The Silkworm

He drank his coffee, keeping the conversation bright but impersonal. She watched him strap his leg on and head for the bathroom, and when he returned to dress she was curled up in a chair, munching a croissant with a slightly forlorn air.

“You’re sure you don’t know where this house was? The one Quine and Fancourt inherited?” he asked her as he pulled on his trousers.

“What?” she said, confused. “Oh—God, you’re not going looking for that, are you? I told you, it’ll have been sold years ago!”

“I might ask Quine’s wife about it,” said Strike.

He told her that he would call her, but briskly, so that she might understand these to be empty words, a matter of form, and left her house with a feeling of faint gratitude, but no guilt.

The rain jabbed again at his face and hands as he walked down the unfamiliar street, heading for the Tube station. Christmassy fairy lights twinkled from the window of the bakery where Nina had just bought croissants. Strike’s large hunched reflection slid across the rain-spotted surface, clutching in one cold fist the plastic carrier bag which Lucy had helpfully given him to carry his cards, his birthday whisky and the box of his shiny new watch.

His thoughts slid irresistibly back to Charlotte, thirty-six but looking twenty-five, celebrating her birthday with her new fiancé. Perhaps she had received diamonds, Strike thought; she had always said she didn’t care for such things, but when they had argued the glitter of all he could not give her had sometimes been flung back hard in his face…

Successful bloke? Greg had asked of Owen Quine, by which he meant: “Big car? Nice house? Fat bank balance?”

Strike passed the Beatles Coffee Shop with its jauntily positioned black-and-white heads of the Fab Four peering out at him, and entered the relative warmth of the station. He did not want to spend this rainy Sunday alone in his attic rooms in Denmark Street. He wanted to keep busy on the anniversary of Charlotte Campbell’s birth.

Pausing to take out his mobile, he telephoned Leonora Quine.

“Hello?” she said brusquely.

“Hi, Leonora, it’s Cormoran Strike here—”

“Have you found Owen?” she demanded.

“Afraid not. I’m calling because I’ve just heard that your husband was left a house by a friend.”

“What house?”

She sounded tired and irritable. He thought of the various moneyed husbands he had come up against professionally, men who hid bachelor apartments from their wives, and wondered whether he had just given away something that Quine had been keeping from his family.

“Isn’t it true? Didn’t a writer called Joe North leave a house jointly to—?”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Talgarth Road, yeah. That was thirty-odd years ago, though. What d’you wanna know about that for?”

“It’s been sold, has it?”

“No,” she said resentfully, “because bloody Fancourt never let us. Out of spite, it is, because he never uses it. It just sits there, no use to anyone, moldering away.”

Strike leaned back against the wall beside the ticket machines, his eyes fixed on a circular ceiling supported by a spider’s web of struts. This, he told himself again, is what comes of taking on clients when you’re wrecked. He should have asked if they owned any other properties. He should have checked.

“Has anyone gone to see whether your husband’s there, Mrs. Quine?”

She emitted a hoot of derision.

“He wouldn’t go there!” she said, as though Strike were suggesting that her husband had hidden in Buckingham Palace. “He hates it, he never goes near it! Anyway, I don’t think it’s got furniture or nothing.”

“Have you got a key?”

“I dunno. But Owen’d never go there! He hasn’t been near it in years. It’d be an ’orrible place to stay, old and empty.”

“If you could have a look for the key—”

“I can’t go tearing off to Talgarth Road, I’ve got Orlando!” she said, predictably. “Anyway, I’m telling you, he wouldn’t—”

“I’m offering to come over now,” said Strike, “get the key from you, if you can find it, and go and check. Just to make sure we’ve looked everywhere.”

“Yeah, but—it’s Sunday,” she said, sounding taken aback.

“I know it is. D’you think you could have a look for the key?”

“All right, then,” she said after a short pause. “But,” with a last burst of spirit, “he won’t be there!”

Strike took the Tube, changing once, to Westbourne Park and then, collar turned up against the icy deluge, marched towards the address that Leonora had scribbled down for him at their first meeting.

It was another of those odd pockets of London where millionaires sat within a stone’s throw of working-class families who had occupied their homes for forty years or more. The rain-washed scene presented an odd diorama: sleek new apartment blocks behind quiet nondescript terraces, the luxurious new and the comfortable old.