The Silkworm

They were sitting in front of a long window looking out onto a sunny, windswept lawn. Robin wondered fleetingly when the program had been filmed—before the snows had come, clearly—but Matthew dominated her thoughts. She ought to go and find him, yet somehow she remained on the sofa.

“When Eff—Ellie died,” began Fancourt, “when she died—”

The close-up felt painfully intrusive. The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes deepened as he closed them; a square hand flew to conceal his face.

Michael Fancourt appeared to be crying.

“So much for love being a mirage and a chimera,” sighed Mrs. Ellacott as she tossed down her pen. “This is no good. I wanted blood and guts, Michael. Blood and guts.”

Unable to stand inaction any longer, Robin got up and headed for the sitting-room door. These were not normal circumstances. Matthew’s mother had been buried that day. It behooved her to apologize, to make amends.

35

We are all liable to mistakes, sir; if you own it to be so, there needs no farther apology.

William Congreve, The Old Bachelor

The Sunday broadsheets next day strove to find a dignified balance between an objective assessment of Owen Quine’s life and work and the macabre, Gothic nature of his death.

“A minor literary figure, occasionally interesting, tipping latterly into self-parody, eclipsed by his contemporaries but continuing to blaze his own outmoded trail,” said the Sunday Times in a front-page column that led to a promise of much more excitement within: A sadist’s blueprint: see pages 10-11 and, beside a thumbnail photograph of Kenneth Halliwell: Books and Bookmen: literary killers p. 3 Culture.

“Rumors about the unpublished book that allegedly inspired his murder are now spreading beyond London’s literary circles,” the Observer assured its readers. “Were it not for the dictates of good taste, Roper Chard would have an instant bestseller on its hands.”

KINKY WRITER DISEMBOWELED IN SEX GAME, declared the Sunday People.

Strike had bought every paper on his way home from Nina Lascelles’s, difficult though it was to manage them all and his stick over snowy pavements. It occurred to him as he struggled towards Denmark Street that he was unwisely encumbered, should his would-be assailant of the previous evening reappear, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Later that evening he worked his way through the news stories while eating chips, lying on his bed with his prosthetic leg mercifully removed once more.

Viewing the facts through the press’s distorting lens was stimulating to his imagination. At last, having finished Culpepper’s piece in the News of the World (“Sources close to the story confirm that Quine liked to be tied up by his wife, who denies that she knew the kinky writer had gone to stay in their second home”), Strike slid the papers off his bed, reached for the notebook he kept by his bed and scribbled himself a list of reminders for the following day. He did not add Anstis’s initial to any of the tasks or questions, but bookshop man and MF when filmed? were both followed by a capital R. He then texted Robin, reminding her to keep her eyes peeled for a tall woman in a black coat the following morning and not to enter Denmark Street if she was there.

Robin saw nobody answering that description on her short journey from the Tube and arrived at the office at nine o’clock next morning to find Strike sitting at her desk and using her computer.

“Morning. No nutters outside?”

“No one,” said Robin, hanging up her coat.

“How’s Matthew?”

“Fine,” lied Robin.

The aftermath of their row about her decision to drive Strike to Devon clung to her like fumes. The argument had simmered and erupted repeatedly all through their car journey back to Clapham; her eyes were still puffy from crying and lack of sleep.

“Tough for him,” muttered Strike, still frowning at the monitor. “His mother’s funeral.”

“Mm,” said Robin, moving to fill the kettle and feeling annoyed that Strike chose to empathize with Matthew today, exactly when she would have welcomed an assurance that he was an unreasonable prick.

“What are you looking at?” she asked, setting a mug of tea at Strike’s elbow, for which he gave her muttered thanks.

“Trying to find out when Michael Fancourt’s interview was filmed,” he said. “He was on telly on Saturday night.”

“I watched that,” said Robin.

“Me too,” said Strike.

“Arrogant prat,” said Robin, sitting down on the mock-leather sofa, which for some reason did not emit farting noises when she did it. Perhaps, Strike thought, it was his weight.

“Notice anything funny when he was talking about his late wife?” Strike asked.

“The crocodile tears were a bit much,” said Robin, “seeing how he’d just been explaining how love’s an illusion and all that rubbish.”