The Silkworm

“Guilty silence,” he noted with an amiable smile. His speech had a sonorous over-deliberation that to Strike declared a practiced drunk. “Three guesses what you’re talking about: Bombyx—Mori—Quine. Hi,” he added, looking at Strike and stretching out a hand: their eyes were on a level. “We haven’t met, have we?”

“Jerry—Cormoran, Cormoran—Jerry,” said Nina at once. “My date,” she added, an aside directed more at the three women beside her than at the tall editor.

“Cameron, was it?” asked Waldegrave, cupping a hand around his ear.

“Close enough,” said Strike.

“Sorry,” said Waldegrave. “Deaf on one side. And have you ladies been gossiping in front of the tall dark stranger,” he said, with rather ponderous humor, “in spite of Mr. Chard’s very clear instructions that nobody outside the company should be made privy to our guilty secret?”

“You won’t tell on us, will you, Jerry?” asked the dark girl.

“If Daniel really wanted to keep that book quiet,” said the redhead impatiently, though with a swift glance over her shoulder to check that the boss was nowhere nearby, “he shouldn’t be sending lawyers all over town trying to hush it up. People keep calling me, asking what’s going on.”

“Jerry,” said the dark girl bravely, “why did you have to speak to the lawyers?”

“Because I’m in it, Sarah,” said Waldegrave, with a wave of his glass that sent a slug of the contents slopping onto the manicured lawn. “In it up to my malfunctioning ears. In the book.”

The women all made sounds of shock and protestation.

“What could Quine possibly say about you, when you’ve been so decent to him?” demanded the dark girl.

“The burden of Owen’s song is that I’m gratuitously brutal to his masterpieces,” said Waldegrave, and he made a scissor-like gesture with the hand not grasping the glass.

“Oh, is that all?” said the blonde, with the faintest tinge of disappointment. “Big deal. He’s lucky to have a deal at all, the way he carries on.”

“Starting to look like he’s gone underground again,” commented Waldegrave. “Not answering any calls.”

“Cowardly bastard,” said the redhead.

“I’m quite worried about him, actually.”

“Worried?” repeated the redhead incredulously. “You can’t be serious, Jerry.”

“You’d be worried too, if you’d read that book,” said Waldegrave, with a tiny hiccup. “I think Owen’s cracking up. It reads like a suicide note.”

The blonde let out a little laugh, hastily repressed when Waldegrave looked at her.

“I’m not joking. I think he’s having a breakdown. The subtext, under all the usual grotesquerie, is: everyone’s against me, everyone’s out to get me, everyone hates me—”

“Everyone does hate him,” interjected the blonde.

“No rational person would have imagined it could be published. And now he’s disappeared.”

“He’s always doing that, though,” said the redhead impatiently. “It’s his party piece, isn’t it, doing a runner? Daisy Carter at Davis-Green told me he went off in a huff twice when they were doing The Balzac Brothers with him.”

“I’m worried about him,” said Waldegrave stubbornly. He took a deep drink of wine and said, “Might’ve slit his wrists—”

“Owen wouldn’t kill himself!” scoffed the blonde. Waldegrave looked down at her with what Strike thought was a mixture of pity and dislike.

“People do kill themselves, you know, Miranda, when they think their whole reason for living is being taken away from them. Even the fact that other people think their suffering is a joke isn’t enough to shake them out of it.”

The blonde girl looked incredulous, then glanced around the circle for support, but nobody came to her defense.

“Writers are different,” said Waldegrave. “I’ve never met one who was any good who wasn’t screwy. Something bloody Liz Tassel would do well to remember.”

“She claims she didn’t know what was in the book,” said Nina. “She’s telling everyone she was ill and didn’t read it properly—”

“I know Liz Tassel,” growled Waldegrave and Strike was interested to see a flash of authentic anger in this amiable, drunken editor. “She knew what she was bloody doing when she put that book out. She thought it was her last chance to make some money off Owen. Nice bit of publicity off the back of the scandal about Fancourt, whom she’s hated for years…but now the shit’s hit the fan she’s disowning her client. Bloody outrageous behavior.”

“Daniel disinvited her tonight,” said the dark girl. “I had to ring her and tell her. It was horrible.”

“D’you know where Owen might’ve gone, Jerry?” asked Nina.

Waldegrave shrugged.

“Could be anywhere, couldn’t he? But I hope he’s all right, wherever he is. I can’t help being fond of the silly bastard, in spite of it all.”

“What is this big Fancourt scandal that he’s written about?” asked the redhead. “I heard someone say it was something to do with a review…”

Everyone in the group apart from Strike began to talk at once, but Waldegrave’s voice carried over the others’ and the women fell silent with the instinctive courtesy women often show to incapacitated males.