The Silkworm

At the party following the christening of Timothy Cormoran Anstis—which had been postponed until he was eighteen months old, because his father and his godfather had to be airlifted out of Afghanistan and discharged from their respective hospitals—Helly had insisted on making a tearful, tipsy speech about how Strike had saved her baby’s daddy’s life, and how much it meant to her to have him agree to be Timmy’s guardian angel, too. Strike, who had not been able to think of any valid reason to refuse being the boy’s godfather, had stared at the tablecloth while Helly spoke, careful not to meet Charlotte’s eye in case she made him laugh. She had been wearing—he remembered it vividly—his favorite peacock blue wrap-over dress, which had clung to every inch of her perfect figure. Having a woman that beautiful on his arm, even while he was still on crutches, had acted as a counterweight to the half a leg still not yet fit for a prosthesis. It had transformed him from the Man With Only One Foot to the man who had managed—miraculously, as he knew nearly every man who came into contact with her must think—to snag a fiancée so stunning that men stopped talking in midsentence when she entered the room.

“Cormy, darling,” crooned Helly when she opened the door. “Look at you, all famous…we thought you’d forgotten us.”

Nobody else ever called him Cormy. He had never bothered to tell her he disliked it.

She treated him, without encouragement, to a tender hug that he knew was intended to suggest pity and regret for his single status. The house was warm and brightly lit after the hostile winter night outside and he was glad to see, as he extricated himself from Helly, Anstis stride into view, holding a pint of Doom Bar as a welcoming gift.

“Ritchie, let him get inside. Honestly…”

But Strike had accepted the pint and taken several grateful mouthfuls before he bothered to take off his coat.

Strike’s three-and-a-half-year-old godson burst into the hall, making shrill engine noises. He was very like his mother, whose features, small and pretty though they were, were oddly bunched up in the middle of her face. Timothy sported Superman pajamas and was swiping at the walls with a plastic lightsaber.

“Oh, Timmy, darling, don’t, our lovely new paintwork…He wanted to stay up and see his Uncle Cormoran. We tell him about you all the time,” said Helly.

Strike contemplated the small figure without enthusiasm, detecting very little reciprocal interest from his godson. Timothy was the only child Strike knew whose birthday he had a hope of remembering, not that this had ever led Strike to buy him a present. The boy had been born two days before the Viking had exploded on that dusty road in Afghanistan, taking with it Strike’s lower right leg and part of Anstis’s face.

Strike had never confided in anyone how, during long hours in his hospital bed, he had wondered why it had been Anstis he had grabbed and pulled towards the back of the vehicle. He had gone over it in his mind: the strange presentiment, amounting almost to certainty, that they were about to explode, and the reaching out and seizing of Anstis, when he could equally have grabbed Sergeant Gary Topley.

Was it because Anstis had spent most of the previous day Skyping Helen within earshot of Strike, looking at the newborn son he might otherwise never have met? Was that why Strike’s hand had reached without hesitation for the older man, the Territorial Army policeman, and not Red Cap Topley, engaged but childless? Strike did not know. He was not sentimental about children and he disliked the wife he had saved from widowhood. He knew himself to be merely one among millions of soldiers, dead and living, whose split-second actions, prompted by instinct as much as training, had forever altered other men’s fates.

“Do you want to read Tim his bedtime story, Cormy? We’ve got a new book, haven’t we, Timmy?”

Strike could think of little he wanted to do less, especially if it involved the hyperactive boy sitting on his lap and perhaps kicking his right knee.

Anstis led the way into the open-plan kitchen and dining area. The walls were cream, the floorboards bare, a long wooden table stood near French windows at the end of the room, surrounded by chairs upholstered in black. Strike had the vague idea that they had been a different color when he had last been here, with Charlotte. Helly bustled in behind them and thrust a highly colored picture book into Strike’s hands. He had no choice but to sit down on a dining-room chair, with his godson placed firmly beside him, and to read the story of Kyla the Kangaroo Who Loved to Bounce, which was (as he would not usually have noticed) published by Roper Chard. Timothy did not appear remotely interested in Kyla’s antics and played with his lightsaber throughout.