‘Why’re you telling me this?’ Kathryn demanded.
‘Because we don’t want to see another innocent woman arrested,’ said Robin, ‘because we think the police are wasting time sniffing around the wrong people and because,’ (‘throw in a bit of self-interest once you’ve baited the hook, it keeps things plausible’) ‘obviously,’ said Robin, with a show of awkwardness, ‘it would do Cormoran a lot of good if he was the one who got the real killer. Again,’ she added.
‘Yeah,’ said Kathryn, nodding vehemently, ‘that’s it, isn’t it? He wants the publicity.’
No woman who had been with Owen Quine for two years was going to believe that publicity wasn’t an unqualified boon.
‘Look, we just wanted to warn you how they’re thinking,’ said Robin, ‘and to ask for your help. But obviously, if you don’t want…’
Robin made to stand.
(‘Once you’ve laid it out for her, act like you can take it or leave it. You’re there when she starts chasing you.’)
‘I’ve told the police everything I know,’ said Kathryn, who appeared disconcerted now that Robin, who was taller than her, had stood up again. ‘I haven’t got anything else to say.’
‘Well, we’re not sure they were asking the right questions,’ said Robin, sinking back onto the sofa. ‘You’re a writer,’ she said, turning suddenly off the piste that Strike had prepared for her, her eyes on the laptop in the corner. ‘You notice things. You understood him and his work better than anyone else.’
The unexpected swerve into flattery caused whatever words of fury Kathryn had been about to fling at Robin (her mouth had been open, ready to deliver them) to die in her throat.
‘So?’ Kathryn said. Her aggression felt a little fake now. ‘What d’you want to know?’
‘Will you let Strike come and hear what you’ve got to say? He won’t if you don’t want him to,’ Robin assured her (an offer unsanctioned by her boss). ‘He respects your right to refuse.’ (Strike had made no such declaration.) ‘But he’d like to hear it in your own words.’
‘I don’t know that I’ve got anything useful to say,’ said Kathryn, folding her arms again, but she could not disguise a ring of gratified vanity.
‘I know it’s a big ask,’ said Robin, ‘but if you help us get the real killer, Kathryn, you’ll be in the papers for the
right
reasons.’
The promise of it settled gently over the sitting room – Kathryn interviewed by eager and now admiring journalists, asking about her work, perhaps:
Tell me about
Melina’s Sacrifice…
Kathryn glanced sideways at Pippa, who said:
‘That bastard
kidnapped
me!’
‘You tried to attack him, Pip,’ said Kathryn. She turned a little anxiously to Robin. ‘
I
never told her to do that. She was – after we saw what he’d written in the book – we were both… and we thought
he
–
your boss – had been hired to fit us up.’
‘I understand,’ lied Robin, who found the reasoning tortuous and paranoid, but perhaps that was what spending time with Owen Quine did to a person.
‘She got carried away and didn’t think,’ said Kathryn, with a look of mingled affection and reproof at her protégée. ‘Pip’s got temper issues.’
‘Understandable,’ said Robin hypocritically. ‘May I call Cormoran – Strike, I mean? Ask him to meet us here?’
She had already slipped her mobile out of her pocket and glanced down at it. Strike had texted her:
On balcony. Bloody freezing.
She texted back:
Wait 5.
In fact, she needed only three minutes. Softened by Robin’s earnestness and air of understanding, and by the encouragement of the alarmed Pippa to let Strike in and find out the worst, when he finally knocked Kathryn proceeded to the front door with something close to alacrity.
The room seemed much smaller with his arrival. Next to Kathryn, Strike appeared huge and almost unnecessarily male; when she had swept it clear of Christmas ornaments, he dwarfed the only armchair. Pippa retreated to the end of the sofa and perched on the arm, throwing Strike looks composed of defiance and terror.
‘D’you want a drink of something?’ Kathryn threw at Strike in his heavy overcoat, with his size fourteen feet planted squarely on her swirly rug.
‘Cup of tea would be great,’ he said.
She left for the tiny kitchen. Finding herself alone with Strike and Robin, Pippa panicked and scuttled after her.
‘You’ve done bloody well,’ Strike murmured to Robin, ‘if they’re offering tea.’
‘She’s
very
proud of being a writer,’ Robin breathed back, ‘which means she could understand him in ways that other people…’
But Pippa had returned with a box of cheap biscuits and Strike and Robin fell silent at once. Pippa resumed her seat at the end of the sofa, casting Strike frightened sidelong glances that had, as when she had cowered in their office, a whiff of theatrical enjoyment about them.
‘This is very good of you, Kathryn,’ said Strike, when she had set a tray of tea on the table. One of the mugs, Robin saw, read
Keep Clam and Proofread
.
‘We’ll see,’ retorted Kent, her arms folded as she glared at him from a height.
‘Kath, sit,’ coaxed Pippa, and Kathryn sat reluctantly down between Pippa and Robin on the sofa.
Strike’s first priority was to nurse the tenuous trust that Robin had managed to foster; the direct attack had no place here. He therefore embarked on a speech echoing Robin’s, implying that the authorities were having second thoughts about Leonora’s arrest and that they were reviewing the current evidence, avoiding direct mention of the police yet implying with every word that the Met was now turning its attention to Kathryn Kent. As he spoke a siren echoed in the distance. Strike added assurances that he personally felt sure that Kent was completely in the clear, but that he saw her as a resource the police had failed to understand or utilise properly.
‘Yeah, well, you could be right there,’ she said. She had not so much blossomed under his soothing words as unclenched. Picking up the
Keep Clam
mug she said with a show of disdain, ‘All they wanted to know about was our sex life.’
The way Anstis had told it, Strike remembered, Kathryn had volunteered a lot of information on the subject without being put under undue pressure.
‘I’m not interested in your sex life,’ said Strike. ‘It’s obvious he wasn’t – to be blunt – getting what he wanted at home.’
‘Hadn’t slept with her in years,’ said Kathryn. Remembering the photographs in Leonora’s bedroom of Quine tied up, Robin dropped her gaze to the surface of her tea. ‘They had nothing in common. He couldn’t talk to her about his work, she wasn’t interested, didn’t give a damn. He told us – didn’t he?’ – she looked up at Pippa, perched on the arm of the sofa beside her – ‘she never even read his books properly. He wanted someone to connect to on that level. He could really talk to me about literature.’
‘And me,’ said Pippa, launching at once into a speech: ‘He was interested in identity politics, you know, and he talked to me for hours about what it was like for me being born, basically, in the wrong—’
‘Yeah, he told me it was a relief to be able to talk to someone who actually understood his work,’ said Kathryn loudly, drowning Pippa out.
‘I thought so,’ said Strike, nodding. ‘And the police didn’t bother asking you about any of this, I take it?’
‘Well, they asked where we met and I told them: on his creative writing course,’ said Kathryn. ‘It was just gradual, you know, he was interested in my writing…’
‘… in our writing…’ said Pippa quietly.
Kathryn talked at length, Strike nodding with every appearance of interest at the gradual progression of the teacher–student relationship to something much warmer, Pippa tagging along, it seemed, and leaving Quine and Kathryn only at the bedroom door.
‘I write fantasy with a twist,’ said Kathryn and Strike was surprised and a little amused that she had begun to talk like Fancourt: in rehearsed phrases, in sound-bites. He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practised talking about their work during their coffee breaks and he remembered what Waldegrave had told him about Quine, that he had freely admitted to role-playing interviews with a biro. ‘It’s fantasy slash erotica really, but quite literary. And that’s the thing about traditional publishing, you know, they don’t want to take a chance on something that hasn’t been seen before, it’s all about what fits their sales categories, and if you’re blending several genres, if you’re creating something entirely new, they’re afraid to take a chance… I know that
Liz Tassel
,’ Kathryn spoke the name as though it were a medical complaint, ‘told Owen my work was too
niche
. But that’s the great thing about indie publishing, the freedom—’
‘Yeah,’ said Pippa, clearly desperate to put in her two pennys’ worth, ‘that’s true, for genre fiction I think indie can be the way to go—’
‘Except I’m not really genre,’ said Kathryn, with a slight frown, ‘that’s my point—’
‘—but Owen felt that for my memoir I’d do better going the traditional route,’ said Pippa. ‘You know, he had a real interest in gender identity and he was fascinated with what I’d been through. I introduced him to a couple of other transgendered people and he promised to talk to his editor about me, because he thought, with the right promotion, you know, and with a story that’s never really been told—’
‘Owen loved
Melina’s
Sacrifice
, he couldn’t wait to read on. He was practically ripping it out of my hand every time I finished a chapter,’ said Kathryn loudly, ‘and he told me—’
She stopped abruptly in mid-flow. Pippa’s evident irritation at being interrupted faded ludicrously from her face. Both of them, Robin could tell, had suddenly remembered that all the time Quine had been showering them with effusive encouragement, interest and praise, the characters of Harpy and Epicoene had been taking obscene shape on an old electric typewriter hidden from their eager gazes.
‘So he talked to you about his own work?’ Strike asked.
‘A bit,’ said Kathryn Kent in a flat voice.
‘How long was he working on
Bombyx Mori
, do you know?’
‘Most of the time I knew him,’ she said.
‘What did he say about it?’
There was a pause. Kathryn and Pippa looked at each other.
‘I’ve already told him,’ Pippa told Kathryn, with a significant glance at Strike, ‘that he told us it was going to be different.’
‘Yeah,’ said Kathryn heavily. She folded her arms. ‘He didn’t tell us it was going to be like that.’
Like that
…
Strike remembered the brown, glutinous substance that had leaked from Harpy’s breasts. It had been, for him, one of the most revolting images in the book. Kathryn’s sister, he remembered, had died of breast cancer.
‘Did he say what it was going to be like?’ Strike asked.
‘He lied,’ said Kathryn simply. ‘He said it was going to be the writer’s journey or something but he made out… he told us we were going to be…’
‘“Beautiful lost souls,”’ said Pippa, on whom the phrase seemed to have impressed itself.
‘Yeah,’ said Kathryn heavily.
‘Did he ever read any of it to you, Kathryn?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He said he wanted it to be a – a—’
‘Oh,
Kath
,’ said Pippa tragically. Kathryn had buried her face in her hands.
‘Here,’ said Robin kindly, delving into her handbag for tissues.
‘No,’ said Kathryn roughly, pushing herself off the sofa and disappearing into the kitchen. She came back with a handful of kitchen roll.
‘He said,’ she repeated, ‘he wanted it to be a surprise. That bastard,’ she said, sitting back down. ‘
Bastard.
’
She dabbed at her eyes and shook her head, the long mane of red hair swaying, while Pippa rubbed her back.
‘Pippa told me,’ said Strike, ‘that Quine put a copy of the manuscript through your door.’
‘Yeah,’ said Kathryn.
It was clear that Pippa had already confessed to this indiscretion.
‘Jude next door saw him doing it. She’s a nosy bitch, always keeping tabs on me.’
Strike, who had just put an additional twenty through the nosy neighbour’s letter box as a thank-you for keeping him informed of Kathryn’s movements, asked:
‘When?’
‘Early hours of the sixth,’ said Kathryn.
Strike could almost feel Robin’s tension and excitement.
‘Were the lights outside your front door working then?’
‘Them? They’ve been out for months.’
‘Did she speak to Quine?’
‘No, just peered out the window. It was two in the morning or something, she wasn’t going to go outside in her nightie. But she’d seen him come and go loads of times. She knew what he l-looked like,’ said Kathryn on a sob, ‘in his s-stupid cloak and hat.’
‘Pippa said there was a note,’ said Strike.
‘Yeah – “
Payback time for both of us
”,’ said Kathryn.
‘Have you still got it?’
‘I burned it,’ said Kathryn.
‘Was it addressed to you? “Dear Kathryn”?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘just the message and a bloody kiss.
Bastard!
’ she sobbed.
‘Shall I go and get us some real drink?’ volunteered Robin surprisingly.
‘There’s some in the kitchen,’ said Kathryn, her reply muffled by application of the kitchen roll to her mouth and cheeks. ‘Pip, you get it.’
‘You were sure the note was from him?’ asked Strike as Pippa sped off in pursuit of alcohol.
‘Yeah, it was his handwriting, I’d know it anywhere,’ said Kathryn.
‘What did you understand by it?’
‘I dunno,’ said Kathryn weakly, wiping her overflowing eyes. ‘Payback for me because he had a go at his wife? And payback for him on everyone… even me. Gutless bastard,’ she said, unconsciously echoing Michael Fancourt. ‘He could’ve told me he didn’t want… if he wanted to end it… why do that?
Why?
And it wasn’t just me… Pip… making out he cared, talking to her about her life… she’s had an awful time… I mean, her memoir’s not great literature or anything, but—’