The Silkworm

The editor rumpled his untidy hair.

“Well, if that’s your attitude.”

“Surprised you care how Daniel Chard feels.”

“I don’t particularly,” said Waldegrave, “but he can make life unpleasant for other people when he’s in a bad mood. I’d like tonight to go well for Pinkelman. I can’t understand why you’re here.”

“Wanted to make a delivery,” said Strike.

He pulled a blank white envelope out from an inside pocket.

“What is this?”

“It’s for you,” said Strike.

Waldegrave took it, looking utterly confused.

“Something you should think about,” said Strike, moving closer to the bemused editor in the noisy bar. “Fancourt had mumps, you know, before his wife died.”

“What?” said Waldegrave, bewildered.

“Never had kids. Pretty sure he’s infertile. Thought you might be interested.”

Waldegrave stared at him, opened his mouth, found nothing to say, then walked away, still clutching the white envelope.

“What was that?” Al asked Strike, agog.

“Plan A,” said Strike. “We’ll see.”

Waldegrave sat back down at the Roper Chard table. Mirrored in the black window beside him, he opened the envelope Strike had given him. Puzzled, he pulled out a second envelope. There was a scribbled name on this one.

The editor looked up at Strike, who raised his eyebrows.

Jerry Waldegrave hesitated, then turned to Elizabeth Tassel and passed her the envelope. She read what was written on it, frowning. Her eyes flew to Strike’s. He smiled and toasted her with his glass.

She seemed uncertain as to what to do for a moment; then she nudged the girl beside her and passed the envelope on.

It traveled up the table and across it, into the hands of Michael Fancourt.

“There we are,” said Strike. “Al, I’m going into the garden for a fag. Stay here and keep your phone on.”

“They don’t allow mobiles—”

But Al caught sight of Strike’s expression and amended hastily:

“Will do.”

48

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labors

For thee? For thee does she undo herself?

Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy

The garden was deserted and bitterly cold. Strike sank up to his ankles in snow, unable to feel the cold seeping through his right trouser leg. All the smokers who would ordinarily have congregated on the smooth lawns had chosen the street instead. He plowed a solitary trench through the frozen whiteness, surrounded by silent beauty, coming to a halt beside a small round pond that had become a disc of thick gray ice. A plump bronze cupid sat in the middle on an oversized clam shell. It wore a wig of snow and pointed its bow and arrow, not anywhere that it might hit a human being, but straight up at the dark heavens.

Strike lit a cigarette and turned back to look at the blazing windows of the club. The diners and waiters looked like paper cutouts moving against a lit screen.

If Strike knew his man, he would come. Wasn’t this an irresistible situation to a writer, to the compulsive spinner of experience into words, to a lover of the macabre and the strange?

And sure enough, after a few minutes Strike heard a door open, a snatch of conversation and music hastily muffled, then the sound of deadened footsteps.

“Mr. Strike?”

Fancourt’s head looked particularly large in the darkness.

“Would it not be easier to go onto the street?”

“I’d rather do this in the garden,” said Strike.

“I see.”

Fancourt sounded vaguely amused, as though he intended, at least in the short term, to humor Strike. The detective suspected that it appealed to the writer’s sense of theater that he should be the one summoned from the table of anxious people to talk to the man who was making them all so nervous.

“What’s this about?” asked Fancourt.

“Value your opinion,” said Strike. “Question of critical analysis of Bombyx Mori.”

“Again?” said Fancourt.

His good humor was cooling with his feet. He pulled his coat more closely around him and said, the snow falling thick and fast:

“I’ve said everything I want to say about that book.”

“One of the first things I was told about Bombyx Mori,” said Strike, “was that it was reminiscent of your early work. Gore and arcane symbolism, I think were the words used.”

“So?” said Fancourt, hands in his pockets.

“So, the more I’ve talked to people who knew Quine, the clearer it’s become that the book that everyone’s read bears only a vague resemblance to the one he claimed to be writing.”

Fancourt’s breath rose in a cloud before him, obscuring the little that Strike could see of his heavy features.

“I’ve even met a girl who says she heard part of the book that doesn’t appear in the final manuscript.”

“Writers cut,” said Fancourt, shuffling his feet, his shoulders hunched up around his ears. “Owen would have done well to cut a great deal more. Several novels, in fact.”

“There are also all the duplications from his earlier work,” said Strike. “Two hermaphrodites. Two bloody bags. All that gratuitous sex.”

“He was a man of limited imagination, Mr. Strike.”