The Silkworm

20

Late that evening Strike sat alone at his desk while the traffic rumbled through the rain outside, eating Singapore noodles with one hand and scribbling a list for himself with the other. The rest of the day’s work over, he was free to turn his attention fully to the murder of Owen Quine and in his spiky, hard-to-read handwriting was jotting down those things that must be done next. Beside some of them he had jotted the letter A for Anstis, and if it had crossed Strike’s mind that it might be considered arrogant or deluded of a private detective with no authority in the investigation to imagine he had the power to delegate tasks to the police officer in charge of the case, the thought did not trouble him.

Having worked with Anstis in Afghanistan, Strike did not have a particularly high opinion of the police officer’s abilities. He thought Anstis competent but unimaginative, an efficient recognizer of patterns, a reliable pursuer of the obvious. Strike did not despise these traits—the obvious was usually the answer and the methodical ticking of boxes the way to prove it—but this murder was elaborate, strange, sadistic and grotesque, literary in inspiration and ruthless in execution. Was Anstis capable of comprehending the mind that had nurtured a plan of murder in the fetid soil of Quine’s own imagination?

Strike’s mobile rang, piercing in the silence. Only when he had put it to his ear and heard Leonora Quine did he realize that he had been hoping it would be Robin.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’ve had the police here,” she said, cutting through the social niceties. “They’ve been all through Owen’s study. I didn’t wanna, but Edna said I should let ’em. Can’t we be left in peace after what just happened?”

“They’ve got grounds for a search,” said Strike. “There might be something in Owen’s study that’ll give them a lead on his killer.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” said Strike patiently, “but I think Edna’s right. It was best to let them in.”

There was a silence.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “and now they’ve left it locked up so I can’t get in it. And they wanna come back. I don’t like them being here. Orlando don’t like it. One of ’em,” she sounded outraged, “asked if I wanted to move out of the house for a bit. I said, ‘No, I bloody don’t.’ Orlando’s never stayed anywhere else, she couldn’t deal with it. I’m not going anywhere.”

“The police haven’t said they want to question you, have they?”

“No,” she said. “Only asked if they can go in the study.”

“Good. If they want to ask you questions—”

“I should get a lawyer, yeah. That’s what Edna said.”

“Would it be all right if I come and see you tomorrow morning?” he asked.

“Yeah.” She sounded glad. “Come round ten, I need to go shopping first thing. Couldn’t get out all day. I didn’t wanna leave them in the house without me here.”

Strike hung up, reflecting again that Leonora’s manner was unlikely to be standing her in good stead with the police. Would Anstis see, as Strike did, that Leonora’s slight obtuseness, her failure to produce what others felt was appropriate behavior, her stubborn refusal to look at what she did not wish to look at—arguably the very qualities that had enabled her to endure the ordeal of living with Quine—would have made it impossible for her to kill him? Or would her oddities, her refusal to show normal grief reactions because of an innate though perhaps unwise honesty, cause the suspicion already lying in Anstis’s mundane mind to swell, obliterating other possibilities?

There was an intensity, almost a feverishness, about the way Strike returned to his scribbling, left hand still shoveling food into his mouth. Thoughts came fluently, cogently: jotting down the questions he wanted answered, locations he wanted cased, the trails he wanted followed. It was a plan of action for himself and a means of nudging Anstis in the right direction, of helping open his eyes to the fact that it was not always the wife when a husband was killed, even if the man had been feckless, unreliable and unfaithful.

At last Strike cast his pen down, finished the noodles in two large mouthfuls and cleared his desk. His notes he put into the cardboard folder with Owen Quine’s name on the spine, having first crossed out “Missing Person” and substituted the word “Murder.” He turned off the lights and was on the point of locking the glass door when he thought of something and returned to Robin’s computer.

And there it was, on the BBC website. Not headline news, of course, because whatever Quine might have thought, he had not been a very famous man. It came three stories below the main news that the EU had agreed to a bailout for the Irish Republic.

The body of a man believed to be writer Owen Quine, 58, has been found in a house in Talgarth Road, London. Police have launched a murder inquiry following the discovery, which was made yesterday by a family friend.

There was no photograph of Quine in his Tyrolean cloak, nor were there details of the horrors to which the body had been subjected. But it was early days; there was time.

Upstairs in his flat, some of Strike’s energy deserted him. He dropped onto his bed and rubbed his eyes wearily, then fell backwards and lay there, fully dressed, his prosthesis still attached. Thoughts he had managed to keep at bay now pressed in upon him…

Why had he not alerted the police to the fact that Quine had been missing for nearly two weeks? Why had he not suspected that Quine might be dead? He had had answers to these questions when DI Rawlins had put them to him, reasonable answers, sane answers, but he found it much more difficult to satisfy himself.

He did not need to take out his phone to see Quine’s body. The vision of that bound, decaying corpse seemed imprinted on his retinas. How much cunning, how much hatred, how much perversity had it taken to turn Quine’s literary excrescence into reality? What kind of human being could bring themselves to slit a man open and pour acid over him, to gut him and lay plates around his empty corpse?

Strike could not rid himself of the unreasonable conviction that he ought somehow to have smelled the scene from afar, like the carrion bird he had trained to be. How had he—with his once-notorious instinct for the strange, the dangerous, the suspicious—not realized that the noisy, self-dramatizing, self-publicizing Quine had been gone too long, that he was too silent?

Because the silly bastard kept crying wolf…and because I’m knackered.

He rolled over, heaved himself off the bed and headed for the bathroom, but his thoughts kept scurrying back to the body: the gaping hole in the torso, the burned-out eye sockets. The killer had moved around that monstrosity while it was still bleeding, when Quine’s screams had perhaps barely stopped echoing through the great vaulted space, and gently straightened forks…and there was another question for his list: what, if anything, had the neighbors heard of Quine’s final moments?

Strike got into bed at last, covered his eyes with a large, hairy forearm and listened to his own thoughts, which were gabbling at him like a workaholic twin who would not pipe down. Forensics had already had more than twenty-four hours. They would have formed opinions, even if all tests were not yet in. He must call Anstis, find out what they were saying…

Enough, he told his tired, hyperactive brain. Enough.

And by the same power of will that in the army had enabled him to fall instantly asleep on bare concrete, on rocky ground, on lumpy camp beds that squeaked rusty complaints about his bulk whenever he moved, he slid smoothly into sleep like a warship sliding out on dark water.