The Silkworm

45

Both the family home and Talgarth Road continued to be combed for forensic evidence. Leonora remained in Holloway. It had become a waiting game.

Strike was used to standing for hours in the cold, watching darkened windows, following faceless strangers; to unanswered phones and doors, blank faces, clueless bystanders; to enforced, frustrating inaction. What was different and distracting on this occasion was the small whine of anxiety that formed a backdrop to everything he did.

You had to maintain a distance, but there were always people who got to you, injustices that bit. Leonora in prison, white-faced and weeping, her daughter confused, vulnerable and bereft of both parents. Robin had pinned up Orlando’s picture over her desk, so that a merry red-bellied bird gazed down upon the detective and his assistant as they busied themselves with other cases, reminding them that a curly-haired girl in Ladbroke Grove was still waiting for her mother to come home.

Robin, at least, had a meaningful job to do, although she felt that she was letting Strike down. She had returned to the office two days running with nothing to show for her efforts, her evidence bag empty. The detective had warned her to err on the side of caution, to bail at the least sign that she might have been noticed or remembered. He did not like to be explicit about how recognizable he thought her, even with her red-gold hair piled under a beanie hat. She was very good-looking.

“I’m not sure I need to be quite so cautious,” she said, having followed his instructions to the letter.

“Let’s remember what we’re dealing with here, Robin,” he snapped, anxiety continuing to whine in his gut. “Quine didn’t rip out his own guts.”

Some of his fears were strangely amorphous. Naturally he worried that the killer would yet escape, that there were great, gaping holes in the fragile cobweb of a case he was building, a case that just now was built largely out of his own reconstructive imaginings, that needed physical evidence to anchor it down lest the police and defense counsel blew it clean away. But he had other worries.

Much as he had disliked the Mystic Bob tag with which Anstis had saddled him, Strike had a sense of approaching danger now, almost as strongly as when he had known, without question, that the Viking was about to blow up around him. Intuition, they called it, but Strike knew it to be the reading of subtle signs, the subconscious joining of dots. A clear picture of the killer was emerging out of the mass of disconnected evidence, and the image was stark and terrifying: a case of obsession, of violent rage, of a calculating, brilliant but profoundly disturbed mind.

The longer he hung around, refusing to let go, the closer he circled, the more targeted his questioning, the greater the chance that the killer might wake up to the threat he posed. Strike had confidence in his own ability to detect and repel attack, but he could not contemplate with equanimity the solutions that might occur to a diseased mind that had shown itself fond of Byzantine cruelty.

The days of Polworth’s leave came and went without tangible results.

“Don’t give up now, Diddy,” he told Strike over the phone. Characteristically, the fruitlessness of his endeavors seemed to have stimulated rather than discouraged Polworth. “I’m going to pull a sickie Monday. I’ll have another bash.”

“I can’t ask you to do that,” muttered Strike, frustrated. “The drive—”

“I’m offering, you ungrateful peg-legged bastard.”

“Penny’ll kill you. What about her Christmas shopping?”

“What about my chance to show up the Met?” said Polworth, who disliked the capital and its inhabitants on long-held principle.

“You’re a mate, Chum,” said Strike.

When he had hung up, he saw Robin’s grin.

“What’s funny?”

“‘Chum,’” she said. It sounded so public school, so unlike Strike.

“It’s not what you think,” said Strike. He was halfway through the story of Dave Polworth and the shark when his mobile rang again: an unknown number. He picked up.

“Is that Cameron—er—Strike?”

“Speaking.”

“It’s Jude Graham ’ere. Kath Kent’s neighbor. She’s back,” said the female voice happily.

“That’s good news,” said Strike, with a thumbs-up to Robin.

“Yeah, she got back this morning. Got a friend staying with ’er. I asked ’er where she’d been, but she wouldn’t say,” said the neighbor.

Strike remembered that Jude Graham thought him a journalist.

“Is the friend male or female?”

“Female,” she answered regretfully. “Tall skinny dark girl, she’s always hanging around Kath.”

“That’s very helpful, Ms. Graham,” said Strike. “I’ll—er—put something through your door later for your trouble.”

“Great,” said the neighbor happily. “Cheers.”

She rang off.

“Kath Kent’s back at home,” Strike told Robin. “Sounds like she’s got Pippa Midgley staying with her.”

“Oh,” said Robin, trying not to smile. “I, er, suppose you’re regretting you put her in a headlock now?”

Strike grinned ruefully.

“They’re not going to talk to me,” he said.

“No,” Robin agreed. “I don’t think they will.”

“Suits them fine, Leonora in the clink.”

“If you told them your whole theory, they might cooperate,” suggested Robin.

Strike stroked his chin, looking at Robin without seeing her.

“I can’t,” he said finally. “If it leaks out that I’m sniffing up that tree, I’ll be lucky not to get a knife in the back one dark night.”

“Are you serious?”

“Robin,” said Strike, mildly exasperated, “Quine was tied up and disemboweled.”

He sat down on the arm of the sofa, which squeaked less than the cushions but groaned under his weight, and said:

“Pippa Midgley liked you.”

“I’ll do it,” said Robin at once.

“Not alone,” he said, “but maybe you could get me in? How about this evening?”

“Of course!” she said, elated.

Hadn’t she and Matthew established new rules? This was the first time she had tested him, but she went to the telephone with confidence. His reaction when she told him that she did not know when she would be home that night could not have been called enthusiastic, but he accepted the news without demur.

So, at seven o’clock that evening, having discussed at length the tactics that they were about to employ, Strike and Robin proceeded separately through the icy night, ten minutes apart with Robin in the lead, to Stafford Cripps House.

A gang of youths stood again in the concrete forecourt of the block and they did not permit Robin to pass with the wary respect they had accorded Strike two weeks previously. One of them danced backwards ahead of her as she approached the inner stairs, inviting her to party, telling her she was beautiful, laughing derisively at her silence, while his mates jeered behind her in the darkness, discussing her rear view. As they entered the concrete stairwell her taunter’s jeers echoed strangely. She thought he might be seventeen at most.

“I need to go upstairs,” she said firmly as he slouched across the stairwell for his mates’ amusement, but sweat had prickled on her scalp. He’s a kid, she told herself. And Strike’s right behind you. The thought gave her courage. “Get out of the way, please,” she said.

He hesitated, dropped a sneering comment about her figure, and moved. She half expected him to grab her as she passed but he loped back to his mates, all of them calling filthy names after her as she climbed the stairs and emerged with relief, without being followed, on to the balcony leading to Kath Kent’s flat.

The lights inside were on. Robin paused for a second, gathering herself, then rang the doorbell.

After some seconds the door opened a cautious six inches and there stood a middle-aged woman with a long tangle of red hair.

“Kathryn?”

“Yeah?” said the woman suspiciously.

“I’ve got some very important information for you,” said Robin. “You need to hear this.”

(“Don’t say ‘I need to talk to you,’” Strike had coached her, “or ‘I’ve got some questions.’ You frame it so that it sounds like it’s to her advantage. Get as far as you can without telling her who you are; make it sound urgent, make her worry she’s going to miss something if she lets you go. You want to be inside before she can think it through. Use her name. Make a personal connection. Keep talking.”)

“What?” demanded Kathryn Kent.

“Can I come in?” asked Robin. “It’s very cold out here.”

“Who are you?”

“You need to hear this, Kathryn.”

“Who—?”

“Kath?” said someone behind her.

“Are you a journalist?”

“I’m a friend,” Robin improvised, her toes over the threshold. “I want to help you, Kathryn.”

“Hey—”

A familiar long pale face and large brown eyes appeared beside Kath’s.

“It’s her I told you about!” said Pippa. “She works with him—”

“Pippa,” said Robin, making eye contact with the tall girl, “you know I’m on your side—there’s something I need to tell you both, it’s urgent—”

Her foot was two thirds of the way across the threshold. Robin put every ounce of earnest persuasiveness that she could muster into her expression as she looked into Pippa’s panicked eyes.

“Pippa, I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think it was really important—”

“Let her in,” Pippa told Kathryn. She sounded scared.

The hall was cramped and seemed full of hanging coats. Kathryn led Robin into a small, lamplit sitting room with plain magnolia-painted walls. Brown curtains hung at the windows, the fabric so thin that the lights of buildings opposite and distant, passing cars shone through them. A slightly grubby orange throw covered the old sofa, which sat on a rug patterned with swirling abstract shapes, and the remains of a Chinese takeaway sat on the cheap pine coffee table. In the corner was a rickety computer table bearing a laptop. The two women, Robin saw, with a pang of something like remorse, had been decorating a small fake Christmas tree together. A string of lights lay on the floor and there were a number of decorations on the only armchair. One of them was a china disc reading Future Famous Writer!

“What d’you want?” demanded Kathryn Kent, her arms folded.

She was glaring at Robin through small, fierce eyes.

“May I sit down?” said Robin and she did so without waiting for Kathryn’s answer. (“Make yourself at home as much as you can without being rude, make it harder for her to dislodge you,” Strike had said.)

“What d’you want?” Kathryn Kent repeated.

Pippa stood in front of the windows, staring at Robin, who saw that she was fiddling with a tree ornament: a mouse dressed as Santa.

“You know that Leonora Quine’s been arrested for murder?” said Robin.

“Of course I do. I’m the one,” Kathryn pointed at her own ample chest, “who found the Visa bill with the ropes, the burqa and the overalls on it.”

“Yes,” said Robin, “I know that.”

“Ropes and a burqa!” ejaculated Kathryn Kent. “Got more than he bargained for, didn’t he? All those years thinking she was just some dowdy little…boring little—little cow—and look what she did to him!”

“Yes,” said Robin, “I know it looks that way.”

“What d’you mean, ‘looks that’—?”

“Kathryn, I’ve come here to warn you: they don’t think she did it.”

(“No specifics. Don’t mention the police explicitly if you can avoid it, don’t commit to a checkable story, keep it vague,” Strike had told her.)

“What d’you mean?” repeated Kathryn sharply. “The police don’t—?”

“And you had access to his card, more opportunities to copy it—”

Kathryn looked wildly from Robin to Pippa, who was clutching the Santa-mouse, white-faced.

“But Strike doesn’t think you did it,” said Robin.

“Who?” said Kathryn. She appeared too confused, too panicked, to think straight.

“Her boss,” stage-whispered Pippa.

“Him!” said Kathryn, rounding on Robin again. “He’s working for Leonora!”

“He doesn’t think you did it,” repeated Robin, “even with the credit card bill—the fact you even had it. I mean, it looks odd, but he’s sure you had it by acci—”

“She gave it me!” said Kathryn Kent, flinging out her arms, gesticulating furiously. “His daughter—she gave it me, I never even looked on the back for weeks, never thought to. I was being nice, taking her crappy bloody picture and acting like it was good—I was being nice!”

“I understand that,” said Robin. “We believe you, Kathryn, I promise. Strike wants to find the real killer, he’s not like the police.” (“Insinuate, don’t state.”) “He’s not interested in just grabbing the next woman Quine might’ve—you know—”

The words let tie him up hung in the air, unspoken.

Pippa was easier to read than Kathryn. Credulous and easily panicked, she looked at Kathryn, who seemed furious.

“Maybe I don’t care who killed him!” Kathryn snarled through clenched teeth.

“But you surely don’t want to be arrest—?”

“I’ve only got your word for it they’re interested in me! There’s been nothing on the news!”

“Well…there wouldn’t be, would there?” said Robin gently. “The police don’t hold press conferences to announce that they think they might have the wrong pers—”

“Who had the credit card? Her.”

“Quine usually had it himself,” said Robin, “and his wife’s not the only person who had access.”

“How d’you know what the police are thinking any more than I do?”

“Strike’s got good contacts at the Met,” said Robin calmly. “He was in Afghanistan with the investigating officer, Richard Anstis.”

The name of the man who had interrogated her seemed to carry weight with Kathryn. She glanced at Pippa again.

“Why’re you telling me this?” Kathryn demanded.

“Because we don’t want to see another innocent woman arrested,” said Robin, “because we think the police are wasting time sniffing around the wrong people and because,” (“throw in a bit of self-interest once you’ve baited the hook, it keeps things plausible”) “obviously,” said Robin, with a show of awkwardness, “it would do Cormoran a lot of good if he was the one who got the real killer. Again,” she added.

“Yeah,” said Kathryn, nodding vehemently, “that’s it, isn’t it? He wants the publicity.”

No woman who had been with Owen Quine for two years was going to believe that publicity wasn’t an unqualified boon.

“Look, we just wanted to warn you how they’re thinking,” said Robin, “and to ask for your help. But obviously, if you don’t want…”

Robin made to stand.

(“Once you’ve laid it out for her, act like you can take it or leave it. You’re there when she starts chasing you.”)

“I’ve told the police everything I know,” said Kathryn, who appeared disconcerted now that Robin, who was taller than her, had stood up again. “I haven’t got anything else to say.”

“Well, we’re not sure they were asking the right questions,” said Robin, sinking back onto the sofa. “You’re a writer,” she said, turning suddenly off the piste that Strike had prepared for her, her eyes on the laptop in the corner. “You notice things. You understood him and his work better than anyone else.”

The unexpected swerve into flattery caused whatever words of fury Kathryn had been about to fling at Robin (her mouth had been open, ready to deliver them) to die in her throat.

“So?” Kathryn said. Her aggression felt a little fake now. “What d’you want to know?”

“Will you let Strike come and hear what you’ve got to say? He won’t if you don’t want him to,” Robin assured her (an offer unsanctioned by her boss). “He respects your right to refuse.” (Strike had made no such declaration.) “But he’d like to hear it in your own words.”

“I don’t know that I’ve got anything useful to say,” said Kathryn, folding her arms again, but she could not disguise a ring of gratified vanity.

“I know it’s a big ask,” said Robin, “but if you help us get the real killer, Kathryn, you’ll be in the papers for the right reasons.”

The promise of it settled gently over the sitting room—Kathryn interviewed by eager and now admiring journalists, asking about her work, perhaps: Tell me about Melina’s Sacrifice…

Kathryn glanced sideways at Pippa, who said:

“That bastard kidnapped me!”

“You tried to attack him, Pip,” said Kathryn. She turned a little anxiously to Robin. “I never told her to do that. She was—after we saw what he’d written in the book—we were both…and we thought he—your boss—had been hired to fit us up.”

“I understand,” lied Robin, who found the reasoning tortuous and paranoid, but perhaps that was what spending time with Owen Quine did to a person.

“She got carried away and didn’t think,” said Kathryn, with a look of mingled affection and reproof at her protégée. “Pip’s got temper issues.”

“Understandable,” said Robin hypocritically. “May I call Cormoran—Strike, I mean? Ask him to meet us here?”

She had already slipped her mobile out of her pocket and glanced down at it. Strike had texted her:

On balcony. Bloody freezing.

She texted back:

Wait 5.

In fact, she needed only three minutes. Softened by Robin’s earnestness and air of understanding, and by the encouragement of the alarmed Pippa to let Strike in and find out the worst, when he finally knocked Kathryn proceeded to the front door with something close to alacrity.

The room seemed much smaller with his arrival. Next to Kathryn, Strike appeared huge and almost unnecessarily male; when she had swept it clear of Christmas ornaments, he dwarfed the only armchair. Pippa retreated to the end of the sofa and perched on the arm, throwing Strike looks composed of defiance and terror.

“D’you want a drink of something?” Kathryn threw at Strike in his heavy overcoat, with his size fourteen feet planted squarely on her swirly rug.

“Cup of tea would be great,” he said.

She left for the tiny kitchen. Finding herself alone with Strike and Robin, Pippa panicked and scuttled after her.

“You’ve done bloody well,” Strike murmured to Robin, “if they’re offering tea.”

“She’s very proud of being a writer,” Robin breathed back, “which means she could understand him in ways that other people…”

But Pippa had returned with a box of cheap biscuits and Strike and Robin fell silent at once. Pippa resumed her seat at the end of the sofa, casting Strike frightened sidelong glances that had, as when she had cowered in their office, a whiff of theatrical enjoyment about them.

“This is very good of you, Kathryn,” said Strike, when she had set a tray of tea on the table. One of the mugs, Robin saw, read Keep Clam and Proofread.

“We’ll see,” retorted Kent, her arms folded as she glared at him from a height.

“Kath, sit,” coaxed Pippa, and Kathryn sat reluctantly down between Pippa and Robin on the sofa.

Strike’s first priority was to nurse the tenuous trust that Robin had managed to foster; the direct attack had no place here. He therefore embarked on a speech echoing Robin’s, implying that the authorities were having second thoughts about Leonora’s arrest and that they were reviewing the current evidence, avoiding direct mention of the police yet implying with every word that the Met was now turning its attention to Kathryn Kent. As he spoke a siren echoed in the distance. Strike added assurances that he personally felt sure that Kent was completely in the clear, but that he saw her as a resource the police had failed to understand or utilize properly.

“Yeah, well, you could be right there,” she said. She had not so much blossomed under his soothing words as unclenched. Picking up the Keep Clam mug she said with a show of disdain, “All they wanted to know about was our sex life.”

The way Anstis had told it, Strike remembered, Kathryn had volunteered a lot of information on the subject without being put under undue pressure.

“I’m not interested in your sex life,” said Strike. “It’s obvious he wasn’t—to be blunt—getting what he wanted at home.”

“Hadn’t slept with her in years,” said Kathryn. Remembering the photographs in Leonora’s bedroom of Quine tied up, Robin dropped her gaze to the surface of her tea. “They had nothing in common. He couldn’t talk to her about his work, she wasn’t interested, didn’t give a damn. He told us—didn’t he?”—she looked up at Pippa, perched on the arm of the sofa beside her—“she never even read his books properly. He wanted someone to connect to on that level. He could really talk to me about literature.”

“And me,” said Pippa, launching at once into a speech: “He was interested in identity politics, you know, and he talked to me for hours about what it was like for me being born, basically, in the wrong—”

“Yeah, he told me it was a relief to be able to talk to someone who actually understood his work,” said Kathryn loudly, drowning Pippa out.

“I thought so,” said Strike, nodding. “And the police didn’t bother asking you about any of this, I take it?”

“Well, they asked where we met and I told them: on his creative writing course,” said Kathryn. “It was just gradual, you know, he was interested in my writing…”

“…in our writing…” said Pippa quietly.

Kathryn talked at length, Strike nodding with every appearance of interest at the gradual progression of the teacher-student relationship to something much warmer, Pippa tagging along, it seemed, and leaving Quine and Kathryn only at the bedroom door.

“I write fantasy with a twist,” said Kathryn and Strike was surprised and a little amused that she had begun to talk like Fancourt: in rehearsed phrases, in sound bites. He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks and he remembered what Waldegrave had told him about Quine, that he had freely admitted to role-playing interviews with a biro. “It’s fantasy slash erotica really, but quite literary. And that’s the thing about traditional publishing, you know, they don’t want to take a chance on something that hasn’t been seen before, it’s all about what fits their sales categories, and if you’re blending several genres, if you’re creating something entirely new, they’re afraid to take a chance…I know that Liz Tassel,” Kathryn spoke the name as though it were a medical complaint, “told Owen my work was too niche. But that’s the great thing about indie publishing, the freedom—”

“Yeah,” said Pippa, clearly desperate to put in her two pennys’ worth, “that’s true, for genre fiction I think indie can be the way to go—”

“Except I’m not really genre,” said Kathryn, with a slight frown, “that’s my point—”

“—but Owen felt that for my memoir I’d do better going the traditional route,” said Pippa. “You know, he had a real interest in gender identity and he was fascinated with what I’d been through. I introduced him to a couple of other transgendered people and he promised to talk to his editor about me, because he thought, with the right promotion, you know, and with a story that’s never really been told—”

“Owen loved Melina’s Sacrifice, he couldn’t wait to read on. He was practically ripping it out of my hand every time I finished a chapter,” said Kathryn loudly, “and he told me—”

She stopped abruptly in midflow. Pippa’s evident irritation at being interrupted faded ludicrously from her face. Both of them, Robin could tell, had suddenly remembered that all the time Quine had been showering them with effusive encouragement, interest and praise, the characters of Harpy and Epicoene had been taking obscene shape on an old electric typewriter hidden from their eager gazes.

“So he talked to you about his own work?” Strike asked.

“A bit,” said Kathryn Kent in a flat voice.

“How long was he working on Bombyx Mori, do you know?”

“Most of the time I knew him,” she said.

“What did he say about it?”

There was a pause. Kathryn and Pippa looked at each other.

“I’ve already told him,” Pippa told Kathryn, with a significant glance at Strike, “that he told us it was going to be different.”

“Yeah,” said Kathryn heavily. She folded her arms. “He didn’t tell us it was going to be like that.”

Like that…Strike remembered the brown, glutinous substance that had leaked from Harpy’s breasts. It had been, for him, one of the most revolting images in the book. Kathryn’s sister, he remembered, had died of breast cancer.

“Did he say what it was going to be like?” Strike asked.

“He lied,” said Kathryn simply. “He said it was going to be the writer’s journey or something but he made out…he told us we were going to be…”

“‘Beautiful lost souls,’” said Pippa, on whom the phrase seemed to have impressed itself.

“Yeah,” said Kathryn heavily.

“Did he ever read any of it to you, Kathryn?”

“No,” she said. “He said he wanted it to be a—a—”

“Oh, Kath,” said Pippa tragically. Kathryn had buried her face in her hands.

“Here,” said Robin kindly, delving into her handbag for tissues.

“No,” said Kathryn roughly, pushing herself off the sofa and disappearing into the kitchen. She came back with a handful of kitchen roll.

“He said,” she repeated, “he wanted it to be a surprise. That bastard,” she said, sitting back down. “Bastard.”

She dabbed at her eyes and shook her head, the long mane of red hair swaying, while Pippa rubbed her back.

“Pippa told me,” said Strike, “that Quine put a copy of the manuscript through your door.”

“Yeah,” said Kathryn.

It was clear that Pippa had already confessed to this indiscretion.

“Jude next door saw him doing it. She’s a nosy bitch, always keeping tabs on me.”

Strike, who had just put an additional twenty through the nosy neighbor’s letter box as a thank-you for keeping him informed of Kathryn’s movements, asked:

“When?”

“Early hours of the sixth,” said Kathryn.

Strike could almost feel Robin’s tension and excitement.

“Were the lights outside your front door working then?”

“Them? They’ve been out for months.”

“Did she speak to Quine?”

“No, just peered out the window. It was two in the morning or something, she wasn’t going to go outside in her nightie. But she’d seen him come and go loads of times. She knew what he l-looked like,” said Kathryn on a sob, “in his s-stupid cloak and hat.”

“Pippa said there was a note,” said Strike.

“Yeah—‘Payback time for both of us,’”said Kathryn.

“Have you still got it?”

“I burned it,” said Kathryn.

“Was it addressed to you? ‘Dear Kathryn’?”

“No,” she said, “just the message and a bloody kiss. Bastard!” she sobbed.

“Shall I go and get us some real drink?” volunteered Robin surprisingly.

“There’s some in the kitchen,” said Kathryn, her reply muffled by application of the kitchen roll to her mouth and cheeks. “Pip, you get it.”

“You were sure the note was from him?” asked Strike as Pippa sped off in pursuit of alcohol.

“Yeah, it was his handwriting, I’d know it anywhere,” said Kathryn.

“What did you understand by it?”

“I dunno,” said Kathryn weakly, wiping her overflowing eyes. “Payback for me because he had a go at his wife? And payback for him on everyone…even me. Gutless bastard,” she said, unconsciously echoing Michael Fancourt. “He could’ve told me he didn’t want…if he wanted to end it…why do that? Why? And it wasn’t just me…Pip…making out he cared, talking to her about her life…she’s had an awful time…I mean, her memoir’s not great literature or anything, but—”

Pippa returned carrying clinking glasses and a bottle of brandy, and Kathryn fell silent.

“We were saving this for the Christmas pudding,” said Pippa, deftly uncorking the cognac. “There you go, Kath.”

Kathryn took a large brandy and swigged it down in one. It seemed to have the desired effect. With a sniff, she straightened her back. Robin accepted a small measure. Strike declined.

“When did you read the manuscript?” he asked Kathryn, who was already helping herself to more brandy.

“Same day I found it, on the ninth, when I got home to grab some more clothes. I’d been staying with Angela at the hospice, see…he hadn’t picked up any of my calls since bonfire night, not one, and I’d told him Angela was really bad, I’d left messages. Then I came home and found the manuscript all over the floor. I thought, Is that why he’s not picking up, he wants me to read this first? I took it back to the hospice with me and read it there, while I was sitting by Angela.”

Robin could only imagine how it would have felt to read her lover’s depiction of her while she sat beside her dying sister’s bed.

“I called Pip—didn’t I?” said Kathryn; Pippa nodded, “—and told her what he’d done. I kept calling him, but he still wouldn’t pick up. Well, after Angela had died I thought, Screw it. I’m coming to find you.” The brandy had given color to Kathryn’s wan cheeks. “I went to their house but when I saw her—his wife—I could tell she was telling the truth. He wasn’t there. So I told her to tell him Angela was dead. He’d met Angela,” said Kathryn, her face crumpling again. Pippa set down her own glass and put her arms around Kathryn’s shaking shoulders, “I thought he’d realize at least what he’d done to me when I was losing…when I’d lost…”

For over a minute there were no sounds in the room but Kathryn’s sobs and the distant yells of the youths in the courtyard below.

“I’m sorry,” said Strike formally.

“It must have been awful for you,” said Robin.

A fragile sense of comradeship bound the four of them now. They could agree on one thing, at least; that Owen Quine had behaved very badly.

“It’s your powers of textual analysis I’m really here for,” Strike told Kathryn when she had again dried her eyes, now swollen to slits in her face.

“What d’you mean?” she asked, but Robin heard gratified pride behind the curtness.

“I don’t understand some of what Quine wrote in Bombyx Mori.”

“It isn’t hard,” she said, and again she unknowingly echoed Fancourt: “It won’t win prizes for subtlety, will it?”

“I don’t know,” said Strike. “There’s one very intriguing character.”

“Vainglorious?” she said.

Naturally, he thought, she would jump to that conclusion. Fancourt was famous.

“I was thinking of the Cutter.”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said, with a sharpness that took Robin aback. Kathryn glanced at Pippa and Robin recognized the mutual glow, poorly disguised, of a shared secret.

“He pretended to be better than that,” said Kathryn. “He pretended there were some things that were sacred. Then he went and…”

“Nobody seems to want to interpret the Cutter for me,” said Strike.

“That’s because some of us have some decency,” said Kathryn.

Strike caught Robin’s eye. He was urging her to take over.

“Jerry Waldegrave’s already told Cormoran that he’s the Cutter,” she said tentatively.

“I like Jerry Waldegrave,” said Kathryn defiantly.

“You met him?” asked Robin.

“Owen took me to a party, Christmas before last,” she said. “Waldegrave was there. Sweet man. He’d had a few,” she said.

“Drinking even then, was he?” interjected Strike.

It was a mistake; he had encouraged Robin to take over because he guessed that she seemed less frightening. His interruption made Kathryn clam up.

“Anyone else interesting at the party?” Robin asked, sipping her brandy.

“Michael Fancourt was there,” said Kathryn at once. “People say he’s arrogant, but I thought he was charming.”

“Oh—did you speak to him?”

“Owen wanted me to stay well away,” she said, “but I went to the Ladies and on the way back I just told him how much I’d loved House of Hollow. Owen wouldn’t have liked that,” she said with pathetic satisfaction. “Always going on about Fancourt being overrated, but I think he’s marvelous. Anyway, we talked for a while and then someone pulled him away, but yes,” she repeated defiantly, as though the shade of Owen Quine were in the room and could hear her praising his rival, “he was charming to me. Wished me luck with my writing,” she said, sipping her brandy.

“Did you tell him you were Owen’s girlfriend?” asked Robin.

“Yes,” said Kathryn, with a twist to her smile, “and he laughed and said, ‘You have my commiserations.’ It didn’t bother him. He didn’t care about Owen anymore, I could tell. No, I think he’s a nice man and a marvelous writer. People are envious, aren’t they, when you’re successful?”

She poured herself more brandy. She was holding it remarkably well. Other than the flush it had brought to her face, there was no sign of tipsiness at all.

“And you liked Jerry Waldegrave,” said Robin, almost absentmindedly.

“Oh, he’s lovely,” said Kathryn, on a roll now, praising anyone that Quine might have attacked. “Lovely man. He was very, very drunk, though. He was in a side room and people were steering clear, you know. That bitch Tassel told us to leave him to it, that he was talking gibberish.”

“Why do you call her a bitch?” asked Robin.

“Snobby old cow,” said Kathryn. “Way she spoke to me, to everyone. But I know what it was: she was upset because Michael Fancourt was there. I said to her—Owen had gone off to see if Jerry was all right, he wasn’t going to leave him passed out in a chair, whatever that old bitch said—I told her: ‘I’ve just been talking to Fancourt, he was charming.’ She didn’t like that,” said Kathryn with satisfaction. “Didn’t like the idea of him being charming to me when he hates her. Owen told me she used to be in love with Fancourt and he wouldn’t give her the time of day.”

She relished the gossip, however old. For that night, at least, she had been an insider.

“She left soon after I told her that,” said Kathryn with satisfaction. “Horrible woman.”

“Michael Fancourt told me,” said Strike, and the eyes of Kathryn and Pippa were instantly riveted on him, eager to hear what the famous writer might have said, “that Owen Quine and Elizabeth Tassel once had an affair.”

One moment of stupefied silence and then Kathryn Kent burst out laughing. It was unquestionably genuine: raucous, almost joyful, shrieks filled the room.

“Owen and Elizabeth Tassel?”

“That’s what he said.”

Pippa beamed at the sight and sound of Kathryn Kent’s exuberant, unexpected mirth. She rolled against the back of the sofa, trying to catch her breath; brandy slopped onto her trousers as she shook with what seemed entirely genuine amusement. Pippa caught the hysteria from her and began to laugh too.

“Never,” panted Kathryn, “in…a…million…years…”

“This would have been a long time ago,” said Strike, but her long red mane shook as she continued to roar with unfeigned laughter.

“Owen and Liz…never. Never, ever…you don’t understand,” she said, now dabbing at eyes wet with mirth. “He thought she was awful. He would’ve told me…Owen talked about everyone he’d slept with, he wasn’t a gentleman like that, was he, Pip? I’d have known if they’d ever…I don’t know where Michael Fancourt got that from. Never,” said Kathryn Kent, with unforced merriment and total conviction.

The laughter had loosened her up.

“But you don’t know what the Cutter really meant?” Robin asked her, setting her empty brandy glass down on the pine coffee table with the finality of a guest about to take their leave.

“I never said I didn’t know,” said Kathryn, still out of breath from her protracted laughter. “I do know. It was just awful, to do it to Jerry. Such a bloody hypocrite…Owen tells me not to mention it to anyone and then he goes and puts it in Bombyx Mori…”

Robin did not need Strike’s look to tell her to remain silent and let Kathryn’s brandy-fueled good humor, her enjoyment of their undivided attention and the reflected glory of knowing sensitive secrets about literary figures do their work.

“All right,” she said. “All right, here it is…

“Owen told me as we were leaving. Jerry was very drunk that night and you know his marriage is on the rocks, has been for years…he and Fenella had had a really terrible row the night before the party and she’d told him that their daughter might not be his. That she might be…”

Strike knew what was coming.

“…Fancourt’s,” said Kathryn, after a suitably dramatic pause. “The dwarf with the big head, the baby she thought of aborting because she didn’t know whose it was, d’you see? The Cutter with his cuckold’s horns…

“And Owen told me to keep my mouth shut. ‘It’s not funny,’ he said, ‘Jerry loves his daughter, only good thing he’s got in his life.’ But he talked about it all the way home. On and on about Fancourt and how much he’d hate finding out he had a daughter, because Fancourt never wanted kids…All that bullshit about protecting Jerry! Anything to get at Michael Fancourt. Anything.”