The Silkworm

24

Strike’s dreams that night, fueled by a day’s consumption of Doom Bar, by talk of blood, acid and blowflies, were strange and ugly.

Charlotte was getting married and he, Strike, was running to an eerie Gothic cathedral, running on two whole, functioning legs, because he knew that she had just given birth to his child and he needed to see it, to save it. There she was, in the vast, dark empty space, alone at the altar, struggling into a blood-red gown, and somewhere out of sight, perhaps in a cold vestry, lay his baby, naked, helpless and abandoned.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“You’re not seeing it. You didn’t want it. Anyway, there’s something wrong with it,” she said.

He was afraid of what he would see if he went to find the baby. Her bridegroom was nowhere to be seen but she was ready for the wedding, in a thick scarlet veil.

“Leave it, it’s horrible,” she said coldly, pushing past him, walking alone away from the altar, back up the aisle towards the distant doorway. “You’d only touch it,” she shouted over her shoulder. “I don’t want you touching it. You’ll see it eventually. It’ll have to be announced,” she added in a vanishing voice, as she became a sliver of scarlet dancing in the light of the open doors, “in the papers…”

He was suddenly awake in the morning gloom, his mouth dry and his knee throbbing ominously in spite of a night’s rest.

Winter had slid in the night like a glacier over London. A hard frost had iced the outside of his attic window and the temperature inside his rooms, with their ill-fitting windows and doors and the total lack of insulation under the roof, had plummeted.

Strike got up and reached for a sweater lying on the end of his bed. When he came to fix on his prosthesis, he found that his knee was exceptionally swollen after the journey to and from Greenwich. The shower water took longer than usual to heat up; he cranked up the thermostat, fearing burst pipes and frozen gutters, subzero living quarters and an expensive plumber. After drying himself off, he unearthed his old sports bandages from the box on the landing to strap up his knee.

He knew, now, as clearly as though he had spent the night puzzling it out, how Helly Anstis knew Charlotte’s wedding plans. He had been stupid not to think of it before. His subconscious had known.

Once clean, dressed and breakfasted he headed downstairs. Glancing out of the window behind his desk, he noted that the knifelike cold was keeping away the little cluster of journalists who had waited in vain for his return the previous day. Sleet pattered on the windows as he moved back to the outer office and Robin’s computer. Here, in the search engine, he typed: charlotte campbell hon jago ross wedding.

Pitiless and prompt came the results.

Tatler, December 2010: Cover girl Charlotte Campbell on her wedding to the future Viscount of Croy…

“Tatler,” said Strike aloud in the office.

He only knew of the magazine’s existence because its society pages were full of Charlotte’s friends. She had bought it, sometimes, to read ostentatiously in front of him, commenting on men she had once slept with, or whose stately homes she had partied in.

And now she was the Christmas cover girl.

Even strapped up, his knee complained at having to support him down the metal stairs and out into the sleet. There was an early morning queue at the counter of the newsagents. Calmly he scanned the shelves of magazines: soap stars on the cheap ones and film stars on the expensive; December issues almost sold out, even though they were still in November. Emma Watson in white on the cover of Vogue (“The Super Star Issue”), Rihanna in pink on Marie Claire (“The Glamour Issue”) and on the cover of Tatler…

Pale, perfect skin, black hair blown away from high cheekbones and wide hazel-green eyes, flecked like a russet apple. Two huge diamonds dangling from her ears and a third on the hand lying lightly against her face. A dull, blunt hammer blow to the heart, absorbed without the slightest external sign. He took the magazine, the last on the shelf, paid for it and returned to Denmark Street.

It was twenty to nine. He shut himself in his office, sat down at his desk and laid the magazine down in front of him.

IN-CROY-ABLE! Former Wild Child turned future Viscountess, Charlotte Campbell.

The strap line ran across Charlotte’s swanlike neck.

It was the first time he had looked at her since she had clawed his face in this very office and run from him, straight into the arms of the Honorable Jago Ross. He supposed that they must airbrush all their pictures. Her skin could not be this flawless, the whites of her eyes this pure, but they had not exaggerated anything else, not the exquisite bone structure, nor (he was sure) the size of the diamond on her finger.

Slowly he turned to the contents page and then to the article within. A double-page picture of Charlotte, very thin in a glittering silver floor-length dress, standing in the middle of a long gallery lined with tapestries; beside her, leaning on a card table and looking like a dissolute arctic fox, was Jago Ross. More photographs over the page: Charlotte sitting on an ancient four-poster, laughing with her head thrown back, the white column of her neck rising from a sheer cream blouse; Charlotte and Jago in jeans and wellington boots, walking hand in hand over the parkland in front of their future home with two Jack Russells at their heels; Charlotte windswept on the castle keep, looking over a shoulder draped in the Viscount’s tartan.

Doubtless Helly Anstis had considered it four pounds ten well spent.

On 4 December this year, the seventeenth-century chapel at the Castle of Croy (NEVER “Croy Castle”—it annoys the family) will be dusted off for its first wedding in over a century. Charlotte Campbell, breathtakingly beautiful daughter of 1960s It Girl Tula Clermont and academic and broadcaster Anthony Campbell, will marry the Hon Jago Ross, heir to the castle and to his father’s titles, principal of which is Viscount of Croy.

The future Viscountess is a not altogether uncontroversial addition to the Rosses of Croy, but Jago laughs at the idea that anyone in his family could be less than delighted to welcome the former wild child into his old and rather grand Scottish family.

“Actually, my mother always hoped we’d marry,” he says. “We were boyfriend and girlfriend at Oxford but I suppose we were just too young… found each other again in London… both just out of relationships…”

Were you? thought Strike. Were you both just out of relationships? Or were you fucking her at the same time I was, so that she didn’t know which of us had fathered the baby she was worried she might be carrying? Changing the dates to cover every eventuality, keeping her options open…

…made headlines in her youth when she went missing from Bedales for seven days, causing a national search… admitted to rehab at the age of 25…

“Old news, move on, nothing to see,” says Charlotte brightly. “Look, I had a lot of fun in my youth, but it’s time to settle down and honestly, I can’t wait.”

Fun, was it? Strike asked her stunning picture. Fun, standing on that roof and threatening to jump? Fun, calling me from that psychiatric hospital and begging me to get you out?

Ross, fresh from a very messy divorce that has kept the gossip columns busy…“I wish we could have settled it without the lawyers,” he sighs… “I can’t wait to be a step-mummy!” trills Charlotte…

(“If I have to spend one more evening with the Anstises’ bratty kids, Corm, I swear to God I’ll brain one of them.” And, in Lucy’s suburban back garden, watching Strike’s nephews playing football, “Why are these children such shits?” The expression on Lucy’s round face when she overheard it…)

His own name, leaping off the page.

…including a surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son Cormoran Strike, who made headlines last year…

…a surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son…

…Jonny Rokeby’s eldest…

He closed the magazine with a sudden, reflexive movement and slid it into his bin.

Sixteen years, on and off. Sixteen years of the torture, the madness and occasional ecstasy. And then—after all those times she had left him, throwing herself into the arms of other men as other women cast themselves onto railway tracks—he had walked out. In doing so, he had crossed an unforgivable Rubicon, for it had always been understood that he should stand rock-like, to be left and returned to, never flinching, never giving up. But on that night when he had confronted her with the tangle of lies she had told about the baby in her belly and she had become hysterical and furious, the mountain had moved at last: out of the door, with an ashtray flung after it.

His black eye had barely healed when she had announced her engagement to Ross. Three weeks it had taken her, because she knew only one way to respond to pain: to wound the transgressor as deeply as possible, with no thought for the consequences to herself. And he knew in his bones, no matter how arrogant his friends might tell him he was being, that the Tatler pictures, the dismissal of their relationship in the terms that would hurt him most (he could hear her spelling it out for the society mag: “he’s Jonny Rokeby’s son”); the Castle of Fucking Croy…all of it, all of it, was done with a view to hurting him, wanting him to watch and to see, to regret and to pity. She had known what Ross was; she had told Strike about the poorly disguised alcoholism and violence, passed through the blue-blooded network of gossip that had kept her informed through the years. She had laughed about her lucky escape. Laughed.

Self-immolation in a ball gown. Watch me burn, Bluey. The wedding was in ten days’ time and if he had ever been sure of anything in his life, it was that if he called Charlotte right now and said “Run away with me,” even after their filthy scenes, the hateful things she had called him, the lies and the mess and the several tons of baggage under which their relationship had finally splintered, she would say yes. Running away was her life’s blood and he had been her favorite destination, freedom and safety combined; she had said it to him over and over again after fights that would have killed them both if emotional wounds could bleed: “I need you. You’re my everything, you know that. You’re the only place I’ve ever felt safe, Bluey…”

He heard the glass door onto the landing open and close, the familiar sounds of Robin arriving at work, removing her coat, filling the kettle.

Work had always been his salvation. Charlotte had hated the way he could switch, from crazy, violent scenes, from her tears and her pleas and her threats, to immerse himself totally in a case. She had never managed to stop him putting on his uniform, never prevented his return to work, never succeeded in forcing him away from an investigation. She deplored his focus, his allegiance to the army, his ability to shut her out, seeing it as a betrayal, as abandonment.

Now, on this cold winter’s morning, sitting in his office with her picture in the bin beside him, Strike found himself craving orders, a case abroad, an enforced sojourn on another continent. He did not want to trail after unfaithful husbands and girlfriends, or insert himself into the petty disputes of shoddy businessmen. Only one subject had ever matched Charlotte for the fascination it exercised over him: unnatural death.

“Morning,” he said, limping into the outer office, where Robin was making two mugs of tea. “We’ll have to be quick with these. We’re going out.”

“Where?” asked Robin in surprise.

The sleet was sliding wetly down their windows. She could still feel how it had burned her face as she hurried over the slippery pavements, desperate to get inside.

“Got stuff to do on the Quine case.”

It was a lie. The police had all the power; what could he do that they were not doing better? And yet he knew in his gut that Anstis lacked the nose for the strange and the warped that would be needed to find this killer.

“You’ve got Caroline Ingles at ten.”

“Shit. Well, I’ll put her off. Thing is, forensics reckon Quine died very soon after he disappeared.”

He took a mouthful of hot, strong tea. He seemed more purposeful, more energized than she had seen him for a while.

“That puts the spotlight right back on the people who had early access to the manuscript. I want to find out where they all live, and whether they live alone. Then we’re going to recce their houses. Find out how hard it would’ve been to get in and out carrying a bag of guts. Whether they might have places they could bury or burn evidence.”

It was not much, but it was all he could do today, and he was desperate to do something.

“You’re coming,” he added. “You’re always good at this stuff.”

“What, being your Watson?” she said, apparently indifferent. The anger she had carried with her out of the Cambridge the previous day had not quite burned out. “We could find out about their houses online. Look at them on Google Earth.”

“Yeah, good thinking,” rejoined Strike. “Why case locations when you could just look at out-of-date photos?”

Stung, she said:

“I’m more than happy—”

“Good. I’ll cancel Ingles. You get online and find out addresses for Christian Fisher, Elizabeth Tassel, Daniel Chard, Jerry Waldegrave and Michael Fancourt. We’ll nip along to Clem Attlee Court and have another look from the point of view of hiding evidence; from what I saw in the dark there were a lot of bins and bushes…Oh, and call the Bridlington Bookshop in Putney. We can have a word with the old bloke who claims he met Quine there on the eighth.”

He strode back into his office and Robin sat down at her computer. The scarf she had just hung up was dripping icily onto the floor, but she did not care. The memory of Quine’s mutilated body continued to haunt her, yet she was possessed of an urge (concealed from Matthew like a dirty secret) to find out more, to find out everything.

What infuriated her was that Strike, who of all people should have understood, could not see in her what so obviously burned in him.