The Silkworm

“Fine,” said Robin, who wanted to maintain her heroic status in his eyes. Taking deep lungfuls of the frosty air, she followed Strike, surprisingly nimble on his crutches, up the gravel path towards the entrance. Their young passenger had disappeared without another word to them.

Daniel Chard opened the front door himself. He was wearing a mandarin-collared, smock-like shirt in chartreuse silk and loose linen trousers. Like Strike, he was on crutches, his left foot and calf encased in a thick surgical boot and strapping. Chard looked down at Strike’s dangling, empty trouser leg and for several painful seconds did not seem able to look away.

“And you thought you had problems,” said Strike, holding out his hand.

The small joke fell flat. Chard did not smile. The aura of awkwardness, of otherness, that had surrounded him at his firm’s party clung to him still. He shook Strike’s hand without looking him in the eye and his welcoming words were:

“I’ve been expecting you to cancel all morning.”

“No, we made it,” said Strike unnecessarily. “This is my assistant, Robin, who’s driven me down. I hope—”

“No, she can’t sit outside in the snow,” said Chard, though without noticeable warmth. “Come in.”

He backed away on his crutches to let them move over the threshold onto highly polished floorboards the color of honey.

“Would you mind removing your shoes?”

A stocky, middle-aged Filipina woman with her black hair in a bun emerged from a pair of swing doors set into the brick wall on their right. She was clothed entirely in black and holding two white linen bags into which Strike and Robin were evidently expected to put their footwear. Robin handed hers over; it made her feel strangely vulnerable to feel the boards beneath her soles. Strike merely stood there on his single foot.

“Oh,” said Chard, staring again. “No, I suppose…Mr. Strike had better keep his shoe on, Nenita.”

The woman retired wordlessly into the kitchen.

Somehow, the interior of Tithebarn House increased Robin’s unpleasant sensation of vertigo. No walls divided its vast interior. The first floor, which was reached by a steel and glass spiral staircase, was suspended on thick metal cables from the high ceiling. Chard’s huge double bed, which seemed to be of black leather, was visible, high above them, with what looked like a huge crucifix of barbed wire hanging over it on the brick wall. Robin dropped her gaze hastily, feeling sicker than ever.

Most of the furniture on the lower level comprised cubes of white or black leather. Vertical steel radiators were interspersed with artfully simple bookshelves of more wood and metal. The dominant feature of the under-furnished room was a life-size white marble sculpture of an angel, perched on a rock and partially dissected to expose half of her skull, a portion of her guts and a slice of the bone in her leg. Her breast, Robin saw, unable to tear her eyes away, was revealed as a mound of fat globules sitting on a circle of muscle that resembled the gills of a mushroom.

Ludicrous to feel sick when the dissected body was made of cold, pure stone, mere insentient albescence, nothing like the rotting carcass preserved on Strike’s mobile…don’t think about that…she ought to have made Strike leave at least one biscuit…sweat had broken out on her upper lip, her scalp…

“You all right, Robin?” asked Strike sharply. She knew she must have changed color from the look on the two men’s faces, and to her fear that she might pass out was added embarrassment that she was being a liability to Strike.

“Sorry,” she said through numb lips. “Long journey…if I could have a glass of water…”

“Er—very well,” said Chard, as though water were in short supply. “Nenita?”

The woman in black reappeared.

“The young lady needs a glass of water,” said Chard.

Nenita gestured to Robin to follow her. Robin heard the publisher’s crutches making a gentle thump, thump behind her on the wooden floor as she entered the kitchen. She had a brief impression of steel surfaces and whitewashed walls, and the young man to whom she had given a lift prodding at a large saucepan, then found herself sitting on a low stool.

Robin had assumed that Chard had followed to see that she was all right, but as Nenita pressed a cold glass into her hand she heard him speak somewhere above her.

“Thanks for fixing the gates, Manny.”

The young man did not reply. Robin heard the clunk of Chard’s crutches recede and the swinging of the kitchen doors.

“That’s my fault,” Strike told Chard, when the publisher rejoined him. He felt truly guilty. “I ate all the food she brought for the journey.”

“Nenita can give her something,” said Chard. “Shall we sit down?”

Strike followed him past the marble angel, which was reflected mistily in the warm wood below, and they headed on their four crutches to the end of the room, where a black iron woodburner made a pool of welcome warmth.