The Silkworm

“No,” said Ilsa. “It’s on the back of one of his daughter’s pictures. Apparently the daughter gave it to a friend of his months ago, and this friend went to the police with it early this morning, claiming they’d only just looked at the back and realized what was on there. What did you just say?”

“Nothing,” Strike sighed.

“It sounded like ‘Tashkent.’”

“Not that far off. I’ll let you go, Ilsa…thanks for everything.”

Strike sat for a few seconds in frustrated silence.

“Bollocks,” he said softly to his dark office.

He knew how this had happened. Pippa Midgley, in her paranoia and her hysteria, convinced that Strike had been hired by Leonora to pin the murder on somebody else, had run from his office straight to Kathryn Kent. Pippa had confessed that she had blown Kathryn’s pretense never to have read Bombyx Mori and urged her to use the evidence she had against Leonora. And so Kathryn Kent had ripped down her lover’s daughter’s picture (Strike imagined it stuck, with a magnet, to the fridge) and hurried off to the police station.

“Bollocks,” he repeated, more loudly, and dialed Robin’s number.

39

I am so well acquainted with despair,

I know not how to hope…

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Honest Whore

As her lawyer had predicted, Leonora Quine was charged with the murder of her husband at eleven o’clock the following morning. Alerted by phone, Strike and Robin watched the news spread online where, minute by minute, the story proliferated like multiplying bacteria. By half past eleven the Sun website had a full article on Leonora headed ROSE WEST LOOKALIKE WHO TRAINED AT THE BUTCHER’S.

The journalists had been busily collecting evidence of Quine’s poor record as a husband. His frequent disappearances were linked to liaisons with other women, the sexual themes of his work dissected and embellished. Kathryn Kent had been located, doorstepped, photographed and categorized as “Quine’s curvy red-headed mistress, a writer of erotic fiction.”

Shortly before midday, Ilsa called Strike again.

“She’s going to be up in court tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“Wood Green, eleven o’clock. Straight from there to Holloway, I expect.”

Strike had once lived with his mother and Lucy in a house a mere three minutes away from the closed women’s prison that served north London.

“I want to see her.”

“You can try, but I can’t imagine the police will want you near her and I’ve got to tell you, Corm, as her lawyer, it might not look—”

“Ilsa, I’m the only chance she’s got now.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she said drily.

“You know what I mean.”

He heard her sigh.

“I’m thinking of you too. Do you really want to put the police’s backs—?”

“How is she?” interrupted Strike.

“Not good,” said Ilsa. “The separation from Orlando’s killing her.”

The afternoon was punctuated with calls from journalists and people who had known Quine, both groups equally desperate for inside information. Elizabeth Tassel’s voice was so deep and rough on the phone that Robin thought her a man.

“Where’s Orlando?” the agent demanded of Strike when he came to the phone, as though he had been delegated charge of all members of the Quine family. “Who’s got her?”

“She’s with a neighbor, I think,” he said, listening to her wheeze down the line.

“My God, what a mess,” rasped the agent. “Leonora…the worm turning after all these years…it’s incredible…”

Nina Lascelles’s reaction was, not altogether to Strike’s surprise, poorly disguised relief. Murder had receded to its rightful place on the hazy edge of the possible. Its shadow no longer touched her; the killer was nobody she knew.

“His wife does look a bit like Rose West, doesn’t she?” she asked Strike on the phone and he knew that she was staring at the Sun’s website. “Except with long hair.”

She seemed to be commiserating with him. He had not solved the case. The police had beaten him to it.

“Listen, I’m having a few people over on Friday, fancy coming?”

“Can’t, sorry,” said Strike. “I’m having dinner with my brother.”

He could tell that she thought he was lying. There had been an almost imperceptible hesitation before he had said “my brother,” which might well have suggested a pause for rapid thought. Strike could not remember ever describing Al as his brother before. He rarely discussed his half-siblings on his father’s side.

Before she left the office that evening Robin set a mug of tea in front of him as he sat poring over the Quine file. She could almost feel the anger that Strike was doing his best to hide, and suspected that it was directed at himself quite as much as at Anstis.

“It’s not over,” she said, winding her scarf around her neck as she prepared to depart. “We’ll prove it wasn’t her.”

She had once before used the plural pronoun when Strike’s faith in himself had been at a low ebb. He appreciated the moral support, but a feeling of impotence was swamping his thought processes. Strike hated paddling on the periphery of the case, forced to watch as others dived for clues, leads and information.