The Silkworm

Strike wondered what impression Elizabeth Tassel thought she made on the world; whether she realized how little she was liked. She allowed the cough that she had been trying to suppress free expression and he waited for the loud, seal-like barks to pass before asking:

“You think she should have faked some grief?”

“I don’t say it’s fake,” snapped Elizabeth. “I’m sure she is upset in her own limited way. I’m just saying it wouldn’t hurt to play the grieving widow a bit more. It’s what people expect.”

“I suppose you’ve talked to the police?”

“Of course. We’ve been through the row in the River Café, over and over the reason I didn’t read the damn book properly. And they wanted to know my movements after I last saw Owen. Specifically, the three days after I saw him.”

She glared interrogatively at Strike, whose expression remained impassive.

“I take it they think he died within three days of our argument?”

“I’ve no idea,” lied Strike. “What did you tell them about your movements?”

“That I went straight home after Owen stormed out on me, got up at six next morning, took a taxi to Paddington and went to stay with Dorcus.”

“One of your writers, I think you said?”

“Yes, Dorcus Pengelly, she—”

Elizabeth noticed Strike’s small grin and, for the first time in their acquaintance, her face relaxed into a fleeting smile.

“It’s her real name, if you can believe it, not a pseudonym. She writes pornography dressed up as historical romance. Owen was very sniffy about her books, but he’d have killed for her sales. They go,” said Elizabeth, “like hotcakes.”

“When did you get back from Dorcus’s?”

“Late Monday afternoon. It was supposed to be a nice long weekend, but nice,” said Elizabeth tensely, “thanks to Bombyx Mori, it was not.

“I live alone,” she continued. “I can’t prove I went home, that I didn’t murder Owen as soon as I got back to London. I certainly felt like doing it…”

She drank more water and continued:

“The police were mostly interested in the book. They seem to think it’s given a lot of people a motive.”

It was her first overt attempt to get information out of him.

“It looked like a lot of people at first,” said Strike, “but if they’ve got the time of death right and Quine died within three days of your row in the River Café, the number of suspects will be fairly limited.”

“How so?” asked Elizabeth sharply, and he was reminded of one of his most scathing tutors at Oxford, who used this two-word question like a giant needle to puncture ill-founded theorizing.

“Can’t give you that information, I’m afraid,” Strike replied pleasantly. “Mustn’t prejudice the police case.”

Her pallid skin, across the small table, was large-pored and coarse-grained, the olive-dark eyes watchful.

“They asked me,” she said, “to whom I had shown the manuscript during the few days I had it before sending it to Jerry and Christian—answer: nobody. And they asked me with whom Owen discusses his manuscripts while he’s writing them. I don’t know why that was,” she said, her black eyes still fixed on Strike’s. “Do they think somebody egged him on?”

“I don’t know,” Strike lied again. “Does he discuss the books he’s working on?”

“He might have confided bits in Jerry Waldegrave. He barely deigned to tell me his titles.”

“Really? He never asked your advice? Did you say you’d studied English at Oxford—?”

“I took a first,” she said angrily, “but that counted for less than nothing with Owen, who incidentally was thrown off his course at Loughborough or some such place, and never got a degree at all. Yes, and Michael once kindly told Owen that I’d been ‘lamentably derivative’ as a writer back when we were students, and Owen never forgot it.” The memory of the old slight had given a purple tinge to her yellowish skin. “Owen shared Michael’s prejudice about women in literature. Neither of them minded women praising their work, of c-course—” She coughed into her napkin and emerged red-faced and angry. “Owen was a bigger glutton for praise than any author I’ve ever met, and they are most of them insatiable.”

Their food arrived: tomato and basil soup for Elizabeth and cod and chips for Strike.

“You told me when we last met,” said Strike, having swallowed his first large mouthful, “that there came a point when you had to choose between Fancourt and Quine. Why did you choose Quine?”

She was blowing on a spoonful of soup and seemed to give her answer serious consideration before speaking.

“I felt—at that time—that he was more sinned against than sinning.”

“Did this have something to do with the parody somebody wrote of Fancourt’s wife’s novel?”

“‘Somebody’ didn’t write it,” she said quietly. “Owen did.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“He showed it to me before he sent it to the magazine. I’m afraid,” Elizabeth met Strike’s gaze with cold defiance, “it made me laugh. It was painfully accurate and very funny. Owen was always a good literary mimic.”

“But then Fancourt’s wife killed herself.”