.’

‘—and I got you sandwiches and I thought you might like to see this,’ she said. ‘Michael Fancourt’s given an interview about Quine.’

She passed him a pack of cheese and pickle sandwiches and a copy of The Times, folded to the correct page. Strike lowered himself onto the farting leather sofa and ate while reading the article, which was adorned with a split photograph. On the left-hand side was a picture of Fancourt standing in front of an Elizabethan country house. Photographed from below, his head looked less out of proportion than usual. On the right-hand side was Quine, eccentric and wild-eyed in his feather-trimmed trilby, addressing a sparse audience in what seemed to be a small marquee.

The writer of the piece made much of the fact that Fancourt and Quine had once known each other well, had even been considered equivalent talents.

Few now remember Quine’s breakout work, Hobart’s Sin, although Fancourt touts it still as a fine example of what he calls Quine’s magical-brutalism. For all Fancourt’s reputation of a man who nurses his grudges, he brings a surprising generosity to our discussion of Quine’s oeuvre.

‘Always interesting and often underrated,’ he says. ‘I suspect that he will be treated more kindly by future critics than our contemporaries.’

This unexpected generosity is the more surprising when one considers that 25 years ago Fancourt’s first wife, Elspeth Kerr, killed herself after reading a cruel parody of her first novel. The spoof was widely attributed to Fancourt’s close friend and fellow literary rebel: the late Owen Quine.

‘One mellows almost without realising it – a compensation of age, because anger is exhausting. I unburdened myself of many of the feelings about Ellie’s death in my last novel, which should not be read as autobiographical, although…’

Strike skimmed the next two paragraphs, which appeared to be promoting Fancourt’s next book, and resumed reading at the point where the word ‘violence’ jumped out at him.

It is difficult to reconcile the tweed-jacketed Fancourt in front of me with the one-time self-described literary punk who drew both plaudits and criticism for the inventive and gratuitous violence of his early work.

‘If Mr Graham Greene was correct,’ wrote critic Harvey Bird of Fancourt’s first novel, ‘and the writer needs a chip of ice in his heart, then Michael Fancourt surely has what it takes in abundance. Reading the rape scene in Bellafront one starts to imagine that this young man’s innards must be glacial. In fact, there are two ways of looking at Bellafront, which is undoubtedly accomplished and original. The first possibility is that Mr Fancourt has written an unusually mature first novel, in which he has resisted the neophyte tendency to insert himself into the (anti-)heroic role. We may wince at its grotesqueries or its morality, but nobody could deny the power or artistry of the prose. The second, more disturbing, possibility is that Mr Fancourt does not possess much of an organ in which to place a chip of ice and his singularly inhuman tale corresponds to his own inner landscape. Time – and further work – will tell.’

Fancourt hailed originally from Slough, the only son of an unwed nurse. His mother still lives in the house in which he grew up.

‘She’s happy there,’ he says. ‘She has an enviable capacity for enjoying the familiar.’

His own home is a long way from a terraced house in Slough. Our conversation takes place in a long drawing room crammed with Meissen knick-knacks and Aubusson rugs, its windows overlooking the extensive grounds of Endsor Court.

‘This is all my wife’s choice,’ says Fancourt dismissively. ‘My taste in art is very different and confined to the grounds.’ A large trench to the side of the building is being prepared for the concrete foundation to support a sculpture in rusted metal representing the Fury Tisiphone, which he describes with a laugh as an ‘impulse buy… the avenger of murder, you know… a very powerful piece. My wife loathes it.’

And somehow we find ourselves back where the interview began: at the macabre fate of Owen Quine.

‘I haven’t yet processed Owen’s murder,’ says Fancourt quietly. ‘Like most writers, I tend to find out what I feel on a subject by writing about it. It is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it.’

Does this mean that we can expect a fictionalised account of Quine’s killing?

‘I can hear the accusations of bad taste and exploitation already,’ smiles Fancourt. ‘I dare say the themes of lost friendship, of a last chance to talk, to explain and make amends may make an appearance in due course, but Owen’s murder has already been treated fictionally – by himself.’

He is one of the few to have read the notorious manuscript that appears to have formed the blueprint of the murder.

‘I read it the very day that Quine’s body was discovered. My publisher was very keen for me to see it – I’m portrayed in it, you see.’ He seems genuinely indifferent about his inclusion, however insulting the portrait may have been. ‘I wasn’t interested in calling in lawyers. I deplore censorship.’

What did he think of the book, in literary terms?

‘It’s what Nabokov called a maniac’s masterpiece,’ he replies, smiling. ‘There may be a case for publishing it in due course, who knows?’

He can’t, surely, be serious?

‘But why shouldn’t it be published?’ demands Fancourt. ‘Art is supposed to provoke: by that standard alone, Bombyx Mori has more than fulfilled its remit. Yes, why not?’ asks the literary punk, ensconced in his Elizabethan manor.

‘With an introduction by Michael Fancourt?’ I suggest.

‘Stranger things have happened,’ replies Michael Fancourt, with a grin. ‘Much strange

r.’

‘Christ almighty,’ muttered Strike, throwing The Times back onto Robin’s desk and narrowly missing the Christmas tree.

‘Did you see he only claims to have read Bombyx Mori the day you found Quine?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike.

‘He’s lying,’ said Robin.

‘We think he’s lying,’ Strike corrected her.

Holding fast to his resolution not to waste any more money on taxis, but with the snow still falling, Strike took the number 29 bus through the darkening afternoon. It ran north, taking Strike on a twenty-minute journey through recently gritted roads. A haggard woman got on at Hampstead Road, accompanied by a small, grizzling boy. Some sixth sense told Strike that the three of them were headed in the same direction and, sure enough, both he and the woman stood to get out in Camden Road, alongside the bare flank of HMP Holloway.

‘You’re gonna see Mummy,’ she told her charge, whom Strike guessed to be her grandson, though she looked around forty.

Surrounded by bare-limbed trees and grass verges covered in thick snow, the jail might have been a redbrick university faculty but for authoritarian signs in government-issue blue and white, and the sixteen-foot-high doors set into the wall so that prison vans might pass. Strike joined the trickle of visitors, several of them with children who strained to make marks in the untouched snow heaped beside the paths. The line shuffled together past the terracotta walls with their cement frets, past the hanging baskets now balls of snow in the freezing December air. The majority of his fellow visitors were women; Strike was unique among the men not merely for his size but for the fact that he did not look as though life had pummelled him into a quiescent stupor. A heavily tattooed youth in sagging jeans walking ahead of him staggered a little with every step. Strike had seen neurological damage back in Selly Oak, but guessed that this kind had not been sustained under mortar fire.

The stout female prison officer whose job it was to check IDs examined his driver’s licence, then stared up at him.

‘I know who you are,’ she said, with a piercing look.

Strike wondered whether Anstis had asked to be tipped off if he went to see Leonora. It seemed probable.

He had arrived deliberately early, so as not to waste a minute of his allotted time with his client. This foresight permitted him a coffee in the visitors’ centre, which was run by a children’s charity. The room was bright and almost cheerful, and many of the kids greeted the trucks and teddies as old friends. Strike’s haggard companion from the bus watched, gaunt and impassive, as the boy with her played with an Action Man around Strike’s large feet, treating him like a massive piece of sculpture (Tisiphone, the avenger of murder…).

He was called through to the visitors’ hall at six on the dot. Footsteps echoed off the shiny floors. The walls were of concrete blocks but bright murals painted by the prisoners did their best to soften the cavernous space, which echoed with the clang of metal and keys and the murmur of talk. The plastic seats were fixed either side of a small, low central table, similarly immovable, so as to minimise contact between prisoner and visitor, and prevent the passing of contraband. A toddler wailed. Warders stood around the walls, watching. Strike, who had only ever dealt with male prisoners, felt a repugnance for the place unusual in him. The kids staring at gaunt mothers, the subtle signs of mental illness in the fiddling and twitching of bitten fingers, drowsy, over-medicated women curled in their plastic seats were quite unlike the male detention facilities with which he was familiar.

Leonora sat waiting, tiny and fragile, pathetically glad to see him. She was wearing her own clothes, a loose sweatshirt and trousers in which she looked shrunken.

‘Orlando’s been in,’ she said. Her eyes were bright red; he could tell that she had been crying for a long time. ‘Didn’t want to leave me. They dragged her out. Wouldn’t let me calm her down.’

Where she would have shown defiance and anger he could hear the beginnings of institutionalised hopelessness. Forty-eight hours had taught her that she had lost all control and power.

‘Leonora, we need to talk about that credit card statement.’

‘I never had that card,’ she said, her white lips trembling. ‘Owen always kept it, I never had it except sometimes if I needed to go to the supermarket. He always gave me cash.’

Strike remembered that she had come to him in the first place because money was running out.

‘I left all our finances up to Owen, that’s how he liked it, but he was careless, he never used to check his bills nor his bank statements, used to just sling ’em in his office. I used to say to him, “You wanna check those, someone could be diddling you,” but he never cared. He’d give anything to Orlando to draw on, that’s why it had her picture—’

‘Never mind the picture. Somebody other than you or Owen must have had access to that credit card. We’re going to run through a few people, OK?’

‘All right,’ she mumbled, cowed.

‘Elizabeth Tassel supervised work on the house in Talgarth Road, right? How was that paid for? Did she have a copy of your credit card?’

‘No,’ said Leonora.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure, cos we offered it to her and she said it was easier just to take it out of Owen’s next royalties cos he was due some any time. He sells well in Finland, I dunno why, but they like his—’

‘You can’t think of any time where Elizabeth Tassel did something for the house and had the Visa card?’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘never.’

‘OK,’ said Strike, ‘can you remember – and take your time – any occasion when Owen paid for something with his credit card at Roper Chard?’

And to his astonishment she said, ‘Not at Roper Chard exactly, but yeah.

‘They were all there. I was there, too. It was… I dunno… two years ago? Maybe less… a big dinner for publishers, it was, at the Dorchester. They put me and Owen at a table with all the junior people. Daniel Chard and Jerry Waldegrave were nowhere near us. Anyway, there was a silent auction, you know, when you write down your bid for—’

‘Yeah, I know how they work,’ said Strike, trying to contain his impatience.

‘It was for some writers’ charity, when they try and get writers outta prison. And Owen bid on a weekend in this country house hotel and he won it and he had to give his credit card details at the dinner. Some of the young girls from the publishers were there all tarted up, taking payment. He gave the girl his card. I remember that because he was pissed,’ she said, with a shadow of her former sullenness, ‘an’ he paid eight hundred quid for it. Showin’ off. Tryin’ to make out he earned money like the others.’

‘He handed his credit card over to a girl from the publishers,’ repeated Strike. ‘Did she take the details at the table or—?’

‘She couldn’t make her little machine work,’ said Leonora. ‘She took it away and brought it back.’

‘Anyone else there you recognised?’

‘Michael Fancourt was there with his publisher,’ she said, ‘on the other side of the room. That was before he moved to Roper Chard.’

‘Did he and Owen speak?’

‘Not likely,’ she said.

‘Right, what about—?’ he said, and hesitated. They had never before acknowledged the existence of Kathryn Kent.

‘His girlfriend coulda got at it any time, couldn’t she?’ said Leonora, as though she had read his mind.

‘You knew about her?’ he asked, matter-of-fact.

‘Police said something,’ replied Leonora, her expression bleak. ‘There’s always been someone. Way he was. Picking them up at his writing classes. I used to give him right tellings-off. When they said he was – when they said he was – he was tied up—’

She had started to cry again.

‘I knew it must’ve been a woman what done it. He liked that. Got him going.’

‘You didn’t know about Kathryn Kent before the police mentioned her?’

>

‘I saw her name on a text on his phone one time but he said it was nothing. Said she was just one of his students. Like he always said. Told me he’d never leave us, me and Orlando.’

She wiped her eyes under her outdated glasses with the back of a thin, trembling hand.

‘But you never saw Kathryn Kent until she came to the door to say that her sister had died?’

‘Was that her, was it?’ asked Leonora, sniffing and dabbing at her eyes with her cuff. ‘Fat, i’n’t she? Well, she could’ve got his credit card details any time, couldn’t she? Taken it out of his wallet while he was sleeping.’

It was going to be difficult to find and question Kathryn Kent, Strike knew. He was sure she would have absconded from her flat to avoid the attentions of the press.

‘The things the murderer bought on the card,’ he said, changing tack, ‘were ordered online. You haven’t got a computer at home, have you?’