The Silkworm Read online

  And at such times, Strike would think nostalgically of the army, of the anonymity of a career in which your background and your parentage counted for almost nothing beside your ability to do the job. Back in the Special Investigation Branch, the most personal question he had faced on introduction was a request to repeat the odd pair of names with which his extravagantly unconventional mother had saddled him.

  Traffic was already rolling busily along Charing Cross Road by the time Strike emerged from the Tube. The November dawn was breaking now, grey and half-hearted, full of lingering shadows. He turned into Denmark Street feeling drained and sore, looking forward to the short sleep he might be able to squeeze in before his next client arrived at nine thirty. With a wave at the girl in the guitar shop, with whom he often took cigarette breaks on the street, Strike let himself in through the black outer door beside the 12 Bar Café and began to climb the metal staircase that curled around the broken birdcage lift inside. Up past the graphic designer on the first floor, past his own office with its engraved glass door on the second; up to the third and smallest landing where his home now lay.

  The previous occupant, manager of the bar downstairs, had moved on to more salubrious quarters and Strike, who had been sleeping in his office for a few months, had leapt at the chance to rent the place, grateful for such an easy solution to the problem of his homelessness. The space under the eaves was small by any standards, and especially for a man of six foot three. He scarcely had room to turn around in the shower; kitchen and living room were uneasily combined and the bedroom was almost entirely filled by the double bed. Some of Strike’s possessions remained boxed up on the landing, in spite of the landlord’s injunction against this.

  His small windows looked out across rooftops, with Denmark Street far below. The constant throb of the bass from the bar below was muffled to the point that Strike’s own music often obliterated it.

  Strike’s innate orderliness was manifest throughout: the bed was made, the crockery clean, everything in its place. He needed a shave and shower, but that could wait; after hanging up his overcoat, he set his alarm for nine twenty and stretched out on the bed fully clothed.

  He fell asleep within seconds and within a few more – or so it seemed – he was awake again. Somebody was knocking on his door.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cormoran, I’m really sorry—’

  His assistant, a tall young woman with long strawberry-blonde hair, looked apologetic as he opened the door, but at the sight of him her expression became appalled.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Wuzassleep. Been ’wake all night – two nights.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Robin repeated, ‘but it’s nine forty and William Baker’s here and getting—’

  ‘Shit,’ mumbled Strike. ‘Can’t’ve set the alarm right – gimme five min—’

  ‘That’s not all,’ said Robin. ‘There’s a woman here. She hasn’t got an appointment. I’ve told her you haven’t got room for another client, but she’s refusing to leave.’

  Strike yawned, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Five minutes. Make them tea or something.’

  Six minutes later, in a clean shirt, smelling of toothpaste and deodorant but still unshaven, Strike entered the outer office where Robin was sitting at her computer.

  ‘Well, better late than never,’ said William Baker with a rigid smile. ‘Lucky you’ve got such a good-looking secretary, or I might have got bored and left.’

  Strike saw Robin flush angrily as she turned away, ostensibly organising the post. There had been something inherently offensive in the way that Baker had said ‘secretary’. Immaculate in his pinstriped suit, the company director was employing Strike to investigate two of his fellow board members.

  ‘Morning, William,’ said Strike.

  ‘No apology?’ murmured Baker, his eyes on the ceiling.

  ‘Hello, who are you?’ Strike asked, ignoring him and addressing instead the slight, middle-aged woman in an old brown overcoat who was perched on the sofa.

  ‘Leonora Quine,’ she replied, in what sounded, to Strike’s practised ear, like a West Country accent.

  ‘I’ve got a very busy morning ahead, Strike,’ said Baker.

  He walked without invitation into the inner office. When Strike did not follow, he lost a little of his suavity.

  ‘I doubt you got away with shoddy time-keeping in the army, Mr Strike. Come along, please.’

  Strike did not seem to hear him.

  ‘What exactly is it you were wanting me to do for you, Mrs Quine?’ he asked the shabby woman on the sofa.

  ‘Well, it’s my husband—’

  ‘Mr Strike, I’ve got an appointment in just over an hour,’ said William Baker, more loudly.

  ‘—your secretary said you didn’t have no appointments but I said I’d wait.’

  ‘Strike!’ barked William Baker, calling his dog to heel.

  ‘Robin,’ snarled the exhausted Strike, losing his temper at last. ‘Make up Mr Baker’s bill and give him the file; it’s up to date.’

  ‘What?’ said William Baker, thrown. He re-emerged into the outer office.

  ‘He’s sacking you,’ said Leonora Quine with satisfaction.

  ‘You haven’t finished the job,’ Baker told Strike. ‘You said there was more—’

  ‘Someone else can finish the job for you. Someone who doesn’t mind tossers as clients.’

  The atmosphere in the office seemed to become petrified. Wooden-faced, Robin retrieved Baker’s file from the outer cabinet and handed it to Strike.

  ‘How dare—’

  ‘There’s a lot of good stuff in that file that’ll stand up in court,’ said Strike, handing it to the director. ‘Well worth the money.’

  ‘You haven’t finished—’

  ‘He’s finished with you,’ interjected Leonora Quine.

  ‘Will you shut up, you stupid wom—’ William Baker began, then took a sudden step backwards as Strike took a half-step forwards. Nobody said anything. The ex-serviceman seemed suddenly to be filling twice as much space as he had just seconds before.

  ‘Take a seat in my office, Mrs Quine,’ said Strike quietly.

  She did as she was told.

  ‘You think she’ll be able to afford you?’ sneered a retreating William Baker, his hand now on the door handle.

  ‘My fees are negotiable,’ said Strike, ‘if I like the client.’

  He followed Leonora Quine into his office and closed the door behind him with a snap.

  3

  … left alone to bear up all these ills…

  Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier

  ‘He’s a right one, isn’t he?’ commented Leonora Quine as she sat down in the chair facing Strike’s desk.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Strike, sinking heavily into the seat opposite her. ‘He is.’

  In spite of a barely crumpled pink-and-white complexion and the clear whites of her pale blue eyes, she looked around fifty. Fine, limp, greying hair was held off her face by two plastic combs and she was blinking at him through old-fashioned glasses with over-large plastic frames. Her coat, though clean, had surely been bought in the eighties. It had shoulder pads and large plastic buttons.

  ‘So you’re here about your husband, Mrs Quine?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Leonora. ‘He’s missing.’

  ‘How long’s he been gone?’ asked Strike, reaching automatically for a notebook.

  ‘Ten days,’ said Leonora.

  ‘Have you been to the police?’

  ‘I don’t need the police,’ she said impatiently, as though she was tired of explaining this to people. ‘I called them once before and everyone was angry at me because he was only with a friend. Owen just goes off sometimes. He’s a writer,’ she said, as though this explained everything.

  ‘He’s disappeared before?’

  ‘He’s emotional,’ she said, her expression glum. ‘He’s always going off on one, but it’s been ten days and I know he’s really upset but
I need him home now. There’s Orlando and I’ve got things to do and there’s—’

  ‘Orlando?’ repeated Strike, his tired mind on the Florida resort. He did not have time to go to America and Leonora Quine, in her ancient coat, certainly did not look as though she could afford a ticket for him.

  ‘Our daughter, Orlando,’ said Leonora. ‘She needs looking after. I’ve got a neighbour in to sit with her while I’m here.’

  There was a knock on the door and Robin’s bright gold head appeared.

  ‘Would you like coffee, Mr Strike? You, Mrs Quine?’

  When they had given Robin their orders and she had withdrawn, Leonora said:

  ‘It won’t take you long, because I think I know where he is, only I can’t get hold of the address and nobody’ll take my calls. It’s been ten days,’ she repeated, ‘and we need him home.’

  It seemed to Strike a great extravagance to resort to a private detective in this circumstance, especially as her appearance exhaled poverty.

  ‘If it’s a simple question of making a phone call,’ he said gently, ‘haven’t you got a friend or a—?’

  ‘Edna can’t do it,’ she said and he found himself disproportionately touched (exhaustion sometimes laid him raw in this way) at her tacit admission that she had one friend in the world. ‘Owen’s told them not to say where he is. I need,’ she said simply, ‘a man to do it. Force them to say.’

  ‘Your husband’s name’s Owen, is it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she replied, ‘Owen Quine. He wrote Hobart’s Sin.’

  Neither name nor title meant anything to Strike.

  ‘And you think you know where he is?’

  ‘Yeah. We was at this party with a load of publishers and people – he didn’t want to take me, but I says, “I got a babysitter already, I’m coming” – so I hears Christian Fisher telling Owen about this place, this writer’s retreat place. And afterwards I says to Owen, “What was that place he was telling you about?” and Owen says, “I’m not telling you, that’s the whole bloody point, getting away from the wife and kids.”’

  She almost invited Strike to join her husband in laughing at her; proud, as mothers sometimes pretend to be, of their child’s insolence.

  ‘Who’s Christian Fisher?’ asked Strike, forcing himself to concentrate.

  ‘Publisher. Young, trendy bloke.’

  ‘Have you tried phoning Fisher and asking him for the address of this retreat?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve called him every day for a week and they said they’d taken a message and he’d get back to me, but he hasn’t. I think Owen’s told him not to say where he is. But you’ll be able to get the address out of Fisher. I know you’re good,’ she said. ‘You solved that Lula Landry thing, when the police never.’

  A mere eight months previously, Strike had had but a single client, his business had been moribund and his prospects desperate. Then he had proven, to the satisfaction of the Crown Prosecution Service, that a famous young woman had not committed suicide but had been pushed to her death from a fourth-floor balcony. The ensuing publicity had brought a tide of business; he had been, for a few weeks, the best-known private detective in the metropolis. Jonny Rokeby had become a mere footnote to his story; Strike had become a name in his own right, albeit a name most people got wrong…

  ‘I interrupted you,’ he said, trying hard to hold on to the thread of his thoughts.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Strike, squinting at his own crabbed writing on the notebook. ‘You said, “There’s Orlando, I’ve got things to do and there’s—”’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she said, ‘there’s funny stuff happening since he left.’

  ‘What kind of funny stuff?’

  ‘Shit,’ said Leonora Quine matter-of-factly, ‘through our letter box.’

  ‘Someone’s put excrement through your letter box?’ Strike said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Since your husband disappeared?’

  ‘Yeah. Dog,’ said Leonora, and it was a split-second before Strike deduced that this applied to the excrement, not her husband. ‘Three or four times now, at night. Nice thing to find in the morning, I don’t think. And there was a woman come to the door and all, who was weird.’

  She paused, waiting for Strike to prompt her. She seemed to enjoy being questioned. Many lonely people, Strike knew, found it pleasant to be the focus of somebody’s undivided attention and sought to prolong the novel experience.

  ‘When did this woman come to the door?’

  ‘Last week it was, and she asks for Owen and when I says, “He’s not here,” she says, “Tell him Angela died,” and walks off.’

  ‘And you didn’t know her?’

  ‘Never seen her before.’

  ‘Do you know an Angela?’

  ‘No. But he gets women fans going funny over him, sometimes,’ said Leonora, suddenly expansive. ‘Like, he had this woman once that wrote him letters and sent him photos of herself dressed up like one of his characters. Some of these women who write to him think he understands them or something because of his books. Silly, innit?’ she said. ‘It’s all made up.’

  ‘Do fans usually know where your husband lives?’

  ‘No,’ said Leonora. ‘But she could’ve bin a student or something. He teaches writing as well, sometimes.’

  The door opened and Robin entered with a tray. After putting black coffee in front of Strike and a tea in front of Leonora Quine, she withdrew again, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Is that everything strange that’s happened?’ Strike asked Leonora. ‘The excrement through the door, and this woman coming to the house?’

  ‘And I think I’ve been followed. Tall, dark girl with round shoulders,’ said Leonora.

  ‘This is a different woman to the one—?’

  ‘Yeah, the one that come to the house was dumpy. Long red hair. This one’s dark and bent over, like.’

  ‘You’re sure she was following you?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. I seen her behind me two, three times now. She isn’t local, I’ve never seen her before and I’ve lived in Ladbroke Grove thirty-odd years.’

  ‘OK,’ said Strike slowly. ‘You said your husband’s upset? What happened to upset him?’

  ‘He had a massive row with his agent.’

  ‘What about, do you know?’

  ‘His book, his latest. Liz – that’s his agent – tells him it’s the best thing he’s ever done, and then, like, a day later, she takes him out to dinner and says it’s unpublishable.’

  ‘Why did she change her mind?’

  ‘Ask her,’ said Leonora, showing anger for the first time. ‘Course he was upset after that. Anyone would be. He’s worked on that book for two years. He comes home in a right state and he goes into his study and grabs it all—’

  ‘Grabs what?’

  ‘His book, the manuscript and his notes and everything, swearing his head off, and he shoves them in a bag and he goes off and I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Has he got a mobile? Have you tried calling him?’

  ‘Yeah and he’s not picking up. He never does, when he goes off like this. He chucked his phone out the car window once,’ she said, again with that faint note of pride at her husband’s spirit.

  ‘Mrs Quine,’ said Strike, whose altruism necessarily had its limits, whatever he had told William Baker, ‘I’ll be honest with you: I don’t come cheap.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Leonora implacably. ‘Liz’ll pay.’

  ‘Liz?’

  ‘Liz – Elizabeth Tassel. Owen’s agent. It’s her fault he’s gone away. She can take it out of her commission. He’s her best client. She’ll want him back all right, once she realises what she’s done.’

  Strike did not set as much store by this assurance as Leonora herself seemed to. He added three sugars to the coffee and gulped it down, trying to think how best to proceed. He felt vaguely sorry for Leonora Quine, who seemed inured to her erratic husband’s tantrums, who accepte
d the fact that nobody would deign to return her calls, who was sure that the only help she could expect must be paid for. Her slight eccentricity of manner aside, there was a truculent honesty about her. Nevertheless, he had been ruthless in taking on only profitable cases since his business had received its unexpected boost. Those few people who had come to him with hard-luck stories, hoping that his own personal difficulties (reported and embellished in the press) would predispose him to helping them free of charge, had left disappointed.

  But Leonora Quine, who had drunk her tea quite as quickly as Strike had downed his coffee, was already on her feet, as though they had agreed terms and everything was settled.

  ‘I’d better get going,’ she said, ‘I don’t like leaving Orlando too long. She’s missing her daddy. I’ve told her I’m getting a man to go find him.’

  Strike had recently helped several wealthy young women rid themselves of City husbands who had become much less attractive to them since the financial crash. There was something appealing about restoring a husband to a wife, for a change.

  ‘All right,’ he said, yawning as he pushed his notebook towards her. ‘I’ll need your contact details, Mrs Quine. A photograph of your husband would be handy too.’

  She wrote her address and telephone number out for him in a round, childish hand, but his request for a photo seemed to surprise her.

  ‘What d’you need a picture for? He’s at that writer’s retreat. Just make Christian Fisher tell you where it is.’

  She was through the door before Strike, tired and sore, could emerge from behind his desk. He heard her say briskly to Robin: ‘Ta for the tea,’ then the glass door onto the landing opened with a flash and closed with a gentle judder, and his new client had gone.

  4

  Well, ’tis a rare thing to have an ingenious friend…

  William Congreve, The Double-Dealer

  Strike dropped onto the sofa in the outer office. It was almost new, an essential expense as he had broken the second-hand 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-grey eyes – scrutinised him over her coffee cup.