The Silkworm Read online

  ‘I don’t want to read any more bad books; I had enough with the Brothers Ballsache,’ said Strike. ‘Anything about Quine?’

  ‘Loads,’ said Robin, ‘assuming he’s the man she calls The Famous Writer. TFW for short.’

  ‘I doubt she’s sleeping with two authors,’ said Strike. ‘It must be him. “Famous” is stretching it a bit, though. Had you heard of Quine before Leonora walked in?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Robin. ‘Here he is, look, on the second of November.’

  Great talk with TFW about Plot and Narrative tonight which are of course not the same thing. For those wondering:- Plot is what happens, Narrative is how much you show your readers and how you show it to them.

  An example from my second Novel ‘Melina’s Sacrifice.’

  As they made their way towards the Forest of Harderell Lendor raised his handsome profile to see how near they were to it. His well-maintained body, honed by horseback-riding and archery skills –

  ‘Scroll up,’ said Strike, ‘see what else there is about Quine.’

  Robin obliged, pausing on a post from 21 October.

  So TFW calls and he can’t see me (again.) Family problems. What can I do except say that I understand? I knew it would be complicated when we fell in love. I can’t be openly explicit on this but Ill just say he’s stuck with a wife he doesn’t love because of a Third Party. Not his fault. Not the Third Party’s fault. The wife won’t let him go even if it’s the best thing for everyone so we’re locked into what sometimes feels like it’s Purgatory

  The Wife knows about me and pretend’s not to. I don’t know how she can stnad living with a man who wants to be with someone else because I know I couldn’t do it. TFW says she’s always put the Third Party before everything else including HIm. Strange how often being a ‘Carer’ masks deep Selfishness.

  Some people will say its all my fault for falling in love with a Married man. Your not telling me anything my friends, mySsister and my own Mother don’t tell me all the time. I’ve tried to call it off and what can I say except The Heart has it’s reasons, which Reasons don’t know. And now tonight I’m crying over him all over again for a brand new Reason. He tells me he’s nearly finished his Masterpiece, the book he says is the Best he’s ever written. ‘I hope you’ll like it. You’re in it.’

  What do you say when a Famous Writer writes you into what he says is his best book? I understand what he’s giving me in way’s a Non-Writer can’t. It makes you feel proud and humble. Yes there are people we Writer’s let into our hearts, but into our Books?! That’s special. That’s different.

  Can’t help loving TFW. The Heart has it’s Reasons.

  There was an exchange of comments below.

  What would you say if I told you he’d read a bit to me? Pippa2011

  You’d better be joking Pip he won’t read me any!!! Kath

  You wait. Pippa2011 xxxx

  ‘Interesting,’ said Strike. ‘Very interesting. When Kent attacked me last night, she assured me that someone called Pippa wanted to kill me.’

  ‘Look at this, then!’ said Robin in excitement, scrolling down to 9 November.

  The first time I ever met TFW he said to me “Your not writing properly unless someone is bleeding, probably you”. As follower’s of this Blog know I’ve Metaphorically opened my veins both here and also in my novels. But today I feel like I have been Fatally stabbed by somebodywho I had learned to trust.

  ‘O Macheath! thou hast robb’d me of my Quiet – to see thee tortur’d would give me Pleasure.’

  ‘Where’s that quotation from?’ asked Strike.

  Robin’s nimble fingers danced across the keyboard.

  ‘The Beggar’s Opera, by John Gay.’

  ‘Erudite, for a woman who confuses “you’re” and “your” and goes in for random capitalisation.’

  ‘We can’t all be literary geniuses,’ said Robin reproachfully.

  ‘Thank Christ for that, from all I’m hearing about them.’

  ‘But look at the comment under the quotation,’ said Robin, returning to Kathryn’s blog. She clicked on the link and a single sentence was revealed.

  I’ll turn the handle on the f*@%ing rack for you Kath.

  This comment, too, had been made by Pippa2011.

  ‘Pippa sounds a handful, doesn’t she?’ commented Strike. ‘Anything about what Kent does for a living on here? I’m assuming she’s not paying the bills with her erotic fantasies.’

  ‘That’s a bit odd, too. Look at this bit.’

  On 28 October, Kathryn had written:

  Like most Writers I also have a day job. I can’t say to much about it for secuty reasons. This week security has been tightened at our Facility again which means in consequence that my officious Co-Worker (born again Christian, sanctimnious on the subject of my private life) an excuse to suggest to management that blogs e.tc should be viewed in case sensitive Information is revealed. Frotunately it seems sense has prevailed and no action is being taken.

  ‘Mysterious,’ said Strike. ‘Tightened security… women’s prison? Psychiatric hospital? Or are we talking industrial secrets?’

  ‘And look at this, on the thirteenth of November.’

  Robin scrolled right down to the most recent post on the blog, which was the only entry after that in which Kathryn claimed to have been fatally stabbed.

  My beloved sister has lost her long battle with breast cancer three days ago. Thank you all for your good wishes and support.

  Two comments had been added below this, which Robin opened.

  Pippa2011 had written:

  So sorry to hear this Kath. Sending you all the love in the world xxx.

  Kathryn had replied:

  Thanks Pippa your a real friend xxxx

  Kathryn’s advance thanks for multiple messages of support sat very sadly above the short exchange.

  ‘Why?’ asked Strike heavily.

  ‘Why what?’ said Robin, looking up at him.

  ‘Why do people do this?’

  ‘Blog, you mean? I don’t know… didn’t someone once say the unexamined life isn’t worth living?’

  ‘Yeah, Plato,’ said Strike, ‘but this isn’t examining a life, it’s exhibiting it.’

  ‘Oh God!’ said Robin, slopping tea down herself as she gave a guilty start. ‘I forgot, there’s something else! Christian Fisher called just as I was walking out the door last night. He wants to know if you’re interested in writing a book.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘A book,’ said Robin, fighting the urge to laugh at the expression of disgust on Strike’s face. ‘About your life. Your experiences in the army and solving the Lula Landry—’

  ‘Call him back,’ Strike said, ‘and tell him no, I’m not interested in writing a book.’

  He drained his mug and headed for the peg where an ancient leather jacket now hung beside his black overcoat.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten tonight?’ Robin said, with the knot that had temporarily dissolved tight in her stomach again.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Drinks,’ she said desperately. ‘Me. Matthew. The King’s Arms.’

  ‘No, haven’t forgotten,’ he said, wondering why she looked so tense and miserable. ‘’Spect I’ll be out all afternoon, so I’ll see you there. Eight, was it?’

  ‘Six thirty,’ said Robin, tenser than ever.

  ‘Six thirty. Right. I’ll be there… Venetia.’

  She did a double-take.

  ‘How did you know—?’

  ‘It’s on the invitation,’ said Strike. ‘Unusual. Where did that come from?’

  ‘I was – well, I was conceived there, apparently,’ she said, pink in the face. ‘In Venice. What’s your middle name?’ she asked over his laughter, half amused, half cross. ‘C. B. Strike – what’s the B?’

  ‘Got to get going,’ said Strike. ‘See you at eight.’

  ‘Six thirty!’ she bellowed at the closing door.

  Strike’s destination that afternoon was a s
hop that sold electronic accessories in Crouch End. Stolen mobile phones and laptops were unlocked in a back room, the personal information therein extracted, and the purged devices and the information were then sold separately to those who could use them.

  The owner of this thriving business was causing Mr Gunfrey, Strike’s client, considerable inconvenience. Mr Gunfrey, who was every bit as crooked as the man whom Strike had tracked to his business headquarters, but on a larger and more flamboyant scale, had made a mistake in treading on the wrong toes. It was Strike’s view that Gunfrey needed to clear out while he was ahead. He knew of what this adversary was capable; they had an acquaintance in common.

  The target greeted Strike in an upstairs office that smelled as bad as Elizabeth Tassel’s, while two shell-suited youths lolled around in the background picking their nails. Strike, who was impersonating a thug for hire recommended by their mutual acquaintance, listened as his would-be employer confided that he was intending to target Mr Gunfrey’s teenage son, about whose movements he was frighteningly well informed. He went so far as to offer Strike the job: five hundred pounds to cut the boy. (‘I don’t want no murder, jussa message to his father, you get me?’)

  It was gone six before Strike managed to extricate himself from the premises. His first call, once he had made sure he had not been followed, was to Mr Gunfrey himself, whose appalled silence told Strike that he had at last realised what he was up against.

  Strike then phoned Robin.

  ‘Going to be late, sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked, sounding strained. He could hear the sounds of the pub behind her: conversation and laughter.

  ‘Crouch End.’

  ‘Oh God,’ he heard her say under her breath. ‘It’ll take you ages—’

  ‘I’ll get a cab,’ he assured her. ‘Be as quick as I can.’

  Why, Strike wondered, as he sat in the taxi rumbling along Upper Street, had Matthew chosen a pub in Waterloo? To make sure that Strike had to travel a long way? Payback for Strike having chosen pubs convenient to him on their previous attempts to meet? Strike hoped the King’s Arms served food. He was suddenly very hungry.

  It took forty minutes to reach his destination, partly because the row of nineteenth-century workers’ cottages where the pub stood was blocked to traffic. Strike chose to get out and end the curmudgeonly taxi driver’s attempt to make sense of the street numbering, which appeared not to follow a logical sequence, and proceeded on foot, wondering whether the difficulty of finding the place had influenced Matthew’s choice.

  The King’s Arms turned out to be a picturesque Victorian corner pub the entrances of which were surrounded by a mixture of professional young men in suits and what looked like students, all smoking and drinking. The small crowd parted easily as he approached, giving him a wider berth than was strictly necessary even for a man of his height and breadth. As he crossed the threshold into the small bar Strike wondered, not without a faint hope that it might happen, whether he might be asked to leave on account of his filthy clothes.

  Meanwhile, in the noisy back room, which was a glass-ceilinged courtyard self-consciously crammed with bric-a-brac, Matthew was looking at his watch.

  ‘It’s nearly a quarter past,’ he told Robin.

  Clean cut in his suit and tie, he was – as usual – the handsomest man in the room. Robin was used to seeing women’s eyes swivel as he walked past them; she had never quite managed to make up her mind how aware Matthew was of their swift, burning glances. Sitting at the long wooden bench that they had been forced to share with a party of cackling students, six foot one, with a firm cleft chin and bright blue eyes, he looked like a thoroughbred kept in a paddock of Highland ponies.

  ‘That’s him,’ said Robin, with a surge of relief and apprehension.

  Strike seemed to have become larger and rougher-looking since he had left the office. He moved easily towards them through the packed room, his eyes on Robin’s bright gold head, one large hand grasping a pint of Hophead. Matthew stood up. It looked as though he braced himself.

  ‘Cormoran – hi – you found it.’

  ‘You’re Matthew,’ said Strike, holding out a hand. ‘Sorry I’m so late, I tried to get away earlier but I was with the sort of bloke you wouldn’t want to turn your back on without permission.’

  Matthew returned an empty smile. He had expected Strike to be full of those kinds of comments: self-dramatising, trying to make a mystery of what he did. By the look of him, he’d been changing a tyre.

  ‘Sit down,’ Robin told Strike nervously, moving along the bench so far that she was almost falling off the end. ‘Are you hungry? We were just talking about ordering something.’

  ‘They do reasonably decent food,’ said Matthew. ‘Thai. It’s not the Mango Tree, but it’s all right.’

  Strike smiled without warmth. He had expected Matthew to be like this: name-dropping restaurants in Belgravia to prove, after a single year in London, that he was a seasoned metropolitan.

  ‘How did it go this afternoon?’ Robin asked Strike. She thought that if Matthew only heard about the sort of things that Strike did, he would become as fascinated as she was by the process of detection and his every prejudice would fall away.

  But Strike’s brief description of his afternoon, omitting all identifying details of those involved, met barely concealed indifference on the part of Matthew. Strike then offered them both a drink, as they were holding empty glasses.

  ‘You could show a bit of interest,’ Robin hissed at Matthew once Strike was out of earshot at the bar.

  ‘Robin, he met a man in a shop,’ said Matthew. ‘I doubt they’ll be optioning the film rights any time soon.’

  Pleased with his own wit, he turned his attention to the blackboard menu on the opposite wall.

  When Strike had returned with drinks, Robin insisted on battling her way up to the bar with their food order. She dreaded leaving the two men alone together, but felt that they might, somehow, find their own level without her.

  Matthew’s brief increase in self-satisfaction ebbed away in Robin’s absence.

  ‘You’re ex-army,’ he found himself telling Strike, even though he had been determined not to permit Strike’s life experience to dominate the conversation.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Strike. ‘SIB.’

  Matthew was not sure what that was.

  ‘My father’s ex-RAF,’ he said. ‘Yeah, he was in same time as Jeff Young.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Welsh rugby union player? Twenty-three caps?’ said Matthew.

  ‘Right,’ said Strike.

  ‘Yeah, Dad made Squadron Leader. Left in eighty-six and he’s run his own property management business since. Done all right for himself. Nothing like your old man,’ said Matthew, a little defensively, ‘but all right.’

  Tit, thought Strike.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Robin said anxiously, sitting back down.

  ‘Just Dad,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Robin.

  ‘Why poor thing?’ snapped Matthew.

  ‘Well – he’s worried about your mum, isn’t he? The mini-stroke?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Matthew, ‘that.’

  Strike had met men like Matthew in the army: always officer class, but with that little pocket of insecurity just beneath the smooth surface that made them overcompensate, and sometimes overreach.

  ‘So how are things at Lowther-French?’ Robin asked Matthew, willing him to show Strike what a nice man he was, to show the real Matthew, whom she loved. ‘Matthew’s auditing this really odd little publishing company. They’re quite funny, aren’t they?’ she said to her fiancé.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it “funny”, the shambles they’re in,’ said Matthew, and he talked until their food arrived, littering his chat with references to ‘ninety k’ and ‘a quarter of a mill’, and every sentence was angled, like a mirror, to show him in the best possible light: his cleverness, his quick thinking, his bestin
g of slower, stupider yet more senior colleagues, his patronage of the dullards working for the firm he was auditing.

  ‘… trying to justify a Christmas party, when they’ve barely broken even in two years; it’ll be more like a wake.’

  Matthew’s confident strictures on the small firm were followed by the arrival of their food and silence. Robin, who had been hoping that Matthew would reproduce for Strike some of the kinder, more affectionate things he had found to tell her about the eccentrics at the small press, could think of nothing to say. However, Matthew’s mention of a publishing party had just given Strike an idea. The detective’s jaws worked more slowly. It had occurred to him that there might be an excellent opportunity to seek information on Owen Quine’s whereabouts, and his capacious memory volunteered a small piece of information he had forgotten he knew.

  ‘Got a girlfriend, Cormoran?’ Matthew asked Strike directly; it was something he was keen to establish. Robin had been vague on the point.

  ‘No,’ said Strike absently. ‘’Scuse me – won’t be long, got to make a phone call.’

  ‘Yeah, no problem,’ said Matthew irritably, but only once Strike was once again out of earshot. ‘You’re forty minutes late and then you piss off during dinner. We’ll just sit here waiting till you deign to come back.’

  ‘Matt!’

  Reaching the dark pavement, Strike pulled out cigarettes and his mobile phone. Lighting up, he walked away from his fellow smokers to the quiet end of the side street to stand in darkness beneath the brick arches that bore the railway line.