The Silkworm

41

Strike rose early next morning after a night of broken sleep, tired, frustrated and edgy. He checked his phone for messages before showering and after dressing, then went downstairs into his empty office, irritated that Robin was not there on a Saturday and feeling the absence, unreasonably, as a mark of her lack of commitment. She would have been a useful sounding board this morning; he would have liked company after his revelation of the previous evening. He considered phoning her, but it would be infinitely more satisfying to tell her face to face rather than doing it over the telephone, particularly if Matthew were listening in.

Strike made himself tea but let it grow cold while he pored over the Quine file.

The sense of his impotence ballooned in the silence. He kept checking his mobile.

He wanted to do something, but he was completely stymied by lack of official status, having no authority to make searches of private property or to enforce the cooperation of witnesses. There was nothing he could do until his interview with Michael Fancourt on Monday, unless…Ought he to call Anstis and lay his theory before him? Strike frowned, running thick fingers through his dense hair, imagining Anstis’s patronizing response. There was literally not a shred of evidence. All was conjecture—but I’m right, thought Strike with easy arrogance, and he’s screwed up. Anstis had neither the wit nor the imagination to appreciate a theory that explained every oddity in the killing, but which would seem to him incredible compared to the easy solution, riddled with inconsistencies and unanswered questions though the case against Leonora was.

Explain, Strike demanded of an imaginary Anstis, why a woman smart enough to spirit away his guts without trace would have been dumb enough to order ropes and a burqa on her own credit card. Explain why a mother with no relatives, whose sole preoccupation in life is the well-being of her daughter, would risk a life sentence. Explain why, after years of accommodating Quine’s infidelity and sexual quirks to keep their family together, she suddenly decided to kill him?

But to the last question Anstis might just have a reasonable answer: that Quine had been on the verge of leaving his wife for Kathryn Kent. The author’s life had been well insured: perhaps Leonora would have decided that financial security as a widow would be preferable to an uncertain hand-to-mouth existence while her feckless ex squandered money on his second wife. A jury would buy that version of events, especially if Kathryn Kent took the stand and confirmed that Quine had promised to marry her.

Strike was afraid that he had blown his chance with Kathryn Kent, turning up unexpectedly on her doorstep as he had—in retrospect a clumsy, inept move. He had scared her, looming out of the darkness on her balcony, making it only too easy for Pippa Midgley to paint him as Leonora’s sinister stooge. He ought to have proceeded with finesse, eased himself into her confidence the way he had done with Lord Parker’s PA, so that he could extract confessions like teeth under the influence of concerned sympathy, instead of jack-booting to her door like a bailiff.

He checked his mobile again. No messages. He glanced at his watch. It was barely half past nine. Against his will, he felt his attention tugging to be free of the place where he wanted and needed it—on Quine’s killer, and the things that must be done to secure an arrest—to the seventeenth-century chapel in the Castle of Croy…

She would be getting dressed, no doubt in a bridal gown costing thousands. He could imagine her naked in front of the mirror, painting her face. He had watched her do it a hundred times; wielding the makeup brushes in front of dressing-table mirrors, hotel mirrors, so acutely aware of her own desirability that she almost attained unselfconsciousness.

Was Charlotte checking her phone as the minutes slipped by, now that the short walk up the aisle was so close, now that it felt like the walk along a gangplank? Was she still waiting, hoping, for a response from Strike to her three-word message of yesterday?

And if he sent an answer now…what would it take to make her turn her back on the wedding dress (he could imagine it hanging like a ghost in the corner of her room) and pull on her jeans, throw a few things in a holdall and slip out of a back door? Into a car, her foot flat to the floor, heading back south to the man who had always meant escape…

“Fuck this,” Strike muttered.

He stood up, shoved the mobile in his pocket, threw back the last of his cold tea and pulled on his overcoat. Keeping busy was the only answer: action had always been his drug of choice.

Sure though he was that Kathryn Kent would have decamped to a friend’s now that the press had found her, and notwithstanding the fact that he regretted turning up unannounced on her doorstep, he returned to Clem Attlee Court only to have his suspicions confirmed. Nobody answered the door, the lights were off and all seemed silent within.

An icy wind blew along the brick balcony. As Strike moved away, the angry-looking woman from next door appeared, this time eager to talk.

“She’s gawn away. You press, are you?”

“Yeah,” said Strike, because he could tell the neighbor was excited at the idea and because he did not want Kent to know that he had been back.

“The things your lot’ve written,” she said with poorly disguised glee. “The things you’ve said about her! No, she’s gawn.”

“Any idea when she’ll be back?”

“Nah,” said the neighbor with regret. Her pink scalp was visible through the sparse, tightly permed gray hair. “I could call ya,” she suggested. “If she shows up again.”

“That’d be very helpful,” said Strike.

His name had been in the papers a little too recently to hand over one of his cards. He tore out a page of his notebook, wrote his number out for her and handed it over with a twenty-pound note.

“Cheers,” she said, businesslike. “See ya.”

He passed a cat on his way back downstairs, the same one, he was sure, at which Kathryn Kent had taken a kick. It watched him with wary but superior eyes as he passed. The gang of youths he had met previously had gone; too cold today if your warmest item of clothing was a sweatshirt.

Limping through the slippery gray snow required physical effort, which helped distract his busy mind, making moot the question of whether he was moving from suspect to suspect on Leonora’s behalf, or Charlotte’s. Let the latter continue towards the prison of her own choosing: he would not call, he would not text.

When he reached the Tube, he pulled out his phone and telephoned Jerry Waldegrave. He was sure that the editor had information that Strike needed, that he had not known he needed before his moment of revelation in the River Café, but Waldegrave did not pick up. Strike was not surprised. Waldegrave had a failing marriage, a moribund career and a daughter to worry about; why take a detective’s calls too? Why complicate your life when it did not need complicating, when you had a choice?

The cold, the ringing of unanswered phones, silent flats with locked doors: he could do nothing else today. Strike bought a newspaper and went to the Tottenham, sitting himself beneath one of the voluptuous women painted by a Victorian set-designer, cavorting with flora in their flimsy draperies. Today Strike felt strangely as though he was in a waiting room, whiling away the hours. Memories like shrapnel, forever embedded, infected by what had come later…words of love and undying devotion, times of sublime happiness, lies upon lies upon lies…his attention kept sliding away from the stories he was reading.

His sister Lucy had once said to him in exasperation, “Why do you put up with it? Why? Just because she’s beautiful?”

And he had answered: “It helps.”

She had expected him to say “no,” of course. Though they spent so much time trying to make themselves beautiful, you were not supposed to admit to women that beauty mattered. Charlotte was beautiful, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he had never rid himself of a sense of wonder at her looks, nor of the gratitude they inspired, nor of pride by association.

Love, Michael Fancourt had said, is a delusion.

Strike turned the page on a picture of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s sulky face without seeing it. Had he imagined things in Charlotte that had never been there? Had he invented virtues for her, to add luster to her staggering looks? He had been nineteen when they met. It seemed incredibly young to Strike now, as he sat in this pub carrying a good two stone of excess weight, missing half a leg.

Perhaps he had created a Charlotte in her own image who had never existed outside his own besotted mind, but what of it? He had loved the real Charlotte too, the woman who had stripped herself bare in front of him, demanding whether he could still love her if she did this, if she confessed to this, if she treated him like this…until finally she had found his limit and beauty, rage and tears had been insufficient to hold him, and she had fled into the arms of another man.

And maybe that’s love, he thought, siding in his mind with Michael Fancourt against an invisible and censorious Robin, who for some reason seemed to be sitting in judgment on him as he sat drinking Doom Bar and pretending to read about the worst winter on record. You and Matthew…Strike could see it even if she could not: the condition of being with Matthew was not to be herself.

Where was the couple that saw each other clearly? In the endless parade of suburban conformity that seemed to be Lucy and Greg’s marriage? In the tedious variations on betrayal and disillusionment that brought a never-ending stream of clients to his door? In the willfully blind allegiance of Leonora Quine to a man whose every fault had been excused because “he’s a writer,” or the hero worship that Kathryn Kent and Pippa Midgley had brought to the same fool, trussed like a turkey and disemboweled?

Strike was depressing himself. He was halfway down his third pint. As he wondered whether he was going to have a fourth, his mobile buzzed on the table where he had laid it, facedown.

He drank his beer slowly while the pub filled up around him, looking at his phone, taking bets against himself. Outside the chapel, giving me one last chance to stop it? Or she’s done it and wants to let me know?

He drank the last of his beer before flipping the mobile over.

Congratulate me. Mrs. Jago Ross.

Strike stared at the words for a few seconds, then slid the phone into his pocket, got up, folded the newspaper under his arm and set off home.

As he walked with the aid of his stick back to Denmark Street he remembered words from his favorite book, unread for a very long time, buried at the bottom of the box of belongings on his landing.

The restlessness that had consumed him all day had gone. He felt hungry and in need of relaxation. Arsenal were playing Fulham at three; there was just time to cook himself a late lunch before kick-off.

And after that, he thought, he might go round to see Nina Lascelles. Tonight was not a night he fancied spending alone.