The Silkworm

He had not changed his number since he had split up with Charlotte. Too much hassle, when a hundred professional contacts had it. This was the first time she had used it in eight months.

Strike remembered Dave Polworth’s warning:

You be on the watch, Diddy, for signs of her galloping back over the horizon. Wouldn’t be surprised if she bolts.

Today was the third, he reminded himself. She was supposed to be getting married tomorrow.

For the first time since he had owned a mobile phone, Strike wished it had the facility to reveal a caller’s location. Had she sent this from the Castle of Fucking Croy, in an interlude between checking the canapés and the flowers in the chapel? Or was she standing on the corner of Denmark Street, watching his office like Pippa Midgley? Running away from a grand, well-publicized wedding like this would be Charlotte’s crowning achievement, the very apex of her career of mayhem and disruption.

Strike put the mobile back into his pocket and started on his second sandwich. Deducing that she was not about to discover what had made Strike’s expression turn stony, Robin screwed up her empty crisp packet, dropped it in the bin and said:

“You’re meeting your brother tonight, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Aren’t you meeting your brother—?”

“Oh yeah,” said Strike. “Yeah.”

“At the River Café?”

“Yeah.”

It was yours.

“Why?” asked Robin.

Mine. The hell it was. If it even existed.

“What?” said Strike, vaguely aware that Robin had asked him something.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, pulling himself together. “What did you ask me?”

“Why are you going to the River Café?”

“Oh. Well,” said Strike, reaching for his own packet of crisps, “it’s a long shot, but I want to speak to anyone who witnessed Quine and Tassel’s row. I’m trying to get a handle on whether he staged it, whether he was planning his disappearance all along.”

“You’re hoping to find a member of staff who was there that night?” said Robin, clearly dubious.

“Which is why I’m taking Al,” said Strike. “He knows every waiter in every smart restaurant in London. All my father’s kids do.”

When he had finished lunch he took a coffee into his office and closed the door. Sleet was again spattering his window. He could not resist glancing down into the frozen street, half-expecting (hoping?) to see her there, long black hair whipping around her perfect, pale face, staring up at him, imploring him with her flecked green-hazel eyes…but there was nobody in the street except strangers swaddled against the relentless weather.

He was crazy on every count. She was in Scotland and it was much, much better so.

Later, when Robin had gone home, he put on the Italian suit that Charlotte had bought him over a year ago, when they had dined at this very restaurant to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday. After pulling on his overcoat he locked his flat door and set out for the Tube in the subzero cold, still leaning on his stick.

Christmas assailed him from every window he passed; spangled lights, mounds of new objects, of toys and gadgets, fake snow on glass and sundry pre-Christmas sale signs adding a mournful note in the depths of the recession. More pre-Christmas revelers on the Friday-night Tube: girls in ludicrously tiny glittering dresses risking hypothermia for a fumble with the boy from Packaging. Strike felt weary and low.

The walk from Hammersmith was longer than he had remembered. As he proceeded down Fulham Palace Road he realized how close he was to Elizabeth Tassel’s house. Presumably she had suggested the restaurant, a long way from the Quines’ place in Ladbroke Grove, precisely because of its convenience to her.

After ten minutes Strike turned right and headed through the darkness towards Thames Wharf, through empty echoing streets, his breath rising in a smoky cloud. The riverside garden that in summer would be full of diners at white tableclothed chairs was buried under thick snow. The Thames glinted darkly beyond the pale carpet, iron-cold and menacing. Strike turned into the converted brick storage facility and was at once subsumed in light, warmth and noise.

There, just inside the door, leaning against the bar with his elbow on its shiny steel surface, was Al, deep in friendly conversation with the barman.

He was barely five foot ten, which was short for one of Rokeby’s children, and carrying a little too much weight. His mouse-brown hair was slicked back; he had his mother’s narrow jaw but he had inherited the weak divergent squint that added an attractive strangeness to Rokeby’s handsome face and marked Al inescapably as his father’s son.

Catching sight of Strike, Al let out a roar of welcome, bounced forwards and hugged him. Strike barely responded, being hampered by his stick and the coat he was trying to remove. Al fell back, looking sheepish.

“How are you, bruv?”