The Silkworm (36 page)

‘Christ almighty,’ muttered Strike, throwing
The Times
back onto Robin’s desk and narrowly missing the Christmas tree.

‘Did you see he only claims to have read
Bombyx Mori
the day you found Quine?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike.

‘He’s lying,’ said Robin.

‘We
think
he’s lying,’ Strike corrected her.

Holding fast to his resolution not to waste any more money on taxis, but with the snow still falling, Strike took the number 29 bus through the darkening afternoon. It ran north, taking Strike on a twenty-minute journey through recently gritted roads. A haggard woman got on at Hampstead Road, accompanied by a small, grizzling boy. Some sixth sense told Strike that the three of them were headed in the same direction and, sure enough, both he and the woman stood to get out in Camden Road, alongside the bare flank of HMP Holloway.

‘You’re gonna see Mummy,’ she told her charge, whom Strike guessed to be her grandson, though she looked around forty.

Surrounded by bare-limbed trees and grass verges covered in thick snow, the jail might have been a redbrick university faculty but for authoritarian signs in government-issue blue and white, and the sixteen-foot-high doors set into the wall so that prison vans might pass. Strike joined the trickle of visitors, several of them with children who strained to make marks in the untouched snow heaped beside the paths. The line shuffled together past the terracotta walls with their cement frets, past the hanging baskets now balls of snow in the freezing December air. The majority of his fellow visitors were women; Strike was unique among the men not merely for his size but for the fact that he did not look as though life had pummelled him into a quiescent stupor. A heavily tattooed youth in sagging jeans walking ahead of him staggered a little with every step. Strike had seen neurological damage back in Selly Oak, but guessed that this kind had not been sustained under mortar fire.

The stout female prison officer whose job it was to check IDs examined his driver’s licence, then stared up at him.

‘I know who you are,’ she said, with a piercing look.

Strike wondered whether Anstis had asked to be tipped off if he went to see Leonora. It seemed probable.

He had arrived deliberately early, so as not to waste a minute of his allotted time with his client. This foresight permitted him a coffee in the visitors’ centre, which was run by a children’s charity. The room was bright and almost cheerful, and many of the kids greeted the trucks and teddies as old friends. Strike’s haggard companion from the bus watched, gaunt and impassive, as the boy with her played with an Action Man around Strike’s large feet, treating him like a massive piece of sculpture (
Tisiphone, the avenger of murder
…
).

He was called through to the visitors’ hall at six on the dot. Footsteps echoed off the shiny floors. The walls were of concrete blocks but bright murals painted by the prisoners did their best to soften the cavernous space, which echoed with the clang of metal and keys and the murmur of talk. The plastic seats were fixed either side of a small, low central table, similarly immovable, so as to minimise contact between prisoner and visitor, and prevent the passing of contraband. A toddler wailed. Warders stood around the walls, watching. Strike, who had only ever dealt with male prisoners, felt a repugnance for the place unusual in him. The kids staring at gaunt mothers, the subtle signs of mental illness in the fiddling and twitching of bitten fingers, drowsy, over-medicated women curled in their plastic seats were quite unlike the male detention facilities with which he was familiar.

Leonora sat waiting, tiny and fragile, pathetically glad to see him. She was wearing her own clothes, a loose sweatshirt and trousers in which she looked shrunken.

‘Orlando’s been in,’ she said. Her eyes were bright red; he could tell that she had been crying for a long time. ‘Didn’t want to leave me. They dragged her out. Wouldn’t let me calm her down.’

Where she would have shown defiance and anger he could hear the beginnings of institutionalised hopelessness. Forty-eight hours had taught her that she had lost all control and power.

‘Leonora, we need to talk about that credit card statement.’

‘I never had that card,’ she said, her white lips trembling. ‘Owen always kept it, I never had it except sometimes if I needed to go to the supermarket. He always gave me cash.’

Strike remembered that she had come to him in the first place because money was running out.

‘I left all our finances up to Owen, that’s how he liked it, but he was careless, he never used to check his bills nor his bank statements, used to just sling ’em in his office. I used to say to him, “You wanna check those, someone could be diddling you,” but he never cared. He’d give anything to Orlando to draw on, that’s why it had her picture—’

‘Never mind the picture. Somebody other than you or Owen must have had access to that credit card. We’re going to run through a few people, OK?’

‘All right,’ she mumbled, cowed.

‘Elizabeth Tassel supervised work on the house in Talgarth Road, right? How was that paid for? Did she have a copy of your credit card?’

‘No,’ said Leonora.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure, cos we offered it to her and she said it was easier just to take it out of Owen’s next royalties cos he was due some any time. He sells well in Finland, I dunno why, but they like his—’

‘You can’t think of
any
time where Elizabeth Tassel did something for the house and had the Visa card?’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘never.’

‘OK,’ said Strike, ‘can you remember – and take your time – any occasion when Owen paid for something with his credit card at Roper Chard?’

And to his astonishment she said, ‘Not at Roper Chard exactly, but yeah.

‘They were all there. I was there, too. It was… I dunno… two years ago? Maybe less… a big dinner for publishers, it was, at the Dorchester. They put me and Owen at a table with all the junior people. Daniel Chard and Jerry Waldegrave were nowhere near us. Anyway, there was a silent auction, you know, when you write down your bid for—’

‘Yeah, I know how they work,’ said Strike, trying to contain his impatience.

‘It was for some writers’ charity, when they try and get writers outta prison. And Owen bid on a weekend in this country house hotel and he won it and he had to give his credit card details at the dinner. Some of the young girls from the publishers were there all tarted up, taking payment. He gave the girl his card. I remember that because he was pissed,’ she said, with a shadow of her former sullenness, ‘an’ he paid eight hundred quid for it. Showin’ off. Tryin’ to make out he earned money like the others.’

‘He handed his credit card over to a girl from the publishers,’ repeated Strike. ‘Did she take the details at the table or—?’

‘She couldn’t make her little machine work,’ said Leonora. ‘She took it away and brought it back.’

‘Anyone else there you recognised?’

‘Michael Fancourt was there with his publisher,’ she said, ‘on the other side of the room. That was before he moved to Roper Chard.’

‘Did he and Owen speak?’

‘Not likely,’ she said.

‘Right, what about—?’ he said, and hesitated. They had never before acknowledged the existence of Kathryn Kent.

‘His girlfriend coulda got at it any time, couldn’t she?’ said Leonora, as though she had read his mind.

‘You knew about her?’ he asked, matter-of-fact.

‘Police said something,’ replied Leonora, her expression bleak. ‘There’s always been someone. Way he was. Picking them up at his writing classes. I used to give him right tellings-off. When they said he was – when they said he was – he was tied up—’

She had started to cry again.

‘I knew it must’ve been a woman what done it. He liked that. Got him going.’

‘You didn’t know about Kathryn Kent before the police mentioned her?’

‘I saw her name on a text on his phone one time but he said it was nothing. Said she was just one of his students. Like he always said. Told me he’d never leave us, me and Orlando.’

She wiped her eyes under her outdated glasses with the back of a thin, trembling hand.

‘But you never saw Kathryn Kent until she came to the door to say that her sister had died?’

‘Was that her, was it?’ asked Leonora, sniffing and dabbing at her eyes with her cuff. ‘Fat, i’n’t she? Well, she could’ve got his credit card details any time, couldn’t she? Taken it out of his wallet while he was sleeping.’

It was going to be difficult to find and question Kathryn Kent, Strike knew. He was sure she would have absconded from her flat to avoid the attentions of the press.

‘The things the murderer bought on the card,’ he said, changing tack, ‘were ordered online. You haven’t got a computer at home, have you?’

‘Owen never liked ’em, he preferred his old type—’

‘Have you ever ordered shopping over the internet?’

‘Yeah,’ she replied, and his heart sank a little. He had been hoping that Leonora might be that almost mythical beast: a computer virgin.

‘Where did you do that?’

‘Edna’s, she let me borrow hers to order Orlando an art set for her birthday so I didn’t have to go into town,’ said Leonora.

Doubtless the police would soon be confiscating and ripping apart the kind-hearted Edna’s computer.

A woman with a shaved head and a tattooed lip at the next table began shouting at a warder, who had warned her to stay in her seat. Leonora cowered away from the prisoner as she erupted into obscenities and the officer approached.

‘Leonora, there’s one last thing,’ said Strike loudly, as the shouting at the next table reached a crescendo. ‘Did Owen say anything to you about meaning to go away, to take a break, before he walked out on the fifth?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘’F course not.’

The prisoner at the next table had been persuaded to quieten down. Her visitor, a woman similarly tattooed and only slightly less aggressive-looking, gave the prison officer the finger as she walked away.

‘You can’t think of anything Owen said or did that might’ve suggested he was planning to go away for a while?’ Strike persisted as Leonora watched their neighbours with anxious, owl-like eyes.

‘What?’ she said distractedly. ‘No – he never tells – told me – always just went… If he knew he was going, why wouldn’t he say goodbye?’

She began to cry, one thin hand over her mouth.

‘What’s going to happen to Dodo if they keep me in prison?’ she asked him through her sobs. ‘Edna can’t have her for ever. She can’t handle her. She went an’ left Cheeky Monkey behind an’ Dodo had done some pictures for me,’ and after a disconcerted moment or two Strike decided that she must be talking about the plush orang-utan that Orlando had been cradling on his visit to their house. ‘If they make me stay here—’

‘I’m going to get you out,’ said Strike with more confidence than he felt; but what harm would it do to give her something to hold on to, something to get her through the next twenty-four hours?

Their time was up. He left the hall without looking back, wondering what it was about Leonora, faded and grumpy, fifty years old with a brain-damaged daughter and a hopeless life, that had inspired in him this fierce determination, this fury…

Because she didn’t do
it
, came the simple answer.
Because she’s innocent.

In the last eight months a stream of clients had pushed open the engraved glass door bearing his name and the reasons they had sought him had been uncannily similar. They had come because they wanted a spy, a weapon, a means of redressing some balance in their favour or of divesting themselves of inconvenient connections. They came because they sought an advantage, because they felt they were owed retribution or compensation. Because overwhelmingly, they wanted more money.

But Leonora had come to him because she wanted her husband to come home. It had been a simple wish born of weariness and of love, if not for the errant Quine then for the daughter who missed him. For the purity of her desire, Strike felt he owed her the best he could give.

The cold air outside the prison tasted different. It had been a long time since Strike had been in an environment where following orders was the backbone of daily life. He could feel his freedom as he walked, leaning heavily on the stick, back towards the bus stop.

At the back of the bus, three drunken young women wearing headbands from which reindeer antlers protruded were singing:

Bloody Christmas
, thought Strike, thinking irritably of the presents he would be expected to buy for his nephews and godchildren, none of whose ages he could ever remember.

The bus groaned on through the slush and the snow. Lights of every colour gleamed blurrily at Strike through the steamed-up bus window. Scowling, with his mind on injustice and murder, he effortlessly and silently repelled anyone who might have considered sitting in the seat beside him.

Sleet, rain and snow pelted the office windows in turn the following day. Miss Brocklehurst’s boss turned up at the office around midday to view confirmation of her infidelity. Shortly after Strike had bidden him farewell, Caroline Ingles arrived. She was harried, on her way to pick up her children from school, but determined to give Strike the card for the newly opened Golden Lace Gentleman’s Club and Bar that she had found in her husband’s wallet. Mr Ingles’s promise to stay well away from lap-dancers, call girls and strippers had been a requirement of their reconciliation. Strike agreed to stake out Golden Lace to see whether Mr Ingles had again succumbed to temptation. By the time Caroline Ingles had left, Strike was very ready for the pack of sandwiches waiting for him on Robin’s desk, but he had taken barely a mouthful when his phone rang.

Aware that their professional relationship was coming to a close, his brunette client was throwing caution to the winds and inviting Strike out to dinner. Strike thought he could see Robin smiling as she ate her sandwich, determinedly facing her monitor. He tried to decline with politeness, at first pleading his heavy workload and finally telling her that he was in a relationship.

‘You never told me that,’ she said, suddenly cold.

‘I like to keep my private and professional lives separate,’ he said.

She hung up halfway through his polite farewell.

‘Maybe you should have gone out with her,’ said Robin innocently. ‘Just to make sure she’ll pay her bill.’

‘She’ll bloody pay,’ growled Strike, making up for lost time by cramming half a sandwich into his mouth. The phone buzzed. He groaned and looked down to see who had texted him.

His stomach contracted.

‘Leonora?’ asked Robin, who had seen his face fall.

Strike shook his head, his mouth full of sandwich.

The message comprised three words:

He had not changed his number since he had split up with Charlotte. Too much hassle, when a hundred professional contacts had it. This was the first time she had used it in eight months.

Strike remembered Dave Polworth’s warning:

You be on the watch, Diddy, for signs of her galloping back over the horizon. Wouldn’t be surprised if she bolts.
 

Today was the third, he reminded himself. She was supposed to be getting married tomorrow.

For the first time since he had owned a mobile phone, Strike wished it had the facility to reveal a caller’s location. Had she sent this from the Castle of Fucking Croy, in an interlude between checking the canapés and the flowers in the chapel? Or was she standing on the corner of Denmark Street, watching his office like Pippa Midgley? Running away from a grand, well-publicised wedding like this would be Charlotte’s crowning achievement, the very apex of her career of mayhem and disruption.

Strike put the mobile back into his pocket and started on his second sandwich. Deducing that she was not about to discover what had made Strike’s expression turn stony, Robin screwed up her empty crisp packet, dropped it in the bin and said:

‘You’re meeting your brother tonight, aren’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Aren’t you meeting your brother—?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Yeah.’

‘At the River Café?’

‘Yeah.’

It was yours.
 

‘Why?’ asked Robin.

Mine. The hell it was. If it even existed.
 

‘What?’ said Strike, vaguely aware that Robin had asked him something.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he said, pulling himself together. ‘What did you ask me?’

‘Why are you going to the River Café?’

‘Oh. Well,’ said Strike, reaching for his own packet of crisps, ‘it’s a long shot, but I want to speak to anyone who witnessed Quine and Tassel’s row. I’m trying to get a handle on whether he staged it, whether he was planning his disappearance all along.’

‘You’re hoping to find a member of staff who was there that night?’ said Robin, clearly dubious.

‘Which is why I’m taking Al,’ said Strike. ‘He knows every waiter in every smart restaurant in London. All my father’s kids do.’

When he had finished lunch he took a coffee into his office and closed the door. Sleet was again spattering his window. He could not resist glancing down into the frozen street, half-expecting (hoping?) to see her there, long black hair whipping around her perfect, pale face, staring up at him, imploring him with her flecked green-hazel eyes… but there was nobody in the street except strangers swaddled against the relentless weather.

He was crazy on every count. She was in Scotland and it was much, much better so.

Later, when Robin had gone home, he put on the Italian suit that Charlotte had bought him over a year ago, when they had dined at this very restaurant to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday. After pulling on his overcoat he locked his flat door and set out for the Tube in the sub-zero cold, still leaning on his stick.

Christmas assailed him from every window he passed; spangled lights, mounds of new objects, of toys and gadgets, fake snow on glass and sundry pre-Christmas sale signs adding a mournful note in the depths of the recession. More pre-Christmas revellers on the Friday-night Tube: girls in ludicrously tiny glittering dresses risking hypothermia for a fumble with the boy from Packaging. Strike felt weary and low.

The walk from Hammersmith was longer than he had remembered. As he proceeded down Fulham Palace Road he realised how close he was to Elizabeth Tassel’s house. Presumably she had suggested the restaurant, a long way from the Quines’ place in Ladbroke Grove, precisely because of its convenience to her.

After ten minutes Strike turned right and headed through the darkness towards Thames Wharf, through empty echoing streets, his breath rising in a smoky cloud. The riverside garden that in summer would be full of diners at white table-clothed chairs was buried under thick snow. The Thames glinted darkly beyond the pale carpet, iron-cold and menacing. Strike turned into the converted brick storage facility and was at once subsumed in light, warmth and noise.

There, just inside the door, leaning against the bar with his elbow on its shiny steel surface, was Al, deep in friendly conversation with the barman.

He was barely five foot ten, which was short for one of Rokeby’s children, and carrying a little too much weight. His mouse-brown hair was slicked back; he had his mother’s narrow jaw but he had inherited the weak divergent squint that added an attractive strangeness to Rokeby’s handsome face and marked Al inescapably as his father’s son.

Catching sight of Strike, Al let out a roar of welcome, bounced forwards and hugged him. Strike barely responded, being hampered by his stick and the coat he was trying to remove. Al fell back, looking sheepish.

‘How are you, bruv?’

In spite of the comic Anglicism, his accent was a strange mid-Atlantic hybrid that testified to years spent between Europe and America.

‘Not bad,’ said Strike, ‘you?’

‘Yeah, not bad,’ echoed Al. ‘Not bad. Could be worse.’

He gave a kind of exaggerated Gallic shrug. Al had been educated at Le Rosey, the international boarding school in Switzerland, and his body language still bore traces of the Continental manners he had met there. Something else underlay the response, however, something that Strike felt every time they met: Al’s guilt, his defensiveness, a preparedness to meet accusations of having had a soft and easy life compared to his older brother.

‘What’re you having?’ Al asked. ‘Beer? Fancy a Peroni?’

They sat side by side at the crammed bar, facing glass shelves of bottles, waiting for their table. Looking down the long, packed restaurant, with its industrial steel ceiling in stylised waves, its cerulean carpet and the wood-burning oven at the end like a giant beehive, Strike spotted a celebrated sculptor, a famous female architect and at least one well-known actor.

‘Heard about you and Charlotte,’ Al said. ‘Shame.’

Strike wondered whether Al knew somebody who knew her. He ran with a jet-set crowd that might well stretch to the future Viscount of Croy.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Strike with a shrug. ‘For the best.’

(He and Charlotte had sat here, in this wonderful restaurant by the river, and enjoyed their very last happy evening together. It had taken four months for the relationship to unravel and implode, four months of exhausting aggression and misery…
it was yours
.)

A good-looking young woman whom Al greeted by name showed them to their table; an equally attractive young man handed them menus. Strike waited for Al to order wine and for the staff to depart before explaining why they were there.

‘Four weeks ago tonight,’ he told Al, ‘a writer called Owen Quine had a row with his agent in here. By all accounts the whole restaurant saw it. He stormed out and shortly afterwards – probably within days and maybe even that night—’

‘—he was murdered,’ said Al, who had listened to Strike with his mouth open. ‘I saw it in the paper. You found the body.’

His tone conveyed a yearning for details that Strike chose to ignore.

‘There might be nothing to find out here, but I—’

‘His wife did it, though,’ said Al, puzzled. ‘They’ve got her.’

‘His wife didn’t do it,’ said Strike, turning his attention to the paper menu. He had noticed before now that Al, who had grown up surrounded by innumerable inaccurate press stories about his father and his family, never seemed to extend his healthy mistrust of British journalism to any other topic.

(It had had two campuses, Al’s school: lessons by Lake Geneva in the summer months and then up to Gstaad for the winter; afternoons spent skiing and skating. Al had grown up breathing exorbitantly priced mountain air, cushioned by the companionship of other celebrity children. The distant snarling of the tabloids had been a mere background murmur in his life… this, at least, was how Strike interpreted the little that Al had told him of his youth.)

‘The wife didn’t do it?’ said Al when Strike looked up again.

‘No.’

‘Whoa. You gonna pull another Lula Landry?’ asked Al, with a wide grin that added charm to his off-kilter stare.

‘That’s the idea,’ said Strike.

‘You want me to sound out the staff?’ asked Al.

‘Exactly,’ said Strike.

He was amused and touched by how delighted Al seemed to be at being given the chance to render him service.

‘No problem. No problem. Try and get someone decent for you. Where’s Loulou gone? She’s a smart cookie.’

After they had ordered, Al strolled to the bathroom to see whether he could spot the smart Loulou. Strike sat alone, drinking Tignanello ordered by Al, watching the white-coated chefs working in the open kitchen. They were young, skilled and efficient. Flames darted, knives flickered, heavy iron pans moved hither and thither.

He’s not stupid
, Strike thought of his brother, watching Al meander back towards the table, leading a dark girl in a white apron.
He’s just
…

‘This is Loulou,’ said Al, sitting back down. ‘She was here that night.’

‘You remember the argument?’ Strike asked her, focusing at once on the girl who was too busy to sit but stood smiling vaguely at him.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘It was really loud. Brought the place to a standstill.’

‘Can you remember what the man looked like?’ Strike said, keen to establish that she had witnessed the right row.

‘Fat bloke wearing a hat, yeah,’ she said. ‘Yelling at a woman with grey hair. Yeah, they had a real bust-up. Sorry, I’m going to have to—’

And she was gone, to take another table’s order.

‘We’ll grab her on the way back,’ Al reassured Strike. ‘Eddie sends his best, by the way. Wishes he could’ve been here.’

‘How’s he doing?’ asked Strike, feigning interest. Where Al had shown himself keen to forge a friendship, his younger brother, Eddie, seemed indifferent. He was twenty-four and the lead singer in his own band. Strike had never listened to any of their music.

‘He’s great,’ said Al.

Silence fell between them. Their starters arrived and they ate without talking. Strike knew that Al had achieved excellent grades in his International Baccalaureate. One evening in a military tent in Afghanistan, Strike had seen a photograph online of eighteen-year-old Al in a cream blazer with a crest on the pocket, long hair swept sideways and gleaming gold in the bright Geneva sun. Rokeby had had his arm around Al, beaming with paternal pride. The picture had been newsworthy because Rokeby had never been photographed in a suit and tie before.

‘Hello, Al,’ said a familiar voice.

And, to Strike’s astonishment, there stood Daniel Chard on crutches, his bald head reflecting the subtle spots shining from the industrial waves above them. Wearing a dark red open-necked shirt and a grey suit, the publisher looked stylish among this more bohemian crowd.

‘Oh,’ said Al, and Strike could tell that he was struggling to place Chard, ‘er – hi—’

‘Dan Chard,’ said the publisher. ‘We met when I was speaking to your father about his autobiography?’

‘Oh – oh yeah!’ said Al, standing up and shaking hands. ‘This is my brother Cormoran.’

If Strike had been surprised to see Chard approach Al, it was nothing to the shock that registered on Chard’s face at the sight of Strike.

‘Your – your brother?’

‘Half-brother,’ said Strike, inwardly amused by Chard’s evident bewilderment. How could the hireling detective be related to the playboy prince?

The effort it had cost Chard to approach the son of a potentially lucrative subject seemed to have left him with nothing to spare for a three-way awkward silence.

‘Leg feeling better?’ Strike asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Chard. ‘Much. Well, I’ll… I’ll leave you to your dinner.’