The Silkworm

“Except for the times he walked out on the family to consort with mistresses or fritter away money in hotel rooms,” suggested Strike.

“All right, he wouldn’t have won Father of the Year,” snapped Elizabeth, “but there was love there.”

A silence fell over the table and Strike decided not to break it. He was sure that Elizabeth Tassel had agreed to this meeting, as she had requested the last, for reasons of her own and he was keen to hear them. He therefore ate his fish and waited.

“The police have asked me,” she said finally, when his plate was almost clear, “whether Owen was blackmailing me in some way.”

“Really?” said Strike.

The restaurant clattered and chattered around them, and outside the snow fell thicker than ever. Here again was the familiar phenomenon of which he had spoken to Robin: the suspect who wished to re-explain, worried that they had not made a good enough job of it on their first attempt.

“They’ve taken note of the large dollops of money passing from my account to Owen’s over the years,” said Elizabeth.

Strike said nothing; her ready payment of Quine’s hotel bills had struck him as out of character in their previous meeting.

“What do they think anyone could blackmail me for?” she asked him with a twist to her scarlet mouth. “My professional life has been scrupulously honest. I have no private life to speak of. I’m the very definition of a blameless spinster, aren’t I?”

Strike, who judged it impossible to answer such a question, however rhetorical, without giving offense, said nothing.

“It started when Orlando was born,” Elizabeth said. “Owen had managed to get through all the money he’d ever made and Leonora was in intensive care for two weeks after the birth, and Michael Fancourt was screaming to anybody who’d listen that Owen had murdered his wife.

“Owen was a pariah. Neither he nor Leonora had any family. I lent him money, as a friend, to get baby things. Then I advanced him money for a mortgage on a bigger house. Then there was money for specialists to look at Orlando when it was clear that she wasn’t developing quite as she should, and therapists to help her. Before I knew it, I was the family’s personal bank. Every time royalties came in Owen would make a big fuss about repaying me, and sometimes I’d get a few thousand back.

“At heart,” said the agent, the words tumbling out of her, “Owen was an overgrown child, which could make him unbearable or charming. Irresponsible, impulsive, egotistical, amazingly lacking in conscience, but he could also be fun, enthusiastic and engaging. There was a pathos, a funny fragility about him, however badly he behaved, that made people feel protective. Jerry Waldegrave felt it. Women felt it. I felt it. And the truth is that I kept on hoping, even believing, that one day he’d produce another Hobart’s Sin. There was always something, in every bloody awful book he’s written, something that meant you couldn’t completely write him off.”

A waiter came over to take away their plates. Elizabeth waved away his solicitous inquiry as to whether there had been something wrong with her soup and asked for a coffee. Strike accepted the offer of the dessert menu.

“Orlando’s sweet, though,” Elizabeth added gruffly. “Orlando’s very sweet.”

“Yeah…she seemed to think,” said Strike, watching her closely, “that she saw you going into Quine’s study the other day, while Leonora was in the bathroom.”

He did not think that she had expected the question, nor did she seem to like it.

“She saw that, did she?”

She sipped water, hesitated, then said:

“I’d challenge anyone depicted in Bombyx Mori, given the chance of seeing what other nasty jottings Owen might have left lying around, not to take the opportunity of having a look.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No,” she said, “because the place was a tip. I could see immediately that it would take far too long to search and,” she raised her chin defiantly, “to be absolutely frank, I didn’t want to leave fingerprints. So I left as quickly as I walked in. It was the—possibly ignoble—impulse of a moment.”

She seemed to have said everything she had come to say. Strike ordered an apple and strawberry crumble and took the initiative.

“Daniel Chard wants to see me,” he told her. Her olive-dark eyes widened in surprise.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Unless the snow’s too bad, I’m going down to visit him in Devon tomorrow. I’d like to know, before I meet him, why he’s portrayed as the murderer of a young blond man in Bombyx Mori.”

“I’m not providing a key to that filthy book for you,” retorted Elizabeth with a return of all her former aggression and suspicion. “No. Not doing it.”

“That’s a shame,” said Strike, “because people are talking.”

“Am I likely to compound my own egregious mistake in sending the damn thing out into the world by gossiping about it?”

“I’m discreet,” Strike assured her. “Nobody needs to know where I got my information.”

But she merely glared at him, cold and impassive.

“What about Kathryn Kent?”

“What about her?”