The Silkworm

29

In spite of their near-crash, Strike and Robin entered the Devonshire town of Tiverton shortly after twelve. Robin followed the sat nav’s instructions past quiet country houses topped with thick layers of glittering white, over a neat little bridge spanning a river the color of flint and past a sixteenth-century church of unexpected grandeur to the far side of the town, where a pair of electric gates were discreetly set back from the road.

A handsome young Filipino man wearing what appeared to be deck shoes and an overlarge coat was attempting to prize these open manually. When he caught sight of the Land Cruiser he mimed to Robin to wind down her window.

“Frozen,” he told her succinctly. “Wait a moment, please.”

They sat for five minutes until at last he had succeeded in unfreezing the gates and had dug a clearing in the steadily falling snow to allow the gates to swing open.

“Do you want a lift back to the house?” Robin asked him.

He climbed into the backseat beside Strike’s crutches.

“You friends of Mr. Chard?”

“He’s expecting us,” said Strike evasively.

Up a long and winding private driveway they went, the Land Cruiser making easy work of the heaped, crunchy overnight fall. The shiny dark green leaves of the rhododendrons lining the path had refused to bear their load of snow, so that the approach was all black and white: walls of dense foliage crowding in on the pale, powdery drive. Tiny spots of light had started popping in front of Robin’s eyes. It had been a very long time since breakfast and, of course, Strike had eaten all the biscuits.

Her feeling of seasickness and a slight sense of unreality persisted as she got down out of the Toyota and looked up at Tithebarn House, which stood beside a dark patch of wood that pressed close to one side of the house. The massive oblong structure in front of them had been converted by an adventurous architect: half of the roof had been replaced by sheet glass; the other seemed to be covered in solar panels. Looking up at the place where the structure became transparent and skeletal against the bright, light gray sky made Robin feel even giddier. It reminded her of the ghastly picture on Strike’s phone, the vaulted space of glass and light in which Quine’s mutilated body had lain.

“Are you all right?” said Strike, concerned. She looked very pale.

“Fine,” said Robin, who wanted to maintain her heroic status in his eyes. Taking deep lungfuls of the frosty air, she followed Strike, surprisingly nimble on his crutches, up the gravel path towards the entrance. Their young passenger had disappeared without another word to them.

Daniel Chard opened the front door himself. He was wearing a mandarin-collared, smock-like shirt in chartreuse silk and loose linen trousers. Like Strike, he was on crutches, his left foot and calf encased in a thick surgical boot and strapping. Chard looked down at Strike’s dangling, empty trouser leg and for several painful seconds did not seem able to look away.

“And you thought you had problems,” said Strike, holding out his hand.

The small joke fell flat. Chard did not smile. The aura of awkwardness, of otherness, that had surrounded him at his firm’s party clung to him still. He shook Strike’s hand without looking him in the eye and his welcoming words were:

“I’ve been expecting you to cancel all morning.”

“No, we made it,” said Strike unnecessarily. “This is my assistant, Robin, who’s driven me down. I hope—”

“No, she can’t sit outside in the snow,” said Chard, though without noticeable warmth. “Come in.”

He backed away on his crutches to let them move over the threshold onto highly polished floorboards the color of honey.

“Would you mind removing your shoes?”

A stocky, middle-aged Filipina woman with her black hair in a bun emerged from a pair of swing doors set into the brick wall on their right. She was clothed entirely in black and holding two white linen bags into which Strike and Robin were evidently expected to put their footwear. Robin handed hers over; it made her feel strangely vulnerable to feel the boards beneath her soles. Strike merely stood there on his single foot.

“Oh,” said Chard, staring again. “No, I suppose…Mr. Strike had better keep his shoe on, Nenita.”

The woman retired wordlessly into the kitchen.

Somehow, the interior of Tithebarn House increased Robin’s unpleasant sensation of vertigo. No walls divided its vast interior. The first floor, which was reached by a steel and glass spiral staircase, was suspended on thick metal cables from the high ceiling. Chard’s huge double bed, which seemed to be of black leather, was visible, high above them, with what looked like a huge crucifix of barbed wire hanging over it on the brick wall. Robin dropped her gaze hastily, feeling sicker than ever.

Most of the furniture on the lower level comprised cubes of white or black leather. Vertical steel radiators were interspersed with artfully simple bookshelves of more wood and metal. The dominant feature of the under-furnished room was a life-size white marble sculpture of an angel, perched on a rock and partially dissected to expose half of her skull, a portion of her guts and a slice of the bone in her leg. Her breast, Robin saw, unable to tear her eyes away, was revealed as a mound of fat globules sitting on a circle of muscle that resembled the gills of a mushroom.

Ludicrous to feel sick when the dissected body was made of cold, pure stone, mere insentient albescence, nothing like the rotting carcass preserved on Strike’s mobile…don’t think about that…she ought to have made Strike leave at least one biscuit…sweat had broken out on her upper lip, her scalp…

“You all right, Robin?” asked Strike sharply. She knew she must have changed color from the look on the two men’s faces, and to her fear that she might pass out was added embarrassment that she was being a liability to Strike.

“Sorry,” she said through numb lips. “Long journey…if I could have a glass of water…”

“Er—very well,” said Chard, as though water were in short supply. “Nenita?”

The woman in black reappeared.

“The young lady needs a glass of water,” said Chard.

Nenita gestured to Robin to follow her. Robin heard the publisher’s crutches making a gentle thump, thump behind her on the wooden floor as she entered the kitchen. She had a brief impression of steel surfaces and whitewashed walls, and the young man to whom she had given a lift prodding at a large saucepan, then found herself sitting on a low stool.

Robin had assumed that Chard had followed to see that she was all right, but as Nenita pressed a cold glass into her hand she heard him speak somewhere above her.

“Thanks for fixing the gates, Manny.”

The young man did not reply. Robin heard the clunk of Chard’s crutches recede and the swinging of the kitchen doors.

“That’s my fault,” Strike told Chard, when the publisher rejoined him. He felt truly guilty. “I ate all the food she brought for the journey.”

“Nenita can give her something,” said Chard. “Shall we sit down?”

Strike followed him past the marble angel, which was reflected mistily in the warm wood below, and they headed on their four crutches to the end of the room, where a black iron woodburner made a pool of welcome warmth.

“Great place,” said Strike, lowering himself onto one of the larger cubes of black leather and laying his crutches beside him. The compliment was insincere; his preference was for utilitarian comfort and Chard’s house seemed to him to be all surface and show.

“Yes, I worked closely with the architects,” said Chard, with a small flicker of enthusiasm. “There’s a studio”—he pointed through another discreet pair of doors—“and a pool.”

He too sat down, stretching out the leg that ended in the thick, strapped boot in front of him.

“How did it happen?” Strike asked, nodding towards the broken leg.

Chard pointed with the end of his crutch at the metal and glass spiral staircase.

“Painful,” said Strike, eyeing the drop.

“The crack echoed all through the space,” said Chard, with an odd relish. “I hadn’t realized one can actually hear it happening.

“Would you like a tea or coffee?”

“Tea would be great.”

Strike saw Chard place his uninjured foot on a small brass plate beside his seat. Slight pressure, and Manny emerged again from the kitchen.

“Tea, please, Manny,” said Chard with a warmth conspicuously absent in his usual manner. The young man disappeared again, sullen as ever.

“Is that St. Michael’s Mount?” Strike asked, pointing to a small picture hanging near the woodburner. It was a naive painting on what seemed to be board.

“An Alfred Wallis,” said Chard, with another minor glow of enthusiasm. “The simplicity of the forms…primitive and naive. My father knew him. Wallis only took up painting seriously in his seventies. You know Cornwall?”

“I grew up there,” said Strike.

But Chard was more interested in talking about Alfred Wallis. He mentioned again that the artist had only found his true métier late in life and embarked on an exposition of the artist’s works. Strike’s total lack of interest in the subject went unnoticed. Chard was not fond of eye contact. The publisher’s eyes slid from the painting to spots around the large brick interior, seeming to glance at Strike only incidentally.

“You’re just back from New York, aren’t you?” asked Strike when Chard drew breath.

“A three-day conference, yes,” said Chard and the flare of enthusiasm faded. He gave the impression of repeating stock phrases as he said, “Challenging times. The arrival of electronic reading devices has been a game changer. Do you read?” he asked Strike, point-blank.

“Sometimes,” said Strike. There was a battered James Ellroy in his flat that he had been intending to finish for four weeks, but most nights he was too tired to focus. His favorite book lay in one of the unpacked boxes of possessions on the landing; it was twenty years old and he had not opened it for a long time.

“We need readers,” muttered Daniel Chard. “More readers. Fewer writers.”

Strike suppressed the urge to retort, Well, you’ve got rid of one of them, at least.

Manny reappeared bearing a clear perspex tray on legs, which he set down in front of his employer. Chard leaned forward to pour the tea into tall white porcelain mugs. His leather furniture, Strike noted, did not emit the irritating sounds his own office sofa did, but then, it had probably cost ten times as much. The backs of Chard’s hands were as raw and painful-looking as they had been at the company party, and in the clear overhead lighting set into the underside of the hanging first floor he looked older than he had at a distance; sixty, perhaps, yet the dark, deep-set eyes, the hawkish nose and the thin mouth were handsome still in their severity.

“He’s forgotten the milk,” said Chard, scrutinizing the tray. “Do you take milk?”

“Yeah,” said Strike.

Chard sighed, but instead of pressing the brass plate on the floor he struggled back onto his one sound foot and his crutches, and swung off towards the kitchen, leaving Strike staring thoughtfully after him.

Those who worked with him found Daniel Chard peculiar, although Nina had described him as shrewd. His uncontrolled rages about Bombyx Mori had sounded to Strike like the reaction of an over-sensitive man of questionable judgment. He remembered the slight sense of embarrassment emanating from the crowd as Chard mumbled his speech at the anniversary party. An odd man, hard to read…

Strike’s eyes drifted upwards. Snow was falling gently onto the clear roof high above the marble angel. The glass must be heated in some way, to prevent the snow settling, Strike concluded. And the memory of Quine, eviscerated and trussed, burned and rotting beneath a great vaulted window, returned to him. Like Robin, he suddenly found the high glass ceiling of Tithebarn House unpleasantly reminiscent.

Chard reemerged from the kitchen and swung back across the floor on his crutches, a small jug of milk held precariously in his hand.

“You’ll be wondering why I asked you to come here,” said Chard finally, when he had sat back down and each of them held his tea at last. Strike arranged his features to look receptive.

“I need somebody I can trust,” said Chard without waiting for Strike’s answer. “Someone outside the company.”

One darting glance at Strike and he fixed his eyes safely on his Alfred Wallis again.

“I think,” said Chard, “I may be the only person who’s realized that Owen Quine did not work alone. He had an accomplice.”

“An accomplice?” Strike repeated at last, as Chard seemed to expect a response.

“Yes,” said Chard fervently. “Oh yes. You see, the style of Bombyx Mori is Owen’s, but somebody else was in on it. Someone helped him.”

Chard’s sallow skin had flushed. He gripped and fondled the handle of one of the crutches beside him.

“The police will be interested, I think, if this can be proven?” said Chard, managing to look Strike full in the face. “If Owen was murdered because of what was written in Bombyx Mori, wouldn’t an accomplice be culpable?”

“Culpable?” repeated Strike. “You think this accomplice persuaded Quine to insert material in the book in the hope that a third party would retaliate murderously?”

“I…well, I’m not sure,” said Chard, frowning. “He might not have expected that to happen, precisely—but he certainly intended to wreak havoc.”

His knuckles were whitening as they tightened on the handle of his crutch.

“What makes you think Quine had help?” asked Strike.

“Owen couldn’t have known some of the things that are insinuated in Bombyx Mori unless he’d been fed information,” said Chard, now staring at the side of his stone angel.

“I think the police’s main interest in an accomplice,” said Strike slowly, “would be because he or she might have a lead on the killer.”

It was the truth, but it was also a way of reminding Chard that a man had died in grotesque circumstances. The identity of the murderer did not seem of pressing interest to Chard.

“Do you think so?” asked Chard with a faint frown.

“Yeah,” said Strike, “I do. And they’d be interested in an accomplice if they were able to shed light on some of the more oblique passages in the book. One of the theories the police are bound to be following is that someone killed Quine to stop him revealing something that he had hinted at in Bombyx Mori.”

Daniel Chard was staring at Strike with an arrested expression.

“Yes. I hadn’t…Yes.”

To Strike’s surprise, the publisher pulled himself up on his crutches and began to move a few paces backwards and forwards, swinging on his crutches in a parodic version of those first tentative physiotherapy exercises Strike had been given, years previously, at Selly Oak Hospital. Strike saw now that he was a fit man, that biceps rippled beneath the silk sleeves.

“The killer, then—” Chard began, and then “What?” he snapped suddenly, staring over Strike’s shoulder.

Robin had reemerged from the kitchen, a much healthier color.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pausing, unnerved.

“This is confidential,” said Chard. “No, I’m sorry. Could you return to the kitchen, please?”

“I—all right,” said Robin, taken aback and, Strike could tell, offended. She threw him a look, expecting him to say something, but he was silent.

When the swing doors had closed behind Robin, Chard said angrily:

“Now I’ve lost my train of thought. Entirely lost—”

“You were saying something about the killer.”

“Yes. Yes,” said Chard manically, resuming his backwards and forwards motion, swinging on his crutches. “The killer, then, if they knew about the accomplice, might want to target him too? And perhaps that’s occurred to him,” said Chard, more to himself than to Strike, his eyes on his expensive floorboards. “Perhaps that accounts…Yes.”

The small window in the wall nearest Strike showed only the dark face of the wood close by the house; white flecks falling dreamily against the black.

“Disloyalty,” said Chard suddenly, “cuts at me like nothing else.”

He stopped his agitated thumping up and down and turned to face the detective.

“If,” he said, “I told you who I suspect to have helped Owen, and asked you to bring me proof, would you feel obliged to pass that information to the police?”

It was a delicate question, thought Strike, running a hand absently over his chin, imperfectly shaved in the haste of leaving that morning.

“If you’re asking me to establish the truth of your suspicions…” said Strike slowly.

“Yes,” said Chard. “Yes, I am. I would like to be sure.”

“Then no, I don’t think I’d need to tell the police what I’m up to. But if I uncovered the fact that there was an accomplice and it looked like they might have killed Quine—or knew who had done it—I’d obviously consider myself duty-bound to inform the police.”

Chard lowered himself back onto one of the large leather cubes, dropping his crutches with a clatter on the floor.

“Damn,” he said, his displeasure echoing off the many hard surfaces around them as he leaned over to check that he had not dented the varnished wood.

“You know I’ve also been engaged by Quine’s wife to try and find out who killed him?” Strike asked.

“I had heard something of the sort,” said Chard, still examining his teak floorboards for damage. “That won’t interfere with this line of inquiry, though?”

His self-absorption was remarkable, Strike thought. He remembered Chard’s copperplate writing on the card with the painting of violets: Do let me know if there is anything you need. Perhaps his secretary had dictated it to him.

“Would you like to tell me who the alleged collaborator is?” asked Strike.

“This is extremely painful,” mumbled Chard, his eyes flitting from Alfred Wallis to the stone angel and up to the spiral stairs.

Strike said nothing.

“It’s Jerry Waldegrave,” said Chard, glancing at Strike and away again. “And I’ll tell you why I suspect—how I know.

“His behavior has been strange for weeks. I first noticed it when he telephoned me about Bombyx Mori, to tell me what Quine had done. There was no embarrassment, no apology.”

“Would you have expected Waldegrave to apologize for something Quine had written?”

The question seemed to surprise Chard.

“Well—Owen was one of Jerry’s authors, so yes, I would have expected some regret that Owen had depicted me in that—in that way.”

And Strike’s unruly imagination again showed him the naked Phallus Impudicus standing over the body of a dead young man emitting supernatural light.

“Are you and Waldegrave on bad terms?” he asked.

“I’ve shown Jerry Waldegrave a lot of forbearance, a considerable forbearance,” said Chard, ignoring the direct question. “I kept him on full pay while he went to a treatment facility a year ago. Perhaps he feels hard done by,” said Chard, “but I’ve been on his side, yes, on occasions when many another man, a more prudent man, might have remained neutral. Jerry’s personal misfortunes are not of my making. There is resentment. Yes, I would say that there is definite resentment, however unjustified.”

“Resentment about what?” asked Strike.

“Jerry isn’t fond of Michael Fancourt,” mumbled Chard, his eyes on the flames in the woodburner. “Michael had a—a flirtation, a long time ago, with Fenella, Jerry’s wife. And as it happens, I actually warned Michael off, because of my friendship with Jerry. Yes!” said Chard, nodding, deeply impressed by the memory of his own actions. “I told Michael it was unkind and unwise, even in his state of…because Michael had lost his first wife, you see, not very long before.

“Michael didn’t appreciate my unsolicited advice. He took offense; he took off for a different publisher. The board was very unhappy,” said Chard. “It’s taken us twenty-odd years to lure Michael back.

“But after all this time,” Chard said, his bald pate merely one more reflective surface among the glass, polished wood and steel, “Jerry can hardly expect his personal animosities to govern company policy. Ever since Michael agreed to come back to Roper Chard, Jerry has made it his business to—to undermine me, subtly, in a hundred little ways.

“What I believe happened is this,” said Chard, glancing from time to time at Strike, as though to gauge his reaction. “Jerry took Owen into his confidence about Michael’s deal, which we were trying to keep under wraps. Owen had, of course, been an enemy of Fancourt’s for a quarter of a century. Owen and Jerry decided to concoct this…this dreadful book, in which Michael and I are subjected to—to disgusting calumnies as a way of drawing attention away from Michael’s arrival and as an act of revenge on both of us, on the company, on anyone else they cared to denigrate.

“And, most tellingly,” said Chard, his voice echoing now through the empty space, “after I told Jerry, explicitly, to make sure the manuscript was locked safely away he allowed it to be read widely by anyone who cared to do so, and having made sure it’s being gossiped about all over London, he resigns and leaves me looking—”

“When did Waldegrave resign?” asked Strike.

“The day before yesterday,” said Chard, before plunging on: “and he was extremely reluctant to join me in legal action against Quine. That in itself shows—”

“Perhaps he thought bringing in lawyers would draw more attention to the book?” Strike suggested. “Waldegrave’s in Bombyx Mori himself, isn’t he?”

“That!” said Chard and sniggered. It was the first sign of humor Strike had seen in him and the effect was unpleasant. “You don’t want to take everything at face value, Mr. Strike. Owen never knew about that.”

“About what?”

“The Cutter character is Jerry’s own work—I realized it on a third reading,” said Chard. “Very, very clever: it looks like an attack on Jerry himself, but it’s really a way of causing Fenella pain. They are still married, you see, but very unhappily. Very unhappily.

“Yes, I saw it all, on rereading,” said Chard. The spotlights in the hanging ceiling made rippled reflections on his skull as he nodded. “Owen didn’t write the Cutter. He barely knows Fenella. He didn’t know about that old business.”

“So what exactly are the bloody sack and the dwarf supposed to—?”

“Get it out of Jerry,” said Chard. “Make him tell you. Why should I help him spread slander around?”

“I’ve been wondering,” Strike said, obediently dropping that line of inquiry, “why Michael Fancourt agreed to come to Roper Chard when Quine was working for you, given that they were on such bad terms?”

There was a short pause.

“We were under no legal obligation to publish Owen’s next book,” said Chard. “We had a first-look option. That was all.”

“So you think Jerry Waldegrave told Quine that he was about to be dropped, to keep Fancourt happy?”

“Yes,” said Chard, staring at his own fingernails. “I do. Also, I had offended Owen the last time I saw him, so the news that I might be about to drop him no doubt swept away any last vestige of loyalty he might once have felt towards me, because I took him on when every other publisher in Britain had given up on—”

“How did you offend him?”

“Oh, it was when he last came into the office. He brought his daughter with him.”

“Orlando?”

“Named, he told me, for the eponymous protagonist of the novel by Virginia Woolf.” Chard hesitated, his eyes flickering to Strike and then back to his nails. “She’s—not quite right, his daughter.”

“Really?” said Strike. “In what way?”

“Mentally,” mumbled Chard. “I was visiting the art department when they came in. Owen told me he was showing her around—something he had no business doing, but Owen always made himself at home…great sense of entitlement and self-importance, always…

“His daughter grabbed at a mock-up cover—grubby hands—I seized her wrist to stop her ruining it—” He mimed the action in midair; with the remembrance of this act of near desecration came a look of distaste. “It was instinctive, you know, a desire to protect the image, but it upset her very much. There was a scene. Very embarrassing and uncomfortable,” mumbled Chard, who seemed to suffer again in retrospect. “She became almost hysterical. Owen was furious. That, no doubt, was my crime. That, and bringing Michael Fancourt back to Roper Chard.”

“Who,” Strike asked, “would you think had most reason to be upset at their depiction in Bombyx Mori?”

“I really don’t know,” said Chard. After a short pause he said, “Well, I doubt Elizabeth Tassel was delighted to see herself portrayed as parasitic, after all the years of shepherding Owen out of parties to stop him making a drunken fool of himself, but I’m afraid,” said Chard coldly, “I haven’t got much sympathy for Elizabeth. She allowed that book to go out unread. Criminal carelessness.”

“Did you contact Fancourt after you’d read the manuscript?” asked Strike.

“He had to know what Quine had done,” said Chard. “Better by far that he heard it from me. He was just home from receiving the Prix Prévost in Paris. I did not make that call with relish.”

“How did he react?”

“Michael’s resilient,” muttered Chard. “He told me not to worry, said that Owen had done himself more harm than he had done us. Michael rather enjoys his enmities. He was perfectly calm.”

“Did you tell him what Quine had said, or implied, about him in the book?”

“Of course,” said Chard. “I couldn’t let him hear it from anyone else.”

“And he didn’t seem upset?”

“He said, ‘The last word will be mine, Daniel. The last word will be mine.’”

“What did you understand by that?”

“Oh, well, Michael’s a famous assassin,” said Chard, with a small smile. “He can flay anyone alive in five well-chosen—when I say ‘assassin,’” said Chard, suddenly and comically anxious, “naturally, I’m talking in literary—”

“Of course,” Strike reassured him. “Did you ask Fancourt to join you in legal action against Quine?”

“Michael despises the courts as a means of redress in such matters.”

“You knew the late Joseph North, didn’t you?” asked Strike conversationally.

The muscles in Chard’s face tightened: a mask beneath the darkening skin.

“A very—that was a very long time ago.”

“North was a friend of Quine’s, wasn’t he?”

“I turned down Joe North’s novel,” said Chard. His thin mouth was working. “That’s all I did. Half a dozen other publishers did the same. It was a mistake, commercially speaking. It had some success, posthumously. Of course,” he added dismissively, “I think Michael largely rewrote it.”

“Quine resented you turning his friend’s book down?”

“Yes, he did. He made a lot of noise about it.”

“But he came to Roper Chard anyway?”

“There was nothing personal in my turning down Joe North’s book,” said Chard, with heightened color. “Owen came to understand that, eventually.”

There was another uncomfortable pause.

“So…when you’re hired to find a—a criminal of this type,” said Chard, changing subject with palpable effort, “do you work with the police on that, or—?”

“Oh yeah,” said Strike, with a wry remembrance of the animosity he had recently encountered from the force, but delighted that Chard had played so conveniently into his hands. “I’ve got great contacts at the Met. Your movements don’t seem to be giving them any cause for concern,” he said, with faint emphasis on the personal pronoun.

The provocative, slippery phrasing had its full effect.

“The police have looked into my movements?”

Chard spoke like a frightened boy, unable to muster even a pretense of self-protective sangfroid.

“Well, you know, everyone depicted in Bombyx Mori was bound to come in for scrutiny from the police,” said Strike casually, sipping his tea, “and everything you people did after the fifth, when Quine walked out on his wife, taking the book with him, will be of interest to them.”

And to Strike’s great satisfaction, Chard began at once to review his own movements aloud, apparently for his own reassurance.

“Well, I didn’t know anything about the book at all until the seventh,” he said, staring at his bound-up foot again. “I was down here when Jerry called me…I headed straight back up to London—Manny drove me. I spent the night at home, Manny and Nenita can confirm that…on the Monday I met with my lawyers at the office, talked to Jerry…I was at a dinner party that night—close friends in Notting Hill—and again Manny drove me home…I turned in early on Tuesday because on Wednesday morning I was going to New York. I was there until the thirteenth…home all day the fourteenth…on the fifteenth…”

Chard’s mumbling deteriorated into silence. Perhaps he had realized that there was not the slightest need for him to explain himself to Strike. The darting look he gave the detective was suddenly cagey. Chard had wanted to buy an ally; Strike could tell that he had suddenly awoken to the double-edged nature of such a relationship. Strike was not worried. He had gained more from the interview than he had expected; to be unhired now would cost him only money.

Manny came padding back across the floor.

“You want lunch?” he asked Chard curtly.

“In five minutes,” Chard said, with a smile. “I must say good-bye to Mr. Strike first.”

Manny stalked away on rubber-soled shoes.

“He’s sulking,” Chard told Strike, with an uncomfortable half-laugh. “They don’t like it down here. They prefer London.”

He retrieved his crutches from the floor and pushed himself back up into a standing position. Strike, with more effort, imitated him.

“And how is—er—Mrs. Quine?” Chard said, with an air of belatedly ticking off the proprieties as they swung, like strange three-legged animals, back towards the front door. “Big redheaded woman, yes?”

“No,” said Strike. “Thin. Graying hair.”

“Oh,” said Chard, without much interest. “I met someone else.”

Strike paused beside the swing doors that led to the kitchen. Chard halted too, looking aggrieved.

“I’m afraid I need to get on, Mr. Strike—”

“So do I,” said Strike pleasantly, “but I don’t think my assistant would thank me for leaving her behind.”

Chard had evidently forgotten the existence of Robin, whom he had so peremptorily dismissed.

“Oh, yes, of course—Manny! Nenita!”

“She’s in the bathroom,” said the stocky woman, emerging from the kitchen holding the linen bag containing Robin’s shoes.

The wait passed in a faintly uncomfortable silence. At last Robin appeared, her expression stony, and slipped her feet back into her shoes.

The cold air bit their warm faces as the front door swung open while Strike shook hands with Chard. Robin moved directly to the car and climbed into the driver’s seat without speaking to anyone.

Manny reappeared in his thick coat.

“I’ll come down with you,” he told Strike. “To check the gates.”

“They can buzz the house if they’re stuck, Manny,” said Chard, but the young man paid no attention, clambering into the car as before.

The three of them rode in silence back down the black-and-white drive, through the falling snow. Manny pressed the remote control he had brought with him and the gates slid open without difficulty.

“Thanks,” said Strike, turning to look at him in the backseat. “’Fraid you’ve got a cold walk back.”

Manny sniffed, got out of the car and slammed the door. Robin had just shifted into first gear when Manny appeared at Strike’s window. She applied the brake.

“Yeah?” said Strike, winding the window down.

“I didn’t push him,” said Manny fiercely.

“Sorry?”

“Down the stairs,” said Manny. “I didn’t push him. He’s lying.”

Strike and Robin stared at him.

“You believe me?”

“Yeah,” said Strike.

“OK then,” said Manny, nodding at them. “OK.”

He turned and walked, slipping a little in his rubber-soled shoes, back up to the house.