The Silkworm

23

An afternoon in the pub with his leg propped up had not much reduced the swelling in Strike’s knee. After buying painkillers and a cheap bottle of red on the way to the Tube, he set out for Greenwich where Anstis lived with his wife, Helen, commonly known as Helly. The journey to their house in Ashburnham Grove took him over an hour due to a delay on the Central line; he stood the whole way, keeping his weight on his left leg, regretting anew the hundred pounds he had spent on taxis to and from Lucy’s house.

By the time he got off the Docklands Light Railway spots of rain were again peppering his face. He turned up his collar and limped away into the darkness for what should have been a five-minute walk, but which took him nearly fifteen.

Only as he turned the corner into the neat terraced street with its well-tended front gardens did it occur to Strike that he ought, perhaps, to have brought a gift for his godson. He felt as little enthusiasm for the social part of the evening ahead as he felt eager to discuss with Anstis the forensic information.

Strike did not like Anstis’s wife. Her nosiness was barely concealed beneath a sometimes cloying warmth; it emerged from time to time like a flick knife flashing suddenly from beneath a fur coat. She gushed gratitude and solicitousness every time Strike swam into her orbit, but he could tell that she itched for details of his checkered past, for information about his rock star father, his dead, drug-taking mother, and he could well imagine that she would yearn for details of his breakup with Charlotte, whom she had always treated with an effusiveness that failed to mask dislike and suspicion.

At the party following the christening of Timothy Cormoran Anstis—which had been postponed until he was eighteen months old, because his father and his godfather had to be airlifted out of Afghanistan and discharged from their respective hospitals—Helly had insisted on making a tearful, tipsy speech about how Strike had saved her baby’s daddy’s life, and how much it meant to her to have him agree to be Timmy’s guardian angel, too. Strike, who had not been able to think of any valid reason to refuse being the boy’s godfather, had stared at the tablecloth while Helly spoke, careful not to meet Charlotte’s eye in case she made him laugh. She had been wearing—he remembered it vividly—his favorite peacock blue wrap-over dress, which had clung to every inch of her perfect figure. Having a woman that beautiful on his arm, even while he was still on crutches, had acted as a counterweight to the half a leg still not yet fit for a prosthesis. It had transformed him from the Man With Only One Foot to the man who had managed—miraculously, as he knew nearly every man who came into contact with her must think—to snag a fiancée so stunning that men stopped talking in midsentence when she entered the room.

“Cormy, darling,” crooned Helly when she opened the door. “Look at you, all famous…we thought you’d forgotten us.”

Nobody else ever called him Cormy. He had never bothered to tell her he disliked it.

She treated him, without encouragement, to a tender hug that he knew was intended to suggest pity and regret for his single status. The house was warm and brightly lit after the hostile winter night outside and he was glad to see, as he extricated himself from Helly, Anstis stride into view, holding a pint of Doom Bar as a welcoming gift.

“Ritchie, let him get inside. Honestly…”

But Strike had accepted the pint and taken several grateful mouthfuls before he bothered to take off his coat.

Strike’s three-and-a-half-year-old godson burst into the hall, making shrill engine noises. He was very like his mother, whose features, small and pretty though they were, were oddly bunched up in the middle of her face. Timothy sported Superman pajamas and was swiping at the walls with a plastic lightsaber.

“Oh, Timmy, darling, don’t, our lovely new paintwork…He wanted to stay up and see his Uncle Cormoran. We tell him about you all the time,” said Helly.

Strike contemplated the small figure without enthusiasm, detecting very little reciprocal interest from his godson. Timothy was the only child Strike knew whose birthday he had a hope of remembering, not that this had ever led Strike to buy him a present. The boy had been born two days before the Viking had exploded on that dusty road in Afghanistan, taking with it Strike’s lower right leg and part of Anstis’s face.

Strike had never confided in anyone how, during long hours in his hospital bed, he had wondered why it had been Anstis he had grabbed and pulled towards the back of the vehicle. He had gone over it in his mind: the strange presentiment, amounting almost to certainty, that they were about to explode, and the reaching out and seizing of Anstis, when he could equally have grabbed Sergeant Gary Topley.

Was it because Anstis had spent most of the previous day Skyping Helen within earshot of Strike, looking at the newborn son he might otherwise never have met? Was that why Strike’s hand had reached without hesitation for the older man, the Territorial Army policeman, and not Red Cap Topley, engaged but childless? Strike did not know. He was not sentimental about children and he disliked the wife he had saved from widowhood. He knew himself to be merely one among millions of soldiers, dead and living, whose split-second actions, prompted by instinct as much as training, had forever altered other men’s fates.

“Do you want to read Tim his bedtime story, Cormy? We’ve got a new book, haven’t we, Timmy?”

Strike could think of little he wanted to do less, especially if it involved the hyperactive boy sitting on his lap and perhaps kicking his right knee.

Anstis led the way into the open-plan kitchen and dining area. The walls were cream, the floorboards bare, a long wooden table stood near French windows at the end of the room, surrounded by chairs upholstered in black. Strike had the vague idea that they had been a different color when he had last been here, with Charlotte. Helly bustled in behind them and thrust a highly colored picture book into Strike’s hands. He had no choice but to sit down on a dining-room chair, with his godson placed firmly beside him, and to read the story of Kyla the Kangaroo Who Loved to Bounce, which was (as he would not usually have noticed) published by Roper Chard. Timothy did not appear remotely interested in Kyla’s antics and played with his lightsaber throughout.

“Bedtime Timmy, give Cormy a kiss,” Helly told her son, who, with Strike’s silent blessing, merely wriggled off his chair and ran out of the kitchen yelling protests. Helly followed. Mother and son’s raised voices grew muffled as they thumped upstairs.

“He’ll wake Tilly,” predicted Anstis and, sure enough, when Helly reappeared it was with a howling one-year-old in her arms, whom she thrust at her husband before turning to the oven.

Strike sat stolidly at the kitchen table, growing steadily hungrier, and feeling profoundly grateful that he did not have children. It took nearly three quarters of an hour for the Anstises to persuade Tilly back into her bed. At last the casserole reached the table and, with it, another pint of Doom Bar. Strike could have relaxed but for the sense that Helly Anstis was now gearing up for the attack.

“I was so, so sorry to hear about you and Charlotte,” she told him.

His mouth was full, so he mimed vague appreciation of her sympathy.

“Ritchie!” she said playfully as her husband made to pour her a glass of wine. “I don’t think so! We’re expecting again,” she told Strike proudly, one hand on her stomach.

He swallowed.

“Congratulations,” he said, staggered that they looked so pleased at the prospect of another Timothy or Tilly.

Right on cue, their son reappeared and announced that he was hungry. To Strike’s disappointment, it was Anstis who left the table to deal with him, leaving Helly staring beadily at Strike over a forkful of boeuf bourguignon.

“So she’s getting married on the fourth. I can’t even imagine what that feels like for you.”

“Who’s getting married?” Strike asked.

Helly looked amazed.

“Charlotte,” she said.

Dimly, down the stairs, came the sound of his godson wailing.

“Charlotte’s getting married on the fourth of December,” said Helly, and with her realization that she was the first to give him the news came a look of burgeoning excitement; but then something in Strike’s expression seemed to unnerve her.

“I…I heard,” she said, dropping her gaze to her plate as Anstis returned.

“Little bugger,” he said. “I’ve told him I’ll smack his bum for him if he gets out of bed again.”

“He’s just excited,” said Helly, who still seemed flustered by the anger she had sensed in Strike, “because Cormy’s here.”

The casserole had turned to rubber and polystyrene in Strike’s mouth. How could Helly Anstis know when Charlotte was getting married? The Anstises hardly moved in the same circles as her or her future husband, who (as Strike despised himself for remembering) was the son of the Fourteenth Viscount of Croy. What did Helly Anstis know about the world of private gentlemen’s clubs, of Savile Row tailoring and coked-up supermodels of which the Hon. Jago Ross had been a habitué all his trust-funded life? She knew no more than Strike himself. Charlotte, to whom it was native territory, had joined Strike in a social no-man’s-land when they had been together, a place where neither was comfortable with the other’s social set, where two utterly disparate norms collided and everything became a struggle for common ground.

Timothy was back in the kitchen, crying hard. Both his parents stood up this time and jointly moved him back towards his bedroom while Strike, hardly aware that they had gone, was left to disappear into a fug of memories.

Charlotte had been volatile to the point that one of her stepfathers had once tried to have her committed. She lied as other women breathed; she was damaged to her core. The longest consecutive period that she and Strike had ever managed together was two years, yet as often as their trust in each other had splintered they had been drawn back together, each time (so it seemed to Strike) more fragile than they had been before, but with the longing for each other strengthening. For sixteen years Charlotte had defied the disbelief and disdain of her family and friends to return, over and over again, to a large, illegitimate and latterly disabled soldier. Strike would have advised any friend to leave and not look back, but he had come to see her like a virus in his blood that he doubted he would ever eradicate; the best he could hope for was to control its symptoms. The final breach had come eight months previously, just before he had become newsworthy through the Landry case. She had finally told an unforgivable lie, he had left her for good and she had retreated into a world where men still went grouse shooting and women had tiaras in the family vault; a world she had told him she despised (although it looked as though that had been a lie too…).

The Anstises returned, minus Timothy but with a sobbing and hiccuping Tilly.

“Bet you’re glad you haven’t got any, aren’t you?” said Helly gaily, sitting back down at the table with Tilly on her lap. Strike grinned humorlessly and did not contradict her.

There had been a baby: or more accurately the ghost, the promise of a baby and then, supposedly, the death of a baby. Charlotte had told him that she was pregnant, refused to consult a doctor, changed her mind about dates, then announced that all was over without a shred of proof that it had ever been real. It was a lie most men would have found impossible to forgive and for Strike it had been, as surely she must have known, the lie to end all lies and the death of that tiny amount of trust that had survived years of her mythomania.

Marrying on the fourth of December, in eleven days’ time…how could Helly Anstis know?

He was perversely grateful, now, for the whining and tantrums of the two children, which effectively disrupted conversation all through a pudding of rhubarb flan and custard. Anstis’s suggestion that they take fresh beers into his study to go over the forensic report was the best Strike had heard all day. They left a slightly sulky Helly, who clearly felt that she had not had her money’s worth out of Strike, to manage the now very sleepy Tilly and the unnervingly wide-awake Timothy, who had reappeared to announce that he had spilled his drinking water all over his bed.

Anstis’s study was a small, book-lined room off the hall. He offered Strike the computer chair and sat on an old futon. The curtains were not drawn; Strike could see a misty rain falling like dust motes in the light of an orange streetlamp.

“Forensics say it’s as hard a job as they’ve ever had,” Anstis began, and Strike’s attention was immediately all his. “All this is unofficial, mind, we haven’t got everything in yet.”

“Have they been able to tell what actually killed him?”

“Blow to the head,” said Anstis. “The back of his skull’s been stoved in. It might not’ve been instantaneous, but the brain trauma alone would’ve killed him. They can’t be sure he was dead when he was carved open, but he was almost certainly unconscious.”

“Small mercies. Any idea whether he was tied up before or after he was knocked out?”

“There’s some argument about that. There’s a patch of skin under the ropes on one of his wrists that’s bruised, which they think indicates he was tied up before he was killed, but we’ve no indication whether he was still conscious when the ropes were put on him. The problem is, all that bloody acid everywhere’s taken away any marks on the floor that might’ve shown a struggle, or the body being dragged. He was a big, heavy guy—”

“Easier to handle if he was trussed up,” agreed Strike, thinking of short, thin Leonora, “but it’d be good to know the angle he was hit at.”

“From just above,” said Anstis, “but as we don’t know whether he was hit standing, sitting or kneeling…”

“I think we can be sure he was killed in that room,” said Strike, following his own train of thought. “I can’t see anyone being strong enough to carry a body that heavy up those stairs.”

“The consensus is that he died more or less on the spot where the body was found. That’s where the greatest concentration of the acid is.”

“D’you know what kind of acid it was?”

“Oh, didn’t I say? Hydrochloric.”

Strike struggled to remember something of his chemistry lessons. “Don’t they use that to galvanize steel?”

“Among other things. It’s as caustic a substance as you can legally buy and it’s used in a load of industrial processes. Heavy-duty cleaning agent as well. One weird thing about it is, it occurs naturally in humans. In our gastric acid.”

Strike sipped his beer, considering.

“In the book, they pour vitriol on him.”

“Vitriol’s sulphuric acid, and hydrochloric acid derives from it. Seriously corrosive to human tissue—as you saw.”

“Where the hell did the killer get that amount of the stuff?”

“Believe it or not, it looks like it was already in the house.”

“Why the hell—?”

“Still haven’t found anyone who can tell us. There were empty gallon containers on the kitchen floor, and dusty containers of the same description in a cupboard under the stairs, full of the stuff and unopened. They came from an industrial chemicals company in Birmingham. There were marks on the empty ones that looked as though they’d been made by gloved hands.”

“Very interesting,” said Strike, scratching his chin.

“We’re still trying to check when and how they were bought.”

“What about the blunt object that bashed his head in?”

“There’s an old-fashioned doorstop in the studio—solid iron and shaped like one, with a handle: almost certainly that. It fits with the impression in his skull. That’s had hydrochloric acid poured all over it like nearly everything else.”

“How’s time of death looking?”

“Yeah, well, that’s the tricky bit. The entomologist won’t commit himself, says the condition of the corpse throws out all the usual calculations. The fumes from the hydrochloric acid alone would’ve kept insects away for a while, so you can’t date the death from infestation. No self-respecting blowfly wants to lay eggs in acid. We had a maggot or two on bits of the body that weren’t doused in the stuff, but the usual infestation didn’t occur.

“Meanwhile, the heating in the house had been cranked right up, so the body might’ve rotted a bit faster than it would ordinarily have done in this weather. But the hydrochloric acid would’ve tended to mess with normal decomposition. Parts of him are burned to the bone.

“The deciding factor would have been the guts, last meal and so on, but they’d been lifted clean out of the body. Looks like they left with the killer,” said Anstis. “I’ve never heard of that being done before, have you? Pounds of raw intestine taken away.”

“No,” said Strike, “it’s a new one on me.”

“Bottom line: forensics are refusing to commit themselves to a time frame except to say he’s been dead at least ten days. But I had a private word with Underhill, who’s the best of them, and he told me off the record that he thinks Quine’s been dead a good two weeks. He reckons, though, even when they’ve got everything in the evidence’ll still be equivocal enough to give defending counsel a lot to play with.”

“What about pharmacology?” asked Strike, his thoughts circling back to Quine’s bulk, the difficulty of handling a body that big.

“Well, he might’ve been drugged,” agreed Anstis. “We haven’t had blood results back yet and we’re analyzing the contents of the bottles in the kitchen as well. But”—he finished his beer and set down the glass with a flourish—“there’s another way he could’ve made things easy for a killer. Quine liked being tied up—sex games.”

“How d’you know that?”

“The girlfriend,” said Anstis. “Kathryn Kent.”

“You’ve already talked to her, have you?”

“Yep,” said Anstis. “We found a taxi driver who picked up Quine at nine o’clock on the fifth, a couple of streets away from his house, and dropped him in Lillie Road.”

“Right by Stafford Cripps House,” said Strike. “So he went straight from Leonora to the girlfriend?”

“Well, no, he didn’t. Kent was away, staying with her dying sister, and we’ve got corroboration—she spent the night at the hospice. She says she hasn’t seen him for a month, but was surprisingly forthcoming on their sex life.”

“Did you ask for details?”

“I got the impression she thought we knew more than we did. They came pouring out without much prodding.”

“Suggestive,” said Strike. “She told me she’d never read Bombyx Mori—”

“She told us that too.”

“—but her character ties up and assaults the hero in the book. Maybe she wanted it on record that she ties people up for sex, not torture or murder. What about the copy of the manuscript Leonora says he took away with him? All the notes and the old typewriter ribbons? Did you find them?”

“Nope,” said Anstis. “Until we find out whether he stayed somewhere else before he went to Talgarth Road, we’re going to assume the killer took them. The place was empty except for a bit of food and drink in the kitchen and a camping mattress and sleeping bag in one of the bedrooms. It looks like Quine was dossing down there. Hydrochloric acid’s been poured around that room too, all over Quine’s bed.”

“No fingerprints? Footprints? Unexplained hair, mud?”

“Nothing. We’ve still got people working on the place, but the acid’s obliterated everything in its path. Our people are wearing masks just so the fumes don’t rip their throats out.”

“Anyone apart from this taxi driver admitted to seeing Quine since he disappeared?”

“Nobody’s seen him entering Talgarth Road but we’ve got a neighbor at number 183 who swears she saw Quine leave it at one in the morning. Early hours of the sixth. The neighbor was letting herself in after a bonfire-night party.”

“It was dark and she was two doors down, so what she actually saw was…?”

“Silhouette of a tall figure in a cloak, carrying a holdall.”

“A holdall,” repeated Strike.

“Yep,” said Anstis.

“Did the cloaked figure get into a car?”

“No, it walked out of sight, but obviously a car could have been parked round the corner.”

“Anyone else?”

“I’ve got an old geezer in Putney swearing he saw Quine on the eighth. Rang his local police station and described him accurately.”

“What was Quine doing?”

“Buying books in the Bridlington Bookshop, where the bloke works.”

“How convincing a witness is he?”

“Well, he’s old, but he claims he can remember what Quine bought and the physical description’s good. And we’ve got another woman who lives in the flats across the road from the crime scene who reckons she passed Michael Fancourt walking past the house, also on the morning of the eighth. You know, that author with the big head? Famous one?”

“Yeah, I do,” said Strike slowly.

“Witness claims she looked back at him over her shoulder and stared, because she recognized him.”

“He was just walking past?”

“So she claims.”

“Anybody checked that with Fancourt yet?”

“He’s in Germany, but he’s said he’s happy to cooperate with us when he gets back. Agent bending over backwards to be helpful.”

“Any other suspicious activity around Talgarth Road? Camera footage?”

“The only camera’s at the wrong angle for the house, it watches traffic—but I’m saving the best till last. We’ve got a different neighbor—other side, four doors down—who swears he saw a fat woman in a burqa letting herself in on the afternoon of the fourth, carrying a plastic bag from a halal takeaway. He says he noticed because the house had been empty so long. He claims she was there for an hour, then left.”

“He’s sure she was in Quine’s house?”

“So he says.”

“And she had a key?”

“That’s his story.”

“A burqa,” repeated Strike. “Bloody hell.”

“I wouldn’t swear his eyesight’s great; he’s got very thick lenses in his glasses. He told me he didn’t know of any Muslims living in the street, so it had caught his attention.”

“So we’ve got two alleged sightings of Quine since he walked out on his wife: early hours of the sixth, and on the eighth, in Putney.”

“Yeah,” said Anstis, “but I wouldn’t pin too much hope on either of them, Bob.”

“You think he died the night he left,” said Strike, more statement than question, and Anstis nodded.

“Underhill thinks so.”

“No sign of the knife?”

“Nothing. The only knife in the kitchen was a very blunt, everyday one. Definitely not up to the job.”

“Who do we know had a key to the place?”

“Your client,” said Anstis, “obviously. Quine himself must’ve had one. Fancourt’s got two, he’s already told us that by phone. The Quines lent one to his agent when she was organizing some repairs for them; she says she gave it back. A next-door neighbor’s got a key so he can let himself in if anything goes wrong with the place.”

“Didn’t he go in once the stink got bad?”

“One side did put a note through the door complaining about the smell, but the key holder left for two months in New Zealand a fortnight ago. We’ve spoken to him by phone. Last time he was in the house was in about May, when he took delivery of a couple of packages while some workmen were in and put them in the hall. Mrs. Quine’s vague about who else might have been lent a key over the years.

“She’s an odd woman, Mrs. Quine,” Anstis went on smoothly, “isn’t she?”

“Haven’t thought about it,” lied Strike.

“You know the neighbors heard her chasing him, the night he disappeared?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. She ran out of the house after him, screaming. The neighbors all say”—Anstis was watching Strike closely—“that she yelled ‘I know where you’re off to, Owen!’”

“Well, she thought she did know,” Strike said with a shrug. “She thought he was going to the writer’s retreat Christian Fisher told him about. Bigley Hall.”

“She’s refusing to move out of the house.”

“She’s got a mentally handicapped daughter who’s never slept anywhere else. Can you imagine Leonora overpowering Quine?”

“No,” said Anstis, “but we know it turned him on to be tied up, and I doubt they were married for thirty-odd years without her knowing that.”

“You think they had a row, then she tracked him down and suggested a bit of bondage?”

Anstis gave the suggestion of a small, token laugh, then said:

“It doesn’t look great for her, Bob. Angry wife with the key to the house, early access to the manuscript, plenty of motive if she knew about the mistress, especially if there was any question of Quine leaving her and the daughter for Kent. Only her word for it that ‘I know where you’re going’ meant this writer’s retreat and not the house on Talgarth Road.”

“Sounds convincing when you put it like that,” Strike said.

“But you don’t think so.”

“She’s my client,” said Strike. “I’m being paid to think of alternatives.”

“Has she told you where she used to work?” asked Anstis, with the air of a man about to play his trump card. “Back in Hay-on-Wye, before they were married?”

“Go on,” said Strike, not without a degree of apprehension.

“In her uncle’s butcher’s shop,” said Anstis.

Outside the study door Strike heard Timothy Cormoran Anstis thudding down the stairs again, screaming his head off at some fresh disappointment. For the first time in their unsatisfactory acquaintance, Strike felt a real empathy for the boy.