‘And I’ll lay you odds they’ll find a dead cat called Mr Poop,’ snarled Strike.
‘That won’t stop Anstis,’ predicted Ilsa. ‘He’s absolutely sure it’s her, Corm. They’ve got the right to keep her until eleven a.m. tomorrow and I’m sure they’re going to charge her.’
‘They haven’t got enough,’ said Strike fiercely. ‘Where’s the DNA evidence? Where are the witnesses?’
‘That’s the problem, Corm, there aren’t any and that credit card bill’s pretty damning. Look, I’m on your side,’ said Ilsa patiently. ‘You want my honest opinion? Anstis is taking a punt, hoping it’s going to work out. I think he’s feeling the pressure from all the press interest. And to be frank, he’s feeling agitated about you slinking around the case and wants to take the initiative.’
Strike groaned.
‘Where did they get a six-month-old Visa bill? Has it taken them this long to go through the stuff they took out of his study?’
‘No,’ said Ilsa. ‘It’s on the back of one of his daughter’s pictures. Apparently the daughter gave it to a friend of his months ago, and this friend went to the police with it early this morning, claiming they’d only just looked at the back and realised what was on there. What did you just say?’
‘Nothing,’ Strike sighed.
‘It sounded like “Tashkent”.’
‘Not that far off. I’ll let you go, Ilsa… thanks for everything.’
Strike sat for a few seconds in frustrated silence.
‘Bollocks,’ he said softly to his dark office.
He knew how this had happened. Pippa Midgley, in her paranoia and her hysteria, convinced that Strike had been hired by Leonora to pin the murder on somebody else, had run from his office straight to Kathryn Kent. Pippa had confessed that she had blown Kathryn’s pretence never to have read
Bombyx Mori
and urged her to use the evidence she had against Leonora. And so Kathryn Kent had ripped down her lover’s daughter’s picture (Strike imagined it stuck, with a magnet, to the fridge) and hurried off to the police station.
‘
Bollocks,
’ he repeated, more loudly, and dialled Robin’s number.
I am so well acquainted with despair,
I know not how to hope…
Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton,
The Honest Whore
As her lawyer had predicted, Leonora Quine was charged with the murder of her husband at eleven o’clock the following morning. Alerted by phone, Strike and Robin watched the news spread online where, minute by minute, the story proliferated like multiplying bacteria. By half past eleven the
Sun
website had a full article on Leonora headed
ROSE
WEST
LOOKALIKE
WHO
TRAINED
AT
THE
BUTCHER
’
S
.
The journalists had been busily collecting evidence of Quine’s poor record as a husband. His frequent disappearances were linked to liaisons with other women, the sexual themes of his work dissected and embellished. Kathryn Kent had been located, doorstepped, photographed and categorised as ‘Quine’s curvy red-headed mistress, a writer of erotic fiction’.
Shortly before midday, Ilsa called Strike again.
‘She’s going to be up in court tomorrow.’
‘Where?’
‘Wood Green, eleven o’clock. Straight from there to Holloway, I expect.’
Strike had once lived with his mother and Lucy in a house a mere three minutes away from the closed women’s prison that served north London.
‘I want to see her.’
‘You can try, but I can’t imagine the police will want you near her and I’ve got to tell you, Corm, as her lawyer, it might not look—’
‘Ilsa, I’m the only chance she’s got now.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,’ she said drily.
‘You know what I mean.’
He heard her sigh.
‘I’m thinking of you too. Do you really want to put the police’s backs—?’
‘How is she?’ interrupted Strike.
‘Not good,’ said Ilsa. ‘The separation from Orlando’s killing her.’
The afternoon was punctuated with calls from journalists and people who had known Quine, both groups equally desperate for inside information. Elizabeth Tassel’s voice was so deep and rough on the phone that Robin thought her a man.
‘Where’s Orlando?’ the agent demanded of Strike when he came to the phone, as though he had been delegated charge of all members of the Quine family. ‘Who’s got her?’
‘She’s with a neighbour, I think,’ he said, listening to her wheeze down the line.
‘My God, what a mess,’ rasped the agent. ‘Leonora… the worm turning after all these years… it’s incredible…’
Nina Lascelles’s reaction was, not altogether to Strike’s surprise, poorly disguised relief. Murder had receded to its rightful place on the hazy edge of the possible. Its shadow no longer touched her; the killer was nobody she knew.
‘His wife
does
look a bit like Rose West, doesn’t she?’ she asked Strike on the phone and he knew that she was staring at the
Sun
’s website. ‘Except with long hair.’
She seemed to be commiserating with him. He had not solved the case. The police had beaten him to it.
‘Listen, I’m having a few people over on Friday, fancy coming?’
‘Can’t, sorry,’ said Strike. ‘I’m having dinner with my brother.’
He could tell that she thought he was lying. There had been an almost imperceptible hesitation before he had said ‘my brother’, which might well have suggested a pause for rapid thought. Strike could not remember ever describing Al as his brother before. He rarely discussed his half-siblings on his father’s side.
Before she left the office that evening Robin set a mug of tea in front of him as he sat poring over the Quine file. She could almost feel the anger that Strike was doing his best to hide, and suspected that it was directed at himself quite as much as at Anstis.
‘It’s not over,’ she said, winding her scarf around her neck as she prepared to depart. ‘We’ll prove it wasn’t her.’
She had once before used the plural pronoun when Strike’s faith in himself had been at a low ebb. He appreciated the moral support, but a feeling of impotence was swamping his thought processes. Strike hated paddling on the periphery of the case, forced to watch as others dived for clues, leads and information.
He sat up late with the Quine file that night, reviewing the notes he had made of interviews, examining again the photographs he had printed off his phone. The mangled body of Owen Quine seemed to signal to him in the silence as corpses often did, exhaling mute appeals for justice and pity. Sometimes the murdered carried messages from their killers like signs forced into their stiff dead hands. Strike stared for a long time at the burned and gaping chest cavity, the ropes tight around ankles and wrists, the carcass trussed and gutted like a turkey, but try as he might, he could glean nothing from the pictures that he did not already know. Eventually he turned off all the lights and headed upstairs to bed.
It was a bittersweet relief to have to spend Thursday morning at the offices of his brunette client’s exorbitantly expensive divorce lawyers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Strike was glad to have something to while away time that could not be spent investigating Quine’s murder, but he still felt that he had been lured to the meeting under false pretences. The flirtatious divorcée had given him to understand that her lawyer wanted to hear from Strike in person how he had collected the copious evidence of her husband’s duplicity. He sat beside her at a highly polished mahogany table with room for twelve while she referred constantly to ‘what Cormoran managed to find out’ and ‘as Cormoran witnessed, didn’t you?’, occasionally touching his wrist. It did not take Strike long to deduce from her suave lawyer’s barely concealed irritation that it had not been his idea to have Strike in attendance. Nevertheless, as might have been expected when the hourly fee ran to over five hundred pounds, he showed no disposition to hurry matters along.
On a trip to the bathroom Strike checked his phone and saw, in tiny thumbnail pictures, Leonora being led in and out of Wood Green Crown Court. She had been charged and driven away in a police van. There had been plenty of press photographers but no members of the public baying for her blood; she was not supposed to have murdered anyone that the public much cared about.
A text from Robin arrived just as he was about to re-enter the conference room:
Could get you in to see Leonora at 6 this evening?
Great
, he texted back.
‘I thought,’ said his flirtatious client, once he had sat back down, ‘that Cormoran might be rather impressive on the witness stand.’
Strike had already shown her lawyer the meticulous notes and photographs he had compiled, detailing Mr Burnett’s every covert transaction, the attempted sale of the apartment and the palming of the emerald necklace included. To Mrs Burnett’s evident disappointment, neither man saw any reason for Strike to attend court in person given the quality of his records. Indeed, the lawyer could barely conceal his resentment of the reliance she seemed to place upon the detective. No doubt he thought this wealthy divorcée’s discreet caresses and batted eyelashes might be better directed towards him, in his bespoke pinstripe suit, with his distinguished salt-and-pepper hair, instead of a man who looked like a limping prize fighter.
Relieved to quit the rarefied atmosphere, Strike caught the Tube back to his office, glad to take off his suit in his flat, happy to think that he would soon be rid of that particular case and in possession of the fat cheque that had been the only reason he had taken it. He was free now to focus on that thin, grey-haired fifty-year-old woman in Holloway who was touted as
WRITER
’
S
MOUSY
WIFE
EXPERT
WITH
CLEAVER
on page two of the
Evening Standard
he had picked up on the journey.
‘Was her lawyer happy?’ Robin asked when he reappeared in the office.
‘Reasonably,’ said Strike, staring at the miniature tinsel Christmas tree she had placed on her tidy desk. It was decorated with tiny baubles and LED lights.
‘Why?’ he asked succinctly.
‘Christmas,’ said Robin, with a faint grin but without apology. ‘I was going to put it up yesterday, but after Leonora was charged I didn’t feel very festive. Anyway, I’ve got you an appointment to see her at six. You’ll need to take photo ID—’
‘Good work, thanks.’
‘—and I got you sandwiches and I thought you might like to see this,’ she said. ‘Michael Fancourt’s given an interview about Quine.’
She passed him a pack of cheese and pickle sandwiches and a copy of
The Times
, folded to the correct page. Strike lowered himself onto the farting leather sofa and ate while reading the article, which was adorned with a split photograph. On the left-hand side was a picture of Fancourt standing in front of an Elizabethan country house. Photographed from below, his head looked less out of proportion than usual. On the right-hand side was Quine, eccentric and wild-eyed in his feather-trimmed trilby, addressing a sparse audience in what seemed to be a small marquee.
The writer of the piece made much of the fact that Fancourt and Quine had once known each other well, had even been considered equivalent talents.
Few now remember Quine’s breakout work,
Hobart’s Sin
, although Fancourt touts it still as a fine example of what he calls Quine’s magical-brutalism. For all Fancourt’s reputation of a man who nurses his grudges, he brings a surprising generosity to our discussion of Quine’s oeuvre.
‘Always interesting and often underrated,’ he says. ‘I suspect that he will be treated more kindly by future critics than our contemporaries.’
This unexpected generosity is the more surprising when one considers that 25 years ago Fancourt’s first wife, Elspeth Kerr, killed herself after reading a cruel parody of her first novel. The spoof was widely attributed to Fancourt’s close friend and fellow literary rebel: the late Owen Quine.
‘One mellows almost without realising it – a compensation of age, because anger is exhausting. I unburdened myself of many of the feelings about Ellie’s death in my last novel, which should not be read as autobiographical, although…’
Strike skimmed the next two paragraphs, which appeared to be promoting Fancourt’s next book, and resumed reading at the point where the word ‘violence’ jumped out at him.
It is difficult to reconcile the tweed-jacketed Fancourt in front of me with the one-time self-described literary punk who drew both plaudits and criticism for the inventive and gratuitous violence of his early work.
‘If Mr Graham Greene was correct,’ wrote critic Harvey Bird of Fancourt’s first novel, ‘and the writer needs a chip of ice in his heart, then Michael Fancourt surely has what it takes in abundance. Reading the rape scene in
Bellafront
one starts to imagine that this young man’s innards must be glacial. In fact, there are two ways of looking at
Bellafront
, which is undoubtedly accomplished and original. The first possibility is that Mr Fancourt has written an unusually mature first novel, in which he has resisted the neophyte tendency to insert himself into the (anti-)heroic role. We may wince at its grotesqueries or its morality, but nobody could deny the power or artistry of the prose. The second, more disturbing, possibility is that Mr Fancourt does not possess much of an organ in which to place a chip of ice and his singularly inhuman tale corresponds to his own inner landscape. Time – and further work – will tell.’
Fancourt hailed originally from Slough, the only son of an unwed nurse. His mother still lives in the house in which he grew up.
‘She’s happy there,’ he says. ‘She has an enviable capacity for enjoying the familiar.’
His own home is a long way from a terraced house in Slough. Our conversation takes place in a long drawing room crammed with Meissen knick-knacks and Aubusson rugs, its windows overlooking the extensive grounds of Endsor Court.
‘This is all my wife’s choice,’ says Fancourt dismissively. ‘My taste in art is very different and confined to the grounds.’ A large trench to the side of the building is being prepared for the concrete foundation to support a sculpture in rusted metal representing the Fury Tisiphone, which he describes with a laugh as an ‘impulse buy… the avenger of murder, you know… a very powerful piece. My wife loathes it.’
And somehow we find ourselves back where the interview began: at the macabre fate of Owen Quine.
‘I haven’t yet processed Owen’s murder,’ says Fancourt quietly. ‘Like most writers, I tend to find out what I feel on a subject by writing about it. It is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it.’
Does this mean that we can expect a fictionalised account of Quine’s killing?
‘I can hear the accusations of bad taste and exploitation already,’ smiles Fancourt. ‘I dare say the themes of lost friendship, of a last chance to talk, to explain and make amends may make an appearance in due course, but Owen’s murder has already been treated fictionally – by himself.’
He is one of the few to have read the notorious manuscript that appears to have formed the blueprint of the murder.
‘I read it the very day that Quine’s body was discovered. My publisher was very keen for me to see it – I’m portrayed in it, you see.’ He seems genuinely indifferent about his inclusion, however insulting the portrait may have been. ‘I wasn’t interested in calling in lawyers. I deplore censorship.’
What did he think of the book, in literary terms?
‘It’s what Nabokov called a maniac’s masterpiece,’ he replies, smiling. ‘There may be a case for publishing it in due course, who knows?’
He can’t, surely, be serious?
‘But why shouldn’t it be published?’ demands Fancourt. ‘Art is supposed to provoke: by that standard alone,
Bombyx Mori
has more than fulfilled its remit. Yes, why not?’ asks the literary punk, ensconced in his Elizabethan manor.
‘With an introduction by Michael Fancourt?’ I suggest.
‘Stranger things have happened,’ replies Michael Fancourt, with a grin. ‘Much stranger.’