The Silkworm

“Why are you sure she came home on the Tuesday?” Robin asked and Strike, who had been about to ask the same thing, looked at her in surprise. He did not know about the old man in the bookshop and the German sinkhole.

“Because on Tuesday nights I work on a helpline,” said Pippa, “and I was there when Kath called me in f-floods, because she’d put the manuscript in order, and read what he’d written about us—”

“Well, this is all very interesting,” said Strike, “because Kathryn Kent told the police that she’d never read Bombyx Mori.”

Pippa’s horrified expression might, under other circumstances, have been amusing.

“You fucking tricked me!”

“Yeah, you’re a really tough nut to crack,” said Strike. “Don’t even think about it,” he added, standing over her as she tried to get up.

“He was a—a shit!” shouted Pippa seething with impotent rage. “He was a user! Pretending to be interested in our work and using us all along, that l-lying b-bastard…I thought he understood what my life’s been about—we used to talk for hours about it and he encouraged me with my life story—he t-told me he was going to help me get a publishing deal—”

Strike felt a sudden weariness wash over him. What was this mania to appear in print?

“—and he was just trying to keep me sweet, telling him all my most private thoughts and feelings, and Kath—what he did to Kath—you don’t understand—I’m glad his bitch wife killed him! If she hadn’t—”

“Why,” demanded Strike, “d’you keep saying his wife killed Quine?”

“Because Kath’s got proof!”

A short pause.

“What proof?” asked Strike.

“Wouldn’t you like to know!” shouted Pippa with a cackle of hysterical laughter. “Never you mind!”

“If she’s got proof, why hasn’t she taken it to the police?”

“Out of compassion!” shouted Pippa. “Something you wouldn’t—”

“Why,” came a plaintive voice from outside the glass door, “is there still all this shouting?”

“Oh bloody hell,” said Strike as the fuzzy outline of Mr. Crowdy from downstairs pressed close to the glass.

Robin moved to unlock the door.

“Very sorry, Mr. Crow—”

Pippa was off the sofa in an instant. Strike made a grab for her but his knee buckled agonizingly as he lunged. Knocking Mr. Crowdy aside she was gone, clattering down the stairs.

“Leave her!” Strike said to Robin, who looked braced to give chase. “Least I’ve got her knife.”

“Knife?” yelped Mr. Crowdy and it took them fifteen minutes to persuade him not to contact the landlord (for the publicity following the Lula Landry case had unnerved the graphic designer, who lived in dread that another murderer might come seeking Strike and perhaps wander by mistake into the wrong office).

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Strike when they had at last persuaded Crowdy to leave. He slumped down on the sofa; Robin took her computer chair and they looked at each other for a few seconds before starting to laugh.

“Decent good cop, bad cop routine we had going there,” said Strike.

“I wasn’t faking,” said Robin, “I really did feel a bit sorry for her.”

“I noticed. What about me, getting attacked?”

“Did she really want to stab you, or was it play-acting?” asked Robin sceptically.

“She might’ve liked the idea of it more than the reality,” acknowledged Strike. “Trouble is, you’re just as dead if you’re knifed by a self-dramatizing twat as by a professional. And what she thought she’d gain by stabbing me—”

“Mother love,” said Robin quietly.

Strike stared at her.

“Her own mother’s disowned her,” said Robin, “and she’s going through a really traumatic time, I expect, taking hormones and God knows what else she’s got to do before she has the operation. She thought she had a new family, didn’t she? She thought Quine and Kathryn Kent were her new parents. She told us Quine said she was a second daughter to him and he put her in the book as Kathryn Kent’s daughter. But in Bombyx Mori he revealed her to the world as half male, half female. He also suggested that, beneath all the filial affection, she wanted to sleep with him.

“Her new father,” said Robin, “had let her down very badly. But her new mother was still good and loving, and she’d been betrayed as well, so Pippa set out to get even for both of them.”

She could not stop herself grinning at Strike’s looked of stunned admiration.

“Why the hell did you give up that psychology degree?”

“Long story,” said Robin, looking away towards the computer monitor. “She’s not very old…twenty, d’you think?”

“Looked about that,” agreed Strike. “Pity we never got round to asking her about her movements in the days after Quine disappeared.”

“She didn’t do it,” said Robin with certainty, looking back at him.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” sighed Strike, “if only because shoving dog shit through his letter box might’ve felt a bit anticlimactic after carving out his guts.”

“And she doesn’t seem very strong on planning or efficiency, does she?”

“An understatement,” he agreed.

“Are you going to call the police about her?”