The Silkworm (25 page)

‘So you think he’d already planned to storm out of the restaurant when he met Elizabeth Tassel?’

‘Could be,’ said Strike.

‘And to go to Talgarth Road?’

‘Maybe.’

The sun had risen fully now, so that the frosted treetops sparkled.

‘And he got what he wanted, didn’t he?’ said Strike, squinting as a thousand specks of ice glittered over the windscreen. ‘Couldn’t have arranged better publicity for his book if he’d tried. Just a pity he didn’t live to see himself on the BBC news.

‘Oh, bollocks,’ he added under his breath.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve finished all the biscuits… sorry,’ said Strike, contrite.

‘That’s all right,’ Robin said, amused. ‘I had breakfast.’

‘I didn’t,’ Strike confided.

His antipathy to discussing his leg had been dissolved by warm coffee, by their discussion and by her practical thoughts for his comfort.

‘Couldn’t get the bloody prosthesis on. My knee’s swollen to hell: I’m going to have to see someone. Took me ages to get sorted.’

She had guessed as much, but appreciated the confidence.

They passed a golf course, its flags protruding from acres of soft whiteness, and water-filled gravel pits now sheets of burnished pewter in the winter light. As they approached Swindon Strike’s phone rang. Checking the number (he half expected a repeat call from Nina Lascelles) he saw that it was Ilsa, his old schoolfriend. He also saw, with misgivings, that he had missed a call from Leonora Quine at six thirty, when he must have been struggling down Charing Cross Road on his crutches.

‘Ilsa, hi. What’s going on?’

‘Quite a lot, actually,’ she said. She sounded tinny and distant; he could tell that she was in her car.

‘Did Leonora Quine call you on Wednesday?’

‘Yep, we met that afternoon,’ she said. ‘And I’ve just spoken to her again. She told me she tried to speak to you this morning and couldn’t get you.’

‘Yeah, I had an early start, must’ve missed her.’

‘I’ve got her permission to tell—’

‘What’s happened?’

‘They’ve taken her in for questioning. I’m on my way to the station now.’

‘Shit,’ said Strike. ‘
Shit.
What have they got?’

‘She told me they found photographs in her and Quine’s bedroom. Apparently he liked being tied up and he liked being photographed once restrained,’ said Ilsa with mordant matter-of-factness. ‘She told me all this as though she was talking about the gardening.’

He could hear faint sounds of heavy traffic back in central London. Here on the motorway the loudest sounds were the swish of the windscreen wipers, the steady purr of the powerful engine and the occasional whoosh of the reckless, overtaking in the swirling snow.

‘You’d think she’d have the sense to get rid of the pictures,’ said Strike.

‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that suggestion about destroying evidence,’ said Ilsa mock-sternly.

‘Those pictures aren’t bloody evidence,’ said Strike. ‘Christ almighty,
of
course
they had a kinky sex life, those two – how else was Leonora going to keep hold of a man like Quine? Anstis’s mind’s too clean, that’s the problem; he thinks everything except the missionary position is evidence of bloody criminal tendencies.’

‘What do you know about the investigating officer’s sexual habits?’ Ilsa asked, amused.

‘He’s the bloke I pulled to the back of the vehicle in Afghanistan,’ muttered Strike.

‘
Oh,
’ said Ilsa.

‘And he’s determined to fit up Leonora. If that’s all they’ve got, dirty photos—’

‘It isn’t. Did you know the Quines have got a lock-up?’

Strike listened, tense, suddenly worried. Could he have been wrong, completely wrong—?

‘Well, did you?’ asked Ilsa.

‘What’ve they found?’ asked Strike, no longer flippant. ‘Not the guts?’

‘
What
did you just say? It sounded like “not the guts”!’

‘What’ve they found?’ Strike corrected himself.

‘I don’t know, but I expect I’ll find out when I get there.’

‘She’s not under arrest?’

‘Just in for questioning, but they’re sure it’s her, I can tell, and I don’t think she realises how serious things are getting. When she rang me, all she could talk about was her daughter being left with the neighbour, her daughter being upset—’

‘The daughter’s twenty-four and she’s got learning difficulties.’

‘Oh,’ said Ilsa. ‘Sad… Listen, I’m nearly there, I’ll have to go.’

‘Keep me posted.’

‘Don’t expect anything soon. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be a while.’

‘
Shit,
’ Strike said again as he hung up.

‘What’s happened?’

An enormous tanker had pulled out of the slow lane to overtake a Honda Civic with a Baby On Board sign in its rear window. Strike watched its gargantuan silver bullet of a body swaying at speed on the icy road and noted with unspoken approval that Robin slowed down, leaving more braking room.

‘The police have taken Leonora in for questioning.’

Robin gasped.

‘They’ve found photos of Quine tied up in their bedroom and something else in a lock-up, but Ilsa doesn’t know what—’

It had happened to Strike before. The instantaneous shift from calm to calamity. The slowing of time. Every sense suddenly wire-taut and screaming.

The tanker was jack-knifing.

He heard himself bellow ‘BRAKE!’ because that was what he had done last time to try to stave off death—

But Robin slammed her foot on the accelerator. The car roared forward. There was no room to pass. The lorry hit the icy road on its side and spun; the Civic hit it, flipped over and skidded on its roof towards the side of the road; a Golf and a Mercedes had slammed into each other and were locked together, speeding towards the truck of the tanker—

They were hurtling towards the ditch at the side of the road. Robin missed the overturned Civic by an inch. Strike grabbed hold of the door handle as the Land Cruiser hit the rough ground at speed – they were going to plough into the ditch and maybe overturn – the tail end of the tanker was swinging lethally towards them, but they were travelling so fast that she missed that by a whisker – a massive jolt, Strike’s head hit the roof of the car, and they had swerved back onto the icy tarmac on the other side of the pile-up, unscathed.

‘Holy fucking—’

She was braking at last, in total control, pulling up on the hard shoulder, and her face was as white as the snow spattering the windscreen.

‘There was a kid in that Civic.’

And before he could say another word she had gone, slamming the door behind her.

He leaned over the back of his seat, trying to grab his crutches. Never had he felt his disability more acutely. He had just managed to pull the crutches into the seat with him when he heard sirens. Squinting through the snowy rear window, he spotted the distant flicker of blue light. The police were there already. He was a one-legged liability. He threw the crutches back down, swearing.

Robin returned to the car ten minutes later.

‘It’s OK,’ she panted. ‘The little boy’s all right, he was in a car seat. The lorry driver’s covered in blood but he’s conscious—’

‘Are you OK?’

She was trembling a little, but smiled at the question.

‘Yeah, I’m fine. I was just scared I was going to see a dead child.’

‘Right then,’ said Strike, taking a deep breath. ‘Where the
fuck
did you learn to drive like that?’

‘Oh, I did a couple of advanced driving courses,’ said Robin with a shrug, pushing her wet hair out of her eyes.

Strike stared at her.

‘When was this?’

‘Not long after I dropped out of university. I was… I was going through a bad time and I wasn’t going out much. It was my dad’s idea. I’ve always loved cars.

‘It was just something to do,’ she said, putting on her seatbelt and turning on the ignition. ‘Sometimes when I’m home, I go up to the farm to practise. My uncle’s got a field he lets me drive in.’

Strike was still staring at her.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to wait a bit before we—?’

‘No, I’ve given them my name and address. We should get going.’

She shifted gear and pulled smoothly out onto the motorway. Strike could not look away from her calm profile; her eyes were again fixed on the road, her hands confident and relaxed on the wheel.

‘I’ve seen worse steering than that from defensive drivers in the army,’ he told her. ‘The ones who drive generals, who’re trained to make a getaway under fire.’ He glanced back at the tangle of overturned vehicles now blocking the road. ‘I still don’t know how you got us out of that.’

The near-crash had not brought Robin close to tears, but at these words of praise and appreciation she suddenly thought she might cry, let herself down. With a great effort of will she compressed her emotion into a little laugh and said:

‘You realise that if I’d braked, we’d have skidded right into the tanker?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, and he laughed too. ‘Dunno why I said that,’ he lied.

In spite of their near-crash, Strike and Robin entered the Devonshire town of Tiverton shortly after twelve. Robin followed the sat nav’s instructions past quiet country houses topped with thick layers of glittering white, over a neat little bridge spanning a river the colour of flint and past a sixteenth-century church of unexpected grandeur to the far side of the town, where a pair of electric gates were discreetly set back from the road.

A handsome young Filipino man wearing what appeared to be deck shoes and an over-large coat was attempting to prise these open manually. When he caught sight of the Land Cruiser he mimed to Robin to wind down her window.

‘Frozen,’ he told her succinctly. ‘Wait a moment, please.’

They sat for five minutes until at last he had succeeded in unfreezing the gates and had dug a clearing in the steadily falling snow to allow the gates to swing open.

‘Do you want a lift back to the house?’ Robin asked him.

He climbed into the back seat beside Strike’s crutches.

‘You friends of Mr Chard?’

‘He’s expecting us,’ said Strike evasively.

Up a long and winding private driveway they went, the Land Cruiser making easy work of the heaped, crunchy overnight fall. The shiny dark green leaves of the rhododendrons lining the path had refused to bear their load of snow, so that the approach was all black and white: walls of dense foliage crowding in on the pale, powdery drive. Tiny spots of light had started popping in front of Robin’s eyes. It had been a very long time since breakfast and, of course, Strike had eaten all the biscuits.

Her feeling of seasickness and a slight sense of unreality persisted as she got down out of the Toyota and looked up at Tithebarn House, which stood beside a dark patch of wood that pressed close to one side of the house. The massive oblong structure in front of them had been converted by an adventurous architect: half of the roof had been replaced by sheet glass; the other seemed to be covered in solar panels. Looking up at the place where the structure became transparent and skeletal against the bright, light grey sky made Robin feel even giddier. It reminded her of the ghastly picture on Strike’s phone, the vaulted space of glass and light in which Quine’s mutilated body had lain.

‘Are you all right?’ said Strike, concerned. She looked very pale.

‘Fine,’ said Robin, who wanted to maintain her heroic status in his eyes. Taking deep lungfuls of the frosty air, she followed Strike, surprisingly nimble on his crutches, up the gravel path towards the entrance. Their young passenger had disappeared without another word to them.

Daniel Chard opened the front door himself. He was wearing a mandarin-collared, smock-like shirt in chartreuse silk and loose linen trousers. Like Strike, he was on crutches, his left foot and calf encased in a thick surgical boot and strapping. Chard looked down at Strike’s dangling, empty trouser leg and for several painful seconds did not seem able to look away.

‘And you thought you had problems,’ said Strike, holding out his hand.

The small joke fell flat. Chard did not smile. The aura of awkwardness, of otherness, that had surrounded him at his firm’s party clung to him still. He shook Strike’s hand without looking him in the eye and his welcoming words were:

‘I’ve been expecting you to cancel all morning.’

‘No, we made it,’ said Strike unnecessarily. ‘This is my assistant, Robin, who’s driven me down. I hope—’

‘No, she can’t sit outside in the snow,’ said Chard, though without noticeable warmth. ‘Come in.’

He backed away on his crutches to let them move over the threshold onto highly polished floorboards the colour of honey.

‘Would you mind removing your shoes?’

A stocky, middle-aged Filipina woman with her black hair in a bun emerged from a pair of swing doors set into the brick wall on their right. She was clothed entirely in black and holding two white linen bags into which Strike and Robin were evidently expected to put their footwear. Robin handed hers over; it made her feel strangely vulnerable to feel the boards beneath her soles. Strike merely stood there on his single foot.

‘Oh,’ said Chard, staring again. ‘No, I suppose… Mr Strike had better keep his shoe on, Nenita.’

The woman retired wordlessly into the kitchen.

Somehow, the interior of Tithebarn House increased Robin’s unpleasant sensation of vertigo. No walls divided its vast interior. The first floor, which was reached by a steel and glass spiral staircase, was suspended on thick metal cables from the high ceiling. Chard’s huge double bed, which seemed to be of black leather, was visible, high above them, with what looked like a huge crucifix of barbed wire hanging over it on the brick wall. Robin dropped her gaze hastily, feeling sicker than ever.

Most of the furniture on the lower level comprised cubes of white or black leather. Vertical steel radiators were interspersed with artfully simple bookshelves of more wood and metal. The dominant feature of the under-furnished room was a life-size white marble sculpture of an angel, perched on a rock and partially dissected to expose half of her skull, a portion of her guts and a slice of the bone in her leg. Her breast, Robin saw, unable to tear her eyes away, was revealed as a mound of fat globules sitting on a circle of muscle that resembled the gills of a mushroom.

Ludicrous to feel sick when the dissected body was made of cold, pure stone, mere insentient albescence, nothing like the rotting carcass preserved on Strike’s mobile…
don’t think about that
…
she ought to have made Strike leave at least one biscuit… sweat had broken out on her upper lip, her scalp…

‘You all right, Robin?’ asked Strike sharply. She knew she must have changed colour from the look on the two men’s faces, and to her fear that she might pass out was added embarrassment that she was being a liability to Strike.

‘Sorry,’ she said through numb lips. ‘Long journey… if I could have a glass of water…’

‘Er – very well,’ said Chard, as though water were in short supply. ‘Nenita?’

The woman in black reappeared.

‘The young lady needs a glass of water,’ said Chard.

Nenita gestured to Robin to follow her. Robin heard the publisher’s crutches making a gentle
thump
,
thump
behind her on the wooden floor as she entered the kitchen. She had a brief impression of steel surfaces and whitewashed walls, and the young man to whom she had given a lift prodding at a large saucepan, then found herself sitting on a low stool.

Robin had assumed that Chard had followed to see that she was all right, but as Nenita pressed a cold glass into her hand she heard him speak somewhere above her.

‘Thanks for fixing the gates, Manny.’

The young man did not reply. Robin heard the clunk of Chard’s crutches recede and the swinging of the kitchen doors.

‘That’s my fault,’ Strike told Chard, when the publisher rejoined him. He felt truly guilty. ‘I ate all the food she brought for the journey.’

‘Nenita can give her something,’ said Chard. ‘Shall we sit down?’

Strike followed him past the marble angel, which was reflected mistily in the warm wood below, and they headed on their four crutches to the end of the room, where a black iron wood-burner made a pool of welcome warmth.

‘Great place,’ said Strike, lowering himself onto one of the larger cubes of black leather and laying his crutches beside him. The compliment was insincere; his preference was for utilitarian comfort and Chard’s house seemed to him to be all surface and show.

‘Yes, I worked closely with the architects,’ said Chard, with a small flicker of enthusiasm. ‘There’s a studio’ – he pointed through another discreet pair of doors – ‘and a pool.’

He too sat down, stretching out the leg that ended in the thick, strapped boot in front of him.

‘How did it happen?’ Strike asked, nodding towards the broken leg.

Chard pointed with the end of his crutch at the metal and glass spiral staircase.

‘Painful,’ said Strike, eyeing the drop.

‘The crack echoed all through the space,’ said Chard, with an odd relish. ‘I hadn’t realised one can actually
hear
it happening.

‘Would you like a tea or coffee?’

‘Tea would be great.’

Strike saw Chard place his uninjured foot on a small brass plate beside his seat. Slight pressure, and Manny emerged again from the kitchen.

‘Tea, please, Manny,’ said Chard with a warmth conspicuously absent in his usual manner. The young man disappeared again, sullen as ever.

‘Is that St Michael’s Mount?’ Strike asked, pointing to a small picture hanging near the wood-burner. It was a naive painting on what seemed to be board.

‘An Alfred Wallis,’ said Chard, with another minor glow of enthusiasm. ‘The simplicity of the forms… primitive and naive. My father knew him. Wallis only took up painting seriously in his seventies. You know Cornwall?’

‘I grew up there,’ said Strike.

But Chard was more interested in talking about Alfred Wallis. He mentioned again that the artist had only found his true
métier
late in life and embarked on an exposition of the artist’s works. Strike’s total lack of interest in the subject went unnoticed. Chard was not fond of eye contact. The publisher’s eyes slid from the painting to spots around the large brick interior, seeming to glance at Strike only incidentally.

‘You’re just back from New York, aren’t you?’ asked Strike when Chard drew breath.

‘A three-day conference, yes,’ said Chard and the flare of enthusiasm faded. He gave the impression of repeating stock phrases as he said, ‘Challenging times. The arrival of electronic reading devices has been a game-changer. Do you read?’ he asked Strike, point-blank.

‘Sometimes,’ said Strike. There was a battered James Ellroy in his flat that he had been intending to finish for four weeks, but most nights he was too tired to focus. His favourite book lay in one of the unpacked boxes of possessions on the landing; it was twenty years old and he had not opened it for a long time.

‘We need readers,’ muttered Daniel Chard. ‘More readers. Fewer writers.’

Strike suppressed the urge to retort,
Well
, you’ve got rid of one of them, at least
.

Manny reappeared bearing a clear perspex tray on legs, which he set down in front of his employer. Chard leaned forward to pour the tea into tall white porcelain mugs. His leather furniture, Strike noted, did not emit the irritating sounds his own office sofa did, but then, it had probably cost ten times as much. The backs of Chard’s hands were as raw and painful-looking as they had been at the company party, and in the clear overhead lighting set into the underside of the hanging first floor he looked older than he had at a distance; sixty, perhaps, yet the dark, deep-set eyes, the hawkish nose and the thin mouth were handsome still in their severity.

‘He’s forgotten the milk,’ said Chard, scrutinising the tray. ‘Do you take milk?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike.

Chard sighed, but instead of pressing the brass plate on the floor he struggled back onto his one sound foot and his crutches, and swung off towards the kitchen, leaving Strike staring thoughtfully after him.

Those who worked with him found Daniel Chard peculiar, although Nina had described him as shrewd. His uncontrolled rages about
Bombyx Mori
had sounded to Strike like the reaction of an over-sensitive man of questionable judgement. He remembered the slight sense of embarrassment emanating from the crowd as Chard mumbled his speech at the anniversary party. An odd man, hard to read…

Strike’s eyes drifted upwards. Snow was falling gently onto the clear roof high above the marble angel. The glass must be heated in some way, to prevent the snow settling, Strike concluded. And the memory of Quine, eviscerated and trussed, burned and rotting beneath a great vaulted window returned to him. Like Robin, he suddenly found the high glass ceiling of Tithebarn House unpleasantly reminiscent.

Chard re-emerged from the kitchen and swung back across the floor on his crutches, a small jug of milk held precariously in his hand.

‘You’ll be wondering why I asked you to come here,’ said Chard finally, when he had sat back down and each of them held his tea at last. Strike arranged his features to look receptive.

‘I need somebody I can trust,’ said Chard without waiting for Strike’s answer. ‘Someone outside the company.’

One darting glance at Strike and he fixed his eyes safely on his Alfred Wallis again.

‘I think,’ said Chard, ‘I may be the only person who’s realised that Owen Quine did not work alone. He had an accomplice.’

‘An accomplice?’ Strike repeated at last, as Chard seemed to expect a response.

‘Yes,’ said Chard fervently. ‘Oh yes. You see, the style of
Bombyx Mori
is Owen’s, but somebody else was in on it. Someone helped him.’

Chard’s sallow skin had flushed. He gripped and fondled the handle of one of the crutches beside him.

‘The police will be interested, I think, if this can be proven?’ said Chard, managing to look Strike full in the face. ‘If Owen was murdered because of what was written in
Bombyx Mori
, wouldn’t an accomplice be culpable?’

‘Culpable?’ repeated Strike. ‘You think this accomplice persuaded Quine to insert material in the book in the hope that a third party would retaliate murderously?’

‘I… well, I’m not sure,’ said Chard, frowning. ‘He might not have expected that to happen, precisely – but he certainly intended to wreak havoc.’

His knuckles were whitening as they tightened on the handle of his crutch.

‘What makes you think Quine had help?’ asked Strike.