The Silkworm

‘Owen never liked ’em, he preferred his old type—’

‘Have you ever ordered shopping over the internet?’

‘Yeah,’ she replied, and his heart sank a little. He had been hoping that Leonora might be that almost mythical beast: a computer virgin.

‘Where did you do that?’

‘Edna’s, she let me borrow hers to order Orlando an art set for her birthday so I didn’t have to go into town,’ said Leonora.

Doubtless the police would soon be confiscating and ripping apart the kind-hearted Edna’s computer.

A woman with a shaved head and a tattooed lip at the next table began shouting at a warder, who had warned her to stay in her seat. Leonora cowered away from the prisoner as she erupted into obscenities and the officer approached.

‘Leonora, there’s one last thing,’ said Strike loudly, as the shouting at the next table reached a crescendo. ‘Did Owen say anything to you about meaning to go away, to take a break, before he walked out on the fifth?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘’F course not.’

The prisoner at the next table had been persuaded to quieten down. Her visitor, a woman similarly tattooed and only slightly less aggressive-looking, gave the prison officer the finger as she walked away.

‘You can’t think of anything Owen said or did that might’ve suggested he was planning to go away for a while?’ Strike persisted as Leonora watched their neighbours with anxious, owl-like eyes.

‘What?’ she said distractedly. ‘No – he never tells – told me – always just went… If he knew he was going, why wouldn’t he say goodbye?’

She began to cry, one thin hand over her mouth.

‘What’s going to happen to Dodo if they keep me in prison?’ she asked him through her sobs. ‘Edna can’t have her for ever. She can’t handle her. She went an’ left Cheeky Monkey behind an’ Dodo had done some pictures for me,’ and after a disconcerted moment or two Strike decided that she must be talking about the plush orang-utan that Orlando had been cradling on his visit to their house. ‘If they make me stay here—’

‘I’m going to get you out,’ said Strike with more confidence than he felt; but what harm would it do to give her something to hold on to, something to get her through the next twenty-four hours?

Their time was up. He left the hall without looking back, wondering what it was about Leonora, faded and grumpy, fifty years old with a brain-damaged daughter and a hopeless life, that had inspired in him this fierce determination, this fury…

Because she didn’t do it, came the simple answer. Because she’s innocent.

In the last eight months a stream of clients had pushed open the engraved glass door bearing his name and the reasons they had sought him had been uncannily similar. They had come because they wanted a spy, a weapon, a means of redressing some balance in their favour or of divesting themselves of inconvenient connections. They came because they sought an advantage, because they felt they were owed retribution or compensation. Because overwhelmingly, they wanted more money.

But Leonora had come to him because she wanted her husband to come home. It had been a simple wish born of weariness and of love, if not for the errant Quine then for the daughter who missed him. For the purity of her desire, Strike felt he owed her the best he could give.

The cold air outside the prison tasted different. It had been a long time since Strike had been in an environment where following orders was the backbone of daily life. He could feel his freedom as he walked, leaning heavily on the stick, back towards the bus stop.

At the back of the bus, three drunken young women wearing headbands from which reindeer antlers protruded were singing:

‘They say it’s unrealistic,

But I believe in you Saint Nick…’

Bloody Christmas, thought Strike, thinking irritably of the presents he would be expected to buy for his nephews and godchildren, none of whose ages he could ever remember.

The bus groaned on through the slush and the snow. Lights of every colour gleamed blurrily at Strike through the steamed-up bus window. Scowling, with his mind on injustice and murder, he effortlessly and silently repelled anyone who might have considered sitting in the seat beside him.

40

Be glad thou art unnam’d; ’tis not worth the owning.

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The False One

Sleet, rain and snow pelted the office windows in turn the following day. Miss Brocklehurst’s boss turned up at the office around midday to view confirmation of her infidelity. Shortly after Strike had bidden him farewell, Caroline Ingles arrived. She was harried, on her way to pick up her children from school, but determined to give Strike the card for the newly opened Golden Lace Gentleman’s Club and Bar that she had found in her husband’s wallet. Mr Ingles’s promise to stay well away from lap-dancers, call girls and strippers had been a requirement of their reconciliation. Strike agreed to stake out Golden Lace to see whether Mr Ingles had again succumbed to temptation. By the time Caroline Ingles had left, Strike was very ready for the pack of sandwiches waiting for him on Robin’s desk, but he had taken barely a mouthful when his phone rang.

Aware that their professional relationship was coming to a close, his brunette client was throwing caution to the winds and inviting Strike out to dinner. Strike thought he could see Robin smiling as she ate her sandwich, determinedly facing her monitor. He tried to decline with politeness, at first pleading his heavy workload and finally telling her that he was in a relationship.

‘You never told me that,’ she said, suddenly cold.

‘I like to keep my private and professional lives separate,’ he said.

She hung up halfway through his polite farewell.

‘Maybe you should have gone out with her,’ said Robin innocently. ‘Just to make sure she’ll pay her bill.’

‘She’ll bloody pay,’ growled Strike, making up for lost time by cramming half a sandwich into his mouth. The phone buzzed. He groaned and looked down to see who had texted him.

His stomach contracted.

‘Leonora?’ asked Robin, who had seen his face fall.

Strike shook his head, his mouth full of sandwich.

The message comprised three words:

It was yours.

He had not changed his number since he had split up with Charlotte. Too much hassle, when a hundred professional contacts had it. This was the first time she had used it in eight months.

Strike remembered Dave Polworth’s warning:

You be on the watch, Diddy, for signs of her galloping back over the horizon. Wouldn’t be surprised if she bolts.

Today was the third, he reminded himself. She was supposed to be getting married tomorrow.

For the first time since he had owned a mobile phone, Strike wished it had the facility to reveal a caller’s location. Had she sent this from the Castle of Fucking Croy, in an interlude between checking the canapés and the flowers in the chapel? Or was she standing on the corner of Denmark Street, watching his office like Pippa Midgley? Running away from a grand, well-publicised wedding like this would be Charlotte’s crowning achievement, the very apex of her career of mayhem and disruption.

Strike put the mobile back into his pocket and started on his second sandwich. Deducing that she was not about to discover what had made Strike’s expression turn stony, Robin screwed up her empty crisp packet, dropped it in the bin and said:

‘You’re meeting your brother tonight, aren’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Aren’t you meeting your brother—?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Yeah.’

‘At the River Café?’

‘Yeah.’

It was yours.

‘Why?’ asked Robin.

Mine. The hell it was. If it even existed.

‘What?’ said Strike, vaguely aware that Robin had asked him something.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he said, pulling himself toget

her. ‘What did you ask me?’

‘Why are you going to the River Café?’

‘Oh. Well,’ said Strike, reaching for his own packet of crisps, ‘it’s a long shot, but I want to speak to anyone who witnessed Quine and Tassel’s row. I’m trying to get a handle on whether he staged it, whether he was planning his disappearance all along.’

‘You’re hoping to find a member of staff who was there that night?’ said Robin, clearly dubious.

‘Which is why I’m taking Al,’ said Strike. ‘He knows every waiter in every smart restaurant in London. All my father’s kids do.’

When he had finished lunch he took a coffee into his office and closed the door. Sleet was again spattering his window. He could not resist glancing down into the frozen street, half-expecting (hoping?) to see her there, long black hair whipping around her perfect, pale face, staring up at him, imploring him with her flecked green-hazel eyes… but there was nobody in the street except strangers swaddled against the relentless weather.

He was crazy on every count. She was in Scotland and it was much, much better so.

Later, when Robin had gone home, he put on the Italian suit that Charlotte had bought him over a year ago, when they had dined at this very restaurant to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday. After pulling on his overcoat he locked his flat door and set out for the Tube in the sub-zero cold, still leaning on his stick.

Christmas assailed him from every window he passed; spangled lights, mounds of new objects, of toys and gadgets, fake snow on glass and sundry pre-Christmas sale signs adding a mournful note in the depths of the recession. More pre-Christmas revellers on the Friday-night Tube: girls in ludicrously tiny glittering dresses risking hypothermia for a fumble with the boy from Packaging. Strike felt weary and low.

The walk from Hammersmith was longer than he had remembered. As he proceeded down Fulham Palace Road he realised how close he was to Elizabeth Tassel’s house. Presumably she had suggested the restaurant, a long way from the Quines’ place in Ladbroke Grove, precisely because of its convenience to her.

After ten minutes Strike turned right and headed through the darkness towards Thames Wharf, through empty echoing streets, his breath rising in a smoky cloud. The riverside garden that in summer would be full of diners at white table-clothed chairs was buried under thick snow. The Thames glinted darkly beyond the pale carpet, iron-cold and menacing. Strike turned into the converted brick storage facility and was at once subsumed in light, warmth and noise.

There, just inside the door, leaning against the bar with his elbow on its shiny steel surface, was Al, deep in friendly conversation with the barman.

He was barely five foot ten, which was short for one of Rokeby’s children, and carrying a little too much weight. His mouse-brown hair was slicked back; he had his mother’s narrow jaw but he had inherited the weak divergent squint that added an attractive strangeness to Rokeby’s handsome face and marked Al inescapably as his father’s son.

Catching sight of Strike, Al let out a roar of welcome, bounced forwards and hugged him. Strike barely responded, being hampered by his stick and the coat he was trying to remove. Al fell back, looking sheepish.

‘How are you, bruv?’

In spite of the comic Anglicism, his accent was a strange mid-Atlantic hybrid that testified to years spent between Europe and America.

‘Not bad,’ said Strike, ‘you?’

‘Yeah, not bad,’ echoed Al. ‘Not bad. Could be worse.’

He gave a kind of exaggerated Gallic shrug. Al had been educated at Le Rosey, the international boarding school in Switzerland, and his body language still bore traces of the Continental manners he had met there. Something else underlay the response, however, something that Strike felt every time they met: Al’s guilt, his defensiveness, a preparedness to meet accusations of having had a soft and easy life compared to his older brother.

‘What’re you having?’ Al asked. ‘Beer? Fancy a Peroni?’

They sat side by side at the crammed bar, facing glass shelves of bottles, waiting for their table. Looking down the long, packed restaurant, with its industrial steel ceiling in stylised waves, its cerulean carpet and the wood-burning oven at the end like a giant beehive, Strike spotted a celebrated sculptor, a famous female architect and at least one well-known actor.

‘Heard about you and Charlotte,’ Al said. ‘Shame.’

Strike wondered whether Al knew somebody who knew her. He ran with a jet-set crowd that might well stretch to the future Viscount of Croy.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Strike with a shrug. ‘For the best.’

(He and Charlotte had sat here, in this wonderful restaurant by the river, and enjoyed their very last happy evening together. It had taken four months for the relationship to unravel and implode, four months of exhausting aggression and misery… it was yours.)

A good-looking young woman whom Al greeted by name showed them to their table; an equally attractive young man handed them menus. Strike waited for Al to order wine and for the staff to depart before explaining why they were there.

‘Four weeks ago tonight,’ he told Al, ‘a writer called Owen Quine had a row with his agent in here. By all accounts the whole restaurant saw it. He stormed out and shortly afterwards – probably within days and maybe even that night—’

‘—he was murdered,’ said Al, who had listened to Strike with his mouth open. ‘I saw it in the paper. You found the body.’

His tone conveyed a yearning for details that Strike chose to ignore.

‘There might be nothing to find out here, but I—’

‘His wife did it, though,’ said Al, puzzled. ‘They’ve got her.’

‘His wife didn’t do it,’ said Strike, turning his attention to the paper menu. He had noticed before now that Al, who had grown up surrounded by innumerable inaccurate press stories about his father and his family, never seemed to extend his healthy mistrust of British journalism to any other topic.

(It had had two campuses, Al’s school: lessons by Lake Geneva in the summer months and then up to Gstaad for the winter; afternoons spent skiing and skating. Al had grown up breathing exorbitantly priced mountain air, cushioned by the companionship of other celebrity children. The distant snarling of the tabloids had been a mere background murmur in his life… this, at least, was how Strike interpreted the little that Al had told him of his youth.)

‘The wife didn’t do it?’ said Al when Strike looked up again.

‘No.’

‘Whoa. You gonna pull another Lula Landry?’ asked Al, with a wide grin that added charm to his off-kilter stare.

‘That’s the idea,’ said Strike.

‘You want me to sound out the staff?’ asked Al.

‘Exactly,’ said Strike.

He was amused and touched by how delighted Al seemed to be at being given the chance to render him service.

‘No problem. No problem. Try and get someone decent for you. Where’s Loulou gone? She’s a smart cookie.’

After they had ordered, Al strolled to the bathroom to see whether he could spot the smart Loulou. Strike sat alone, drinking Tignanello ordered by Al, watching the white-coated chefs working in the open kitchen. They were young, skilled and efficient. Flames darted, knives flickered, heavy iron pans moved hither and thither.

He’s not stupid, Strike thought of his brother, watching Al meander back towards the table, leading a dark girl in a white apron. He’s just…

‘This is Loulou,’ said Al, sitting back down. ‘She was here that night.’

‘You remember the argument?’ Strike asked her, focusing at once on the girl who was too busy to sit but stood smiling vaguely at him.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘It was really loud. Brought the place to a standstill.’

‘Can you remember what the man looked like?’ Strike said, keen to establish that she had witnessed the right row.

‘Fat bloke wearing a hat, yeah,’ she said. ‘Yelling at a woman with grey hair. Yeah, they had a real bu

st-up. Sorry, I’m going to have to—’

And she was gone, to take another table’s order.

‘We’ll grab her on the way back,’ Al reassured Strike. ‘Eddie sends his best, by the way. Wishes he could’ve been here.’

‘How’s he doing?’ asked Strike, feigning interest. Where Al had shown himself keen to forge a friendship, his younger brother, Eddie, seemed indifferent. He was twenty-four and the lead singer in his own band. Strike had never listened to any of their music.

‘He’s great,’ said Al.

Silence fell between them. Their starters arrived and they ate without talking. Strike knew that Al had achieved excellent grades in his International Baccalaureate. One evening in a military tent in Afghanistan, Strike had seen a photograph online of eighteen-year-old Al in a cream blazer with a crest on the pocket, long hair swept sideways and gleaming gold in the bright Geneva sun. Rokeby had had his arm around Al, beaming with paternal pride. The picture had been newsworthy because Rokeby had never been photographed in a suit and tie before.

‘Hello, Al,’ said a familiar voice.

And, to Strike’s astonishment, there stood Daniel Chard on crutches, his bald head reflecting the subtle spots shining from the industrial waves above them. Wearing a dark red open-necked shirt and a grey suit, the publisher looked stylish among this more bohemian crowd.

‘Oh,’ said Al, and Strike could tell that he was struggling to place Chard, ‘er – hi—’

‘Dan Chard,’ said the publisher. ‘We met when I was speaking to your father about his autobiography?’

‘Oh – oh yeah!’ said Al, standing up and shaking hands. ‘This is my brother Cormoran.’

If Strike had been surprised to see Chard approach Al, it was nothing to the shock that registered on Chard’s face at the sight of Strike.

‘Your – your brother?’

‘Half-brother,’ said Strike, inwardly amused by Chard’s evident bewilderment. How could the hireling detective be related to the playboy prince?