The Silkworm

“So what exactly are the bloody sack and the dwarf supposed to—?”

“Get it out of Jerry,” said Chard. “Make him tell you. Why should I help him spread slander around?”

“I’ve been wondering,” Strike said, obediently dropping that line of inquiry, “why Michael Fancourt agreed to come to Roper Chard when Quine was working for you, given that they were on such bad terms?”

There was a short pause.

“We were under no legal obligation to publish Owen’s next book,” said Chard. “We had a first-look option. That was all.”

“So you think Jerry Waldegrave told Quine that he was about to be dropped, to keep Fancourt happy?”

“Yes,” said Chard, staring at his own fingernails. “I do. Also, I had offended Owen the last time I saw him, so the news that I might be about to drop him no doubt swept away any last vestige of loyalty he might once have felt towards me, because I took him on when every other publisher in Britain had given up on—”

“How did you offend him?”

“Oh, it was when he last came into the office. He brought his daughter with him.”

“Orlando?”

“Named, he told me, for the eponymous protagonist of the novel by Virginia Woolf.” Chard hesitated, his eyes flickering to Strike and then back to his nails. “She’s—not quite right, his daughter.”

“Really?” said Strike. “In what way?”

“Mentally,” mumbled Chard. “I was visiting the art department when they came in. Owen told me he was showing her around—something he had no business doing, but Owen always made himself at home…great sense of entitlement and self-importance, always…

“His daughter grabbed at a mock-up cover—grubby hands—I seized her wrist to stop her ruining it—” He mimed the action in midair; with the remembrance of this act of near desecration came a look of distaste. “It was instinctive, you know, a desire to protect the image, but it upset her very much. There was a scene. Very embarrassing and uncomfortable,” mumbled Chard, who seemed to suffer again in retrospect. “She became almost hysterical. Owen was furious. That, no doubt, was my crime. That, and bringing Michael Fancourt back to Roper Chard.”

“Who,” Strike asked, “would you think had most reason to be upset at their depiction in Bombyx Mori?”

“I really don’t know,” said Chard. After a short pause he said, “Well, I doubt Elizabeth Tassel was delighted to see herself portrayed as parasitic, after all the years of shepherding Owen out of parties to stop him making a drunken fool of himself, but I’m afraid,” said Chard coldly, “I haven’t got much sympathy for Elizabeth. She allowed that book to go out unread. Criminal carelessness.”

“Did you contact Fancourt after you’d read the manuscript?” asked Strike.

“He had to know what Quine had done,” said Chard. “Better by far that he heard it from me. He was just home from receiving the Prix Prévost in Paris. I did not make that call with relish.”

“How did he react?”

“Michael’s resilient,” muttered Chard. “He told me not to worry, said that Owen had done himself more harm than he had done us. Michael rather enjoys his enmities. He was perfectly calm.”

“Did you tell him what Quine had said, or implied, about him in the book?”

“Of course,” said Chard. “I couldn’t let him hear it from anyone else.”

“And he didn’t seem upset?”

“He said, ‘The last word will be mine, Daniel. The last word will be mine.’”

“What did you understand by that?”

“Oh, well, Michael’s a famous assassin,” said Chard, with a small smile. “He can flay anyone alive in five well-chosen—when I say ‘assassin,’” said Chard, suddenly and comically anxious, “naturally, I’m talking in literary—”

“Of course,” Strike reassured him. “Did you ask Fancourt to join you in legal action against Quine?”

“Michael despises the courts as a means of redress in such matters.”

“You knew the late Joseph North, didn’t you?” asked Strike conversationally.

The muscles in Chard’s face tightened: a mask beneath the darkening skin.

“A very—that was a very long time ago.”

“North was a friend of Quine’s, wasn’t he?”

“I turned down Joe North’s novel,” said Chard. His thin mouth was working. “That’s all I did. Half a dozen other publishers did the same. It was a mistake, commercially speaking. It had some success, posthumously. Of course,” he added dismissively, “I think Michael largely rewrote it.”

“Quine resented you turning his friend’s book down?”

“Yes, he did. He made a lot of noise about it.”

“But he came to Roper Chard anyway?”

“There was nothing personal in my turning down Joe North’s book,” said Chard, with heightened color. “Owen came to understand that, eventually.”

There was another uncomfortable pause.

“So…when you’re hired to find a—a criminal of this type,” said Chard, changing subject with palpable effort, “do you work with the police on that, or—?”