The Silkworm

4

Strike dropped onto the sofa in the outer office. It was almost new, an essential expense as he had broken the secondhand one with which he had initially furnished the office. Covered in mock leather that he had thought smart in the showroom, it made farting noises if you moved on it in the wrong way. His assistant—tall, curvaceous, with a clear, brilliant complexion and bright blue-gray eyes—scrutinized him over her coffee cup.

“You look terrible.”

“Spent all night weaseling details of a peer of the realm’s sexual irregularities and financial malfeasance out of a hysterical woman,” said Strike, on a massive yawn.

“Lord Parker?” gasped Robin.

“That’s the one,” said Strike.

“He’s been—?”

“Shagging three women simultaneously and salting millions away offshore,” said Strike. “If you’ve got a strong stomach, try the News of the World this Sunday.”

“How on earth did you find all that out?”

“Contact of a contact of a contact,” intoned Strike.

He yawned again, so widely that it looked painful.

“You should go to bed,” said Robin.

“Yeah, I should,” said Strike, but he did not move.

“You haven’t got anyone else till Gunfrey this afternoon at two.”

“Gunfrey,” sighed Strike, massaging his eye sockets. “Why are all my clients shits?”

“Mrs. Quine doesn’t seem like a shit.”

He peered blearily at her through his thick fingers.

“How d’you know I took her case?”

“I knew you would,” said Robin with an irrepressible smirk. “She’s your type.”

“A middle-aged throwback to the eighties?”

“Your kind of client. And you wanted to spite Baker.”

“Seemed to work, didn’t it?”

The telephone rang. Still grinning, Robin answered.

“Cormoran Strike’s office,” she said. “Oh. Hi.”

It was her fiancé, Matthew. She glanced sideways at her boss. Strike had closed his eyes and tilted his head back, his arms folded across his broad chest.

“Listen,” said Matthew in Robin’s ear; he never sounded very friendly when calling from work. “I need to move drinks from Friday to Thursday.”

“Oh Matt,” she said, trying to keep both disappointment and exasperation out of her voice.

It would be the fifth time that arrangements for these particular drinks had been made. Robin alone, of the three people involved, had not altered time, date or venue, but had shown herself willing and available on every occasion.

“Why?” she muttered.

A sudden grunting snore issued from the sofa. Strike had fallen asleep where he sat, his large head tilted back against the wall, arms still folded.

“Work drinks on the nineteenth,” said Matthew. “It’ll look bad if I don’t go. Show my face.”

She fought the urge to snap at him. He worked for a major firm of accountants and sometimes he acted as though this imposed social obligations more appropriate to a diplomatic posting.

She was sure that she knew the real reason for the change. Drinks had been postponed repeatedly at Strike’s request; on each occasion he had been busy with some piece of urgent, evening work, and while the excuses had been genuine, they had irritated Matthew. Though he had never said it aloud, Robin knew that Matthew thought Strike was implying that his time was more valuable than Matthew’s, his job more important.

In the eight months that she had worked for Cormoran Strike, her boss and her fiancé had not met, not even on that infamous night when Matthew had picked her up from the casualty department where she had accompanied Strike, with her coat wrapped tightly around his stabbed arm after a cornered killer had tried to finish him. When she had emerged, shaken and bloodstained, from the place where they were stitching Strike up, Matthew had declined her offer to introduce him to her injured boss. He had been furious about the whole business, even though Robin had reassured him that she herself had never been in any danger.

Matthew had never wanted her to take a permanent job with Strike, whom he had regarded with suspicion from the first, disliking his penury, his homelessness and the profession that Matthew seemed to find absurd. The little snatches of information that Robin brought home—Strike’s career in the Special Investigation Branch, the plain-clothes wing of the Royal Military Police, his decoration for bravery, the loss of his lower right leg, the expertise in a hundred areas of which Matthew—so used to being expert in her eyes—knew little or nothing—had not (as she had innocently hoped) built a bridge between the two men, but had somehow reinforced the wall between them.

Strike’s burst of fame, his sudden shift from failure to success, had if anything deepened Matthew’s animosity. Robin realized belatedly that she had only exacerbated matters by pointing out Matthew’s inconsistencies: “You don’t like him being homeless and poor and now you don’t like him getting famous and bringing in loads of work!”

But Strike’s worst crime in Matthew’s eyes, as she well knew, was the clinging designer dress that her boss had bought her after their trip to the hospital, the one that he had intended as a gift of gratitude and farewell, and which, after showing it to Matthew with pride and delight, and seeing his reaction, she had never dared wear.

All of this Robin hoped to fix with a face-to-face meeting, but repeated cancellations by Strike had merely deepened Matthew’s dislike. On the last occasion, Strike had simply failed to turn up. His excuse—that he had been forced to take a detour to shake off a tail set on him by his client’s suspicious spouse—had been accepted by Robin, who knew the intricacies of that particularly bloody divorce case, but it had reinforced Matthew’s view of Strike as attention-seeking and arrogant.

She had had some difficulty in persuading Matthew to commit to a fourth attempt at drinks. Time and venue had both been picked by Matthew, but now, after Robin had secured Strike’s agreement all over again, Matthew was changing the night and it was impossible not to feel that he was doing it to make a point, to show Strike that he too had other commitments; that he too (Robin could not help herself thinking it) could piss people around.

“Fine,” she sighed into the phone, “I’ll check with Cormoran and see whether Thursday’s OK.”

“You don’t sound like it’s fine.”

“Matt, don’t start. I’ll ask him, OK?”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

Robin replaced the receiver. Strike was now in full throat, snoring like a traction engine with his mouth open, legs wide apart, feet flat on the floor, arms folded.

She sighed, looking at her sleeping boss. Strike had never shown any animosity towards Matthew, had never passed comment on him in any way. It was Matthew who brooded over the existence of Strike, who rarely lost an opportunity to point out that Robin could have earned a great deal more if she had taken any of the other jobs she had been offered before deciding to stay with a rackety private detective, deep in debt and unable to pay her what she deserved. It would ease her home life considerably if Matthew could be brought to share her opinion of Cormoran Strike, to like him, even admire him. Robin was optimistic: she liked both of them, so why could they not like each other?

With a sudden snort, Strike was awake. He opened his eyes and blinked at her.

“I was snoring,” he stated, wiping his mouth.

“Not much,” she lied. “Listen, Cormoran, would it be all right if we move drinks from Friday to Thursday?”

“Drinks?”

“With Matthew and me,” she said. “Remember? The King’s Arms, Roupell Street. I did write it down for you,” she said, with a slightly forced cheeriness.

“Right,” he said. “Yeah. Friday.”

“No, Matt wants—he can’t do Friday. Is it OK to do Thursday instead?”

“Yeah, fine,” he said groggily. “I think I’m going to try and get some sleep, Robin.”

“All right. I’ll make a note about Thursday.”

“What’s happening on Thursday?”

“Drinks with—oh, never mind. Go and sleep.”

She sat staring blankly at her computer screen after the glass door had closed, then jumped as it opened again.

“Robin, could you call a bloke called Christian Fisher,” said Strike. “Tell him who I am, tell him I’m looking for Owen Quine and that I need the address of the writer’s retreat he told Quine about?”

“Christian Fisher…where does he work?”

“Bugger,” muttered Strike. “I never asked. I’m so knackered. He’s a publisher…trendy publisher.”

“No problem, I’ll find him. Go and sleep.”

When the glass door had closed a second time, Robin turned her attention to Google. Within thirty seconds she had discovered that Christian Fisher was the founder of a small press called Crossfire, based in Exmouth Market.

As she dialed the publisher’s number, she thought of the wedding invitation that had been sitting in her handbag for a week now. Robin had not told Strike the date of her and Matthew’s wedding, nor had she told Matthew that she wished to invite her boss. If Thursday’s drinks went well…

“Crossfire,” said a shrill voice on the line. Robin focused her attention on the job in hand.