The Silkworm

He strode back into his office and Robin sat down at her computer. The scarf she had just hung up was dripping icily onto the floor, but she did not care. The memory of Quine’s mutilated body continued to haunt her, yet she was possessed of an urge (concealed from Matthew like a dirty secret) to find out more, to find out everything.

What infuriated her was that Strike, who of all people should have understood, could not see in her what so obviously burned in him.

25

Thus ’tis when a man will be ignorantly officious, do services, and not know his why…

Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman

They left the office in a sudden flurry of feathery snowflakes, Robin with the various addresses she had taken from an online directory on her mobile phone. Strike wanted to revisit Talgarth Road first, so Robin told him the results of her directory searches while standing in a Tube carriage that, at the tail end of the rush hour, was full but not packed. The smell of wet wool, grime and Gore-Tex filled their nostrils as they talked, holding the same pole as three miserable-looking Italian backpackers.

“The old man who works in the bookshop’s on holiday,” she told Strike. “Back next Monday.”

“All right, we’ll leave him till then. What about our suspects?”

She raised an eyebrow at the word, but said:

“Christian Fisher lives in Camden with a woman of thirty-two—a girlfriend, do you think?”

“Probably,” agreed Strike. “That’s inconvenient…our killer needed peace and solitude to dispose of bloodstained clothing—not to mention a good stone’s worth of human intestine. I’m looking for somewhere you can get in and out of without being seen.”

“Well, I looked at pictures of the place on Google Street View,” said Robin with a certain defiance. “The flat’s got a common entrance with three others.”

“And it’s miles away from Talgarth Road.”

“But you don’t really think Christian Fisher did it, do you?” asked Robin.

“Strains credulity a bit,” Strike admitted. “He barely knew Quine—he’s not in the book—can’t see it.”

They alighted at Holborn, where Robin tactfully slowed her pace to Strike’s, not commenting on his limp or the way he was using his upper body to propel himself along.

“What about Elizabeth Tassel?” he asked as he walked.

“Fulham Palace Road, alone.”

“Good,” said Strike. “We’ll go and have a look at that, see if she’s got any freshly dug flower beds.”

“Won’t the police be doing this?” Robin asked.

Strike frowned. He was perfectly aware that he was a jackal slinking on the periphery of the case, hoping the lions might leave a scrap on a minor bone.

“Maybe,” he said, “maybe not. Anstis thinks Leonora did it and he doesn’t change his mind easily; I know, I worked with him on a case in Afghanistan. Speaking of Leonora,” he added casually, “Anstis has found out she used to work in a butcher’s.”

“Oh bugger,” said Robin.

Strike grinned. At times of tension, her Yorkshire accent became more pronounced: he had heard “boogger.”

They got onto a much emptier Piccadilly line train to Barons Court; relieved, Strike fell into a seat.

“Jerry Waldegrave lives with his wife, right?” he asked Robin.

“Yes, if she’s called Fenella. In Hazlitt Road, Kensington. A Joanna Waldegrave lives in the basement—”

“Their daughter,” said Strike. “Budding novelist, she was at the Roper Chard party. And Daniel Chard?”

“Sussex Street, Pimlico, with a couple called Nenita and Manny Ramos—”

“Sound like servants.”

“—and he’s got a property in Devon as well: Tithebarn House.”

“Which is presumably where he’s currently laid up with his broken leg.”

“And Fancourt’s ex-directory,” she finished, “but there’s loads of biographical stuff about him online. He owns an Elizabethan place just outside Chew Magna called Endsor Court.”

“Chew Magna?”

“It’s in Somerset. He lives there with his third wife.”

“Bit far to go today,” said Strike regretfully. “No bachelor pad near Talgarth Road where he could stash guts in the freezer?”

“Not that I could find.”

“So where was he staying when he went to stare at the crime scene? Or had he come up for the day for a spot of nostalgia?”

“If it really was him.”

“Yeah, if it was him…and there’s Kathryn Kent too. Well, we know where she lives and we know it’s alone. Quine got dropped off in her vicinity on the night of the fifth, Anstis says, but she was away. Maybe Quine had forgotten she was at her sister’s,” Strike mused, “and maybe when he found out she wasn’t home he went to Talgarth Road instead? She could have come back from the hospice to meet him there. We’ll have a look round her place second.”

As they moved west Strike told Robin about the different witnesses who claimed to have seen a woman in a burqa entering the building on the fourth of November and Quine himself leaving the building in the early hours of the sixth.

“But one or both of them could be mistaken or lying,” he concluded.

“A woman in a burqa. You don’t think,” said Robin tentatively, “the neighbor might be a mad Islamophobe?”