The Silkworm

The Quines’ family home was in Southern Row, a quiet backstreet of small brick houses, a short walk from a whitewashed pub called the Chilled Eskimo. Cold and wet, Strike squinted up at the sign overhead as he passed; it depicted a happy Inuit relaxing beside a fishing hole, his back to the rising sun.

The door of the Quines’ house was a peeling sludge green. Everything about the frontage was dilapidated, including the gate hanging on by only one hinge. Strike thought of Quine’s predilection for comfortable hotel rooms as he rang the doorbell and his opinion of the missing man fell a little further.

“You were quick,” was Leonora’s gruff greeting on opening the door. “Come in.”

He followed her down a dim, narrow hallway. To the left, a door stood ajar onto what was clearly Owen Quine’s study. It looked untidy and dirty. Drawers hung open and an old electric typewriter sat skewed on the desk. Strike could picture Quine tearing pages from it in his rage at Elizabeth Tassel.

“Any luck with the key?” Strike asked Leonora as they entered the dark, stale-smelling kitchen at the end of the hall. The appliances all looked as though they were at least thirty years old. Strike had an idea that his Aunt Joan had owned the identical dark brown microwave back in the eighties.

“Well, I found them,” Leonora told him, gesturing towards half a dozen keys lying on the kitchen table. “I dunno whether any of them’s the right one.”

None of them was attached to a key ring and one of them looked too big to open anything but a church door.

“What number Talgarth Road?” Strike asked her.

“Hundred and seventy-nine.”

“When were you last there?”

“Me? I never been there,” she said with what seemed genuine indifference. “I wasn’t int’rested. Silly thing to do.”

“What was?”

“Leaving it to them.” In the face of Strike’s politely inquiring face she said impatiently, “That Joe North, leaving it to Owen and Michael Fancourt. He said it was for them to write in. They’ve never used it since. Useless.”

“And you’ve never been there?”

“No. They got it round the time I had Orlando. I wasn’t int’rested,” she repeated.

“Orlando was born then?” Strike asked, surprised. He had been vaguely imagining Orlando as a hyperactive ten-year-old.

“In eighty-six, yeah,” said Leonora. “But she’s handicapped.”

“Oh,” said Strike. “I see.”

“Upstairs sulking now, cos I had to tell her off,” said Leonora, in one of her bursts of expansiveness. “She nicks things. She knows it’s wrong but she keeps doing it. I caught her taking Edna-Next-Door’s purse out of her bag when she come round yesterday. It wasn’t cos of the money,” she said quickly, as though he had made an accusation. “It’s cos she liked the color. Edna understands cos she knows her, but not everyone does. I tell her it’s wrong. She knows it’s wrong.”

“All right if I take these and try them, then?” Strike asked, scooping the keys into his hand.

“If y’want,” said Leonora, but she added defiantly, “He won’t be there.”

Strike pocketed his haul, turned down Leonora’s afterthought offer of tea or coffee and returned to the cold rain.

He found himself limping again as he walked towards Westbourne Park Tube station, which would mean a short journey with minimal changes. He had not taken as much care as usual in attaching his prosthesis in his haste to get out of Nina’s flat, nor had he been able to apply any of those soothing products that helped protect the skin beneath it.

Eight months previously (on the very day that he had later been stabbed in his upper arm) he had taken a bad fall down some stairs. The consultant who had examined it shortly afterwards had informed him that he had done additional, though probably reparable, damage to the medial ligaments in the knee joint of his amputated leg and advised ice, rest and further investigation. But Strike had not been able to afford rest and had not wished for further tests, so he had strapped up the knee and tried to remember to elevate his leg when sitting. The pain had mostly subsided but occasionally, when he had done a lot of walking, it began to throb and swell again.

The road along which Strike was trudging curved to the right. A tall, thin, hunched figure was walking behind him, its head bowed so that only the top of a black hood was visible.

Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to go home, now, and rest his knee. It was Sunday. There was no need for him to go marching all over London in the rain.

He won’t be there, said Leonora in his head.

But the alternative was returning to Denmark Street, listening to the rain hammering against the badly fitting window beside his bed under the eaves, with photo albums full of Charlotte too close, in the boxes on the landing…

Better to move, to work, to think about other people’s problems…