‘You read that, did you?’ said Fancourt, with vaguely flattered surprise. ‘Well, so it is, a true literary curiosity. I never denied that Owen could write, you know, it was just that he was never able to dredge up anything profound or interesting to write about. It’s a surprisingly common phenomenon. But with Bombyx Mori he found his subject at last, didn’t he? Everybody hates me, everyone’s against me, I’m a genius and nobody can see it. The result is grotesque and comic, it reeks of bitterness and self-pity, but it has an undeniable fascination. And the language,’ said Fancourt, with the most enthusiasm he had so far brought to the discussion, ‘is admirable. Some passages are among the best things he ever wrote.’
‘This is all very useful,’ said Strike.
Fancourt seemed amused.
‘How?’
‘I’ve got a feeling that Bombyx Mori’s central to this case.’
‘“Case”?’ repeated Fancourt, smiling. There was a short pause. ‘Are you seriously telling me that you still think the killer of Owen Quine is at large?’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ said Strike.
‘Then,’ said Fancourt, smiling still more broadly, ‘wouldn’t it be more useful to analyse the writings of the killer rather than the victim?’
‘Maybe,’ said Strike, ‘but we don’t know whether the killer writes.’
‘Oh, nearly everyone does these days,’ said Fancourt. ‘The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them.’
‘I’m sure people would read Bombyx Mori, especially if you did an introduction,’ said Strike.
‘I think you’re right,’ said Fancourt, smiling more broadly.
‘When exactly did you read the book for the first time?’
‘It would have been… let me see…’
Fancourt appeared to do a mental calculation.
‘Not until the, ah, middle of the week after Quine delivered it,’ said Fancourt. ‘Dan Chard called me, told me that Quine was trying to suggest that I had written the parody of Ellie’s book, and tried to persuade me to join him in legal action against Quine. I refused.’
‘Did Chard read any of it out to you?’
‘No,’ said Fancourt, smiling again. ‘Frightened he might lose his star acquisition, you see. No, he simply outlined the allegation that Quine had made and offered me the services of his lawyers.’
‘When was this telephone call?’
‘On the evening of the… seventh, it must have been,’ said Fancourt. ‘The Sunday night.’
‘The same day you filmed an interview about your new novel,’ said Strike.
‘You’re very well-informed,’ said Fancourt, his eyes narrowing.
‘I watched the programme.’
‘You know,’ said Fancourt, with a needle-prick of malice, ‘you don’t have the appearance of a man who enjoys arts programmes.’
‘I never said I enjoyed them,’ said Strike and was unsurprised to note that Fancourt appeared to enjoy his retort. ‘But I did notice that you misspoke when you said your first wife’s name on camera.’
Fancourt said nothing, but merely watched Strike over his wine glass.
‘You said “Eff” then corrected yourself, and said “Ellie”,’ said Strike.
‘Well, as you say – I misspoke. It can happen to the most articulate of us.’
‘In Bombyx Mori, your late wife—’
‘—is called “Effigy”.’
‘Which is a coincidence,’ said Strike.
‘Obviously,’ said Fancourt.
‘Because you couldn’t yet have known that Quine had called her “Effigy” on the seventh.’
‘Obviously not.’
‘Quine’s mistress got a copy of the manuscript fed through her letter box right after he disappeared,’ said Strike. ‘You didn’t get sent an early copy, by any chance?’
The ensuing pause became over-long. Strike felt the fragile thread that he had managed to spin between them snap. It did not matter. He had saved this question for last.
‘No,’ said Fancourt. ‘I didn’t.’
He pulled out his wallet. His declared intention of picking Strike’s brains for a character in his next novel seemed, not at all to Strike’s regret, forgotten. Strike pulled out some cash, but Fancourt held up a hand and said, with unmistakable offensiveness:
‘No, no, allow me. Your press coverage makes much of the fact that you have known better times. In fact, it puts me in mind of Ben Jonson: “I am a poor gentleman, a soldier; one that, in the better state of my fortunes, scorned so mean a refuge”.’
‘Really?’ said Strike pleasantly, returning his cash to his pocket. ‘I’m put more in mind of
sicine subrepsti mi, atque intestina pururens
ei misero eripuisti omnia nostra bona?
Eripuisti, eheu, nostrae crudele uenenum
Uitae, eheu nostrae pestis amicitiae.’
He looked unsmilingly upon Fancourt’s astonishment. The writer rallied quickly.
‘Ovid?’
‘Catullus,’ said Strike, heaving himself off the low pouffe with the aid of the table. ‘Translates roughly:
So that’s how you crept up on me, an acid eating away
My guts, stole from me everything I most treasure?
Yes, alas, stole: grim poison in my blood
The plague, alas, of the friendship we once had.
‘Well, I expect we’ll see each other around,’ said Strike pleasantly.
He limped off towards the stairs, Fancourt’s eyes upon his back.
44
All his allies and friends rush into troops
Like raging torrents.
Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier
Strike sat for a long time on the sofa in his kitchen-sitting room that night, barely hearing the rumble of the traffic on Charing Cross Road and the occasional muffled shouts of more early Christmas party-goers. He had removed his prosthesis; it was comfortable sitting there in his boxers, the end of his injured leg free of pressure, the throbbing of his knee deadened by another double dose of painkillers. Unfinished pasta congealed on the plate beside him on the sofa, the sky beyond his small window achieved the dark blue velvet depth of true night, and Strike did not move, though wide awake.
It felt like a very long time since he had seen the picture of Charlotte in her wedding dress. He had not given her another thought all day. Was this the start of true healing? She had married Jago Ross and he was alone, mulling the complexities of an elaborate murder in the dim light of his chilly attic flat. Perhaps each of them was, at last, where they really belonged.
On the table in front of him in the clear plastic evidence bag, still half wrapped in the photocopied cover of Upon the Wicked Rocks, sat the dark grey typewriter cassette that he had taken from Orlando. He had been staring at it for what seemed like half an hour at least, feeling like a child on Christmas morning confronted by a mysterious, inviting package, the largest under the tree. And yet he ought not to look, or touch, lest he interfere with whatever forensic evidence might be gleaned from the tape. Any suspicion of tampering…
He checked his watch. He had promised himself not to make the call until half past nine. There were children to be wrestled into bed, a wife to placate after another long day on the job. Strike wanted time to explain fully…
But his patience had limits. Getting up with some difficulty, he took the keys to his office and moved laboriously downstairs, clutching the handrail, hopping and occasionally sitting down. Ten minutes later he re-entered his flat and returned to the still-warm spot on the sofa carrying his penknife and wearing another pair of the latex gloves he had earlier given to Robin.
He lifted the typewriter tape and the crumpled cover illustration gingerly out of the evidence bag and set the cassette, still resting on the paper, on the rickety Formica-topped table. Barely breathing, he pulled out the toothpick attachment from his knife and inserted it delicately behind the two inches of fragile tape that were exposed. By dint of careful manipulation he managed to pull o
ut a little more. Reversed words were revealed, the letters back to front.
YOB EIDDE WENK I THGUOHT DAH I DN
His sudden rush of adrenalin was expressed only in Strike’s quiet sigh of satisfaction. He deftly tightened the tape again, using the knife’s screwdriver attachment in the cog at the top of the cassette, the whole untouched by his hands, then, still wearing the latex gloves, slipped it back into the evidence bag. He checked his watch again. Unable to wait any longer, he picked up his mobile and called Dave Polworth.
‘Bad time?’ he asked when his old friend answered.
‘No,’ said Polworth, sounding curious. ‘What’s up, Diddy?’
‘Need a favour, Chum. A big one.’
The engineer, over a hundred miles away in his sitting room in Bristol, listened without interrupting while the detective explained what it was he wanted done. When finally he had finished, there was a pause.
‘I know it’s a big ask,’ Strike said, listening anxiously to the line crackling. ‘Dunno if it’ll even be possible in this weather.’
‘Course it will,’ said Polworth. ‘I’d have to see when I could do it, though, Diddy. Got two days off coming up… not sure Penny’s going to be keen…’
‘Yeah, I thought that might be a problem,’ said Strike, ‘I know it’d be dangerous.’
‘Don’t insult me, I’ve done worse than this,’ said Polworth. ‘Nah, she wanted me to take her and her mother Christmas shopping… but fuck it, Diddy, did you say this is life or death?’
‘Close,’ said Strike, closing his eyes and grinning. ‘Life and liberty.’
‘And no Christmas shopping, boy, which suits old Chum. Consider it done, and I’ll give you a ring if I’ve got anything, all right?’
‘Stay safe, mate.’
‘Piss off.’
Strike dropped the mobile beside him on the sofa and rubbed his face in his hands, still grinning. He might just have told Polworth to do something even crazier and more pointless than grabbing a passing shark, but Polworth was a man who enjoyed danger, and the time had come for desperate measures.
The last thing Strike did before turning out the light was to re-read the notes of his conversation with Fancourt and to underline, so heavily that he sliced through the page, the word ‘Cutter’.
45
Didst thou not mark the jest of the silkworm?
John Webster, The White Devil
Both the family home and Talgarth Road continued to be combed for forensic evidence. Leonora remained in Holloway. It had become a waiting game.
Strike was used to standing for hours in the cold, watching darkened windows, following faceless strangers; to unanswered phones and doors, blank faces, clueless bystanders; to enforced, frustrating inaction. What was different and distracting on this occasion was the small whine of anxiety that formed a backdrop to everything he did.
You had to maintain a distance, but there were always people who got to you, injustices that bit. Leonora in prison, white-faced and weeping, her daughter confused, vulnerable and bereft of both parents. Robin had pinned up Orlando’s picture over her desk, so that a merry red-bellied bird gazed down upon the detective and his assistant as they busied themselves with other cases, reminding them that a curly-haired girl in Ladbroke Grove was still waiting for her mother to come home.
Robin, at least, had a meaningful job to do, although she felt that she was letting Strike down. She had returned to the office two days running with nothing to show for her efforts, her evidence bag empty. The detective had warned her to err on the side of caution, to bail at the least sign that she might have been noticed or remembered. He did not like to be explicit about how recognisable he thought her, even with her red-gold hair piled under a beanie hat. She was very good-looking.
‘I’m not sure I need to be quite so cautious,’ she said, having followed his instructions to the letter.
‘Let’s remember what we’re dealing with here, Robin,’ he snapped, anxiety continuing to whine in his gut. ‘Quine didn’t rip out his own guts.’
Some of his fears were strangely amorphous. Naturally he worried that the killer would yet escape, that there were great, gaping holes in the fragile cobweb of a case he was building, a case that just now was built largely out of his own reconstructive imaginings, that needed physical evidence to anchor it down lest the police and defence counsel blew it clean away. But he had other worries.
Much as he had disliked the Mystic Bob tag with which Anstis had saddled him, Strike had a sense of approaching danger now, almost as strongly as when he had known, without question, that the Viking was about to blow up around him. Intuition, they called it, but Strike knew it to be the reading of subtle signs, the subconscious joining of dots. A clear picture of the killer was emerging out of the mass of disconnected evidence, and the image was stark and terrifying: a case of obsession, of violent rage, of a calculating, brilliant but profoundly disturbed mind.
The longer he hung around, refusing to let go, the closer he circled, the more targeted his questioning, the greater the chance that the killer might wake up to the threat he posed. Strike had confidence in his own ability to detect and repel attack, but he could not contemplate with equanimity the solutions that might occur to a diseased mind that had shown itself fond of Byzantine cruelty.
The days of Polworth’s leave came and went without tangible results.
‘Don’t give up now, Diddy,’ he told Strike over the phone. Characteristically, the fruitlessness of his endeavours seemed to have stimulated rather than discouraged Polworth. ‘I’m going to pull a sickie Monday. I’ll have another bash.’
‘I can’t ask you to do that,’ muttered Strike, frustrated. ‘The drive—’
‘I’m offering, you ungrateful peg-legged bastard.’
‘Penny’ll kill you. What about her Christmas shopping?’
‘What about my chance to show up the Met?’ said Polworth, who disliked the capital and its inhabitants on long-held principle.
‘You’re a mate, Chum,’ said Strike.
When he had hung up, he saw Robin’s grin.
‘What’s funny?’
‘“Chum”,’ she said. It sounded so public school, so unlike Strike.
‘It’s not what you think,’ said Strike. He was halfway through the story of Dave Polworth and the shark when his mobile rang again: an unknown number. He picked up.
‘Is that Cameron – er – Strike?’
‘Speaking.’
‘It’s Jude Graham ’ere. Kath Kent’s neighbour. She’s back,’ said the female voice happily.
‘That’s good news,’ said Strike, with a thumbs-up to Robin.
‘Yeah, she got back this morning. Got a friend staying with ’er. I asked ’er where she’d been, but she wouldn’t say,’ said the neighbour.
Strike remembered that Jude Graham thought him a journalist.
‘Is the friend male or female?’
‘Female,’ she answered regretfully. ‘Tall skinny dark girl, she’s always hanging around Kath.’
‘That’s very helpful, Ms Graham,’ said Strike. ‘I’ll – er – put something through your door later for your trouble.’
‘Great,’ said the neighbour happily. ‘Cheers.’
She rang off.
‘Kath Kent’s back at home,’ Strike told Robin. ‘Sounds like she’s got Pippa Midgley staying with her.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin, trying not to smile. ‘I, er, suppose you’re regretting you put her in a headlock now?’
Strike grinned ruefully.
‘They’re not going to talk to me,’ he said.
‘No,’ Robin agreed. ‘I don’t think they will.’
‘Suits them fine, Leonora in the clink.’
‘If you told them your whole theory, they might cooperate,’ suggested Robin.
Strike stroked his chin, looking at Robin without seeing her.
‘I can’t,’ he said finally. ‘If it leaks out that I’m sniffing up that tree, I’ll be lucky not
to get a knife in the back one dark night.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Robin,’ said Strike, mildly exasperated, ‘Quine was tied up and disembowelled.’
He sat down on the arm of the sofa, which squeaked less than the cushions but groaned under his weight, and said:
‘Pippa Midgley liked you.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Robin at once.
‘Not alone,’ he said, ‘but maybe you could get me in? How about this evening?’
‘Of course!’ she said, elated.
Hadn’t she and Matthew established new rules? This was the first time she had tested him, but she went to the telephone with confidence. His reaction when she told him that she did not know when she would be home that night could not have been called enthusiastic, but he accepted the news without demur.
So, at seven o’clock that evening, having discussed at length the tactics that they were about to employ, Strike and Robin proceeded separately through the icy night, ten minutes apart with Robin in the lead, to Stafford Cripps House.
A gang of youths stood again in the concrete forecourt of the block and they did not permit Robin to pass with the wary respect they had accorded Strike two weeks previously. One of them danced backwards ahead of her as she approached the inner stairs, inviting her to party, telling her she was beautiful, laughing derisively at her silence, while his mates jeered behind her in the darkness, discussing her rear view. As they entered the concrete stairwell her taunter’s jeers echoed strangely. She thought he might be seventeen at most.
‘I need to go upstairs,’ she said firmly as he slouched across the stairwell for his mates’ amusement, but sweat had prickled on her scalp. He’s a kid, she told herself. And Strike’s right behind you. The thought gave her courage. ‘Get out of the way, please,’ she said.
He hesitated, dropped a sneering comment about her figure, and moved. She half expected him to grab her as she passed but he loped back to his mates, all of them calling filthy names after her as she climbed the stairs and emerged with relief, without being followed, on to the balcony leading to Kath Kent’s flat.
The Silkworm Page 44