The Silkworm

Robin accompanied him inside with barely a word, making no reference even to Manny’s recent, startling assertion. Her cold and slightly martyred air did not entirely surprise Strike, but he was impatient with it. She queued for their burgers, because he could not manage both tray and crutches, and when she had set down the loaded tray at the small Formica table he said, trying to defuse the tension:

“Look, I know you expected me to tell Chard off for treating you like staff.”

“I didn’t,” Robin contradicted him automatically. (Hearing him say it aloud made her feel petulant, childish.)

“Have it your own way,” said Strike with an irritable shrug, taking a large bite of his first burger.

They ate in disgruntled silence for a minute or two, until Robin’s innate honesty reasserted itself.

“All right, I did, a bit,” she said.

Mellowed by greasy food and touched by her admission, Strike said:

“I was getting good stuff out of him, Robin. You don’t start picking arguments with interviewees when they’re in full flow.”

“Sorry for my amateurishness,” she said, stung all over again.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Who’s calling you—?”

“What were you intending, when you took me on?” she demanded suddenly, letting her unwrapped burger fall back onto the tray.

The latent resentment of weeks had suddenly burst its bounds. She did not care what she heard; she wanted the truth. Was she a typist and a receptionist, or was she something more? Had she stayed with Strike, and helped him climb out of penury, merely to be shunted aside like domestic staff?

“Intending?” repeated Strike, staring at her. “What d’you mean, intend—?”

“I thought you meant me to be—I thought I was going to get some—some training,” said Robin, pink-cheeked and unnaturally bright-eyed. “You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but then lately you’ve been talking about getting someone else in. I took a pay cut,” she said tremulously. “I turned down better-paid jobs. I thought you meant me to be—”

Her anger, so long suppressed, was bringing her to the verge of tears, but she was determined not to give in to them. The fictional partner whom she had been imagining for Strike would never cry; not that no-nonsense ex-policewoman, tough and unemotional through every crisis…

“I thought you meant me to be—I didn’t think I was just going to answer the phone.”

“You don’t just answer the phone,” said Strike, who had just finished his first burger and was watching her struggle with her anger from beneath his heavy brows. “You’ve been casing murder suspects’ houses with me this week. You just saved both our lives on the motorway.”

But Robin was not to be deflected.

“What were you expecting me to do when you kept me on?”

“I don’t know that I had any particular plan,” Strike said slowly and untruthfully. “I didn’t know you were this serious about the job—looking for training—”

“How could I not be serious?” demanded Robin loudly.

A family of four in the corner of the tiny restaurant was staring at them. Robin paid them no attention. She was suddenly livid. The long cold journey, Strike eating all the food, his surprise that she could drive properly, her relegation to the kitchen with Chard’s servants and now this—

“You give me half—half—what that human resources job would have paid! Why do you think I stayed? I helped you. I helped you solve the Lula Landry—”

“OK,” said Strike, holding up a large, hairy-backed hand. “OK, here it is. But don’t blame me if you don’t like what you’re about to hear.”

She stared at him, flushed, straight-backed on her plastic chair, her food untouched.

“I did take you on thinking I could train you up. I didn’t have any money for courses, but I thought you could learn on the job until I could afford it.”

Refusing to feel mollified until she heard what was coming next, Robin said nothing.

“You’ve got a lot of aptitude for the job,” said Strike, “but you’re getting married to someone who hates you doing it.”

Robin opened her mouth and closed it again. A sensation of having been unexpectedly winded had robbed her of the power of speech.

“You leave on the dot every day—”

“I do not!” said Robin, furious. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I turned down a day off to be here now, driving you all the way to Devon—”

“Because he’s away,” said Strike. “Because he won’t know.”

The feeling of having been winded intensified. How could Strike know that she had lied to Matthew, if not in fact, then by omission?

“Even if that—whether that’s true or not,” she said unsteadily, “it’s up to me what I do with my—it’s not up to Matthew what career I have.”

“I was with Charlotte sixteen years, on and off,” said Strike, picking up his second burger. “Mostly off. She hated my job. It’s what kept breaking us up—one of the things that kept breaking us up,” he corrected himself, scrupulously honest. “She couldn’t understand a vocation. Some people can’t; at best, work’s about status and paychecks for them, it hasn’t got value in itself.”