The Silkworm

He began unwrapping the burger while Robin glared at him.

“I need a partner who can share the long hours,” said Strike. “Someone who’s OK with weekend work. I don’t blame Matthew for worrying about you—”

“He doesn’t.”

The words were out of her mouth before Robin could consider them. In her blanket desire to refute everything that Strike was saying she had let an unpalatable truth escape her. The fact was that Matthew had very little imagination. He had not seen Strike covered in blood after the killer of Lula Landry had stabbed him. Even her description of Owen Quine lying trussed and disemboweled seemed to have been blurred for him by the thick miasma of jealousy through which he heard everything connected to Strike. His antipathy for her job owed nothing to protectiveness and she had never admitted as much to herself before.

“It can be dangerous, what I do,” said Strike through another huge bite of burger, as though he had not heard her.

“I’ve been useful to you,” said Robin, her voice thicker than his, though her mouth was empty.

“I know you have. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t had you,” said Strike. “Nobody was ever more grateful than me for a temping agency’s mistake. You’ve been incredible, I couldn’t have—don’t bloody cry, that family’s gawping enough already.”

“I don’t give a monkey’s,” said Robin into a handful of paper napkins and Strike laughed.

“If it’s what you want,” he told the top of her red-gold head, “you can go on a surveillance course when I’ve got the money. But if you’re my partner-in-training, there’ll be times that I’m going to have to ask you to do stuff that Matthew might not like. That’s all I’m saying. You’re the one who’s going to have to work it out.”

“And I will,” said Robin, fighting to contain the urge to bawl. “That’s what I want. That’s why I stayed.”

“Then cheer the fuck up and eat your burger.”

Robin found it hard to eat with the huge lump in her throat. She felt shaken but elated. She had not been mistaken: Strike had seen in her what he possessed himself. They were not people who worked merely for the paycheck…

“So, tell me about Daniel Chard,” she said.

He did so while the nosy family of four gathered up their things and left, still throwing covert glances at the couple they could not quite work out (had it been a lovers’ tiff? A family row? How had it been so speedily resolved?).

“Paranoid, bit eccentric, self-obsessed,” concluded Strike five minutes later, “but there might be something in it. Jerry Waldegrave could’ve collaborated with Quine. On the other hand, he might’ve resigned because he’d had enough of Chard, who I don’t think would be an easy bloke to work for.

“D’you want a coffee?”

Robin glanced at her watch. The snow was still falling; she feared delays on the motorway that would prevent her catching the train to Yorkshire, but after their conversation she was determined to demonstrate her commitment to the job, so she agreed to one. In any case, there were things she wished to say to Strike while she was still sitting opposite him. It would not be nearly as satisfying to tell him while in the driver’s seat, where she could not watch his reaction.

“I found out a bit about Chard myself,” she said when she had returned with two cups and an apple pie for Strike.

“Servants’ gossip?”

“No,” said Robin. “They barely said a word to me while I was in the kitchen. They both seemed in foul moods.”

“According to Chard, they don’t like it in Devon. Prefer London. Are they brother and sister?”

“Mother and son, I think,” said Robin. “He called her Mamu.

“Anyway, I asked to go to the bathroom and the staff loo’s just next to an artist’s studio. Daniel Chard knows a lot about anatomy,” said Robin. “There are prints of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings all over the walls and an anatomical model in one corner. Creepy—wax. And on the easel,” she said, “was a very detailed drawing of Manny the Manservant. Lying on the ground, in the nude.”

Strike put down his coffee.

“Those are very interesting pieces of information,” he said slowly.

“I thought you’d like them,” said Robin, with a demure smile.

“Shines an interesting side-light on Manny’s assurance that he didn’t push his boss down the stairs.”

“They really didn’t like you being there,” said Robin, “but that might have been my fault. I said you were a private detective, but Nenita—her English isn’t as good as Manny’s—didn’t understand, so I said you were a kind of policeman.”

“Leading them to assume that Chard had invited me over to complain about Manny’s violence towards him.”

“Did Chard mention it?”

“Not a word,” said Strike. “Much more concerned about Waldegrave’s alleged treachery.”

After visits to the bathroom they returned to the cold, where they had to screw up their eyes against oncoming snow as they traversed the car park. A light frosting had already settled over the top of the Toyota.

“You’re going to make it to King’s Cross, right?” said Strike, checking his watch.