The Silkworm

16

Strike knew immediately upon waking the following morning that he was not in his own bed. It was too comfortable, the sheets too smooth; the daylight stippling the covers fell from the wrong side of the room and the sound of the rain pattering against the window was muffled by drawn curtains. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, squinting around at Nina’s bedroom, glimpsed only briefly by lamplight the previous evening, and caught sight of his own naked torso in a mirror opposite, thick dark chest hair making a black blot against the pale blue wall behind him.

Nina was absent, but he could smell coffee. As he had anticipated, she had been enthusiastic and energetic in bed, driving away the slight melancholy that had threatened to follow him from his birthday celebrations. Now, though, he wondered how quickly he would be able to extricate himself. To linger would be to raise expectations he was not prepared to meet.

His prosthetic leg was propped against the wall beside the bed. On the point of sliding himself out of bed to reach it he drew back, because the bedroom door opened and in walked Nina, fully dressed and damp-haired, with newspapers under her arm, two mugs of coffee in one hand and a plate of croissants in the other.

“I nipped out,” she said breathlessly. “God, it’s horrible out there. Feel my nose, I’m frozen.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said, gesturing to the croissants.

“I’m starving and there’s a fabulous bakery up the road. Look at this—News of the World—Dom’s big exclusive!”

A photograph of the disgraced peer whose hidden accounts Strike had revealed to Culpepper filled the middle of the front page, flanked on three sides by pictures of two of his lovers and of the Cayman Island documents Strike had wrested from his PA. LORD PORKER OF PAYWELL screamed the headline. Strike took the paper from Nina and skim-read the story. Culpepper had kept his word: the heartbroken PA was not mentioned anywhere.

Nina was sitting beside Strike on the bed, reading along with him, emitting faintly amused comments: “Oh God, how anyone could, look at him” and “Oh wow, that’s disgusting.”

“Won’t do Culpepper any harm,” Strike said, closing the paper when both had finished. The date at the top of the front page caught his eye: 21 November. It was his ex-fiancée’s birthday.

A small, painful tug under the solar plexus and a sudden gush of vivid, unwelcome memories…a year ago, almost to the hour, he had woken up beside Charlotte in Holland Park Avenue. He remembered her long black hair, wide hazel-green eyes, a body the like of which he would never see again, never be permitted to touch…They had been happy, that morning: the bed a life raft bobbing on the turbulent sea of their endlessly recurring troubles. He had presented her with a bracelet, the purchase of which had necessitated (though she did not know it) the taking out of a loan at horrifying rates of interest…and two days later, on his own birthday, she had given him an Italian suit, and they had gone out to dinner and actually fixed on a date when they would marry at last, sixteen years after they had first met…

But the naming of a day had marked a new and dreadful phase in their relationship, as though it had damaged the precarious tension in which they were used to living. Charlotte had become steadily more volatile, more capricious. Rows and scenes, broken china, accusations of his unfaithfulness (when it had been she, as he now believed, who had been secretly meeting the man to whom she was now engaged)…they had struggled on for nearly four months until, in a final, filthy explosion of recrimination and rage, everything had ended for good.

A rustle of cotton: Strike looked around, almost surprised to find himself still in Nina’s bedroom. She was about to strip off her top, intending to get back into bed with him.

“I can’t stay,” he told her, stretching across for his prosthesis again.

“Why not?” she asked with her arms folded across her front, gripping the hem of her shirt. “Come on—it’s Sunday!”

“I’ve got to work,” he lied. “People need investigating on Sundays too.”

“Oh,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact but looking crestfallen.

He drank his coffee, keeping the conversation bright but impersonal. She watched him strap his leg on and head for the bathroom, and when he returned to dress she was curled up in a chair, munching a croissant with a slightly forlorn air.

“You’re sure you don’t know where this house was? The one Quine and Fancourt inherited?” he asked her as he pulled on his trousers.

“What?” she said, confused. “Oh—God, you’re not going looking for that, are you? I told you, it’ll have been sold years ago!”

“I might ask Quine’s wife about it,” said Strike.

He told her that he would call her, but briskly, so that she might understand these to be empty words, a matter of form, and left her house with a feeling of faint gratitude, but no guilt.

The rain jabbed again at his face and hands as he walked down the unfamiliar street, heading for the Tube station. Christmassy fairy lights twinkled from the window of the bakery where Nina had just bought croissants. Strike’s large hunched reflection slid across the rain-spotted surface, clutching in one cold fist the plastic carrier bag which Lucy had helpfully given him to carry his cards, his birthday whisky and the box of his shiny new watch.

His thoughts slid irresistibly back to Charlotte, thirty-six but looking twenty-five, celebrating her birthday with her new fiancé. Perhaps she had received diamonds, Strike thought; she had always said she didn’t care for such things, but when they had argued the glitter of all he could not give her had sometimes been flung back hard in his face…

Successful bloke? Greg had asked of Owen Quine, by which he meant: “Big car? Nice house? Fat bank balance?”

Strike passed the Beatles Coffee Shop with its jauntily positioned black-and-white heads of the Fab Four peering out at him, and entered the relative warmth of the station. He did not want to spend this rainy Sunday alone in his attic rooms in Denmark Street. He wanted to keep busy on the anniversary of Charlotte Campbell’s birth.

Pausing to take out his mobile, he telephoned Leonora Quine.

“Hello?” she said brusquely.

“Hi, Leonora, it’s Cormoran Strike here—”

“Have you found Owen?” she demanded.

“Afraid not. I’m calling because I’ve just heard that your husband was left a house by a friend.”

“What house?”

She sounded tired and irritable. He thought of the various moneyed husbands he had come up against professionally, men who hid bachelor apartments from their wives, and wondered whether he had just given away something that Quine had been keeping from his family.

“Isn’t it true? Didn’t a writer called Joe North leave a house jointly to—?”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Talgarth Road, yeah. That was thirty-odd years ago, though. What d’you wanna know about that for?”

“It’s been sold, has it?”

“No,” she said resentfully, “because bloody Fancourt never let us. Out of spite, it is, because he never uses it. It just sits there, no use to anyone, moldering away.”

Strike leaned back against the wall beside the ticket machines, his eyes fixed on a circular ceiling supported by a spider’s web of struts. This, he told himself again, is what comes of taking on clients when you’re wrecked. He should have asked if they owned any other properties. He should have checked.

“Has anyone gone to see whether your husband’s there, Mrs. Quine?”

She emitted a hoot of derision.

“He wouldn’t go there!” she said, as though Strike were suggesting that her husband had hidden in Buckingham Palace. “He hates it, he never goes near it! Anyway, I don’t think it’s got furniture or nothing.”

“Have you got a key?”

“I dunno. But Owen’d never go there! He hasn’t been near it in years. It’d be an ’orrible place to stay, old and empty.”

“If you could have a look for the key—”

“I can’t go tearing off to Talgarth Road, I’ve got Orlando!” she said, predictably. “Anyway, I’m telling you, he wouldn’t—”

“I’m offering to come over now,” said Strike, “get the key from you, if you can find it, and go and check. Just to make sure we’ve looked everywhere.”

“Yeah, but—it’s Sunday,” she said, sounding taken aback.

“I know it is. D’you think you could have a look for the key?”

“All right, then,” she said after a short pause. “But,” with a last burst of spirit, “he won’t be there!”

Strike took the Tube, changing once, to Westbourne Park and then, collar turned up against the icy deluge, marched towards the address that Leonora had scribbled down for him at their first meeting.

It was another of those odd pockets of London where millionaires sat within a stone’s throw of working-class families who had occupied their homes for forty years or more. The rain-washed scene presented an odd diorama: sleek new apartment blocks behind quiet nondescript terraces, the luxurious new and the comfortable old.

The Quines’ family home was in Southern Row, a quiet backstreet of small brick houses, a short walk from a whitewashed pub called the Chilled Eskimo. Cold and wet, Strike squinted up at the sign overhead as he passed; it depicted a happy Inuit relaxing beside a fishing hole, his back to the rising sun.

The door of the Quines’ house was a peeling sludge green. Everything about the frontage was dilapidated, including the gate hanging on by only one hinge. Strike thought of Quine’s predilection for comfortable hotel rooms as he rang the doorbell and his opinion of the missing man fell a little further.

“You were quick,” was Leonora’s gruff greeting on opening the door. “Come in.”

He followed her down a dim, narrow hallway. To the left, a door stood ajar onto what was clearly Owen Quine’s study. It looked untidy and dirty. Drawers hung open and an old electric typewriter sat skewed on the desk. Strike could picture Quine tearing pages from it in his rage at Elizabeth Tassel.

“Any luck with the key?” Strike asked Leonora as they entered the dark, stale-smelling kitchen at the end of the hall. The appliances all looked as though they were at least thirty years old. Strike had an idea that his Aunt Joan had owned the identical dark brown microwave back in the eighties.

“Well, I found them,” Leonora told him, gesturing towards half a dozen keys lying on the kitchen table. “I dunno whether any of them’s the right one.”

None of them was attached to a key ring and one of them looked too big to open anything but a church door.

“What number Talgarth Road?” Strike asked her.

“Hundred and seventy-nine.”

“When were you last there?”

“Me? I never been there,” she said with what seemed genuine indifference. “I wasn’t int’rested. Silly thing to do.”

“What was?”

“Leaving it to them.” In the face of Strike’s politely inquiring face she said impatiently, “That Joe North, leaving it to Owen and Michael Fancourt. He said it was for them to write in. They’ve never used it since. Useless.”

“And you’ve never been there?”

“No. They got it round the time I had Orlando. I wasn’t int’rested,” she repeated.

“Orlando was born then?” Strike asked, surprised. He had been vaguely imagining Orlando as a hyperactive ten-year-old.

“In eighty-six, yeah,” said Leonora. “But she’s handicapped.”

“Oh,” said Strike. “I see.”

“Upstairs sulking now, cos I had to tell her off,” said Leonora, in one of her bursts of expansiveness. “She nicks things. She knows it’s wrong but she keeps doing it. I caught her taking Edna-Next-Door’s purse out of her bag when she come round yesterday. It wasn’t cos of the money,” she said quickly, as though he had made an accusation. “It’s cos she liked the color. Edna understands cos she knows her, but not everyone does. I tell her it’s wrong. She knows it’s wrong.”

“All right if I take these and try them, then?” Strike asked, scooping the keys into his hand.

“If y’want,” said Leonora, but she added defiantly, “He won’t be there.”

Strike pocketed his haul, turned down Leonora’s afterthought offer of tea or coffee and returned to the cold rain.

He found himself limping again as he walked towards Westbourne Park Tube station, which would mean a short journey with minimal changes. He had not taken as much care as usual in attaching his prosthesis in his haste to get out of Nina’s flat, nor had he been able to apply any of those soothing products that helped protect the skin beneath it.

Eight months previously (on the very day that he had later been stabbed in his upper arm) he had taken a bad fall down some stairs. The consultant who had examined it shortly afterwards had informed him that he had done additional, though probably reparable, damage to the medial ligaments in the knee joint of his amputated leg and advised ice, rest and further investigation. But Strike had not been able to afford rest and had not wished for further tests, so he had strapped up the knee and tried to remember to elevate his leg when sitting. The pain had mostly subsided but occasionally, when he had done a lot of walking, it began to throb and swell again.

The road along which Strike was trudging curved to the right. A tall, thin, hunched figure was walking behind him, its head bowed so that only the top of a black hood was visible.

Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to go home, now, and rest his knee. It was Sunday. There was no need for him to go marching all over London in the rain.

He won’t be there, said Leonora in his head.

But the alternative was returning to Denmark Street, listening to the rain hammering against the badly fitting window beside his bed under the eaves, with photo albums full of Charlotte too close, in the boxes on the landing…

Better to move, to work, to think about other people’s problems…

Blinking in the rain, he glanced up at the houses he was passing and glimpsed in his peripheral vision the figure following twenty yards behind him. Though the dark coat was shapeless, Strike had the impression from the short, quick steps, that the figure was female.

Now Strike noticed something curious about the way she was walking, something unnatural. There was none of the self-preoccupation of the lone stroller on a cold wet day. Her head was not bowed in protection against the elements, nor was she maintaining a steady pace with the simple view of achieving a destination. She kept adjusting her speed in tiny but, to Strike, noticeable increments, and every few steps the hidden face beneath the hood presented itself to the chilly onslaught of the driving rain, then vanished again into shadow. She was keeping him in her sights.

What had Leonora said at their first meeting?

I think I’ve been followed. Tall, dark girl with round shoulders.

Strike experimented by speeding up and slowing down infinitesimally. The space between them remained constant; her hidden face flickered up and down more frequently, a pale pink blur, to check his position.

She was not experienced at following people. Strike, who was an expert, would have taken the opposite pavement, pretended to be talking on a mobile phone; concealed his focused and singular interest in the subject…

For his own amusement, he faked a sudden hesitation, as though he had been caught by a doubt as to the right direction. Caught off guard, the dark figure stopped dead, paralyzed. Strike strolled on again and after a few seconds heard her footsteps echoing on the wet pavement behind him. She was too foolish even to realize that she had been rumbled.

Westbourne Park station came into sight a little way ahead: a long, low building of golden brick. He would confront her there, ask her the time, get a good look at her face.

Turning into the station, he drew quickly to the far side of the entrance, waiting for her, out of sight.

Some thirty seconds later he glimpsed the tall, dark figure jogging towards the entrance through the glittering rain, hands still in her pockets; she was frightened that she might have missed him, that he was already on a train.

He took a swift, confident step out into the doorway to face her—the false foot slipped on the wet tiled floor and skidded.

“Fuck!”

With an undignified descent into half-splits, he lost his footing and fell; in the long, slow-motion seconds before he reached the dirty wet floor, landing painfully on the bottle of whisky in his carrier bag, he saw her freeze in silhouette in the entrance, then vanish like a startled deer.

“Bollocks,” he gasped, lying on the sopping tiles while people at the ticket machines stared. He had twisted his leg again as he fell; it felt as though he might have torn a ligament; the knee that had been merely sore was now screaming in protest. Inwardly cursing imperfectly mopped floors and prosthetic ankles of rigid construction, Strike tried to get up. Nobody wanted to approach him. No doubt they thought he was drunk—Nick and Ilsa’s whisky had now escaped the carrier bag and was rolling clunkily across the floor.

Finally a London Underground employee helped him to his feet, muttering about there being a sign warning of the wet floor; hadn’t the gentleman seen it, wasn’t it prominent enough? He handed Strike his whisky. Humiliated, Strike muttered a thank you and limped over to the ticket barriers, wanting only to escape the countless staring eyes.

Safely on a southbound train he stretched out his throbbing leg and probed his knee as best he could through his suit trousers. It felt tender and sore, exactly as it had after he had fallen down those stairs last spring. Furious, now, with the girl who had been following him, he tried to make sense of what had happened.

When had she joined him? Had she been watching the Quine place, seen him go inside? Might she (an unflattering possibility) have mistaken Strike for Owen Quine? Kathryn Kent had certainly done so, briefly, in the dark…

Strike got to his feet some minutes before changing at Hammersmith to better prepare himself for what might be a perilous descent. By the time he reached his destination of Barons Court, he was limping heavily and wishing that he had a stick. He made his way out of a ticket hall tiled in Victorian pea green, placing his feet with care on the floor covered in grimy wet prints. Too soon he had left the dry shelter of the small jewel of a station, with its art nouveau lettering and stone pediments, and proceeded in the relentless rain towards the rumbling dual carriageway that lay close by.

To his relief and gratitude, he realized that he had emerged on that very stretch of Talgarth Road where the house he sought stood.

Though London was full of these kinds of architectural anomalies, he had never seen buildings that jarred so obviously with their surroundings. The old houses sat in a distinctive row, dark redbrick relics of a more confident and imaginative time, while traffic rumbled unforgivingly past them in both directions, for this was the main artery into London from the west.

They were ornate late-Victorian artists’ studios, their lower windows leaded and latticed and oversized arched north-facing windows on their upper floors, like fragments of the vanished Crystal Palace. Wet, cold and sore though he was, Strike paused for a few seconds to look up at number 179, marveling at its distinctive architecture and wondering how much the Quines would stand to make if Fancourt ever changed his mind and agreed to sell.

He heaved himself up the white front steps. The front door was sheltered from the rain by a brick canopy richly ornamented with carved stone swags, scrolls and badges. Strike brought out the keys one by one with cold, numb fingers.

The fourth one he tried slid home without protest and turned as though it had been doing so for years. One gentle click and the front door slid open. He crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him.

A shock, like a slap in the face, like a falling bucket of water. Strike fumbled with his coat collar, dragging it up over his mouth and nose to protect them. Where he should have smelled only dust and old wood, something sharp and chemical was overwhelming him, catching in his nose and throat.

He reached automatically for a switch on the wall beside him, producing a flood of light from two bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. The hallway, which was narrow and empty, was paneled in honey-colored wood. Twisted columns of the same material supported an arch halfway along its length. At first glance it was serene, gracious, well proportioned.

But with eyes narrowed Strike slowly took in the wide, burn-like stains on the original woodwork. A corrosive, acrid fluid—which was making the still, dusty air burn—had been splashed everywhere in what seemed to have been an act of wanton vandalism; it had stripped varnish from the aged floorboards, blasted the patina off the bare wood stairs ahead, even been thrown over the walls so that large patches of painted plaster were bleached and discolored.

After a few seconds of breathing through his thick serge collar, it occurred to Strike that the place was too warm for an uninhabited house. The heating had been cranked up high, which made the fierce chemical smell waft more pungently than if it had been left to disperse in the chill of a winter’s day.

Paper rustled under his feet. Looking down, he saw a smattering of takeaway menus and an envelope addressed TO THE OCCUPIER/CARETAKER. He stooped and picked it up. It was a brief, angry handwritten note from the next-door neighbor, complaining about the smell.

Strike let the note fall back onto the doormat and moved forwards into the hall, observing the scars left on every surface where the chemical substance had been thrown. To his left was a door; he opened it. The room beyond was dark and empty; it had not been tarnished with the bleach-like substance. A dilapidated kitchen, also devoid of furnishings, was the only other room on the lower floor. The deluge of chemicals had not spared it; even a stale half loaf of bread on the sideboard had been doused.

Strike headed up the stairs. Somebody had climbed or descended them, pouring the vicious, corrosive substance from a capacious container; it had spattered everywhere, even onto the landing windowsill, where the paint had bubbled and split apart.

On the first floor, Strike came to a halt. Even through the thick wool of his overcoat he could smell something else, something that the pungent industrial chemical could not mask. Sweet, putrid, rancid: the stench of decaying flesh.

He did not try either of the closed doors on the first floor. Instead, with his birthday whisky swaying stupidly in its plastic bag, he followed slowly in the footsteps of the pourer of acid, up a second flight of stained stairs from which the varnish had been burned away, the carved banisters scorched bare of their waxy shine.

The stench of decay grew stronger with every step Strike took. It reminded him of the time they stuck long sticks into the ground in Bosnia and pulled them out to sniff the ends, the one fail-safe way of finding the mass graves. He pressed his collar more tightly to his mouth as he reached the top floor, to the studio where a Victorian artist had once worked in the unchanging northern light.

Strike did not hesitate on the threshold except for the seconds it took to tug his shirt sleeve down to cover his bare hand, so that he would make no mark on the wooden door as he pushed it open. Silence but for a faint squeak of hinges, and then the desultory buzzing of flies.

He had expected death, but not this.

A carcass: trussed, stinking and rotting, empty and gutted, lying on the floor instead of hanging from a metal hook where surely it belonged. But what looked like a slaughtered pig wore human clothing.

It lay beneath the high arched beams, bathed in light from that gigantic Romanesque window, and though it was a private house and the traffic sloshed still beyond the glass, Strike felt that he stood retching in a temple, witness to sacrificial slaughter, to an act of unholy desecration.

Seven plates and seven sets of cutlery had been set around the decomposing body as though it were a gigantic joint of meat. The torso had been slit from throat to pelvis and Strike was tall enough to see, even from the threshold, the gaping black cavity that had been left behind. The intestines were gone, as though they had been eaten. Fabric and flesh had been burned away all over the corpse, heightening the vile impression that it had been cooked and feasted upon. In places the burned, decomposing cadaver was shining, almost liquid in appearance. Four hissing radiators were hastening the decay.

The rotted face lay furthest away from him, near the window. Strike squinted at it without moving, trying not to breathe. A wisp of yellowing beard clung still to the chin and a single burned-out eye socket was just visible.

And now, with all his experience of death and mutilation, Strike had to fight down the urge to vomit in the almost suffocating mingled stenches of chemical and corpse. He shifted his carrier bag up his thick forearm, drew his mobile phone out of his pocket and took photographs of the scene from as many angles as he could manage without moving further into the room. Then he backed out of the studio, allowing the door to swing shut, which did nothing to mitigate the almost solid stink, and called 999.

Slowly and carefully, determined not to slip and fall even though he was desperate to regain fresh, clean, rain-washed air, Strike proceeded back down the tarnished stairs to wait for the police in the street.