The Silkworm

“Years ago, this was,” Waldegrave went on, picking up where he had left off. “Dan wanted Joe to pose for him; Joe told him to piss off. Common knowledge, f’years.”

He leaned back, ramming the large woman behind him again, who unfortunately was now eating soup. Strike watched her angry dining companion summon a passing waiter to complain. The waiter bent down to Waldegrave and said apologetically, yet with firmness:

“Would you mind pulling in your chair, sir? The lady behind you—”

“Sorry, sorry.”

Waldegrave tugged himself nearer Strike, placed his elbows on the table, pushed his tangled hair out of his eyes and said loudly:

“Head up his bloody arse.”

“Who?” asked Strike, finishing with regret the best meal he had had in a long time.

“Dan. Handed the bloody company on a plate…rolling in it all his life…let him live in the country and paint his houseboy if that’s what he wants…had enough of it. Start my own…start my own bloody company.”

Waldegrave’s mobile phone rang. It took him a while to locate it. He peered over his glasses at the caller’s number before answering.

“What’s up, JoJo?”

Busy though the restaurant was, Strike heard the response: shrill, distant screaming down the line. Waldegrave looked horrified.

“JoJo? Are you—?”

But then the doughy, amiable face became tauter than Strike could have believed. Veins stood out on Waldegrave’s neck and his mouth stretched in an ugly snarl.

“Fuck you!” he said, and his voice carried loudly to all the surrounding tables so that fifty heads jerked upwards, conversations stalled. “Do not call me on JoJo’s number! No, you drunken fucking—you heard me—I drink because I’m fucking married to you, that’s why!”

The overweight woman behind Waldegrave looked around, outraged. Waiters were glaring; one had so far forgotten himself as to have paused with a Yorkshire pudding halfway to a Japanese businessman’s plate. The decorous gentleman’s club had doubtless seen other drunken brawls, but they could not fail to shock among the dark wood panels, the glass chandeliers and the bills of fare, where everything was stolidly British, calm and staid.

“Well, whose fucking fault’s that?” shouted Waldegrave.

He staggered to his feet, ramming his unfortunate neighbor yet again, but this time there was no remonstrance from her companion. The restaurant had fallen silent. Waldegrave was weaving his way out of it, a bottle and a third to the bad, swearing into his mobile, and Strike, stranded at the table, was amused to find in himself some of the disapproval felt in the mess for the man who cannot hold his drink.

“Bill, please,” said Strike to the nearest gaping waiter. He was disappointed that he had not gotten to sample the spotted dick, which he had noted on the bill of fare, but he must catch Waldegrave if he could.

While the diners muttered and watched him out of the corners of their eyes, Strike paid, pulled himself up from the table and, leaning on his stick, followed in Waldegrave’s ungainly footsteps. From the outraged expression of the maître d’ and the sound of Waldegrave still yelling just outside the door, Strike suspected that Waldegrave had taken some persuasion to leave the premises.

He found the editor propped up against the cold wall to the left of the doors. Snow was falling thickly all around them; the pavements were crunchy with it, passersby muffled to the ears. The backdrop of solid grandeur removed, Waldegrave no longer looked like a vaguely scruffy academic. Drunk, grubby and crumpled, swearing into a phone disguised by his large hand, he might have been a mentally ill down-and-out.

“…not my fucking fault, you stupid bitch! Did I write the fucking thing? Did I?…you’d better fucking talk to her then, hadn’t you?…If you don’t, I will…Don’t you threaten me, you ugly fucking slut…if you’d kept your legs closed…you fucking heard me—”

Waldegrave saw Strike. He stood gaping for a few seconds then cut the call. The mobile slipped through his fumbling fingers and landed on the snowy pavement.

“Bollocks,” said Jerry Waldegrave.

The wolf had turned back into the sheep. He groped with bare fingers for the phone in the slush around his feet and his glasses fell off. Strike picked them up for him.

“Thanks. Thanks. Sorry about that. Sorry…”

Strike saw tears on Waldegrave’s puffy cheeks as the editor rammed his glasses back on. Stuffing the cracked phone into his pocket, he turned an expression of despair upon the detective.

“’S ruined my fucking life,” he said. “That book. ’N I thought Owen…one thing he held sacred. Father daughter. One thing…”

With another dismissive gesture, Waldegrave turned and walked away, weaving badly, thoroughly drunk. He had had, the detective guessed, at least a bottle before they met. There was no point following him.