The Silkworm

There was an intensity, almost a feverishness, about the way Strike returned to his scribbling, left hand still shoveling food into his mouth. Thoughts came fluently, cogently: jotting down the questions he wanted answered, locations he wanted cased, the trails he wanted followed. It was a plan of action for himself and a means of nudging Anstis in the right direction, of helping open his eyes to the fact that it was not always the wife when a husband was killed, even if the man had been feckless, unreliable and unfaithful.

At last Strike cast his pen down, finished the noodles in two large mouthfuls and cleared his desk. His notes he put into the cardboard folder with Owen Quine’s name on the spine, having first crossed out “Missing Person” and substituted the word “Murder.” He turned off the lights and was on the point of locking the glass door when he thought of something and returned to Robin’s computer.

And there it was, on the BBC website. Not headline news, of course, because whatever Quine might have thought, he had not been a very famous man. It came three stories below the main news that the EU had agreed to a bailout for the Irish Republic.

The body of a man believed to be writer Owen Quine, 58, has been found in a house in Talgarth Road, London. Police have launched a murder inquiry following the discovery, which was made yesterday by a family friend.

There was no photograph of Quine in his Tyrolean cloak, nor were there details of the horrors to which the body had been subjected. But it was early days; there was time.

Upstairs in his flat, some of Strike’s energy deserted him. He dropped onto his bed and rubbed his eyes wearily, then fell backwards and lay there, fully dressed, his prosthesis still attached. Thoughts he had managed to keep at bay now pressed in upon him…

Why had he not alerted the police to the fact that Quine had been missing for nearly two weeks? Why had he not suspected that Quine might be dead? He had had answers to these questions when DI Rawlins had put them to him, reasonable answers, sane answers, but he found it much more difficult to satisfy himself.

He did not need to take out his phone to see Quine’s body. The vision of that bound, decaying corpse seemed imprinted on his retinas. How much cunning, how much hatred, how much perversity had it taken to turn Quine’s literary excrescence into reality? What kind of human being could bring themselves to slit a man open and pour acid over him, to gut him and lay plates around his empty corpse?

Strike could not rid himself of the unreasonable conviction that he ought somehow to have smelled the scene from afar, like the carrion bird he had trained to be. How had he—with his once-notorious instinct for the strange, the dangerous, the suspicious—not realized that the noisy, self-dramatizing, self-publicizing Quine had been gone too long, that he was too silent?

Because the silly bastard kept crying wolf…and because I’m knackered.

He rolled over, heaved himself off the bed and headed for the bathroom, but his thoughts kept scurrying back to the body: the gaping hole in the torso, the burned-out eye sockets. The killer had moved around that monstrosity while it was still bleeding, when Quine’s screams had perhaps barely stopped echoing through the great vaulted space, and gently straightened forks…and there was another question for his list: what, if anything, had the neighbors heard of Quine’s final moments?

Strike got into bed at last, covered his eyes with a large, hairy forearm and listened to his own thoughts, which were gabbling at him like a workaholic twin who would not pipe down. Forensics had already had more than twenty-four hours. They would have formed opinions, even if all tests were not yet in. He must call Anstis, find out what they were saying…

Enough, he told his tired, hyperactive brain. Enough.

And by the same power of will that in the army had enabled him to fall instantly asleep on bare concrete, on rocky ground, on lumpy camp beds that squeaked rusty complaints about his bulk whenever he moved, he slid smoothly into sleep like a warship sliding out on dark water.

21

Is he then dead?

What, dead at last, quite, quite for ever dead?

William Congreve, The Mourning Bride

At a quarter to nine the next morning Strike made his way slowly down the metal stairs, asking himself, not for the first time, why he did not do something about getting the birdcage lift fixed. His knee was still sore and puffy after his fall, so he was allowing over an hour to get to Ladbroke Grove, because he could not afford to keep taking taxis.

A gust of icy air stung his face as he opened the door, then everything went white as a flash went off inches from his eyes. He blinked—the outlines of three men danced in front of him—he threw up his hand against another volley of flashes.

“Why didn’t you inform the police that Owen Quine was missing, Mr. Strike?”