‘Have you read it?’
‘Most of it.’
‘Did his wife give you a copy?’
‘No, she says she’s never read it.’
‘She forgot she owned a second house and she doesn’t read her own husband’s books,’ said Anstis without emphasis.
‘Her story is that she reads them once they’ve got proper covers on,’ said Strike. ‘For what it’s worth, I believe her.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Anstis, who was now scribbling additions to Strike’s statement. ‘How did you get a copy of the manuscript?’
‘I’d prefer not to say.’
‘Could be a problem,’ said Anstis, glancing up.
‘Not for me,’ said Strike.
‘We might need to come back to that one, Bob.’
Strike shrugged, then asked:
‘Has his wife been told?’
‘Should have been by now, yeah.’
Strike had not called Leonora. The news that her husband was dead must be broken in person by somebody with the necessary training. He had done the job himself, many times, but he was out of practice; in any case, his allegiance this afternoon had been to the desecrated remains of Owen Quine, to stand watch over them until he had delivered them safely into the hands of the police.
He had not forgotten what Leonora would be going through while he was interrogated at Scotland Yard. He had imagined her opening the door to the police officer – or two of them, perhaps – the first thrill of alarm at the sight of the uniform; the hammer blow dealt to the heart by the calm, understanding, sympathetic invitation to retire indoors; the horror of the pronouncement (although they would not tell her, at least at first, about the thick purple ropes binding her husband, or the dark empty cavern that a murderer had made of his chest and belly; they would not say that his face had been burned away by acid or that somebody had laid out plates around him as though he were a giant roast… Strike remembered the platter of lamb that Lucy had handed around nearly twenty-four hours previously. He was not a squeamish man, but the smooth malt seemed to catch in his throat and he set down his beaker).
‘How many people know what’s in this book, d’you reckon?’ asked Anstis slowly.
‘No idea,’ said Strike. ‘Could be a lot by now. Quine’s agent, Elizabeth Tassel – spelled like it sounds,’ he added helpfully, as Anstis scribbled, ‘sent it to Christian Fisher at Crossfire Publishing and he’s a man who likes to gossip. Lawyers got involved to try and stop the talk.’
‘More and more interesting,’ muttered Anstis, writing fast. ‘You want anything else to eat, Bob?’
‘I want a smoke.’
‘Won’t be long,’ promised Anstis. ‘Who’s he libelled?’
‘The question is,’ said Strike, flexing his sore leg, ‘whether it’s libel, or whether he’s exposed the truth about people. But the characters I recognised were – give us a pen and paper,’ he said, because it was quicker to write than to dictate. He said the names aloud as he jotted them down: ‘Michael Fancourt, the writer; Daniel Chard, who’s head of Quine’s publisher; Kathryn Kent, Quine’s girlfriend—’
‘There’s a girlfriend?’
‘Yeah, they’ve been together over a year, apparently. I went to see her – Stafford Cripps House, part of Clement Attlee Court – and she claimed he wasn’t at her flat and she hadn’t seen him… Liz Tassel, his agent; Jerry Waldegrave, his editor, and’ – a fractional hesitation – ‘his wife.’
‘He’s put his wife in there as well, has he?’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike, pushing the list over the desk to Anstis. ‘But there are a load of other characters I wouldn’t recognise. You’ve got a wide field if you’re looking for someone he put in the book.’
‘Have you still got the manuscript?’
‘No.’ Strike, expecting the question, lied easily. Let Anstis get a copy of his own, without Nina’s fingerprints on it.
‘Anything else you can think of that might be helpful?’ Anstis asked, sitting up straight.
‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘I don’t think his wife did it.’
Anstis shot Strike a quizzical look not unmixed with warmth. Strike was godfather to the son who had been born to Anstis just two days before both of them had been blown out of the Viking. Strike had met Timothy Cormoran Anstis a handful of times and had not been impressed in his favour.
‘OK, Bob, sign this for us and I can give you a lift home.’
Strike read through the statement carefully, took pleasure in correcting DI Rawlins’s spelling in a few places, and signed.
His mobile rang as he and Anstis walked down the long corridor towards the lifts, Strike’s knee protesting painfully.
‘Cormoran Strike?’
‘It’s me, Leonora,’ she said, sounding almost exactly as she usually did, except that her voice was perhaps a little less flat.
Strike gestured to Anstis that he was not ready to enter the lift and drew aside from the policeman, to a dark window beneath which traffic was winding in the endless rain.
‘Have the police been to see you?’ he asked her.
‘Yeah. I’m with them now.’
‘I’m very sorry, Leonora,’ he said.
‘You all right?’ she asked gruffly.
‘Me?’ said Strike, surprised. ‘I’m fine.’
‘They ain’t giving you a hard time? They said you was being interviewed. I said to ’em, “He only found Owen cos I asked him, what’s he bin arrested for?”’
‘They hadn’t arrested me,’ said Strike. ‘Just needed a statement.’
‘But they’ve kept you all this time.’
‘How d’you know how long—?’
‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’m downstairs in the lobby. I wanna see you, I made ’em bring me.’
Astonished, with the whisky sitting on his empty stomach, he said the first thing that occurred to him.
‘Who’s looking after Orlando?’
‘Edna,’ said Leonora, taking Strike’s concern for her daughter as a matter of course. ‘When are they gonna let you go?’
‘I’m on my way out now,’ he said.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Anstis when Strike had rung off. ‘Charlotte worrying about you?’
‘Christ, no,’ said Strike as they stepped together into the lift. He had completely forgotten that he had never told Anstis about the break-up. As a friend from the Met, Anstis was sealed off in a compartment on his own where gossip could not travel. ‘That’s over. Ended months ago.’
‘Really? Tough break,’ said Anstis, looking genuinely sorry as the lift began to move downwards. But Strike thought that some of Anstis’s disappointment was for himself. He had been one of the friends most taken with Charlotte, with her extraordinary beauty and her dirty laugh. ‘Bring Charlotte over’ had been Anstis’s frequent refrain when the two men had found themselves free of hospitals and the army, back in the city that was their home.
Strike felt an instinctive desire to shield Leonora from Anstis, but it was impossible. When the lift doors slid open there she was, thin and mousy, with her limp hair in combs, her old coat wrapped around her and an air of still wearing bedroom slippers even though her feet were clad in scuffed black shoes. She was flanked by the two uniformed officers, one female, who had evidently broken the news of Quine’s death and then brought her here. Strike deduced from the guarded glances they gave Anstis that Leonora had given them reason to wonder; that her reaction to the news that her husband was dead had struck them as unusual.
Dry-faced and matter-of-fact, Leonora seemed relieved to see Strike.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Why’d they keep you so long?’
Anstis looked at her curiously, but Strike did not introduce them.
‘Shall we go over here?’ he asked her, indicating a bench along the wall. As he limped off beside her he felt the three police officers draw together behind them.
‘How are you?’ he asked her, partly in the hope that she might exhibit some sign of di
stress, to assuage the curiosity of those watching.
‘Dunno,’ she said, dropping onto the plastic seat. ‘I can’t believe it. I never thought he’d go there, the silly sod. I s’pose some burglar got in and done it. He should’ve gone to a hotel like always, shouldn’t he?’
They had not told her much, then. He thought that she was more shocked than she appeared, more than she knew herself. The act of coming to him seemed the disorientated action of somebody who did not know what else to do, except to turn to the person who was supposed to be helping her.
‘Would you like me to take you home?’ Strike asked her.
‘I ’spect they’ll give me a lift back,’ she said, with the same sense of untroubled entitlement she had brought to the statement that Elizabeth Tassel would pay Strike’s bill. ‘I wanted to see you to check you was all right and I hadn’t got you in trouble, and I wanted to ask you if you’ll keep working for me.’
‘Keep working for you?’ Strike repeated.
For a split-second he wondered whether it was possible that she had not quite grasped what had happened, that she thought Quine was still out there somewhere to be found. Did her faint eccentricity of manner mask something more serious, some fundamental cognitive problem?
‘They think I know something about it,’ said Leonora. ‘I can tell.’
Strike hesitated on the verge of saying ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ but it would have been a lie. He was only too aware that Leonora, wife of a feckless, unfaithful husband, who had chosen not to contact the police and to allow ten days to elapse before making a show of looking for him, who had a key to the empty house where his body had been found and who would undoubtedly be able to take him by surprise, would be the first and most important suspect. Nevertheless, he asked:
‘Why d’you think that?’
‘I can tell,’ she repeated. ‘Way they were talking to me. And they’ve said they wanna look in our house, in his study.’
It was routine, but he could see how she would feel this to be intrusive and ominous.
‘Does Orlando know what’s happened?’ he asked.
‘I told her but I don’t think she realises,’ said Leonora, and for the first time he saw tears in her eyes. ‘She says, “Like Mr Poop” – he was our cat that was run over – but I don’t know if she understands, not really. You can’t always tell with Orlando. I haven’t told her someone killed him. Can’t get my head around it.’
There was a short pause in which Strike hoped, irrelevantly, that he was not giving off whisky fumes.
‘Will you keep working for me?’ she asked him directly. ‘You’re better’n them, that’s why I wanted you in the first place. Will you?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Cos I can tell they think I had something to do with it,’ she repeated, standing up, ‘way they was talking to me.’
She drew her coat more tightly around her.
‘I’d better get back to Orlando. I’m glad you’re all right.’
She shuffled off to her escort again. The female police officer looked taken aback to be treated like a taxi driver but after a glance at Anstis acceded to Leonora’s request for a lift home.
‘The hell was that about?’ Anstis asked him after the two women had passed out of earshot.
‘She was worried you’d arrested me.’
‘Bit eccentric, isn’t she?’
‘Yeah, a bit.’
‘You didn’t tell her anything, did you?’ asked Anstis.
‘No,’ said Strike, who resented the question. He knew better than to pass information about a crime scene to a suspect.
‘You wanna be careful, Bob,’ said Anstis awkwardly, as they passed through the revolving doors into the rainy night. ‘Not to get under anyone’s feet. It’s murder now and you haven’t got many friends round these parts, mate.’
‘Popularity’s overrated. Listen, I’ll get a cab – no,’ he said firmly, over Anstis’s protestations, ‘I need to smoke before I go anywhere. Thanks, Rich, for everything.’
They shook hands; Strike turned up his collar against the rain and with a wave of farewell limped off along the dark pavement. He was almost as glad to have shaken off Anstis as to take the first sweet pull on his cigarette.
18
For this I find, where jealousy is fed,
Horns in the mind are worse than on the head.
Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour
Strike had completely forgotten that Robin had left the office in what he categorised as a sulk on Friday afternoon. He only knew that she was the one person he wanted to talk to about what had happened, and while he usually avoided telephoning her at weekends, the circumstances felt exceptional enough to justify a text. He sent it from the taxi he found after fifteen minutes tramping wet, cold streets in the dark.
Robin was curled up at home in an armchair with Investigative Interviewing: Psychology and Practice, a book she had bought online. Matthew was on the sofa, speaking on the landline to his mother in Yorkshire, who was feeling unwell again. He rolled his eyes whenever Robin reminded herself to look up and smile sympathetically at his exasperation.
When her mobile vibrated, Robin glanced at it irritably; she was trying to concentrate on Investigative Interviewing.
Found Quine murdered. C
She let out a mingled gasp and shriek that made Matthew start. The book slipped out of her lap and fell, disregarded, to the floor. Seizing the mobile, she ran with it to the bedroom.
Matthew talked to his mother for twenty minutes more, then went and listened at the closed bedroom door. He could hear Robin asking questions and being given what seemed to be long, involved answers. Something about the timbre of her voice convinced him that it was Strike on the line. His square jaw tightened.
When Robin finally emerged from the bedroom, shocked and awestruck, she told her fiancé that Strike had found the missing man he had been hunting, and that he had been murdered. Matthew’s natural curiosity tugged him one way, but his dislike of Strike, and the fact that he had dared contact Robin on a Sunday evening, pulled him another.
‘Well, I’m glad something’s happened to interest you tonight,’ he said. ‘I know you’re bored shitless by Mum’s health.’
‘You bloody hypocrite!’ gasped Robin, winded by the injustice.
The row escalated with alarming speed. Strike’s invitation to the wedding; Matthew’s sneering attitude to Robin’s job; what their life together was going to be; what each owed the other: Robin was horrified by how quickly the very fundamentals of their relationship were dragged out for examination and recrimination, but she did not back down. A familiar frustration and anger towards the men in her life had her in its grip – to Matthew, for failing to see why her job mattered to her so much; to Strike, for failing to recognise her potential.
(But he had called her when he had found the body… She had managed to slip in a question – ‘Who else have you told?’ – and he had answered, without any sign that he knew what it would mean to her, ‘No one, only you.’)
Meanwhile, Matthew was feeling extremely hard done by. He had noticed lately something that he knew he ought not to complain about, and which grated all the more for his feeling that he must lump it: before she worked for Strike, Robin had always been first to back down in a row, first to apologise, but her conciliatory nature seemed to have been warped by the stupid bloody job…
They only had one bedroom. Robin pulled spare blankets from on top of the wardrobe, grabbed clean clothes from inside it and announced her intention to sleep on the sofa. Sure that she would cave before long (the sofa was hard and uncomfortable) Matthew did not try to dissuade her.
But he had been wrong in expecting her to soften. When he woke the following morning it was to find an empty sofa and Robin gone. His anger increased exponentially. She had doubtless headed for work an hour earlier than usual, and his imagination – Matthew was not usually imaginative – showed him that big, ugly bastard opening the door of his flat,
not the office below…
19
… I to you will open
The book of a black sin, deep printed in me.
… my disease lies in my soul.
Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier
Strike had set his alarm for an early hour, with the intention of securing some peaceful, uninterrupted time without clients or telephone. He rose at once, showered and breakfasted, took great care over the fastening of the prosthesis onto a definitely swollen knee and, forty-five minutes after waking, limped into his office with the unread portion of Bombyx Mori under his arm. A suspicion that he had not confided to Anstis was driving him to finish the book as a matter of urgency.
After making himself a mug of strong tea he sat down at Robin’s desk, where the light was best, and began to read.
Having escaped the Cutter and entered the city that had been his destination, Bombyx decided to rid himself of the companions of his long journey, Succuba and the Tick. This he did by taking them to a brothel where both appeared satisfied to work. Bombyx departed alone in search of Vainglorious, a famous writer and the man whom he hoped would be his mentor.
Halfway along a dark alleyway, Bombyx was accosted by a woman with long red hair and a demonic expression, who was taking a handful of dead rats home for supper. When she learned Bombyx’s identity Harpy invited him to her house, which turned out to be a cave littered with animal skulls. Strike skim-read the sex, which took up four pages and involved Bombyx being strung up from the ceiling and whipped. Then, like the Tick, Harpy attempted to breast-feed from Bombyx, but in spite of being tied up he managed to beat her off. While his nipples leaked a dazzling supernatural light, Harpy wept and revealed her own breasts, from which leaked something dark brown and glutinous.
Strike scowled over this image. Not only was Quine’s style starting to seem parodic, giving Strike a sense of sickened surfeit, the scene read like an explosion of malice, an eruption of pent-up sadism. Had Quine devoted months, perhaps years, of his life to the intention of causing as much pain and distress as possible? Was he sane? Could a man in such masterly control of his style, little though Strike liked it, be classified as mad?