The Silkworm

Slowly he turned to the contents page and then to the article within. A double-page picture of Charlotte, very thin in a glittering silver floor-length dress, standing in the middle of a long gallery lined with tapestries; beside her, leaning on a card table and looking like a dissolute arctic fox, was Jago Ross. More photographs over the page: Charlotte sitting on an ancient four-poster, laughing with her head thrown back, the white column of her neck rising from a sheer cream blouse; Charlotte and Jago in jeans and wellington boots, walking hand in hand over the parkland in front of their future home with two Jack Russells at their heels; Charlotte windswept on the castle keep, looking over a shoulder draped in the Viscount’s tartan.

Doubtless Helly Anstis had considered it four pounds ten well spent.

On 4 December this year, the seventeenth-century chapel at the Castle of Croy (NEVER “Croy Castle”—it annoys the family) will be dusted off for its first wedding in over a century. Charlotte Campbell, breathtakingly beautiful daughter of 1960s It Girl Tula Clermont and academic and broadcaster Anthony Campbell, will marry the Hon Jago Ross, heir to the castle and to his father’s titles, principal of which is Viscount of Croy.

The future Viscountess is a not altogether uncontroversial addition to the Rosses of Croy, but Jago laughs at the idea that anyone in his family could be less than delighted to welcome the former wild child into his old and rather grand Scottish family.

“Actually, my mother always hoped we’d marry,” he says. “We were boyfriend and girlfriend at Oxford but I suppose we were just too young… found each other again in London… both just out of relationships…”

Were you? thought Strike. Were you both just out of relationships? Or were you fucking her at the same time I was, so that she didn’t know which of us had fathered the baby she was worried she might be carrying? Changing the dates to cover every eventuality, keeping her options open…

…made headlines in her youth when she went missing from Bedales for seven days, causing a national search… admitted to rehab at the age of 25…

“Old news, move on, nothing to see,” says Charlotte brightly. “Look, I had a lot of fun in my youth, but it’s time to settle down and honestly, I can’t wait.”

Fun, was it? Strike asked her stunning picture. Fun, standing on that roof and threatening to jump? Fun, calling me from that psychiatric hospital and begging me to get you out?

Ross, fresh from a very messy divorce that has kept the gossip columns busy…“I wish we could have settled it without the lawyers,” he sighs… “I can’t wait to be a step-mummy!” trills Charlotte…

(“If I have to spend one more evening with the Anstises’ bratty kids, Corm, I swear to God I’ll brain one of them.” And, in Lucy’s suburban back garden, watching Strike’s nephews playing football, “Why are these children such shits?” The expression on Lucy’s round face when she overheard it…)

His own name, leaping off the page.

…including a surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son Cormoran Strike, who made headlines last year…

…a surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son…

…Jonny Rokeby’s eldest…

He closed the magazine with a sudden, reflexive movement and slid it into his bin.

Sixteen years, on and off. Sixteen years of the torture, the madness and occasional ecstasy. And then—after all those times she had left him, throwing herself into the arms of other men as other women cast themselves onto railway tracks—he had walked out. In doing so, he had crossed an unforgivable Rubicon, for it had always been understood that he should stand rock-like, to be left and returned to, never flinching, never giving up. But on that night when he had confronted her with the tangle of lies she had told about the baby in her belly and she had become hysterical and furious, the mountain had moved at last: out of the door, with an ashtray flung after it.