The Silkworm

Strike kept watch while she ran off a copy for him at the photocopier outside the door. The endless swish and hum was strangely soothing. Nobody came, nobody saw; fifteen minutes later, Nina was replacing the manuscript in the safe and locking it up.

“There you go.”

She handed him the copy, with several strong elastic bands holding it together. As he took it she leaned in for a few seconds; a tipsy sway, an extended brush against him. He owed her something in return, but he was shatteringly tired; both the idea of going back to that flat in St. John’s Wood and of taking her to his attic in Denmark Street were unappealing. Would a drink, tomorrow night perhaps, be adequate repayment? And then he remembered that tomorrow night was his birthday dinner at his sister’s. Lucy had said he could bring someone.

“Want to come to a tedious dinner party tomorrow night?” he asked her.

She laughed, clearly elated.

“What’ll be tedious about it?”

“Everything. You’d cheer it up. Fancy it?”

“Well—why not?” she said happily.

The invitation seemed to meet the bill; he felt the demand for some physical gesture recede. They made their way out of the dark department in an atmosphere of friendly camaraderie, the copied manuscript of Bombyx Mori hidden beneath Strike’s overcoat. After noting down her address and phone number, he saw her safely into a taxi with a sense of relief and release.

14

There he sits a whole afternoon sometimes, reading of these same abominable, vile, (a pox on them, I cannot abide them!) rascally verses.

Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour

They marched against the war in which Strike had lost his leg the next day, thousands snaking their way through the heart of chilly London bearing placards, military families to the fore. Strike had heard through mutual army friends that the parents of Gary Topley—dead in the explosion that had cost Strike a limb—would be among the demonstrators, but it did not occur to Strike to join them. His feelings about the war could not be encapsulated in black on a square white placard. Do the job and do it well had been his creed then and now, and to march would be to imply regrets he did not have. And so he strapped on his prosthesis, dressed in his best Italian suit and headed off to Bond Street.

The treacherous husband he sought was insisting that his estranged wife, Strike’s brunet client, had lost, through her own drunken carelessness, several pieces of very valuable jewelry while the couple were staying at a hotel. Strike happened to know that the husband had an appointment in Bond Street this morning, and had a hunch that some of that allegedly lost jewelry might be making a surprise reappearance.

His target entered the jeweler’s while Strike examined the windows of a shop opposite. Once he had left, half an hour later, Strike took himself off for a coffee, allowed two hours to elapse, then strode inside the jeweler’s and proclaimed his wife’s love of emeralds, which pretense resulted, after half an hour’s staged deliberation over various pieces, in the production of the very necklace that the brunet had suspected her errant husband of having pocketed. Strike bought it at once, a transaction only made possible by the fact that his client had advanced him ten thousand pounds for the purpose. Ten thousand pounds to prove her husband’s deceit was as nothing to a woman who stood to receive a settlement of millions.

Strike picked up a kebab on his way home. After locking the necklace in a small safe he had installed in his office (usually used for the protection of incriminating photographs) he headed upstairs, made himself a mug of strong tea, took off the suit and put on the TV so that he could keep an eye on the build-up to the Arsenal-Spurs match. He then stretched out comfortably on his bed and started to read the manuscript he had stolen the night before.

As Elizabeth Tassel had told him, Bombyx Mori was a perverse Pilgrim’s Progress, set in a folkloric no-man’s-land in which the eponymous hero (a young writer of genius) set out from an island populated by inbred idiots too blind to recognize his talent on what seemed to be a largely symbolic journey towards a distant city. The richness and strangeness of the language and imagery were familiar to Strike from his perusal of The Balzac Brothers, but his interest in the subject matter drew him on.