The Silkworm

7

When informed by telephone that her husband was not, after all, at the writer’s retreat, Leonora Quine sounded anxious.

“Where is he, then?” she asked, more of herself, it seemed, than Strike.

“Where does he usually go when he walks out?” Strike asked.

“Hotels,” she said, “and once he was staying with some woman but he don’t know her no more. Orlando,” she said sharply, away from the receiver, “put that down, it’s mine. I said, it’s mine. What?” she said, loudly in Strike’s ear.

“I didn’t say anything. D’you want me to keep looking for your husband?”

“Course I do, who else is gonna bloody find him? I can’t leave Orlando. Ask Liz Tassel where he is. She found him before. Hilton,” said Leonora unexpectedly. “He was at the Hilton once.”

“Which Hilton?”

“I dunno, ask Liz. She made him go off, she should be bloody helping bring him back. She won’t take my calls. Orlando, put it down.”

“Is there anyone else you can think—?”

“No, or I’d’ve bloody asked them, wouldn’t I?” snapped Leonora. “You’re the detective, you find him! Orlando!”

“Mrs. Quine, we’ve got—”

“Call me Leonora.”

“Leonora, we’ve got to consider the possibility that your husband might have done himself an injury. We’d find him more quickly,” said Strike, raising his voice over the domestic clamor at the other end of the line, “if we involved the police.”

“I don’t wanna. I called them that time he was gone a week and he turned up at his lady friend’s and they weren’t happy. He’ll be angry if I do that again. Anyway, Owen wouldn’t—Orlando, leave it!”

“The police could circulate his picture more effectively and—”

“I just want him home quietly. Why doesn’t he just come back?” she added pettishly. “He’s had time to calm down.”

“Have you read your husband’s new book?” Strike asked.

“No. I always wait till they’re finished and I can read ’em with proper covers on and everything.”

“Has he told you anything about it?”

“No, he don’t like talking about work while he’s—Orlando, put it down!”

He was not sure whether she had hung up deliberately or not.

The fog of early morning had lifted. Rain was speckling his office windows. A client was due imminently, yet another divorcing woman who wanted to know where her soon-to-be-ex-husband was burying assets.

“Robin,” said Strike, emerging into the outer office, “will you print me out a picture of Owen Quine off the internet, if you can find one? And call his agent, Elizabeth Tassel, and see if she’s willing to answer a few quick questions.”

About to return to his own office, he thought of something else.

“And could you look up ‘bombyx mori’ for me, and see what it means?”

“How are you spelling that?”

“God knows,” said Strike.

The soon-to-be divorcée arrived on time, at eleven thirty. She was a suspiciously youthful-looking forty-something who exuded fluttery charm and a musky scent that always made the office feel cramped to Robin. Strike disappeared into his office with her, and for two hours Robin heard only the gentle rise and fall of their voices over the steady thrumming of the rain and the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard; calm and placid sounds. Robin had become used to hearing sudden outbreaks of tears, moans, even shouting from Strike’s office. Sudden silences could be the most ominous of all, as when a male client had literally fainted (and, they had learned later, suffered a minor heart attack) on seeing the photographs of his wife and her lover that Strike had taken through a long lens.

When Strike and his client emerged at last, and she had taken fulsome farewell of him, Robin handed her boss a large picture of Owen Quine, taken from the website of the Bath Literature Festival.

“Jesus Christ almighty,” said Strike.

Owen Quine was a large, pale and portly man of around sixty, with straggly yellow-white hair and a pointed Van Dyke beard. His eyes appeared to be of different colors, which gave a peculiar intensity to his stare. For the photograph he had wrapped himself in what seemed to be a Tyrolean cape and was wearing a feather-trimmed trilby.

“You wouldn’t think he’d be able to stay incognito for long,” commented Strike. “Can you make a few copies of this, Robin? We might have to show it around hotels. His wife thinks he once stayed at a Hilton, but she can’t remember which one, so could you start ringing round to see if he’s booked in? Can’t imagine he’d use his own name, but you could try describing him…Any luck with Elizabeth Tassel?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “Believe it or not, I was just about to call her when she called me.”

“She called here? Why?”

“Christian Fisher’s told her you’ve been to see him.”

“And?”

“She’s got meetings this afternoon, but she wants to meet you at eleven o’clock tomorrow at her office.”

“Does she, now?” said Strike, looking amused. “More and more interesting. Did you ask her if she knows where Quine is?”

“Yes; she says she hasn’t got a clue, but she was still adamant she wants to meet you. She’s very bossy. Like a headmistress. And Bombyx mori,” she finished up, “is the Latin name for a silkworm.”

“A silkworm?”

“Yeah, and you know what? I always thought they were like spiders spinning their webs, but you know how they get silk from the worms?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“They boil them,” said Robin. “Boil them alive, so that they don’t damage their cocoons by bursting out of them. It’s the cocoons that are made of silk. Not very nice, really, is it? Why did you want to know about silkworms?”

“I wanted to know why Owen Quine might have called his novel Bombyx Mori,” said Strike. “Can’t say I’m any the wiser.”

He spent the afternoon on tedious paperwork relating to a surveillance case and hoping the weather might improve: he would need to go out as he had virtually nothing to eat upstairs. After Robin had left, Strike continued working while the rain pounding his window became steadily heavier. Finally he pulled on his overcoat and walked, in what was now a downpour, down a sodden, dark Charing Cross Road to buy food at the nearest supermarket. There had been too many takeaways lately.

On the way back up the road, with bulging carrier bags in both hands, he turned on impulse into a secondhand bookshop that was about to close. The man behind the counter was unsure whether they had a copy of Hobart’s Sin, Owen Quine’s first book and supposedly his best, but after a lot of inconclusive mumbling and an unconvincing perusal of his computer screen, offered Strike a copy of The Balzac Brothers by the same author. Tired, wet and hungry, Strike paid two pounds for the battered hardback and took it home to his attic flat.

Having put away his provisions and cooked himself pasta, Strike stretched out on his bed as night pressed dense, dark and cold at his windows, and opened the missing man’s book.

The style was ornate and florid, the story gothic and surreal. Two brothers by the names of Varicocele and Vas were locked inside a vaulted room while the corpse of their older brother decayed slowly in a corner. In between drunken arguments about literature, loyalty and the French writer Balzac, they attempted to coauthor an account of their decomposing brother’s life. Varicocele constantly palpated his aching balls, which seemed to Strike to be a clumsy metaphor for writer’s block; Vas seemed to be doing most of the work.

After fifty pages, and with a murmur of “Bollocks is right,” Strike threw the book aside and began the laborious process of turning in.

The deep and blissful stupor of the previous night eluded him. Rain hammered against the window of his attic room and his sleep was disturbed; confused dreams of catastrophe filled the night. Strike woke in the morning with the uneasy aftermath clinging over him like a hangover. The rain was still pounding on his window, and when he turned on his TV he saw that Cornwall had been hit by severe flooding; people were trapped in cars, or evacuated from their homes and now huddled in emergency centers.

Strike snatched up his mobile phone and called the number, familiar to him as his own reflection in the mirror, that all his life had represented security and stability.

“Hello?” said his aunt.

“It’s Cormoran. You all right, Joan? I’ve just seen the news.”

“We’re all right at the moment, love, it’s up the coast it’s bad,” she said. “It’s wet, mind you, blowing up a storm, but nothing like St. Austell. Just been watching it on the news ourselves. How are you, Corm? It’s been ages. Ted and I were just saying last night, we haven’t heard from you, and we were wanting to say, why don’t you come for Christmas as you’re on your own again? What do you think?”

He was unable to dress or to fasten on his prosthesis while holding the mobile. She talked for half an hour, an unstoppable gush of local chat and sudden, darting forays into personal territory he preferred to leave unprobed. At last, after a final blast of interrogation about his love life, his debts and his amputated leg, she let him go.

Strike arrived in the office late, tired and irritable. He was wearing a dark suit and tie. Robin wondered whether he was going to meet the divorcing brunet for lunch after his meeting with Elizabeth Tassel.

“Heard the news?”

“Floods in Cornwall?” Strike asked, switching on the kettle, because his first tea of the day had grown cold while Joan gabbled.

“William and Kate are engaged,” said Robin.

“Who?”

“Prince William,” said Robin, amused, “and Kate Middleton.”

“Oh,” said Strike coldly. “Good for them.”

He had been among the ranks of the engaged himself until a few months ago. He did not know how his ex-fiancée’s new engagement was proceeding, nor did he enjoy wondering when it was going to end. (Not as theirs had ended, of course, with her clawing her betrothed’s face and revealing her betrayal, but with the kind of wedding he could never have given her; more like the one William and Kate would no doubt soon enjoy.)

Robin judged it safe to break the moody silence only once Strike had had half a mug of tea.

“Lucy called just before you came down, to remind you about your birthday dinner on Saturday night, and to ask whether you want to bring anyone.”

Strike’s spirits slipped several more notches. He had forgotten all about the dinner at his sister’s house.

“Right,” he said heavily.

“Is it your birthday on Saturday?” Robin asked.

“No,” said Strike.

“When is it?”

He sighed. He did not want a cake, a card or presents, but her expression was expectant.

“Tuesday,” he said.

“The twenty-third?”

“Yeah.”

After a short pause, it occurred to him that he ought to reciprocate.

“And when’s yours?” Something in her hesitation unnerved him. “Christ, it’s not today, is it?”

She laughed.

“No, it’s gone. October the ninth. It’s all right, it was a Saturday,” she said, still smiling at his pained expression. “I wasn’t sitting here all day expecting flowers.”

He grinned back. Feeling he ought to make a little extra effort, because he had missed her birthday and never considered finding out when it was, he added:

“Good thing you and Matthew haven’t set a date yet. At least you won’t clash with the Royal Wedding.”

“Oh,” said Robin, blushing, “we have set a date.”

“You have?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “It’s the—the eighth of January. I’ve got your invitation here,” she said, stooping hurriedly over her bag (she had not even asked Matthew about inviting Strike, but too late for that). “Here.”

“The eighth of January?” Strike said, taking the silver envelope. “That’s only—what?—seven weeks away.”

“Yes,” said Robin.

There was a strange little pause. Strike could not remember immediately what else he wanted her to do; then it came back to him, and as he spoke he tapped the silver envelope against his palm, businesslike.

“How’s it going with the Hiltons?”

“I’ve done a few. Quine isn’t there under his own name and nobody’s recognized the description. There are loads of them, though, so I’m just working my way through the list. What are you up to after you see Elizabeth Tassel?” she asked casually.

“Pretending I want to buy a flat in Mayfair. Looks like somebody’s husband’s trying to realize some capital and take it offshore before his wife’s lawyers can stop him.

“Well,” he said, pushing the unopened wedding invitation deep into his overcoat pocket, “better be off. Got a bad author to find.”