The Silkworm (11 page)

‘Thought everyone knew that story,’ said Waldegrave on another faint hiccup. ‘In a nutshell, Michael’s first wife Elspeth wrote a very bad novel. An anonymous parody of it appeared in a literary magazine. She cut the parody out, pinned it to the front of her dress and gassed herself,
à la
Sylvia Plath.’

The redhead gasped.

‘She
killed
herself?’

‘Yep,’ said Waldegrave, swigging wine again. ‘Writers: screwy.’

‘Who wrote the parody?’

‘Everyone’s always thought it was Owen. He denied it, but then I suppose he would, given what it led to,’ said Waldegrave. ‘Owen and Michael never spoke again after Elspeth died. But in
Bombyx Mori
, Owen finds an ingenious way of suggesting that the real author of the parody was Michael himself.’

‘
God,
’ said the redhead, awestruck.

‘Speaking of Fancourt,’ said Waldegrave, glancing at his watch, ‘I’m supposed to be telling you all that there’s going to be a grand announcement downstairs at nine. You girls won’t want to miss it.’

He ambled away. Two of the girls ground out their cigarettes and followed him. The blonde drifted off towards another group.

‘Lovely, Jerry, isn’t he?’ Nina asked Strike, shivering in the depths of her woollen coat.

‘Very magnanimous,’ said Strike. ‘Nobody else seems to think that Quine didn’t know exactly what he was doing. Want to get back in the warm?’

Exhaustion was lapping at the edges of Strike’s consciousness. He wanted passionately to go home, to begin the tiresome process of putting his leg to sleep (as he described it to himself), to close his eyes and attempt eight straight hours’ slumber until he had to rise and place himself again in the vicinity of another unfaithful husband.

The room downstairs was more densely packed than ever. Nina stopped several times to shout and bawl into the ears of acquaintances. Strike was introduced to a squat romantic novelist who appeared dazzled by the glamour of cheap champagne and the loud band, and to Jerry Waldegrave’s wife, who greeted Nina effusively and drunkenly through a lot of tangled black hair.

‘She always sucks up,’ said Nina coldly, disengaging herself and leading Strike closer to the makeshift stage. ‘She comes from money and makes it clear that she married down with Jerry. Horrible snob.’

‘Impressed by your father the QC, is she?’ asked Strike.

‘Scary memory you’ve got,’ said Nina, with an admiring look. ‘No, I think it’s… well, I’m the Honourable Nina Lascelles really. I mean, who gives a shit? But people like Fenella do.’

An underling was now angling a microphone at a wooden lectern on a stage near the bar. Roper Chard’s logo, a rope knot between the two names, and ‘100th Anniversary’ were emblazoned on a banner.

There followed a tedious ten-minute wait during which Strike responded politely and appropriately to Nina’s chatter, which required a great effort, as she was so much shorter, and the room was increasingly noisy.

‘Is Larry Pinkelman here?’ he asked, remembering the old children’s writer on Elizabeth Tassel’s wall.

‘Oh no, he hates parties,’ said Nina cheerfully.

‘I thought you were throwing him one?’

‘How did you know that?’ she asked, startled.

‘You just told me so, in the pub.’

‘Wow, you really pay attention, don’t you? Yeah, we’re doing a dinner for the reprint of his Christmas stories, but it’ll be very small. He hates crowds, Larry, he’s really shy.’

Daniel Chard had at last reached the stage. The talk faded to a murmur and then died. Strike detected tension in the air as Chard shuffled his notes and then cleared his throat.

He must have had a great deal of practice, Strike thought, and yet his public speaking was barely competent. Chard looked up mechanically to the same spot over the crowd’s head at regular intervals; he made eye contact with nobody; he was, at times, barely audible. After taking his listeners on a brief journey through the illustrious history of Roper Publishing, he made a modest detour into the antecedents of Chard Books, his grandfather’s company, described their amalgamation and his own humble delight and pride, expressed in the same flat monotone as the rest, in finding himself, ten years on, as head of the global company. His small jokes were greeted with exuberant laughter fuelled, Strike thought, by discomfort as much as alcohol. Strike found himself staring at the sore, boiled-looking hands. He had once known a young private in the army whose eczema had become so bad under stress that he had had to be hospitalised.

‘There can be no doubt,’ said Chard, turning to what Strike, one of the tallest men in the room and close to the stage, could see was the last page of his speech, ‘that publishing is currently undergoing a period of rapid changes and fresh challenges, but one thing remains as true today as it was a century ago: content is king. While we boast the best writers in the world, Roper Chard will continue to excite, to challenge and to entertain. And it is in that context’ – the approach of a climax was declared not by any excitement, but by a relaxation in Chard’s manner induced by the fact that his ordeal was nearly over – ‘that I am honoured and delighted to tell you that we have this week secured the talents of one of the finest authors in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Michael Fancourt!’

A perceptible intake of breath rolled like a breeze across the crowd. A woman yelped excitedly. Applause broke out somewhere to the rear of the room and spread like crackling fire to the front. Strike saw a distant door open, the glimpse of an over-large head, a sour expression, before Fancourt was swallowed by the enthusiastic employees. It was several minutes before he emerged onto the stage to shake Chard’s hand.

‘Oh my God,’ an excitedly applauding Nina kept saying. ‘Oh my
God
.’

Jerry Waldegrave, who like Strike rose head and shoulders above the mostly female crowd, was standing almost directly opposite them on the other side of the stage. He was again holding a full glass, so could not applaud, and he raised it to his lips, unsmiling, as he watched Fancourt gesture for quiet in front of the microphone.

‘Thanks, Dan,’ said Fancourt. ‘Well, I certainly never expected to find myself here,’ he said, and these words were greeted by a raucous outbreak of laughter, ‘but it feels like a homecoming. I wrote for Chard and then I wrote for Roper and they were good days. I was an angry young man’ – widespread titters – ‘and now I’m an angry old man’ – much laughter and even a small smile from Daniel Chard – ‘and I look forward to raging for you’ – effusive laughter from Chard as well as the crowd; Strike and Waldegrave seemed to be the only two in the room not convulsed. ‘I’m delighted to be back and I’ll do my best to – what was it, Dan? – keep Roper Chard exciting, challenging and entertaining.’

A storm of applause; the two men were shaking hands amid camera flashes.

‘Half a mill’, I reckon,’ said a drunken man behind Strike, ‘and ten k to turn up tonight.’

Fancourt descended the stage right in front of Strike. His habitually dour expression had barely varied for the photographs, but he looked happier as hands stretched out towards him. Michael Fancourt did not disdain adulation.

‘
Wow,
’ said Nina to Strike. ‘Can you
believe
that?’

Fancourt’s over-large head had disappeared into the crowd. The curvaceous Joanna Waldegrave appeared, trying to make her way towards the famous author. Her father was suddenly behind her; with a drunken lurch he reached out a hand and took her upper arm none too gently.

‘He’s got other people to talk to, Jo, leave him.’

‘Mummy’s made a beeline, why don’t you grab
her
?’

Strike watched Joanna stalk away from her father, evidently angry. Daniel Chard had vanished too; Strike wondered whether he had slipped out of a door while the crowd was busy with Fancourt.

‘Your CEO doesn’t love the limelight,’ Strike commented to Nina.

‘They say he’s got a lot better,’ said Nina, who was still gazing towards Fancourt. ‘He could barely look up from his notes ten years ago. He’s a good businessman, though, you know. Shrewd.’

Curiosity and tiredness tussled inside Strike.

‘Nina,’ he said, drawing his companion away from the throng pressing around Fancourt; she permitted him to lead her willingly, ‘where did you say the manuscript of
Bombyx Mori
is?’

‘In Jerry’s safe,’ she said. ‘Floor below this.’ She sipped champagne, her huge eyes shining. ‘Are you asking what I think you’re asking?’

‘How much trouble would you be in?’

‘Loads,’ she said insouciantly. ‘But I’ve got my keycard on me and everyone’s busy, aren’t they?’

Her father, Strike thought ruthlessly, was a QC. They would be wary of how they dismissed her.

‘D’you reckon we could run off a copy?’

‘Let’s do it,’ she said, throwing back the last of her drink.

The lift was empty and the floor below dark and deserted. Nina opened the door to the department with her keycard and led him confidently between blank computer monitors and deserted desks towards a large corner office. The only light came from perennially lit London beyond the windows and the occasional tiny orange light indicating a computer on standby.

Waldegrave’s office was not locked but the safe, which stood behind a hinged bookcase, operated on a keypad. Nina input a four-number code. The door swung open and Strike saw an untidy stack of pages lying inside.

‘That’s it,’ she said happily.

‘Keep your voice down,’ Strike advised her.

Strike kept watch while she ran off a copy for him at the photocopier outside the door. The endless swish and hum was strangely soothing. Nobody came, nobody saw; fifteen minutes later, Nina was replacing the manuscript in the safe and locking it up.

‘There you go.’

She handed him the copy, with several strong elastic bands holding it together. As he took it she leaned in for a few seconds; a tipsy sway, an extended brush against him. He owed her something in return, but he was shatteringly tired; both the idea of going back to that flat in St John’s Wood and of taking her to his attic in Denmark Street were unappealing. Would a drink, tomorrow night perhaps, be adequate repayment? And then he remembered that tomorrow night was his birthday dinner at his sister’s. Lucy had said he could bring someone.

‘Want to come to a tedious dinner party tomorrow night?’ he asked her.

She laughed, clearly elated.

‘What’ll be tedious about it?’

‘Everything. You’d cheer it up. Fancy it?’

‘Well – why not?’ she said happily.

The invitation seemed to meet the bill; he felt the demand for some physical gesture recede. They made their way out of the dark department in an atmosphere of friendly camaraderie, the copied manuscript of
Bombyx Mori
hidden beneath Strike’s overcoat. After noting down her address and phone number, he saw her safely into a taxi with a sense of relief and release.

They marched against the war in which Strike had lost his leg the next day, thousands snaking their way through the heart of chilly London bearing placards, military families to the fore. Strike had heard through mutual army friends that the parents of Gary Topley – dead in the explosion that had cost Strike a limb – would be among the demonstrators, but it did not occur to Strike to join them. His feelings about the war could not be encapsulated in black on a square white placard. Do the job and do it well had been his creed then and now, and to march would be to imply regrets he did not have. And so he strapped on his prosthesis, dressed in his best Italian suit and headed off to Bond Street.

The treacherous husband he sought was insisting that his estranged wife, Strike’s brunette client, had lost, through her own drunken carelessness, several pieces of very valuable jewellery while the couple were staying at a hotel. Strike happened to know that the husband had an appointment in Bond Street this morning, and had a hunch that some of that allegedly lost jewellery might be making a surprise reappearance.

His target entered the jewellers while Strike examined the windows of a shop opposite. Once he had left, half an hour later, Strike took himself off for a coffee, allowed two hours to elapse, then strode inside the jewellers and proclaimed his wife’s love of emeralds, which pretence resulted, after half an hour’s staged deliberation over various pieces, in the production of the very necklace that the brunette had suspected her errant husband of having pocketed. Strike bought it at once, a transaction only made possible by the fact that his client had advanced him ten thousand pounds for the purpose. Ten thousand pounds to prove her husband’s deceit was as nothing to a woman who stood to receive a settlement of millions.

Strike picked up a kebab on his way home. After locking the necklace in a small safe he had installed in his office (usually used for the protection of incriminating photographs) he headed upstairs, made himself a mug of strong tea, took off the suit and put on the TV so that he could keep an eye on the build-up to the Arsenal–Spurs match. He then stretched out comfortably on his bed and started to read the manuscript he had stolen the night before.

As Elizabeth Tassel had told him,
Bombyx Mori
was a perverse
Pilgrim’s Progress
, set in a folkloric no-man’s-land in which the eponymous hero (a young writer of genius) set out from an island populated by inbred idiots too blind to recognise his talent on what seemed to be a largely symbolic journey towards a distant city. The richness and strangeness of the language and imagery were familiar to Strike from his perusal of
The Balzac Brothers
, but his interest in the subject matter drew him on.

The first familiar character to emerge from the densely written and frequently obscene sentences was Leonora Quine. As the brilliant young Bombyx journeyed through a landscape populated by various dangers and monsters he came across Succuba, a woman described succinctly as a ‘well-worn whore’, who captured and tied him up and succeeded in raping him. Leonora was described to the life: thin and dowdy, with her large glasses and her flat, deadpan manner. After being systematically abused for several days, Bombyx persuaded Succuba to release him. She was so desolate at his departure that Bombyx agreed to take her along: the first example of the story’s frequent strange, dream-like reversals, whereby what had been bad and frightening became good and sensible without justification or apology.

A few pages further on, Bombyx and Succuba were attacked by a creature called the Tick, which Strike recognised easily as Elizabeth Tassel: square-jawed, deep-voiced and frightening. Once again Bombyx took pity on the thing once it had finished violating him, and permitted it to join him. The Tick had an unpleasant habit of suckling from Bombyx while he slept. He started to become thin and weak.

Bombyx’s gender appeared strangely mutable. Quite apart from his apparent ability to breast-feed, he was soon showing signs of pregnancy, despite continuing to pleasure a number of apparently nymphomaniac women who strayed regularly across his path.

Wading through ornate obscenity, Strike wondered how many portraits of real people he was failing to notice. The violence of Bombyx’s encounters with other humans was disturbing; their perversity and cruelty left barely an orifice unviolated; it was a sadomasochistic frenzy. Yet Bombyx’s essential innocence and purity were a constant theme, the simple statement of his genius apparently all the reader needed to absolve him of the crimes in which he colluded as freely as the supposed monsters around him. As he turned the pages, Strike remembered Jerry Waldegrave’s opinion that Quine was mentally ill; he was starting to have some sympathy with his view…

The match was about to start. Strike set the manuscript down, feeling as though he had been trapped for a long time inside a dark, grubby basement, away from natural light and air. Now he felt only pleasurable anticipation. He was confident Arsenal were about to win – Spurs had not managed to beat them at home in seventeen years.

And for forty-five minutes Strike lost himself in pleasure and frequent bellows of encouragement while his team went two-nil up.

At half time, and with a feeling of reluctance, he muted the sound and returned to the bizarre world of Owen Quine’s imagination.

He recognised nobody until Bombyx drew close to the city that was his destination. Here, on a bridge over the moat that surrounded the city walls, stood a large, shambling and myopic figure: the Cutter.

The Cutter sported a low cap instead of horn-rimmed glasses, and carried a wriggling, bloodstained sack over his shoulder. Bombyx accepted the Cutter’s offer to lead him, Succuba and the Tick to a secret door into the city. Inured by now to sexual violence, Strike was unsurprised that the Cutter turned out to be intent on Bombyx’s castration. In the ensuing fight, the bag rolled off the Cutter’s back and a dwarfish female creature burst out of it. The Cutter let Bombyx, Succuba and the Tick escape while he pursued the dwarf; Bombyx and his companions managed to find a chink in the city’s walls and looked back to see the Cutter drowning the little creature in the moat.

Strike had been so engrossed in his reading that he had not realised the match had restarted. He glanced up at the muted TV.

‘
Fuck!
’

Two-all: unbelievably Spurs had drawn level. Strike threw the manuscript aside, appalled. Arsenal’s defence was crumbling before his eyes. This should have been a win. They had been set to go top of the league.

‘
FUCK!
’ Strike bellowed ten minutes later as a header soared past Fabia
ń
ski.

Spurs had won.

He turned off the TV with several more expletives and checked his watch. There was only half an hour in which to shower and change before picking up Nina Lascelles in St John’s Wood; the round trip to Bromley was going to cost him a fortune. He contemplated the prospect of the final quarter of Quine’s manuscript with distaste, feeling much sympathy for Elizabeth Tassel, who had skimmed the final passages.

He was not even sure why he was reading it, other than curiosity.

Downcast and irritable, he moved off towards the shower, wishing that he could have spent the night at home and feeling, irrationally, that if he had not allowed his attention to be distracted by the obscene, nightmarish world of
Bombyx Mori
, Arsenal might have won.