The Silkworm

Strike happened to know a little about the tools available to the famous when they wished to manipulate. Lucy’s guitarist father, Rick, was less famous than either Strike’s father or Fancourt, but still celebrated enough to cause a middle-aged woman to gasp and tremble at the sight of him queuing for ice creams in St. Mawes—“ohmigod—what are you doing here?” Rick had once confided in the adolescent Strike that the one sure way to get a woman into bed was to tell her you were writing a song about her. Michael Fancourt’s pronouncement that he was interested in capturing something of Strike in his next novel felt like a variation on the same theme. He had clearly not appreciated that seeing himself in print was neither a novelty to Strike, nor something he had ever chased. With an unenthusiastic nod to acknowledge Fancourt’s request, Strike took out a notebook.

“D’you mind if I use this? Helps me remember what I want to ask you.”

“Feel free,” said Fancourt, looking amused. He tossed aside the copy of the Guardian that he had been reading. Strike saw the picture of a wizened but distinguished-looking old man who was vaguely familiar even upside down. The caption read: Pinkelman at Ninety.

“Dear old Pinks,” said Fancourt, noticing the direction of Strike’s gaze. “We’re giving him a little party at the Chelsea Arts Club next week.”

“Yeah?” said Strike, hunting for a pen.

“He knew my uncle. They did their national service together,” said Fancourt. “When I wrote my first novel, Bellafront—I was fresh out of Oxford—my poor old Unc, trying to be helpful, sent a copy to Pinkelman, who was the only writer he’d ever met.”

He spoke in measured phrases, as though some invisible third party were taking down every word in shorthand. The story sounded prerehearsed, as though he had told it many times, and perhaps he had; he was an oft-interviewed man.

“Pinkelman—at that time author of the seminal Bunty’s Big Adventure series—didn’t understand a word I’d written,” Fancourt went on, “but to please my uncle he forwarded it to Chard Books, where it landed, most fortuitously, on the desk of the only person in the place who could understand it.”

“Stroke of luck,” said Strike.

The waiter returned with wine for Fancourt and a glass of water for Strike.

“So,” said the detective, “were you returning a favor when you introduced Pinkelman to your agent?”

“I was,” said Fancourt, and his nod held the hint of patronage of a teacher glad to note that one of his pupils had been paying attention. “In those days Pinks was with some agent who kept ‘forgetting’ to hand on his royalties. Whatever you say about Elizabeth Tassel, she’s honest—in business terms, she’s honest,” Fancourt amended, sipping his wine.

“She’ll be at Pinkelman’s party too, won’t she?” said Strike, watching Fancourt for his reaction. “She still represents him, doesn’t she?”

“It doesn’t matter to me if Liz is there. Does she imagine that I’m still burning with malice towards her?” asked Fancourt, with his sour smile. “I don’t think I give Liz Tassel a thought from one year’s end to the next.”

“Why did she refuse to ditch Quine when you asked her to?” asked Strike.

Strike did not see why he should not deploy the direct attack to a man who had announced an ulterior motive for meeting within seconds of their first encounter.

“It was never a question of me asking her to drop Quine,” said Fancourt, still in measured cadences for the benefit of that invisible amanuensis. “I explained that I could not remain at her agency while he was there, and left.”

“I see,” said Strike, who was well used to the splitting of hairs. “Why d’you think she let you leave? You were the bigger fish, weren’t you?”

“I think it’s fair to say that I was a barracuda compared to Quine’s stickleback,” said Fancourt with a smirk, “but, you see, Liz and Quine were sleeping together.”

“Really? I didn’t know that,” said Strike, clicking out the nib of his pen.

“Liz arrived at Oxford,” said Fancourt, “this strapping great girl who’d been helping her father castrate bulls and the like on sundry northern farms, desperate to get laid, and nobody fancied the job much. She had a thing for me, a very big thing—we were tutorial partners, juicy Jacobean intrigue calculated to get a girl going—but I never felt altruistic enough to relieve her of her virginity. We remained friends,” said Fancourt, “and when she started her agency I introduced her to Quine, who notoriously preferred to plumb the bottom of the barrel, sexually speaking. The inevitable occurred.”

“Very interesting,” said Strike. “Is this common knowledge?”