The Silkworm (19 page)

‘From just above,’ said Anstis, ‘but as we don’t know whether he was hit standing, sitting or kneeling…’

‘I think we can be sure he was killed in that room,’ said Strike, following his own train of thought. ‘I can’t see anyone being strong enough to carry a body that heavy up those stairs.’

‘The consensus is that he died more or less on the spot where the body was found. That’s where the greatest concentration of the acid is.’

‘D’you know what kind of acid it was?’

‘Oh, didn’t I say? Hydrochloric.’

Strike struggled to remember something of his chemistry lessons. ‘Don’t they use that to galvanise steel?’

‘Among other things. It’s as caustic a substance as you can legally buy and it’s used in a load of industrial processes. Heavy-duty cleaning agent as well. One weird thing about it is, it occurs naturally in humans. In our gastric acid.’

Strike sipped his beer, considering.

‘In the book, they pour vitriol on him.’

‘Vitriol’s sulphuric acid, and hydrochloric acid derives from it. Seriously corrosive to human tissue – as you saw.’

‘Where the hell did the killer get that amount of the stuff?’

‘Believe it or not, it looks like it was already in the house.’

‘Why the hell—?’

‘Still haven’t found anyone who can tell us. There were empty gallon containers on the kitchen floor, and dusty containers of the same description in a cupboard under the stairs, full of the stuff and unopened. They came from an industrial chemicals company in Birmingham. There were marks on the empty ones that looked as though they’d been made by gloved hands.’

‘Very interesting,’ said Strike, scratching his chin.

‘We’re still trying to check when and how they were bought.’

‘What about the blunt object that bashed his head in?’

‘There’s an old-fashioned doorstop in the studio – solid iron and shaped like one, with a handle: almost certainly that. It fits with the impression in his skull. That’s had hydrochloric acid poured all over it like nearly everything else.’

‘How’s time of death looking?’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the tricky bit. The entomologist won’t commit himself, says the condition of the corpse throws out all the usual calculations. The fumes from the hydrochloric acid alone would’ve kept insects away for a while, so you can’t date the death from infestation. No self-respecting blowfly wants to lay eggs in acid. We had a maggot or two on bits of the body that weren’t doused in the stuff, but the usual infestation didn’t occur.

‘Meanwhile, the heating in the house had been cranked right up, so the body might’ve rotted a bit faster than it would ordinarily have done in this weather. But the hydrochloric acid would’ve tended to mess with normal decomposition. Parts of him are burned to the bone.

‘The deciding factor would have been the guts, last meal and so on, but they’d been lifted clean out of the body. Looks like they left with the killer,’ said Anstis. ‘I’ve never heard of that being done before, have you? Pounds of raw intestine taken away.’

‘No,’ said Strike, ‘it’s a new one on me.’

‘Bottom line: forensics are refusing to commit themselves to a time frame except to say he’s been dead at least ten days. But I had a private word with Underhill, who’s the best of them, and he told me off the record that he thinks Quine’s been dead a good two weeks. He reckons, though, even when they’ve got everything in the evidence’ll still be equivocal enough to give defending counsel a lot to play with.’

‘What about pharmacology?’ asked Strike, his thoughts circling back to Quine’s bulk, the difficulty of handling a body that big.

‘Well, he might’ve been drugged,’ agreed Anstis. ‘We haven’t had blood results back yet and we’re analysing the contents of the bottles in the kitchen as well. But’ – he finished his beer and set down the glass with a flourish – ‘there’s another way he could’ve made things easy for a killer. Quine liked being tied up – sex games.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘The girlfriend,’ said Anstis. ‘Kathryn Kent.’

‘You’ve already talked to her, have you?’

‘Yep,’ said Anstis. ‘We found a taxi driver who picked up Quine at nine o’clock on the fifth, a couple of streets away from his house, and dropped him in Lillie Road.’

‘Right by Stafford Cripps House,’ said Strike. ‘So he went straight from Leonora to the girlfriend?’

‘Well, no, he didn’t. Kent was away, staying with her dying sister, and we’ve got corroboration – she spent the night at the hospice. She says she hasn’t seen him for a month, but was surprisingly forthcoming on their sex life.’

‘Did you ask for details?’

‘I got the impression she thought we knew more than we did. They came pouring out without much prodding.’

‘Suggestive,’ said Strike. ‘She told me she’d never read
Bombyx Mori
—’

‘She told us that too.’

‘—but her character ties up and assaults the hero in the book. Maybe she wanted it on record that she ties people up for sex, not torture or murder. What about the copy of the manuscript Leonora says he took away with him? All the notes and the old typewriter ribbons? Did you find them?’

‘Nope,’ said Anstis. ‘Until we find out whether he stayed somewhere else before he went to Talgarth Road, we’re going to assume the killer took them. The place was empty except for a bit of food and drink in the kitchen and a camping mattress and sleeping bag in one of the bedrooms. It looks like Quine was dossing down there. Hydrochloric acid’s been poured around that room too, all over Quine’s bed.’

‘No fingerprints? Footprints? Unexplained hair, mud?’

‘Nothing. We’ve still got people working on the place, but the acid’s obliterated everything in its path. Our people are wearing masks just so the fumes don’t rip their throats out.’

‘Anyone apart from this taxi driver admitted to seeing Quine since he disappeared?’

‘Nobody’s seen him entering Talgarth Road but we’ve got a neighbour at number 183 who swears she saw Quine
leave
it at one in the morning. Early hours of the sixth. The neighbour was letting herself in after a bonfire-night party.’

‘It was dark and she was two doors down, so what she actually saw was…?’

‘Silhouette of a tall figure in a cloak, carrying a holdall.’

‘A holdall,’ repeated Strike.

‘Yep,’ said Anstis.

‘Did the cloaked figure get into a car?’

‘No, it walked out of sight, but obviously a car could have been parked round the corner.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘I’ve got an old geezer in Putney swearing he saw Quine on the eighth. Rang his local police station and described him accurately.’

‘What was Quine doing?’

‘Buying books in the Bridlington Bookshop, where the bloke works.’

‘How convincing a witness is he?’

‘Well, he’s old, but he claims he can remember what Quine bought and the physical description’s good. And we’ve got another woman who lives in the flats across the road from the crime scene who reckons she passed Michael Fancourt walking past the house, also on the morning of the eighth. You know, that author with the big head? Famous one?’

‘Yeah, I do,’ said Strike slowly.

‘Witness claims she looked back at him over her shoulder and stared, because she recognised him.’

‘He was just walking past?’

‘So she claims.’

‘Anybody checked that with Fancourt yet?’

‘He’s in Germany, but he’s said he’s happy to cooperate with us when he gets back. Agent bending over backwards to be helpful.’

‘Any other suspicious activity around Talgarth Road? Camera footage?’

‘The only camera’s at the wrong angle for the house, it watches traffic – but I’m saving the best till last. We’ve got a different neighbour – other side, four doors down – who swears he saw a fat woman in a burqa letting herself in on the afternoon of the fourth, carrying a plastic bag from a halal takeaway. He says he noticed because the house had been empty so long. He claims she was there for an hour, then left.’

‘He’s sure she was in Quine’s house?’

‘So he says.’

‘And she had a key?’

‘That’s his story.’

‘A burqa,’ repeated Strike. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘I wouldn’t swear his eyesight’s great; he’s got very thick lenses in his glasses. He told me he didn’t know of any Muslims living in the street, so it had caught his attention.’

‘So we’ve got two alleged sightings of Quine since he walked out on his wife: early hours of the sixth, and on the eighth, in Putney.’

‘Yeah,’ said Anstis, ‘but I wouldn’t pin too much hope on either of them, Bob.’

‘You think he died the night he left,’ said Strike, more statement than question, and Anstis nodded.

‘Underhill thinks so.’

‘No sign of the knife?’

‘Nothing. The only knife in the kitchen was a very blunt, everyday one. Definitely not up to the job.’

‘Who do we know had a key to the place?’

‘Your client,’ said Anstis, ‘obviously. Quine himself must’ve had one. Fancourt’s got two, he’s already told us that by phone. The Quines lent one to his agent when she was organising some repairs for them; she says she gave it back. A next-door neighbour’s got a key so he can let himself in if anything goes wrong with the place.’

‘Didn’t he go in once the stink got bad?

‘One side
did
put a note through the door complaining about the smell, but the key holder left for two months in New Zealand a fortnight ago. We’ve spoken to him by phone. Last time he was in the house was in about May, when he took delivery of a couple of packages while some workmen were in and put them in the hall. Mrs Quine’s vague about who else might have been lent a key over the years.

‘She’s an odd woman, Mrs Quine,’ Anstis went on smoothly, ‘isn’t she?’

‘Haven’t thought about it,’ lied Strike.

‘You know the neighbours heard her chasing him, the night he disappeared?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yeah. She ran out of the house after him, screaming. The neighbours all say’ – Anstis was watching Strike closely – ‘that she yelled “I know where you’re off to, Owen!”’

‘Well, she thought she did know,’ Strike said with a shrug. ‘She thought he was going to the writer’s retreat Christian Fisher told him about. Bigley Hall.’

‘She’s refusing to move out of the house.’

‘She’s got a mentally handicapped daughter who’s never slept anywhere else. Can you imagine Leonora overpowering Quine?’

‘No,’ said Anstis, ‘but we know it turned him on to be tied up, and I doubt they were married for thirty-odd years without her knowing that.’

‘You think they had a row, then she tracked him down and suggested a bit of bondage?’

Anstis gave the suggestion of a small, token laugh, then said:

‘It doesn’t look great for her, Bob. Angry wife with the key to the house, early access to the manuscript, plenty of motive if she knew about the mistress, especially if there was any question of Quine leaving her and the daughter for Kent. Only her word for it that “I know where you’re going” meant this writer’s retreat and not the house on Talgarth Road.’

‘Sounds convincing when you put it like that,’ Strike said.

‘But you don’t think so.’

‘She’s my client,’ said Strike. ‘I’m being paid to think of alternatives.’

‘Has she told you where she used to work?’ asked Anstis, with the air of a man about to play his trump card. ‘Back in Hay-on-Wye, before they were married?’

‘Go on,’ said Strike, not without a degree of apprehension.

‘In her uncle’s butcher’s shop,’ said Anstis.

Outside the study door Strike heard Timothy Cormoran Anstis thudding down the stairs again, screaming his head off at some fresh disappointment. For the first time in their unsatisfactory acquaintance, Strike felt a real empathy for the boy.

Strike’s dreams that night, fuelled by a day’s consumption of Doom Bar, by talk of blood, acid and blowflies, were strange and ugly.

Charlotte was getting married and he, Strike, was running to an eerie Gothic cathedral, running on two whole, functioning legs, because he knew that she had just given birth to his child and he needed to see it, to save it. There she was, in the vast, dark empty space, alone at the altar, struggling into a blood red gown, and somewhere out of sight, perhaps in a cold vestry, lay his baby, naked, helpless and abandoned.

‘Where is it?’ he asked.

‘You’re not seeing it. You didn’t want it. Anyway, there’s something wrong with it,’ she said.

He was afraid of what he would see if he went to find the baby. Her bridegroom was nowhere to be seen but she was ready for the wedding, in a thick scarlet veil.

‘Leave it, it’s horrible,’ she said coldly, pushing past him, walking alone away from the altar, back up the aisle towards the distant doorway. ‘You’d only touch it,’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘I don’t want you
touching
it. You’ll see it eventually. It’ll have to be announced,’ she added in a vanishing voice, as she became a sliver of scarlet dancing in the light of the open doors, ‘in the papers…’

He was suddenly awake in the morning gloom, his mouth dry and his knee throbbing ominously in spite of a night’s rest.

Winter had slid in the night like a glacier over London. A hard frost had iced the outside of his attic window and the temperature inside his rooms, with their ill-fitting windows and doors and the total lack of insulation under the roof, had plummeted.

Strike got up and reached for a sweater lying on the end of his bed. When he came to fix on his prosthesis, he found that his knee was exceptionally swollen after the journey to and from Greenwich. The shower water took longer than usual to heat up; he cranked up the thermostat, fearing burst pipes and frozen gutters, sub-zero living quarters and an expensive plumber. After drying himself off, he unearthed his old sports bandages from the box on the landing to strap up his knee.

He knew, now, as clearly as though he had spent the night puzzling it out, how Helly Anstis knew Charlotte’s wedding plans. He had been stupid not to think of it before. His subconscious had known.

Once clean, dressed and breakfasted he headed downstairs. Glancing out of the window behind his desk, he noted that the knifelike cold was keeping away the little cluster of journalists who had waited in vain for his return the previous day. Sleet pattered on the windows as he moved back to the outer office and Robin’s computer. Here, in the search engine, he typed:
charlotte
campbell
hon jago ross wedding
.

Pitiless and prompt came the results.

‘
Tatler
,’ said Strike aloud in the office.

He only knew of the magazine’s existence because its society pages were full of Charlotte’s friends. She had bought it, sometimes, to read ostentatiously in front of him, commenting on men she had once slept with, or whose stately homes she had partied in.

And now she was the Christmas cover girl.

Even strapped up, his knee complained at having to support him down the metal stairs and out into the sleet. There was an early morning queue at the counter of the newsagents. Calmly he scanned the shelves of magazines: soap stars on the cheap ones and film stars on the expensive; December issues almost sold out, even though they were still in November. Emma Watson in white on the cover of
Vogue
(‘The Super Star Issue’), Rihanna in pink on
Marie Claire
(‘The Glamour Issue’) and on the cover of
Tatler
…

Pale, perfect skin, black hair blown away from high cheekbones and wide hazel-green eyes, flecked like a russet apple. Two huge diamonds dangling from her ears and a third on the hand lying lightly against her face. A dull, blunt hammer blow to the heart, absorbed without the slightest external sign. He took the magazine, the last on the shelf, paid for it and returned to Denmark Street.

It was twenty to nine. He shut himself in his office, sat down at his desk and laid the magazine down in front of him.

The strapline ran across Charlotte’s swanlike neck.

It was the first time he had looked at her since she had clawed his face in this very office and run from him, straight into the arms of the Honourable Jago Ross. He supposed that they must airbrush all their pictures. Her skin could not be this flawless, the whites of her eyes this pure, but they had not exaggerated anything else, not the exquisite bone structure, nor (he was sure) the size of the diamond on her finger.

Slowly he turned to the contents page and then to the article within. A double-page picture of Charlotte, very thin in a glittering silver floor-length dress, standing in the middle of a long gallery lined with tapestries; beside her, leaning on a card table and looking like a dissolute arctic fox, was Jago Ross. More photographs over the page: Charlotte sitting on an ancient four-poster, laughing with her head thrown back, the white column of her neck rising from a sheer cream blouse; Charlotte and Jago in jeans and wellington boots, walking hand in hand over the parkland in front of their future home with two Jack Russells at their heels; Charlotte windswept on the castle keep, looking over a shoulder draped in the Viscount’s tartan.

Doubtless Helly Anstis had considered it four pounds ten well spent.

Were you?
thought Strike.
Were you both just out of relationships? Or were you fucking her at the same time I was, so that she didn’t know which of us had fathered the baby she was worried she might be carrying? Changing the dates to cover every eventuality, keeping her options open
…

Fun, was it?
Strike asked her stunning picture.
Fun, standing on that roof and threatening to jump?
Fun, calling me from that psychiatric hospital and begging me to get you out?

(‘If I have to spend one more evening with the Anstises’ bratty kids, Corm, I swear to God I’ll brain one of them.’ And, in Lucy’s suburban back garden, watching Strike’s nephews playing football, ‘Why are these children such
shits
?’ The expression on Lucy’s round face when she overheard it…)

His own name, leaping off the page.

…
a
surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son
…

…
Jonny Rokeby’s eldest
…

He closed the magazine with a sudden, reflexive movement and slid it into his bin.

Sixteen years, on and off. Sixteen years of the torture, the madness and occasional ecstasy. And then – after all those times she had left him, throwing herself into the arms of other men as other women cast themselves onto railway tracks – he had walked out. In doing so, he had crossed an unforgivable Rubicon, for it had always been understood that he should stand rock-like, to be left and returned to, never flinching, never giving up. But on that night when he had confronted her with the tangle of lies she had told about the baby in her belly and she had become hysterical and furious, the mountain had moved at last: out of the door, with an ashtray flung after it.

His black eye had barely healed when she had announced her engagement to Ross. Three weeks it had taken her, because she knew only one way to respond to pain: to wound the transgressor as deeply as possible, with no thought for the consequences to herself. And he knew in his bones, no matter how arrogant his friends might tell him he was being, that the
Tatler
pictures, the dismissal of their relationship in the terms that would hurt him most (he could hear her spelling it out for the society mag: ‘he’s
Jonny Rokeby’s
son’); the Castle of Fucking Croy… all of it,
all
of it, was done with a view to hurting him, wanting him to watch and to see, to regret and to pity. She had known what Ross was; she had told Strike about the poorly disguised alcoholism and violence, passed through the blue-blooded network of gossip that had kept her informed through the years. She had laughed about her lucky escape. Laughed.

Self-immolation in a ball gown.
Watch me burn, Bluey
. The wedding was in ten days’ time and if he had ever been sure of anything in his life, it was that if he called Charlotte right now and said ‘Run away with me,’ even after their filthy scenes, the hateful things she had called him, the lies and the mess and the several tons of baggage under which their relationship had finally splintered, she would say yes. Running away was her life’s blood and he had been her favourite destination, freedom and safety combined; she had said it to him over and over again after fights that would have killed them both if emotional wounds could bleed: ‘I need you. You’re my everything, you know that. You’re the only place I’ve ever felt safe, Bluey…’

He heard the glass door on to the landing open and close, the familiar sounds of Robin arriving at work, removing her coat, filling the kettle.

Work had always been his salvation. Charlotte had hated the way he could switch, from crazy, violent scenes, from her tears and her pleas and her threats, to immerse himself totally in a case. She had never managed to stop him putting on his uniform, never prevented his return to work, never succeeded in forcing him away from an investigation. She deplored his focus, his allegiance to the army, his ability to shut her out, seeing it as a betrayal, as abandonment.

Now, on this cold winter’s morning, sitting in his office with her picture in the bin beside him, Strike found himself craving orders, a case abroad, an enforced sojourn on another continent. He did not want to trail after unfaithful husbands and girlfriends, or insert himself into the petty disputes of shoddy businessmen. Only one subject had ever matched Charlotte for the fascination it exercised over him: unnatural death.

‘Morning,’ he said, limping into the outer office, where Robin was making two mugs of tea. ‘We’ll have to be quick with these. We’re going out.’

‘Where?’ asked Robin in surprise.

The sleet was sliding wetly down their windows. She could still feel how it had burned her face as she hurried over the slippery pavements, desperate to get inside.

‘Got stuff to do on the Quine case.’

It was a lie. The police had all the power; what could he do that they were not doing better? And yet he knew in his gut that Anstis lacked the nose for the strange and the warped that would be needed to find this killer.

‘You’ve got Caroline Ingles at ten.’

‘Shit. Well, I’ll put her off. Thing is, forensics reckon Quine died very soon after he disappeared.’

He took a mouthful of hot, strong tea. He seemed more purposeful, more energised than she had seen him for a while.

‘That puts the spotlight right back on the people who had early access to the manuscript. I want to find out where they all live, and whether they live alone. Then we’re going to recce their houses. Find out how hard it would’ve been to get in and out carrying a bag of guts. Whether they might have places they could bury or burn evidence.’

It was not much, but it was all he could do today, and he was desperate to do something.

‘You’re coming,’ he added. ‘You’re always good at this stuff.’

‘What, being your Watson?’ she said, apparently indifferent. The anger she had carried with her out of the Cambridge the previous day had not quite burned out. ‘We could find out about their houses online. Look at them on Google Earth.’

‘Yeah, good thinking,’ rejoined Strike. ‘Why case locations when you could just look at out-of-date photos?’