The Silkworm

28

At five o’clock the following morning, a muffled and gloved Robin boarded one of the first Tube trains of the day, her hair glistening with snowflakes, a small backpack over her shoulder and carrying a weekend bag into which she had packed the black dress, coat and shoes that she would need for Mrs. Cunliffe’s funeral. She did not dare count on getting back home after the round trip to Devon, but intended to go straight to King’s Cross once she had returned the car to the hire company.

Sitting on the almost empty train she consulted her own feelings about the day ahead and found them mixed. Excitement was her dominant emotion, because she was convinced that Strike had some excellent reason for interviewing Chard that could not wait. Robin had learned to trust her boss’s judgment and his hunches; it was one of the things that so irritated Matthew.

Matthew…Robin’s black-gloved fingers tightened on the handle of the bag beside her. She kept lying to Matthew. Robin was a truthful person and never, in the nine years that they had been together, had she lied, or not until recently. Some had been lies of omission. Matthew had asked her on the telephone on Wednesday night what she had done at work that day and she had given him a brief and heavily edited version of her activities, omitting her trip with Strike to the house where Quine had been murdered, lunch at the Albion and, of course, the walk across the bridge at West Brompton station with Strike’s heavy arm over her shoulder.

But there had been outright lies too. Just last night he had asked her, like Strike, whether she oughtn’t take the day off, get an earlier train.

“I tried,” she had said, the lie sliding easily from her lips before she considered it. “They’re all full. It’s the weather, isn’t it? I suppose people are taking the train instead of risking it in their cars. I’ll just have to stick with the sleeper.”

What else could I say? thought Robin as the dark windows reflected her own tense face back at her. He’d have gone ballistic.

The truth was that she wanted to go to Devon; she wanted to help Strike; she wanted to get out from behind her computer, however much quiet satisfaction her competent administration of the business gave her, and investigate. Was that wrong? Matthew thought so. It wasn’t what he’d counted on. He had wanted her to go with the advertising agency, into human resources, at nearly twice the salary. London was so expensive. Matthew wanted a bigger flat. He was, she supposed, carrying her…

Then there was Strike. A familiar frustration, a tight knot in her stomach: we’ll have to get someone else in. Constant mentions of this prospective partner, who was assuming mythical substance in Robin’s mind: a short-haired, shrew-faced woman like the police officer who had stood guard outside the crime scene in Talgarth Road. She would be competent and trained in all the ways that Robin was not, and unencumbered (for the very first time, in this half empty, brightly lit Tube carriage, with the world dark outside and her ears full of rumble and clatter, she said it openly to herself) by a fiancé like Matthew.

But Matthew was the axis of her life, the fixed center. She loved him; she had always loved him. He had stuck with her through the worst time in her life, when many young men would have left. She wanted to marry him and she was going to marry him. It was just that they had never had fundamental disagreements before, never. Something about her job, her decision to stay with Strike, about Strike himself, had introduced a rogue element into their relationship, something threatening and new…

The Toyota Land Cruiser that Robin had hired had been parked overnight in the Q-Park in Chinatown, one of the nearest car parks to Denmark Street, where there was no parking at all. Slipping and sliding in her flattest smart shoes, the weekend bag swinging from her right hand, Robin hurried through the darkness to the multistory, refusing to think anymore about Matthew, or what he would think or say if he could see her, heading off for six hours alone in the car with Strike. After placing her bag in the boot, Robin sat back in the driver’s seat, set up the sat nav, adjusted the heating and left the engine running to warm up the icy interior.

Strike was a little late, which was unlike him. Robin whiled away the wait by acquainting herself fully with the controls. She loved cars, had always loved driving. By the age of ten she had been able to drive the tractor on her uncle’s farm as long as someone helped her release the handbrake. Unlike Matthew, she had passed her test the first time. She had learned not to tease him about this.

Movement glimpsed in her rearview mirror made her look up. A dark-suited Strike was making his way laboriously towards the car on crutches, his right trouser leg pinned up.

Robin felt a sick, swooping feeling in the pit of her stomach—not because of the amputated leg, which she had seen before, and in much more troubling circumstances, but because it was the first time that she had known Strike forsake the prosthesis in public.

She got out of the car, then wished she hadn’t when she caught his scowl.

“Good thinking, getting a four-by-four,” he said, silently warning her not to talk about his leg.

“Yeah, I thought we’d better in this weather,” said Robin.

He moved around to the passenger seat. Robin knew she must not offer help; she could feel an exclusion zone around him as though he were telepathically rejecting all offers of assistance or sympathy, but she was worried that he would not be able to get inside unaided. Strike threw his crutches onto the backseat and stood for a moment precariously balanced; then, with a show of upper body strength that she had never seen before, pulled himself smoothly into the car.

Robin jumped back in hastily, closed her door, put her seatbelt on and reversed out of the parking space. Strike’s preemptive rejection of her concern sat like a wall between them and to her sympathy was added a twist of resentment that he would not let her in to that tiny degree. When had she ever fussed over him or tried to mother him? The most she had ever done was pass him paracetamol…

Strike knew himself to be unreasonable, but the awareness merely increased his irritation. On waking it had been obvious that to try to force the prosthesis onto his leg, when the knee was hot, swollen and extremely painful, would be an act of idiocy. He had been forced to descend the metal stairs on his backside, like a small child. Traversing Charing Cross Road on ice and crutches had earned him the stares of those few early-morning pedestrians who were braving the subzero darkness. He had never wanted to return to this state but here he was, all because of a temporary forgetfulness that he was not, like the dream Strike, whole.

At least, Strike noted with relief, Robin could drive. His sister, Lucy, was distractible and unreliable behind the wheel. Charlotte had always driven her Lexus in a manner that caused Strike physical pain: speeding through red lights, turning up one-way streets, smoking and chatting on her mobile, narrowly missing cyclists and the opening doors of parked cars…Ever since the Viking had blown up around him on that yellow dirt road, Strike had found it difficult to be driven by anyone except a professional.

After a long silence, Robin said:

“There’s coffee in the backpack.”

“What?”

“In the backpack—a flask. I didn’t think we should stop unless we really have to. And there are biscuits.”

The windscreen wipers were carving their way through flecks of snow.

“You’re a bloody marvel,” said Strike, his reserve crumbling. He had not had breakfast: trying and failing to attach his false leg, finding a pin for his suit trousers, digging out his crutches and getting himself downstairs had taken twice the time he had allowed. And in spite of herself, Robin gave a small smile.

Strike poured himself coffee and ate several bits of shortbread, his appreciation of Robin’s deft handling of the strange car increasing as his hunger decreased.

“What does Matthew drive?” he asked as they sped over the Boston Manor viaduct.

“Nothing,” said Robin. “We haven’t got a car in London.”

“Yeah, no need,” said Strike, privately reflecting that if he ever gave Robin the salary she deserved they might be able to afford one.

“So what are you planning to ask Daniel Chard?” Robin asked.

“Plenty,” said Strike, brushing crumbs off his dark jacket. “First off, whether he’d fallen out with Quine and, if so, what about. I can’t fathom why Quine—total dickhead though he clearly was—decided to attack the man who had his livelihood in his hands and who had the money to sue him into oblivion.”

Strike munched shortbread for a while, swallowed, then added:

“Unless Jerry Waldegrave’s right and Quine was having a genuine breakdown when he wrote it and lashed out at anyone he thought he could blame for his lousy sales.”

Robin, who had finished reading Bombyx Mori while Strike had been having lunch with Elizabeth Tassel the previous day, said:

“Isn’t the writing too coherent for somebody having a breakdown?”

“The syntax might be sound, but I don’t think you’d find many people who’d disagree that the content’s bloody insane.”

“His other writing’s very like it.”

“None of his other stuff’s as crazy as Bombyx Mori,” said Strike. “Hobart’s Sin and The Balzac Brothers both had plots.”

“This has got a plot.”

“Has it? Or is Bombyx’s little walking tour just a convenient way of stringing together a load of attacks on different people?”

The snow fell thick and fast as they passed the exit to Heathrow, talking about the novel’s various grotesqueries, laughing a little over its ludicrous jumps of logic, its absurdities. The trees on either side of the motorway looked as though they had been dusted with tons of icing sugar.

“Maybe Quine was born four hundred years too late,” said Strike, still eating shortbread. “Elizabeth Tassel told me there’s a Jacobean revenge play featuring a poisoned skeleton disguised as a woman. Presumably someone shags it and dies. Not a million miles away from Phallus Impudicus getting ready to—”

“Don’t,” said Robin, with a half laugh and a shudder.

But Strike had not broken off because of her protest, or because of any sense of repugnance. Something had flickered deep in his subconscious as he spoke. Somebody had told him…someone had said…but the memory was gone in a flash of tantalizing silver, like a minnow vanishing in pondweed.

“A poisoned skeleton,” Strike muttered, trying to capture the elusive memory, but it was gone.

“And I finished Hobart’s Sin last night as well,” said Robin, overtaking a dawdling Prius.

“You’re a sucker for punishment,” said Strike, reaching for a sixth biscuit. “I didn’t think you were enjoying it.”

“I wasn’t, and it didn’t improve. It’s all about—”

“A hermaphrodite who’s pregnant and gets an abortion because a kid would interfere with his literary ambitions,” said Strike.

“You’ve read it!”

“No, Elizabeth Tassel told me.”

“There’s a bloody sack in it,” said Robin.

Strike looked sideways at her pale profile, serious as she watched the road ahead, her eyes flicking to the rearview mirror.

“What’s inside?”

“The aborted baby,” said Robin. “It’s horrible.”

Strike digested this information as they passed the turning to Maidenhead.

“Strange,” he said at last.

“Grotesque,” said Robin.

“No, it’s strange,” insisted Strike. “Quine was repeating himself. That’s the second thing from Hobart’s Sin he put in Bombyx Mori. Two hermaphrodites, two bloody sacks. Why?”

“Well,” said Robin, “they aren’t exactly the same. In Bombyx Mori the bloody sack doesn’t belong to the hermaphrodite and it hasn’t got an aborted baby in it…maybe he’d reached the end of his invention,” she said. “Maybe Bombyx Mori was like a—a final bonfire of all his ideas.”

“The funeral pyre for his career is what it was.”

Strike sat deep in thought while the scenery beyond the window became steadily more rural. Breaks in the trees showed wide fields of snow, white upon white beneath a pearly gray sky, and still the snow came thick and fast at the car.

“You know,” Strike said at last, “I think there are two alternatives here. Either Quine genuinely was having a breakdown, had lost touch with what he was doing and believed Bombyx Mori was a masterpiece—or he meant to cause as much trouble as possible, and the duplications are there for a reason.”

“What reason?”

“It’s a key,” said Strike. “By cross-referencing his other books, he was helping people understand what he was getting at in Bombyx Mori. He was trying to tell without being had up for libel.”

Robin did not take her eyes off the snowy motorway, but inclined her face towards him, frowning.

“You think it was all totally deliberate? You think he wanted to cause all this trouble?”

“When you stop and think about it,” said Strike, “it’s not a bad business plan for an egotistical, thick-skinned man who’s hardly selling any books. Kick off as much trouble as you can, get the book gossiped about all over London, threats of legal action, loads of people upset, veiled revelations about a famous writer…and then disappear where the writs can’t find you and, before anyone can stop you, put it out as an ebook.”

“But he was furious when Elizabeth Tassel told him she wouldn’t publish it.”

“Was he?” said Strike thoughtfully, “Or was he faking? Did he keep badgering her to read it because he was getting ready to stage a nice big public row? He sounds like a massive exhibitionist. Perhaps it was all part of his promotional plan. He didn’t think Roper Chard got his books enough publicity—I had that from Leonora.”

“So you think he’d already planned to storm out of the restaurant when he met Elizabeth Tassel?”

“Could be,” said Strike.

“And to go to Talgarth Road?”

“Maybe.”

The sun had risen fully now, so that the frosted treetops sparkled.

“And he got what he wanted, didn’t he?” said Strike, squinting as a thousand specks of ice glittered over the windscreen. “Couldn’t have arranged better publicity for his book if he’d tried. Just a pity he didn’t live to see himself on the BBC news.

“Oh, bollocks,” he added under his breath.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve finished all the biscuits…sorry,” said Strike, contrite.

“That’s all right,” Robin said, amused. “I had breakfast.”

“I didn’t,” Strike confided.

His antipathy to discussing his leg had been dissolved by warm coffee, by their discussion and by her practical thoughts for his comfort.

“Couldn’t get the bloody prosthesis on. My knee’s swollen to hell: I’m going to have to see someone. Took me ages to get sorted.”

She had guessed as much, but appreciated the confidence.

They passed a golf course, its flags protruding from acres of soft whiteness, and water-filled gravel pits now sheets of burnished pewter in the winter light. As they approached Swindon Strike’s phone rang. Checking the number (he half expected a repeat call from Nina Lascelles) he saw that it was Ilsa, his old schoolfriend. He also saw, with misgivings, that he had missed a call from Leonora Quine at six thirty, when he must have been struggling down Charing Cross Road on his crutches.

“Ilsa, hi. What’s going on?”

“Quite a lot, actually,” she said. She sounded tinny and distant; he could tell that she was in her car.

“Did Leonora Quine call you on Wednesday?”

“Yep, we met that afternoon,” she said. “And I’ve just spoken to her again. She told me she tried to speak to you this morning and couldn’t get you.”

“Yeah, I had an early start, must’ve missed her.”

“I’ve got her permission to tell—”

“What’s happened?”

“They’ve taken her in for questioning. I’m on my way to the station now.”

“Shit,” said Strike. “Shit. What have they got?”

“She told me they found photographs in her and Quine’s bedroom. Apparently he liked being tied up and he liked being photographed once restrained,” said Ilsa with mordant matter-of-factness. “She told me all this as though she was talking about the gardening.”

He could hear faint sounds of heavy traffic back in central London. Here on the motorway the loudest sounds were the swish of the windscreen wipers, the steady purr of the powerful engine and the occasional whoosh of the reckless, overtaking in the swirling snow.

“You’d think she’d have the sense to get rid of the pictures,” said Strike.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that suggestion about destroying evidence,” said Ilsa mock-sternly.

“Those pictures aren’t bloody evidence,” said Strike. “Christ almighty, of course they had a kinky sex life, those two—how else was Leonora going to keep hold of a man like Quine? Anstis’s mind’s too clean, that’s the problem; he thinks everything except the missionary position is evidence of bloody criminal tendencies.”

“What do you know about the investigating officer’s sexual habits?” Ilsa asked, amused.

“He’s the bloke I pulled to the back of the vehicle in Afghanistan,” muttered Strike.

“Oh,” said Ilsa.

“And he’s determined to fit up Leonora. If that’s all they’ve got, dirty photos—”

“It isn’t. Did you know the Quines have got a lockup?”

Strike listened, tense, suddenly worried. Could he have been wrong, completely wrong—?

“Well, did you?” asked Ilsa.

“What’ve they found?” asked Strike, no longer flippant. “Not the guts?”

“What did you just say? It sounded like ‘not the guts’!”

“What’ve they found?” Strike corrected himself.

“I don’t know, but I expect I’ll find out when I get there.”

“She’s not under arrest?”

“Just in for questioning, but they’re sure it’s her, I can tell, and I don’t think she realizes how serious things are getting. When she rang me, all she could talk about was her daughter being left with the neighbor, her daughter being upset—”

“The daughter’s twenty-four and she’s got learning difficulties.”

“Oh,” said Ilsa. “Sad…Listen, I’m nearly there, I’ll have to go.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Don’t expect anything soon. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be a while.”

“Shit,” Strike said again as he hung up.

“What’s happened?”

An enormous tanker had pulled out of the slow lane to overtake a Honda Civic with a Baby On Board sign in its rear window. Strike watched its gargantuan silver bullet of a body swaying at speed on the icy road and noted with unspoken approval that Robin slowed down, leaving more braking room.

“The police have taken Leonora in for questioning.”

Robin gasped.

“They’ve found photos of Quine tied up in their bedroom and something else in a lockup, but Ilsa doesn’t know what—”

It had happened to Strike before. The instantaneous shift from calm to calamity. The slowing of time. Every sense suddenly wire-taut and screaming.

The tanker was jackknifing.

He heard himself bellow “BRAKE!” because that was what he had done last time to try to stave off death—

But Robin slammed her foot on the accelerator. The car roared forward. There was no room to pass. The lorry hit the icy road on its side and spun; the Civic hit it, flipped over and skidded on its roof towards the side of the road; a Golf and a Mercedes had slammed into each other and were locked together, speeding towards the truck of the tanker—

They were hurtling towards the ditch at the side of the road. Robin missed the overturned Civic by an inch. Strike grabbed hold of the door handle as the Land Cruiser hit the rough ground at speed—they were going to plow into the ditch and maybe overturn—the tail end of the tanker was swinging lethally towards them, but they were traveling so fast that she missed that by a whisker—a massive jolt, Strike’s head hit the roof of the car, and they had swerved back onto the icy tarmac on the other side of the pileup, unscathed.

“Holy fucking—”

She was braking at last, in total control, pulling up on the hard shoulder, and her face was as white as the snow spattering the windscreen.

“There was a kid in that Civic.”

And before he could say another word she had gone, slamming the door behind her.

He leaned over the back of his seat, trying to grab his crutches. Never had he felt his disability more acutely. He had just managed to pull the crutches into the seat with him when he heard sirens. Squinting through the snowy rear window, he spotted the distant flicker of blue light. The police were there already. He was a one-legged liability. He threw the crutches back down, swearing.

Robin returned to the car ten minutes later.

“It’s OK,” she panted. “The little boy’s all right, he was in a car seat. The lorry driver’s covered in blood but he’s conscious—”

“Are you OK?”

She was trembling a little, but smiled at the question.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I was just scared I was going to see a dead child.”

“Right then,” said Strike, taking a deep breath. “Where the fuck did you learn to drive like that?”

“Oh, I did a couple of advanced driving courses,” said Robin with a shrug, pushing her wet hair out of her eyes.

Strike stared at her.

“When was this?”

“Not long after I dropped out of university. I was…I was going through a bad time and I wasn’t going out much. It was my dad’s idea. I’ve always loved cars.

“It was just something to do,” she said, putting on her seatbelt and turning on the ignition. “Sometimes when I’m home, I go up to the farm to practice. My uncle’s got a field he lets me drive in.”

Strike was still staring at her.

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait a bit before we—?”

“No, I’ve given them my name and address. We should get going.”

She shifted gear and pulled smoothly out onto the motorway. Strike could not look away from her calm profile; her eyes were again fixed on the road, her hands confident and relaxed on the wheel.

“I’ve seen worse steering than that from defensive drivers in the army,” he told her. “The ones who drive generals, who’re trained to make a getaway under fire.” He glanced back at the tangle of overturned vehicles now blocking the road. “I still don’t know how you got us out of that.”

The near-crash had not brought Robin close to tears, but at these words of praise and appreciation she suddenly thought she might cry, let herself down. With a great effort of will she compressed her emotion into a little laugh and said:

“You realize that if I’d braked, we’d have skidded right into the tanker?”

“Yeah,” said Strike, and he laughed too. “Dunno why I said that,” he lied.