The Silkworm

17

It was not the first time that Strike had visited New Scotland Yard at the insistence of the Met. His previous interview had also concerned a corpse, and it occurred to the detective, as he sat waiting in an interrogation room many hours later, the pain in his knee less acute after several hours of enforced inaction, that he had had sex the previous evening then too.

Alone in a room hardly bigger than the average office’s stationery cupboard, his thoughts stuck like flies to the rotting obscenity he had found in the artist’s studio. The horror of it had not left him. In his professional capacity he had viewed bodies that had been dragged into positions intended to suggest suicide or accident; had examined corpses bearing horrific traces of attempts to disguise the cruelty to which they had been subjected before death; he had seen men, women and children maimed and dismembered; but what he had seen at 179 Talgarth Road was something entirely new. The malignity of what had been done there had been almost orgiastic, a carefully calibrated display of sadistic showmanship. Worst to contemplate was the order in which acid had been poured, the body disemboweled: had it been torture? Had Quine been alive or dead while his killer laid out place settings around him?

The huge vaulted room where Quine’s body lay would now, no doubt, be swarming with men in full-body protective suits, gathering forensic evidence. Strike wished he were there with them. Inactivity after such a discovery was hateful to him. He burned with professional frustration. Shut out from the moment the police had arrived, he had been relegated to a mere blunderer who had stumbled onto the scene (and “scene,” he thought suddenly, was the right word in more ways than one: the body tied up and arranged in the light from that giant church-like window…a sacrifice to some demonic power…seven plates, seven sets of cutlery…)

The frosted glass window of the interrogation room blocked out everything beyond it but the color of the sky, now black. He had been in this tiny room for a long time and still the police had not finished taking his statement. It was difficult to gauge how much of their desire to prolong the interview was genuine suspicion, how much animosity. It was right, of course, that the person who discovered a murder victim should be subjected to thorough questioning, because they often knew more than they were willing to tell, and not infrequently knew everything. However, in solving the Lula Landry case Strike might be said to have humiliated the Met, who had so confidently pronounced her death suicide. Strike did not think he was being paranoid in thinking that the attitude of the crop-haired female detective inspector who had just left the room contained a determination to make him sweat. Nor did he think that it had been strictly necessary for quite so many of her colleagues to look in on him, some of them lingering only to stare at him, others delivering snide remarks.

If they thought they were inconveniencing him, they were wrong. He had nowhere else to be and they had fed him quite a decent meal. If they had only let him smoke, he would have been quite comfortable. The woman who had been questioning him for an hour had told him he might go outside, accompanied, into the rain for a cigarette, but inertia and curiosity had kept him in his seat. His birthday whisky sat beside him in its carrier bag. He thought that if they kept him here much longer he might break it open. They had left him a plastic beaker of water.

The door behind him whispered over the dense gray carpet.

“Mystic Bob,” said a voice.

Richard Anstis of the Metropolitan Police and the Territorial Army entered the room grinning, his hair wet with rain, carrying a bundle of papers under his arm. One side of his face was heavily scarred, the skin beneath his right eye pulled taut. They had saved his sight at the field hospital in Kabul while Strike had lain unconscious, doctors working to preserve the knee of his severed leg.

“Anstis!” said Strike, taking the policeman’s proffered hand. “What the—?”

“Pulled rank, mate, I’m going to handle this one,” said Anstis, dropping into the seat lately vacated by the surly female detective. “You’re not popular round here, you know. Lucky for you, you’ve got Uncle Dickie on your side, vouching for you.”

He always said that Strike had saved his life, and perhaps it was true. They had been under fire on a yellow dirt road in Afghanistan. Strike himself was not sure what had made him sense the imminent explosion. The youth running from the roadside ahead with what looked like his younger brother could simply have been fleeing the gunfire. All he knew was that he had yelled at the driver of the Viking to brake, an injunction not followed—perhaps not heard—that he had reached forward, grabbed Anstis by the back of the shirt and hauled him one-handed into the back of the vehicle. Had Anstis remained where he was he would probably have suffered the fate of young Gary Topley, who had been sitting directly in front of Strike, and of whom they could find only the head and torso to bury.

“Need to run through this story one more time, mate,” said Anstis, spreading out in front of him the statement that he must have taken from the female officer.

“All right if I drink?” asked Strike wearily.

Under Anstis’s amused gaze, Strike retrieved the Arran single malt from the carrier bag and added two fingers to the lukewarm water in his plastic cup.

“Right: you were hired by his wife to find the dead man…we’re assuming the body’s this writer, this—”

“Owen Quine, yeah,” supplied Strike, as Anstis squinted over his colleague’s handwriting. “His wife hired me six days ago.”

“And at that point he’d been missing—?”

“Ten days.”

“But she hadn’t been to the police?”

“No. He did this regularly: dropped out of sight without telling anyone where he was, then coming home again. He liked taking off for hotels without his wife.”

“Why did she bring you in this time?”

“Things are difficult at home. There’s a disabled daughter and money’s short. He’d been away a bit longer than usual. She thought he’d gone off to a writer’s retreat. She didn’t know the name of the place, but I checked and he wasn’t there.”

“Still don’t see why she called you rather than us.”

“She says she called your lot in once before when he went walkabout and he was angry about it. Apparently he’d been with a girlfriend.”

“I’ll check that,” said Anstis, making a note. “What made you go to that house?”

“I found out last night the Quines co-owned it.”

A slight pause.

“His wife hadn’t mentioned it?”

“No,” said Strike. “Her story is that he hated the place and never went near it. She gave the impression she’d half forgotten they even owned it—”

“Is that likely?” murmured Anstis, scratching his chin. “If they’re skint?”

“It’s complicated,” said Strike. “The other owner’s Michael Fancourt—”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“—and she says he won’t let them sell. There was bad blood between Fancourt and Quine.” Strike drank his whisky; it warmed throat and stomach. (Quine’s stomach, his entire digestive tract, had been cut out. Where the hell was it?) “Anyway, I went along at lunchtime and there he was—or most of him was.”

The whisky had made him crave a cigarette worse than ever.

“The body’s a real fucking mess, from what I’ve heard,” said Anstis.

“Wanna see?”

Strike pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, brought up the photographs of the corpse and handed it across the desk.

“Holy shit,” said Anstis. After a minute of silent contemplation of the rotting corpse he asked, disgusted, “What are those around him…plates?”

“Yep,” said Strike.

“That mean anything to you?”

“Nothing,” said Strike.

“Any idea when he was last seen alive?”

“The last time his wife saw him was the night of the fifth. He’d just had dinner with his agent, who’d told him he couldn’t publish his latest book because he’s libeled Christ knows how many people, including a couple of very litigious men.”

Anstis looked down at the notes left by DI Rawlins.

“You didn’t tell Bridget that.”

“She didn’t ask. We didn’t strike up much of a rapport.”

“How long’s this book been in the shops?”

“It isn’t in the shops,” said Strike, adding more whisky to his beaker. “It hasn’t been published yet. I told you, he rowed with his agent because she told him he couldn’t publish it.”

“Have you read it?”

“Most of it.”

“Did his wife give you a copy?”

“No, she says she’s never read it.”

“She forgot she owned a second house and she doesn’t read her own husband’s books,” said Anstis without emphasis.

“Her story is that she reads them once they’ve got proper covers on,” said Strike. “For what it’s worth, I believe her.”

“Uh-huh,” said Anstis, who was now scribbling additions to Strike’s statement. “How did you get a copy of the manuscript?”

“I’d prefer not to say.”

“Could be a problem,” said Anstis, glancing up.

“Not for me,” said Strike.

“We might need to come back to that one, Bob.”

Strike shrugged, then asked:

“Has his wife been told?”

“Should have been by now, yeah.”

Strike had not called Leonora. The news that her husband was dead must be broken in person by somebody with the necessary training. He had done the job himself, many times, but he was out of practice; in any case, his allegiance this afternoon had been to the desecrated remains of Owen Quine, to stand watch over them until he had delivered them safely into the hands of the police.

He had not forgotten what Leonora would be going through while he was interrogated at Scotland Yard. He had imagined her opening the door to the police officer—or two of them, perhaps—the first thrill of alarm at the sight of the uniform; the hammer blow dealt to the heart by the calm, understanding, sympathetic invitation to retire indoors; the horror of the pronouncement (although they would not tell her, at least at first, about the thick purple ropes binding her husband, or the dark empty cavern that a murderer had made of his chest and belly; they would not say that his face had been burned away by acid or that somebody had laid out plates around him as though he were a giant roast…Strike remembered the platter of lamb that Lucy had handed around nearly twenty-four hours previously. He was not a squeamish man, but the smooth malt seemed to catch in his throat and he set down his beaker).

“How many people know what’s in this book, d’you reckon?” asked Anstis slowly.

“No idea,” said Strike. “Could be a lot by now. Quine’s agent, Elizabeth Tassel—spelled like it sounds,” he added helpfully, as Anstis scribbled, “sent it to Christian Fisher at Crossfire Publishing and he’s a man who likes to gossip. Lawyers got involved to try and stop the talk.”

“More and more interesting,” muttered Anstis, writing fast. “You want anything else to eat, Bob?”

“I want a smoke.”

“Won’t be long,” promised Anstis. “Who’s he libeled?”

“The question is,” said Strike, flexing his sore leg, “whether it’s libel, or whether he’s exposed the truth about people. But the characters I recognized were—give us a pen and paper,” he said, because it was quicker to write than to dictate. He said the names aloud as he jotted them down: “Michael Fancourt, the writer; Daniel Chard, who’s head of Quine’s publisher; Kathryn Kent, Quine’s girlfriend—”

“There’s a girlfriend?”

“Yeah, they’ve been together over a year, apparently. I went to see her—Stafford Cripps House, part of Clement Attlee Court—and she claimed he wasn’t at her flat and she hadn’t seen him…Liz Tassel, his agent; Jerry Waldegrave, his editor, and”—a fractional hesitation—“his wife.”

“He’s put his wife in there as well, has he?”

“Yeah,” said Strike, pushing the list over the desk to Anstis. “But there are a load of other characters I wouldn’t recognize. You’ve got a wide field if you’re looking for someone he put in the book.”

“Have you still got the manuscript?”

“No.” Strike, expecting the question, lied easily. Let Anstis get a copy of his own, without Nina’s fingerprints on it.

“Anything else you can think of that might be helpful?” Anstis asked, sitting up straight.

“Yeah,” said Strike. “I don’t think his wife did it.”

Anstis shot Strike a quizzical look not unmixed with warmth. Strike was godfather to the son who had been born to Anstis just two days before both of them had been blown out of the Viking. Strike had met Timothy Cormoran Anstis a handful of times and had not been impressed in his favor.

“OK, Bob, sign this for us and I can give you a lift home.”

Strike read through the statement carefully, took pleasure in correcting DI Rawlins’s spelling in a few places, and signed.

His mobile rang as he and Anstis walked down the long corridor towards the lifts, Strike’s knee protesting painfully.

“Cormoran Strike?”

“It’s me, Leonora,” she said, sounding almost exactly as she usually did, except that her voice was perhaps a little less flat.

Strike gestured to Anstis that he was not ready to enter the lift and drew aside from the policeman, to a dark window beneath which traffic was winding in the endless rain.

“Have the police been to see you?” he asked her.

“Yeah. I’m with them now.”

“I’m very sorry, Leonora,” he said.

“You all right?” she asked gruffly.

“Me?” said Strike, surprised. “I’m fine.”

“They ain’t giving you a hard time? They said you was being interviewed. I said to ’em, ‘He only found Owen cos I asked him, what’s he bin arrested for?’”

“They hadn’t arrested me,” said Strike. “Just needed a statement.”

“But they’ve kept you all this time.”

“How d’you know how long—?”

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m downstairs in the lobby. I wanna see you, I made ’em bring me.”

Astonished, with the whisky sitting on his empty stomach, he said the first thing that occurred to him.

“Who’s looking after Orlando?”

“Edna,” said Leonora, taking Strike’s concern for her daughter as a matter of course. “When are they gonna let you go?”

“I’m on my way out now,” he said.

“Who’s that?” asked Anstis when Strike had rung off. “Charlotte worrying about you?”

“Christ, no,” said Strike as they stepped together into the lift. He had completely forgotten that he had never told Anstis about the breakup. As a friend from the Met, Anstis was sealed off in a compartment on his own where gossip could not travel. “That’s over. Ended months ago.”

“Really? Tough break,” said Anstis, looking genuinely sorry as the lift began to move downwards. But Strike thought that some of Anstis’s disappointment was for himself. He had been one of the friends most taken with Charlotte, with her extraordinary beauty and her dirty laugh. “Bring Charlotte over” had been Anstis’s frequent refrain when the two men had found themselves free of hospitals and the army, back in the city that was their home.

Strike felt an instinctive desire to shield Leonora from Anstis, but it was impossible. When the lift doors slid open there she was, thin and mousy, with her limp hair in combs, her old coat wrapped around her and an air of still wearing bedroom slippers even though her feet were clad in scuffed black shoes. She was flanked by the two uniformed officers, one female, who had evidently broken the news of Quine’s death and then brought her here. Strike deduced from the guarded glances they gave Anstis that Leonora had given them reason to wonder; that her reaction to the news that her husband was dead had struck them as unusual.

Dry-faced and matter-of-fact, Leonora seemed relieved to see Strike.

“There you are,” she said. “Why’d they keep you so long?”

Anstis looked at her curiously, but Strike did not introduce them.

“Shall we go over here?” he asked her, indicating a bench along the wall. As he limped off beside her he felt the three police officers draw together behind them.

“How are you?” he asked her, partly in the hope that she might exhibit some sign of distress, to assuage the curiosity of those watching.

“Dunno,” she said, dropping onto the plastic seat. “I can’t believe it. I never thought he’d go there, the silly sod. I s’pose some burglar got in and done it. He should’ve gone to a hotel like always, shouldn’t he?”

They had not told her much, then. He thought that she was more shocked than she appeared, more than she knew herself. The act of coming to him seemed the disoriented action of somebody who did not know what else to do, except to turn to the person who was supposed to be helping her.

“Would you like me to take you home?” Strike asked her.

“I ’spect they’ll give me a lift back,” she said, with the same sense of untroubled entitlement she had brought to the statement that Elizabeth Tassel would pay Strike’s bill. “I wanted to see you to check you was all right and I hadn’t got you in trouble, and I wanted to ask you if you’ll keep working for me.”

“Keep working for you?” Strike repeated.

For a split second he wondered whether it was possible that she had not quite grasped what had happened, that she thought Quine was still out there somewhere to be found. Did her faint eccentricity of manner mask something more serious, some fundamental cognitive problem?

“They think I know something about it,” said Leonora. “I can tell.”

Strike hesitated on the verge of saying “I’m sure that’s not true,” but it would have been a lie. He was only too aware that Leonora, wife of a feckless, unfaithful husband, who had chosen not to contact the police and to allow ten days to elapse before making a show of looking for him, who had a key to the empty house where his body had been found and who would undoubtedly be able to take him by surprise, would be the first and most important suspect. Nevertheless, he asked:

“Why d’you think that?”

“I can tell,” she repeated. “Way they were talking to me. And they’ve said they wanna look in our house, in his study.”

It was routine, but he could see how she would feel this to be intrusive and ominous.

“Does Orlando know what’s happened?” he asked.

“I told her but I don’t think she realizes,” said Leonora, and for the first time he saw tears in her eyes. “She says, ‘Like Mr. Poop’—he was our cat that was run over—but I don’t know if she understands, not really. You can’t always tell with Orlando. I haven’t told her someone killed him. Can’t get my head around it.”

There was a short pause in which Strike hoped, irrelevantly, that he was not giving off whisky fumes.

“Will you keep working for me?” she asked him directly. “You’re better’n them, that’s why I wanted you in the first place. Will you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Cos I can tell they think I had something to do with it,” she repeated, standing up, “way they was talking to me.”

She drew her coat more tightly around her.

“I’d better get back to Orlando. I’m glad you’re all right.”

She shuffled off to her escort again. The female police officer looked taken aback to be treated like a taxi driver but after a glance at Anstis acceded to Leonora’s request for a lift home.

“The hell was that about?” Anstis asked him after the two women had passed out of earshot.

“She was worried you’d arrested me.”

“Bit eccentric, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

“You didn’t tell her anything, did you?” asked Anstis.

“No,” said Strike, who resented the question. He knew better than to pass information about a crime scene to a suspect.

“You wanna be careful, Bob,” said Anstis awkwardly, as they passed through the revolving doors into the rainy night. “Not to get under anyone’s feet. It’s murder now and you haven’t got many friends round these parts, mate.”

“Popularity’s overrated. Listen, I’ll get a cab—no,” he said firmly, over Anstis’s protestations, “I need to smoke before I go anywhere. Thanks, Rich, for everything.”

They shook hands; Strike turned up his collar against the rain and with a wave of farewell limped off along the dark pavement. He was almost as glad to have shaken off Anstis as to take the first sweet pull on his cigarette.