The Silkworm

Load of gore and arcane symbolism…stoke that man’s vanity and you could get him to do anything you wanted…two hermaphrodites, two bloody bags…A beautiful lost soul, that’s what he said to me…the silkworm was a metaphor for the writer, who has to go through agonies to get at the good stuff…

Like the turning lid that finds its thread, a multitude of disconnected facts revolved in Strike’s mind and slid suddenly into place, incontrovertibly correct, unassailably right. He turned his theory around and around: it was perfect, snug and solid.

The problem was that he could not yet see how to prove it.

41

Think’st thou my thoughts are lunacies of love?

No, they are brands firèd in Pluto’s forge…

Robert Greene, Orlando Furioso

Strike rose early next morning after a night of broken sleep, tired, frustrated and edgy. He checked his phone for messages before showering and after dressing, then went downstairs into his empty office, irritated that Robin was not there on a Saturday and feeling the absence, unreasonably, as a mark of her lack of commitment. She would have been a useful sounding board this morning; he would have liked company after his revelation of the previous evening. He considered phoning her, but it would be infinitely more satisfying to tell her face to face rather than doing it over the telephone, particularly if Matthew were listening in.

Strike made himself tea but let it grow cold while he pored over the Quine file.

The sense of his impotence ballooned in the silence. He kept checking his mobile.

He wanted to do something, but he was completely stymied by lack of official status, having no authority to make searches of private property or to enforce the cooperation of witnesses. There was nothing he could do until his interview with Michael Fancourt on Monday, unless…Ought he to call Anstis and lay his theory before him? Strike frowned, running thick fingers through his dense hair, imagining Anstis’s patronizing response. There was literally not a shred of evidence. All was conjecture—but I’m right, thought Strike with easy arrogance, and he’s screwed up. Anstis had neither the wit nor the imagination to appreciate a theory that explained every oddity in the killing, but which would seem to him incredible compared to the easy solution, riddled with inconsistencies and unanswered questions though the case against Leonora was.

Explain, Strike demanded of an imaginary Anstis, why a woman smart enough to spirit away his guts without trace would have been dumb enough to order ropes and a burqa on her own credit card. Explain why a mother with no relatives, whose sole preoccupation in life is the well-being of her daughter, would risk a life sentence. Explain why, after years of accommodating Quine’s infidelity and sexual quirks to keep their family together, she suddenly decided to kill him?

But to the last question Anstis might just have a reasonable answer: that Quine had been on the verge of leaving his wife for Kathryn Kent. The author’s life had been well insured: perhaps Leonora would have decided that financial security as a widow would be preferable to an uncertain hand-to-mouth existence while her feckless ex squandered money on his second wife. A jury would buy that version of events, especially if Kathryn Kent took the stand and confirmed that Quine had promised to marry her.

Strike was afraid that he had blown his chance with Kathryn Kent, turning up unexpectedly on her doorstep as he had—in retrospect a clumsy, inept move. He had scared her, looming out of the darkness on her balcony, making it only too easy for Pippa Midgley to paint him as Leonora’s sinister stooge. He ought to have proceeded with finesse, eased himself into her confidence the way he had done with Lord Parker’s PA, so that he could extract confessions like teeth under the influence of concerned sympathy, instead of jack-booting to her door like a bailiff.

He checked his mobile again. No messages. He glanced at his watch. It was barely half past nine. Against his will, he felt his attention tugging to be free of the place where he wanted and needed it—on Quine’s killer, and the things that must be done to secure an arrest—to the seventeenth-century chapel in the Castle of Croy…