The Silkworm

Strike turned the page on a picture of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s sulky face without seeing it. Had he imagined things in Charlotte that had never been there? Had he invented virtues for her, to add luster to her staggering looks? He had been nineteen when they met. It seemed incredibly young to Strike now, as he sat in this pub carrying a good two stone of excess weight, missing half a leg.

Perhaps he had created a Charlotte in her own image who had never existed outside his own besotted mind, but what of it? He had loved the real Charlotte too, the woman who had stripped herself bare in front of him, demanding whether he could still love her if she did this, if she confessed to this, if she treated him like this…until finally she had found his limit and beauty, rage and tears had been insufficient to hold him, and she had fled into the arms of another man.

And maybe that’s love, he thought, siding in his mind with Michael Fancourt against an invisible and censorious Robin, who for some reason seemed to be sitting in judgment on him as he sat drinking Doom Bar and pretending to read about the worst winter on record. You and Matthew…Strike could see it even if she could not: the condition of being with Matthew was not to be herself.

Where was the couple that saw each other clearly? In the endless parade of suburban conformity that seemed to be Lucy and Greg’s marriage? In the tedious variations on betrayal and disillusionment that brought a never-ending stream of clients to his door? In the willfully blind allegiance of Leonora Quine to a man whose every fault had been excused because “he’s a writer,” or the hero worship that Kathryn Kent and Pippa Midgley had brought to the same fool, trussed like a turkey and disemboweled?

Strike was depressing himself. He was halfway down his third pint. As he wondered whether he was going to have a fourth, his mobile buzzed on the table where he had laid it, facedown.

He drank his beer slowly while the pub filled up around him, looking at his phone, taking bets against himself. Outside the chapel, giving me one last chance to stop it? Or she’s done it and wants to let me know?

He drank the last of his beer before flipping the mobile over.

Congratulate me. Mrs. Jago Ross.

Strike stared at the words for a few seconds, then slid the phone into his pocket, got up, folded the newspaper under his arm and set off home.

As he walked with the aid of his stick back to Denmark Street he remembered words from his favorite book, unread for a very long time, buried at the bottom of the box of belongings on his landing.

…difficile est longum subito deponere amoren,

difficile est, uerum hoc qua lubet efficias…

…it is hard to throw off long-established love:

Hard, but this you must manage somehow…

The restlessness that had consumed him all day had gone. He felt hungry and in need of relaxation. Arsenal were playing Fulham at three; there was just time to cook himself a late lunch before kick-off.

And after that, he thought, he might go round to see Nina Lascelles. Tonight was not a night he fancied spending alone.

42

MATHEO: …an odd toy.

GIULIANO: Ay, to mock an ape withal.

Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour

Robin arrived at work on Monday morning feeling tired and vaguely battle-weary, but proud of herself.

She and Matthew had spent most of the weekend discussing her job. In some ways (strange to think this, after nine years together) it had been the deepest and most serious conversation that they had ever had. Why had she not admitted for so long that her secret interest in investigative work had long predated meeting Cormoran Strike? Matthew had seemed stunned when she had finally confessed to him that she had had an ambition to work in some form of criminal investigation since her early teens.

“I’d have thought it would’ve been the last thing…” Matthew had mumbled, tailing off but referring obliquely, as Robin knew, to the reason she had dropped out of university.

“I just never knew how to say it to you,” she told him. “I thought you’d laugh. So it wasn’t Cormoran making me stay, or anything to do with him as a—as a person” (she had been on the verge of saying “as a man,” but saved herself just in time). “It was me. It’s what I want to do. I love it. And now he says he’ll train me, Matt, and that’s what I always wanted.”

The discussion had gone on all through Sunday, the disconcerted Matthew shifting slowly, like a boulder.

“How much weekend work?” he had asked her suspiciously.

“I don’t know; when it’s needed. Matt, I love the job, don’t you understand? I don’t want to pretend anymore. I just want to do it, and I’d like your support.”