Be glad thou art unnam’d; ’tis not worth the owning.
Sleet, rain and snow pelted the office windows in turn the following day. Miss Brocklehurst’s boss turned up at the office around midday to view confirmation of her infidelity. Shortly after Strike had bidden him farewell, Caroline Ingles arrived. She was harried, on her way to pick up her children from school, but determined to give Strike the card for the newly opened Golden Lace Gentleman’s Club and Bar that she had found in her husband’s wallet. Mr. Ingles’s promise to stay well away from lap-dancers, call girls and strippers had been a requirement of their reconciliation. Strike agreed to stake out Golden Lace to see whether Mr. Ingles had again succumbed to temptation. By the time Caroline Ingles had left, Strike was very ready for the pack of sandwiches waiting for him on Robin’s desk, but he had taken barely a mouthful when his phone rang.
Aware that their professional relationship was coming to a close, his brunet client was throwing caution to the winds and inviting Strike out to dinner. Strike thought he could see Robin smiling as she ate her sandwich, determinedly facing her monitor. He tried to decline with politeness, at first pleading his heavy workload and finally telling her that he was in a relationship.
“You never told me that,” she said, suddenly cold.
“I like to keep my private and professional lives separate,” he said.
She hung up halfway through his polite farewell.
“Maybe you should have gone out with her,” said Robin innocently. “Just to make sure she’ll pay her bill.”
“She’ll bloody pay,” growled Strike, making up for lost time by cramming half a sandwich into his mouth. The phone buzzed. He groaned and looked down to see who had texted him.
His stomach contracted.
“Leonora?” asked Robin, who had seen his face fall.
Strike shook his head, his mouth full of sandwich.
The message comprised three words:
It was yours.
He had not changed his number since he had split up with Charlotte. Too much hassle, when a hundred professional contacts had it. This was the first time she had used it in eight months.
Strike remembered Dave Polworth’s warning:
You be on the watch, Diddy, for signs of her galloping back over the horizon. Wouldn’t be surprised if she bolts.
Today was the third, he reminded himself. She was supposed to be getting married tomorrow.
For the first time since he had owned a mobile phone, Strike wished it had the facility to reveal a caller’s location. Had she sent this from the Castle of Fucking Croy, in an interlude between checking the canapés and the flowers in the chapel? Or was she standing on the corner of Denmark Street, watching his office like Pippa Midgley? Running away from a grand, well-publicized wedding like this would be Charlotte’s crowning achievement, the very apex of her career of mayhem and disruption.
Strike put the mobile back into his pocket and started on his second sandwich. Deducing that she was not about to discover what had made Strike’s expression turn stony, Robin screwed up her empty crisp packet, dropped it in the bin and said:
“You’re meeting your brother tonight, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“Aren’t you meeting your brother—?”
“Oh yeah,” said Strike. “Yeah.”
“At the River Café?”
“Yeah.”
It was yours.
“Why?” asked Robin.
Mine. The hell it was. If it even existed.
“What?” said Strike, vaguely aware that Robin had asked him something.
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, pulling himself together. “What did you ask me?”
“Why are you going to the River Café?”
“Oh. Well,” said Strike, reaching for his own packet of crisps, “it’s a long shot, but I want to speak to anyone who witnessed Quine and Tassel’s row. I’m trying to get a handle on whether he staged it, whether he was planning his disappearance all along.”
“You’re hoping to find a member of staff who was there that night?” said Robin, clearly dubious.
“Which is why I’m taking Al,” said Strike. “He knows every waiter in every smart restaurant in London. All my father’s kids do.”
When he had finished lunch he took a coffee into his office and closed the door. Sleet was again spattering his window. He could not resist glancing down into the frozen street, half-expecting (hoping?) to see her there, long black hair whipping around her perfect, pale face, staring up at him, imploring him with her flecked green-hazel eyes…but there was nobody in the street except strangers swaddled against the relentless weather.
He was crazy on every count. She was in Scotland and it was much, much better so.
Later, when Robin had gone home, he put on the Italian suit that Charlotte had bought him over a year ago, when they had dined at this very restaurant to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday. After pulling on his overcoat he locked his flat door and set out for the Tube in the subzero cold, still leaning on his stick.
Christmas assailed him from every window he passed; spangled lights, mounds of new objects, of toys and gadgets, fake snow on glass and sundry pre-Christmas sale signs adding a mournful note in the depths of the recession. More pre-Christmas revelers on the Friday-night Tube: girls in ludicrously tiny glittering dresses risking hypothermia for a fumble with the boy from Packaging. Strike felt weary and low.
The walk from Hammersmith was longer than he had remembered. As he proceeded down Fulham Palace Road he realized how close he was to Elizabeth Tassel’s house. Presumably she had suggested the restaurant, a long way from the Quines’ place in Ladbroke Grove, precisely because of its convenience to her.
After ten minutes Strike turned right and headed through the darkness towards Thames Wharf, through empty echoing streets, his breath rising in a smoky cloud. The riverside garden that in summer would be full of diners at white tableclothed chairs was buried under thick snow. The Thames glinted darkly beyond the pale carpet, iron-cold and menacing. Strike turned into the converted brick storage facility and was at once subsumed in light, warmth and noise.
There, just inside the door, leaning against the bar with his elbow on its shiny steel surface, was Al, deep in friendly conversation with the barman.
He was barely five foot ten, which was short for one of Rokeby’s children, and carrying a little too much weight. His mouse-brown hair was slicked back; he had his mother’s narrow jaw but he had inherited the weak divergent squint that added an attractive strangeness to Rokeby’s handsome face and marked Al inescapably as his father’s son.
Catching sight of Strike, Al let out a roar of welcome, bounced forwards and hugged him. Strike barely responded, being hampered by his stick and the coat he was trying to remove. Al fell back, looking sheepish.
“How are you, bruv?”
In spite of the comic Anglicism, his accent was a strange mid-Atlantic hybrid that testified to years spent between Europe and America.
“Not bad,” said Strike, “you?”
“Yeah, not bad,” echoed Al. “Not bad. Could be worse.”
He gave a kind of exaggerated Gallic shrug. Al had been educated at Le Rosey, the international boarding school in Switzerland, and his body language still bore traces of the Continental manners he had met there. Something else underlay the response, however, something that Strike felt every time they met: Al’s guilt, his defensiveness, a preparedness to meet accusations of having had a soft and easy life compared to his older brother.
“What’re you having?” Al asked. “Beer? Fancy a Peroni?”
They sat side by side at the crammed bar, facing glass shelves of bottles, waiting for their table. Looking down the long, packed restaurant, with its industrial steel ceiling in stylized waves, its cerulean carpet and the wood-burning oven at the end like a giant beehive, Strike spotted a celebrated sculptor, a famous female architect and at least one well-known actor.
“Heard about you and Charlotte,” Al said. “Shame.”
Strike wondered whether Al knew somebody who knew her. He ran with a jet-set crowd that might well stretch to the future Viscount of Croy.
“Yeah, well,” said Strike with a shrug. “For the best.”
(He and Charlotte had sat here, in this wonderful restaurant by the river, and enjoyed their very last happy evening together. It had taken four months for the relationship to unravel and implode, four months of exhausting aggression and misery…it was yours.)
A good-looking young woman whom Al greeted by name showed them to their table; an equally attractive young man handed them menus. Strike waited for Al to order wine and for the staff to depart before explaining why they were there.
“Four weeks ago tonight,” he told Al, “a writer called Owen Quine had a row with his agent in here. By all accounts the whole restaurant saw it. He stormed out and shortly afterwards—probably within days and maybe even that night—”
“—he was murdered,” said Al, who had listened to Strike with his mouth open. “I saw it in the paper. You found the body.”
His tone conveyed a yearning for details that Strike chose to ignore.
“There might be nothing to find out here, but I—”
“His wife did it, though,” said Al, puzzled. “They’ve got her.”
“His wife didn’t do it,” said Strike, turning his attention to the paper menu. He had noticed before now that Al, who had grown up surrounded by innumerable inaccurate press stories about his father and his family, never seemed to extend his healthy mistrust of British journalism to any other topic.
(It had had two campuses, Al’s school: lessons by Lake Geneva in the summer months and then up to Gstaad for the winter; afternoons spent skiing and skating. Al had grown up breathing exorbitantly priced mountain air, cushioned by the companionship of other celebrity children. The distant snarling of the tabloids had been a mere background murmur in his life…this, at least, was how Strike interpreted the little that Al had told him of his youth.)
“The wife didn’t do it?” said Al when Strike looked up again.
“No.”
“Whoa. You gonna pull another Lula Landry?” asked Al, with a wide grin that added charm to his off-kilter stare.
“That’s the idea,” said Strike.
“You want me to sound out the staff?” asked Al.
“Exactly,” said Strike.
He was amused and touched by how delighted Al seemed to be at being given the chance to render him service.
“No problem. No problem. Try and get someone decent for you. Where’s Loulou gone? She’s a smart cookie.”
After they had ordered, Al strolled to the bathroom to see whether he could spot the smart Loulou. Strike sat alone, drinking Tignanello ordered by Al, watching the white-coated chefs working in the open kitchen. They were young, skilled and efficient. Flames darted, knives flickered, heavy iron pans moved hither and thither.
He’s not stupid, Strike thought of his brother, watching Al meander back towards the table, leading a dark girl in a white apron. He’s just…
“This is Loulou,” said Al, sitting back down. “She was here that night.”
“You remember the argument?” Strike asked her, focusing at once on the girl who was too busy to sit but stood smiling vaguely at him.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “It was really loud. Brought the place to a standstill.”
“Can you remember what the man looked like?” Strike said, keen to establish that she had witnessed the right row.
“Fat bloke wearing a hat, yeah,” she said. “Yelling at a woman with gray hair. Yeah, they had a real bust-up. Sorry, I’m going to have to—”
And she was gone, to take another table’s order.
“We’ll grab her on the way back,” Al reassured Strike. “Eddie sends his best, by the way. Wishes he could’ve been here.”
“How’s he doing?” asked Strike, feigning interest. Where Al had shown himself keen to forge a friendship, his younger brother, Eddie, seemed indifferent. He was twenty-four and the lead singer in his own band. Strike had never listened to any of their music.
“He’s great,” said Al.
Silence fell between them. Their starters arrived and they ate without talking. Strike knew that Al had achieved excellent grades in his International Baccalaureate. One evening in a military tent in Afghanistan, Strike had seen a photograph online of eighteen-year-old Al in a cream blazer with a crest on the pocket, long hair swept sideways and gleaming gold in the bright Geneva sun. Rokeby had had his arm around Al, beaming with paternal pride. The picture had been newsworthy because Rokeby had never been photographed in a suit and tie before.
“Hello, Al,” said a familiar voice.
And, to Strike’s astonishment, there stood Daniel Chard on crutches, his bald head reflecting the subtle spots shining from the industrial waves above them. Wearing a dark red open-necked shirt and a gray suit, the publisher looked stylish among this more bohemian crowd.
“Oh,” said Al, and Strike could tell that he was struggling to place Chard, “er—hi—”
“Dan Chard,” said the publisher. “We met when I was speaking to your father about his autobiography?”
“Oh—oh yeah!” said Al, standing up and shaking hands. “This is my brother Cormoran.”
If Strike had been surprised to see Chard approach Al, it was nothing to the shock that registered on Chard’s face at the sight of Strike.
“Your—your brother?”
“Half-brother,” said Strike, inwardly amused by Chard’s evident bewilderment. How could the hireling detective be related to the playboy prince?
The effort it had cost Chard to approach the son of a potentially lucrative subject seemed to have left him with nothing to spare for a three-way awkward silence.
“Leg feeling better?” Strike asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Chard. “Much. Well, I’ll…I’ll leave you to your dinner.”
He moved away, swinging deftly between tables, and resumed his seat where Strike could no longer watch him. Strike and Al sat back down, Strike reflecting on how very small London was once you reached a certain altitude; once you had left behind those who could not easily secure tables at the best restaurants and clubs.
“Couldn’t remember who he was,” said Al with a sheepish grin.
“He’s thinking of writing his autobiography, is he?” Strike asked.
He never referred to Rokeby as Dad, but tried to remember not to call him Rokeby in front of Al.
“Yeah,” said Al. “They’re offering him big money. I dunno whether he’s going to go with that bloke or one of the others. It’ll probably be ghosted.”
Strike wondered fleetingly how Rokeby might treat his eldest son’s accidental conception and disputed birth in such a book. Perhaps, he thought, Rokeby would skip any mention of it. That would certainly be Strike’s preference.
“He’d still like to meet you, you know,” said Al, with an air of having screwed himself up to say it. “He’s really proud…he read everything about the Landry case.”
“Yeah?” said Strike, looking around the restaurant for Loulou, the waitress who remembered Quine.
“Yeah,” said Al.
“So what did he do, interview publishers?” Strike asked. He thought of Kathryn Kent, of Quine himself, the one unable to find a publisher, the other dropped; and the aging rock star able to take his pick.
“Yeah, kind of,” said Al. “I dunno if he’s going to do it or not. I think that Chard guy was recommended to him.”
“Who by?”
“Michael Fancourt,” said Al, wiping his plate of risotto clean with a piece of bread.
“Rokeby knows Fancourt?” asked Strike, forgetting his resolution.
“Yeah,” said Al, with a slight frown; then: “Let’s face it, Dad knows everyone.”
It reminded Strike of the way Elizabeth Tassel had said “I thought everyone knew” why she no longer represented Fancourt, but there was a difference. To Al, “everyone” meant the “someones”: the rich, the famous, the influential. The poor saps who bought his father’s music were nobodies, just as Strike had been nobody until he had burst into prominence for catching a killer.
“When did Fancourt recommend Roper Chard to—when did he recommend Chard?” asked Strike.
“Dunno—few months ago?” said Al vaguely. “He told Dad he’d just moved there himself. Half a million advance.”
“Nice,” said Strike.
“Told Dad to watch the news, that there’d be a buzz about the place once he moved.”
Loulou the waitress had moved back into view. Al hailed her again; she approached with a harried expression.
“Give me ten,” she said, “and I’ll be able to talk. Just give me ten.”
While Strike finished his pork, Al asked about his work. Strike was surprised by the genuineness of Al’s interest.
“D’you miss the army?” Al asked.
“Sometimes,” admitted Strike. “What are you up to these days?”
He felt a vague guilt at not having asked already. Now that he came to think about it, he was not clear how, or whether, Al had ever earned his living.
“Might be going into business with a friend,” said Al.
Not working, then, thought Strike.
“Bespoke services…leisure opportunities,” muttered Al.
“Great,” said Strike.
“Will be if it comes to anything,” said Al.
A pause. Strike looked around for Loulou, the whole point of being here, but she was out of sight, busy as Al had probably never been busy in his life.
“You’ve got credibility, at least,” said Al.
“Hmn?” said Strike.
“Made it on your own, haven’t you?” said Al.
“What?”
Strike realized that there was a one-sided crisis happening at the table. Al was looking at him with a mixture of mingled defiance and envy.
“Yeah, well,” said Strike, shrugging his large shoulders.
He could not think of any more meaningful response that would not sound superior or aggrieved, nor did he wish to encourage Al in what seemed to be an attempt to have a more personal conversation than they had ever managed.
“You’re the only one of us who doesn’t use it,” said Al. “Don’t suppose it would’ve helped in the army, anyway, would it?”
Futile to pretend not to know what “it” was.
“S’pose not,” said Strike (and indeed, on the rare occasions that his parentage had attracted the attention of fellow soldiers he had met nothing but incredulity, especially given how little he looked like Rokeby).
But he thought wryly of his flat on this ice-cold winter night: two and a half cluttered rooms, ill-fitting windowpanes. Al would be spending tonight in Mayfair, in their father’s staffed house. It might be salutary to show his brother the reality of independence before he romanticized it too much…
“S’pose you think this is self-pitying bloody whinging?” demanded Al.
Strike had seen Al’s graduation photograph online a bare hour after interviewing an inconsolable nineteen-year-old private who had accidentally shot his best friend in the chest and neck with a machine gun.
“Everyone’s entitled to whinge,” said Strike.
Al looked as though he might take offense, then, reluctantly, grinned.
Loulou was suddenly beside them, clutching a glass of water and deftly removing her apron with one hand before she sat down with them.
“OK, I’ve got five minutes,” she said to Strike without preamble. “Al says you want to know about that jerk of a writer?”
“Yeah,” said Strike, focusing at once. “What makes you say he was a jerk?”
“He loved it,” she said, sipping her water.
“Loved—?”
“Causing a scene. He was yelling and swearing, but it was for show, you could tell. He wanted everyone to hear him, he wanted an audience. He wasn’t a good actor.”
“Can you remember what he said?” asked Strike, pulling out a notebook. Al was watching excitedly.
“There was loads of it. He called the woman a bitch, said she’d lied to him, that he’d put the book out himself and screw her. But he was enjoying himself,” she said. “It was fake fury.”
“And what about Eliz—the woman?”
“Oh, she was bloody furious,” said Loulou cheerfully. “She wasn’t pretending. The more he ponced about waving his arms and shouting at her, the redder she got—shaking with anger, she could hardly contain herself. She said something about ‘roping in that stupid bloody woman’ and I think it was around then that he stormed out, parking her with the bill, everyone staring at her—she looked mortified. I felt awful for her.”
“Did she try and follow him?”
“No, she paid and then went into the loo for a bit. I wondered whether she was crying, actually. Then she left.”
“That’s very helpful,” said Strike. “You can’t remember anything else they said to each other?”
“Yeah,” said Loulou calmly, “he shouted, ‘All because of Fancourt and his limp fucking dick.’”
Strike and Al stared at her.
“‘All because of Fancourt and his limp fucking dick’?” repeated Strike.
“Yeah,” said Loulou. “That was the bit that made the restaurant go quiet—”
“You can see why it would,” commented Al, with a snigger.
“She tried to shout him down, she was absolutely incensed, but he wasn’t having any of it. He was loving the attention. Lapping it up.
“Look, I’ve got to get going,” said Loulou, “sorry.” She stood up and re-tied her apron. “See you, Al.”
She did not know Strike’s name, but smiled at him as she bustled away again.
Daniel Chard was leaving; his bald head had reappeared over the crowd, accompanied by a group of similarly aged and elegant people, all of them walking out together, talking, nodding to each other. Strike watched them go with his mind elsewhere. He did not notice the removal of his empty plate.
All because of Fancourt and his limp fucking dick…
Odd.
I can’t shake this mad bloody idea that Owen did it to himself. That he staged it…
“You all right, bruv?” asked Al.
A note with a kiss: Payback time for both of us…
“Yeah,” said Strike.
Load of gore and arcane symbolism…stoke that man’s vanity and you could get him to do anything you wanted…two hermaphrodites, two bloody bags…A beautiful lost soul, that’s what he said to me…the silkworm was a metaphor for the writer, who has to go through agonies to get at the good stuff…
Like the turning lid that finds its thread, a multitude of disconnected facts revolved in Strike’s mind and slid suddenly into place, incontrovertibly correct, unassailably right. He turned his theory around and around: it was perfect, snug and solid.
The problem was that he could not yet see how to prove it.