The Silkworm

She would be getting dressed, no doubt in a bridal gown costing thousands. He could imagine her naked in front of the mirror, painting her face. He had watched her do it a hundred times; wielding the makeup brushes in front of dressing-table mirrors, hotel mirrors, so acutely aware of her own desirability that she almost attained unselfconsciousness.

Was Charlotte checking her phone as the minutes slipped by, now that the short walk up the aisle was so close, now that it felt like the walk along a gangplank? Was she still waiting, hoping, for a response from Strike to her three-word message of yesterday?

And if he sent an answer now…what would it take to make her turn her back on the wedding dress (he could imagine it hanging like a ghost in the corner of her room) and pull on her jeans, throw a few things in a holdall and slip out of a back door? Into a car, her foot flat to the floor, heading back south to the man who had always meant escape…

“Fuck this,” Strike muttered.

He stood up, shoved the mobile in his pocket, threw back the last of his cold tea and pulled on his overcoat. Keeping busy was the only answer: action had always been his drug of choice.

Sure though he was that Kathryn Kent would have decamped to a friend’s now that the press had found her, and notwithstanding the fact that he regretted turning up unannounced on her doorstep, he returned to Clem Attlee Court only to have his suspicions confirmed. Nobody answered the door, the lights were off and all seemed silent within.

An icy wind blew along the brick balcony. As Strike moved away, the angry-looking woman from next door appeared, this time eager to talk.

“She’s gawn away. You press, are you?”

“Yeah,” said Strike, because he could tell the neighbor was excited at the idea and because he did not want Kent to know that he had been back.

“The things your lot’ve written,” she said with poorly disguised glee. “The things you’ve said about her! No, she’s gawn.”

“Any idea when she’ll be back?”

“Nah,” said the neighbor with regret. Her pink scalp was visible through the sparse, tightly permed gray hair. “I could call ya,” she suggested. “If she shows up again.”

“That’d be very helpful,” said Strike.

His name had been in the papers a little too recently to hand over one of his cards. He tore out a page of his notebook, wrote his number out for her and handed it over with a twenty-pound note.

“Cheers,” she said, businesslike. “See ya.”

He passed a cat on his way back downstairs, the same one, he was sure, at which Kathryn Kent had taken a kick. It watched him with wary but superior eyes as he passed. The gang of youths he had met previously had gone; too cold today if your warmest item of clothing was a sweatshirt.

Limping through the slippery gray snow required physical effort, which helped distract his busy mind, making moot the question of whether he was moving from suspect to suspect on Leonora’s behalf, or Charlotte’s. Let the latter continue towards the prison of her own choosing: he would not call, he would not text.

When he reached the Tube, he pulled out his phone and telephoned Jerry Waldegrave. He was sure that the editor had information that Strike needed, that he had not known he needed before his moment of revelation in the River Café, but Waldegrave did not pick up. Strike was not surprised. Waldegrave had a failing marriage, a moribund career and a daughter to worry about; why take a detective’s calls too? Why complicate your life when it did not need complicating, when you had a choice?

The cold, the ringing of unanswered phones, silent flats with locked doors: he could do nothing else today. Strike bought a newspaper and went to the Tottenham, sitting himself beneath one of the voluptuous women painted by a Victorian set-designer, cavorting with flora in their flimsy draperies. Today Strike felt strangely as though he was in a waiting room, whiling away the hours. Memories like shrapnel, forever embedded, infected by what had come later…words of love and undying devotion, times of sublime happiness, lies upon lies upon lies…his attention kept sliding away from the stories he was reading.

His sister Lucy had once said to him in exasperation, “Why do you put up with it? Why? Just because she’s beautiful?”

And he had answered: “It helps.”

She had expected him to say “no,” of course. Though they spent so much time trying to make themselves beautiful, you were not supposed to admit to women that beauty mattered. Charlotte was beautiful, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he had never rid himself of a sense of wonder at her looks, nor of the gratitude they inspired, nor of pride by association.

Love, Michael Fancourt had said, is a delusion.