The lights inside were on. Robin paused for a second, gathering herself, then rang the doorbell.
After some seconds the door opened a cautious six inches and there stood a middle-aged woman with a long tangle of red hair.
‘Kathryn?’
‘Yeah?’ said the woman suspiciously.
‘I’ve got some very important information for you,’ said Robin. ‘You need to hear this.’
(‘Don’t say “I need to talk to you”,’ Strike had coached her, ‘or “I’ve got some questions”. You frame it so that it sounds like it’s to her advantage. Get as far as you can without telling her who you are; make it sound urgent, make her worry she’s going to miss something if she lets you go. You want to be inside before she can think it through. Use her name. Make a personal connection. Keep talking.’)
‘What?’ demanded Kathryn Kent.
‘Can I come in?’ asked Robin. ‘It’s very cold out here.’
‘Who are you?’
‘You need to hear this, Kathryn.’
‘Who—?’
‘Kath?’ said someone behind her.
‘Are you a journalist?’
‘I’m a friend,’ Robin improvised, her toes over the threshold. ‘I want to help you, Kathryn.’
‘Hey—’
A familiar long pale face and large brown eyes appeared beside Kath’s.
‘It’s her I told you about!’ said Pippa. ‘She works with him—’
‘Pippa,’ said Robin, making eye contact with the tall girl, ‘you know I’m on your side – there’s something I need to tell you both, it’s urgent—’
Her foot was two thirds of the way across the threshold. Robin put every ounce of earnest persuasiveness that she could muster into her expression as she looked into Pippa’s panicked eyes.
‘Pippa, I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think it was really important—’
‘Let her in,’ Pippa told Kathryn. She sounded scared.
The hall was cramped and seemed full of hanging coats. Kathryn led Robin into a small, lamp-lit sitting room with plain magnolia-painted walls. Brown curtains hung at the windows, the fabric so thin that the lights of buildings opposite and distant, passing cars shone through them. A slightly grubby orange throw covered the old sofa, which sat on a rug patterned with swirling abstract shapes, and the remains of a Chinese takeaway sat on the cheap pine coffee table. In the corner was a rickety computer table bearing a laptop. The two women, Robin saw, with a pang of something like remorse, had been decorating a small fake Christmas tree together. A string of lights lay on the floor and there were a number of decorations on the only armchair. One of them was a china disc reading Future Famous Writer!
‘What d’you want?’ demanded Kathryn Kent, her arms folded.
She was glaring at Robin through small, fierce eyes.
‘May I sit down?’ said Robin and she did so without waiting for Kathryn’s answer. (‘Make yourself at home as much as you can without being rude, make it harder for her to dislodge you,’ Strike had said.)
‘What d’you want?’ Kathryn Kent repeated.
Pippa stood in front of the windows, staring at Robin, who saw that she was fiddling with a tree ornament: a mouse dressed as Santa.
‘You know that Leonora Quine’s been arrested for murder?’ said Robin.
‘Of course I do. I’m the one,’ Kathryn pointed at her own ample chest, ‘who found the Visa bill with the ropes, the burqa and the overalls on it.’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘I know that.’
‘Ropes and a burqa!’ ejaculated Kathryn Kent. ‘Got more than he bargained for, didn’t he? All those years thinking she was just some dowdy little… boring little – little cow – and look what she did to him!’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘I know it looks that way.’
‘What d’you mean, “looks that”—?’
‘Kathryn, I’ve come here to warn you: they don’t think she did it.’
(‘No specifics. Don’t mention the police explicitly if you can avoid it, don’t commit to a checkable story, keep it vague,’ Strike had told her.)
‘What d’you mean?’ repeated Kathryn sharply. ‘The police don’t—?’
‘And you had access to his card, more opportunities to copy it—’
Kathryn looked wildly from Robin to Pippa, who was clutching the Santa-mouse, white-faced.
‘But Strike doesn’t think you did it,’ said Robin.
‘Who?’ said Kathryn. She appeared too confused, too panicked, to think straight.
‘Her boss,’ stage-whispered Pippa.
‘Him!’ said Kathryn, rounding on Robin again. ‘He’s working for Leonora!’
‘He doesn’t think you did it,’ repeated Robin, ‘even with the credit card bill – the fact you even had it. I mean, it looks odd, but he’s sure you had it by acci—’
‘She gave it me!’ said Kathryn Kent, flinging out her arms, gesticulating furiously. ‘His daughter – she gave it me, I never even looked on the back for weeks, never thought to. I was being nice, taking her crappy bloody picture and acting like it was good – I was being nice!’
‘I understand that,’ said Robin. ‘We believe you, Kathryn, I promise. Strike wants to find the real killer, he’s not like the police.’ (‘Insinuate, don’t state.’) ‘He’s not interested in just grabbing the next woman Quine might’ve – you know—’
The words let tie him up hung in the air, unspoken.
Pippa was easier to read than Kathryn. Credulous and easily panicked, she looked at Kathryn, who seemed furious.
‘Maybe I don’t care who killed him!’ Kathryn snarled through clenched teeth.
‘But you surely don’t want to be arrest—?’
‘I’ve only got your word for it they’re interested in me! There’s been nothing on the news!’
‘Well… there wouldn’t be, would there?’ said Robin gently. ‘The police don’t hold press conferences to announce that they think they might have the wrong pers—’
‘Who had the credit card? Her.’
‘Quine usually had it himself,’ said Robin, ‘and his wife’s not the only person who had access.’
‘How d’you know what the police are thinking any more than I do?’
‘Strike’s got good contacts at the Met,’ said Robin calmly. ‘He was in Afghanistan with the investigating officer, Richard Anstis.’
The name of the man who had interrogated her seemed to carry weight with Kathryn. She glanced at Pippa again.
‘Why’re you telling me this?’ Kathryn demanded.
‘Because we don’t want to see another innocent woman arrested,’ said Robin, ‘because we think the police are wasting time sniffing around the wrong people and because,’ (‘throw in a bit of self-interest once you’ve baited the hook, it keeps things plausible’) ‘obviously,’ said Robin, with a show of awkwardness, ‘it would do Cormoran a lot of good if he was the one who got the real killer. Again,’ she added.
‘Yeah,’ said Kathryn, nodding vehemently, ‘that’s it, isn’t it? He wants the publicity.’
No woman who had been with Owen Quine for two years was going to believe that publicity wasn’t an unqualified boon.
‘Look, we just wanted to warn you how they’re thinking,’ said Robin, ‘and to ask for your help. But obviously, if you don’t want…’
Robin made to stand.
(‘Once you’ve laid it out for her, act like you can take it or leave it. You’re there when she starts chasing you.’)
‘I’ve told the police everything I know,’ said Kathryn, who appeared disconcerted now that Robin, who was taller than her, had stood up again. ‘I haven’t got anything else to say.’
‘Well, we’re not sure they were asking the right questions,’ said Robin, sinking back onto the sofa. ‘You’re a writer,’ she said, turning suddenly off the piste that Strike had prepared for her, her eyes on the laptop in the corner. ‘You notice things. You understood him and his work better than anyone
else.’
The unexpected swerve into flattery caused whatever words of fury Kathryn had been about to fling at Robin (her mouth had been open, ready to deliver them) to die in her throat.
‘So?’ Kathryn said. Her aggression felt a little fake now. ‘What d’you want to know?’
‘Will you let Strike come and hear what you’ve got to say? He won’t if you don’t want him to,’ Robin assured her (an offer unsanctioned by her boss). ‘He respects your right to refuse.’ (Strike had made no such declaration.) ‘But he’d like to hear it in your own words.’
‘I don’t know that I’ve got anything useful to say,’ said Kathryn, folding her arms again, but she could not disguise a ring of gratified vanity.
‘I know it’s a big ask,’ said Robin, ‘but if you help us get the real killer, Kathryn, you’ll be in the papers for the right reasons.’
The promise of it settled gently over the sitting room – Kathryn interviewed by eager and now admiring journalists, asking about her work, perhaps: Tell me about Melina’s Sacrifice…
Kathryn glanced sideways at Pippa, who said:
‘That bastard kidnapped me!’
‘You tried to attack him, Pip,’ said Kathryn. She turned a little anxiously to Robin. ‘I never told her to do that. She was – after we saw what he’d written in the book – we were both… and we thought he – your boss – had been hired to fit us up.’
‘I understand,’ lied Robin, who found the reasoning tortuous and paranoid, but perhaps that was what spending time with Owen Quine did to a person.
‘She got carried away and didn’t think,’ said Kathryn, with a look of mingled affection and reproof at her protégée. ‘Pip’s got temper issues.’
‘Understandable,’ said Robin hypocritically. ‘May I call Cormoran – Strike, I mean? Ask him to meet us here?’
She had already slipped her mobile out of her pocket and glanced down at it. Strike had texted her:
On balcony. Bloody freezing.
She texted back:
Wait 5.
In fact, she needed only three minutes. Softened by Robin’s earnestness and air of understanding, and by the encouragement of the alarmed Pippa to let Strike in and find out the worst, when he finally knocked Kathryn proceeded to the front door with something close to alacrity.
The room seemed much smaller with his arrival. Next to Kathryn, Strike appeared huge and almost unnecessarily male; when she had swept it clear of Christmas ornaments, he dwarfed the only armchair. Pippa retreated to the end of the sofa and perched on the arm, throwing Strike looks composed of defiance and terror.
‘D’you want a drink of something?’ Kathryn threw at Strike in his heavy overcoat, with his size fourteen feet planted squarely on her swirly rug.
‘Cup of tea would be great,’ he said.
She left for the tiny kitchen. Finding herself alone with Strike and Robin, Pippa panicked and scuttled after her.
‘You’ve done bloody well,’ Strike murmured to Robin, ‘if they’re offering tea.’
‘She’s very proud of being a writer,’ Robin breathed back, ‘which means she could understand him in ways that other people…’
But Pippa had returned with a box of cheap biscuits and Strike and Robin fell silent at once. Pippa resumed her seat at the end of the sofa, casting Strike frightened sidelong glances that had, as when she had cowered in their office, a whiff of theatrical enjoyment about them.
‘This is very good of you, Kathryn,’ said Strike, when she had set a tray of tea on the table. One of the mugs, Robin saw, read Keep Clam and Proofread.
‘We’ll see,’ retorted Kent, her arms folded as she glared at him from a height.
‘Kath, sit,’ coaxed Pippa, and Kathryn sat reluctantly down between Pippa and Robin on the sofa.
Strike’s first priority was to nurse the tenuous trust that Robin had managed to foster; the direct attack had no place here. He therefore embarked on a speech echoing Robin’s, implying that the authorities were having second thoughts about Leonora’s arrest and that they were reviewing the current evidence, avoiding direct mention of the police yet implying with every word that the Met was now turning its attention to Kathryn Kent. As he spoke a siren echoed in the distance. Strike added assurances that he personally felt sure that Kent was completely in the clear, but that he saw her as a resource the police had failed to understand or utilise properly.
‘Yeah, well, you could be right there,’ she said. She had not so much blossomed under his soothing words as unclenched. Picking up the Keep Clam mug she said with a show of disdain, ‘All they wanted to know about was our sex life.’
The way Anstis had told it, Strike remembered, Kathryn had volunteered a lot of information on the subject without being put under undue pressure.
‘I’m not interested in your sex life,’ said Strike. ‘It’s obvious he wasn’t – to be blunt – getting what he wanted at home.’
‘Hadn’t slept with her in years,’ said Kathryn. Remembering the photographs in Leonora’s bedroom of Quine tied up, Robin dropped her gaze to the surface of her tea. ‘They had nothing in common. He couldn’t talk to her about his work, she wasn’t interested, didn’t give a damn. He told us – didn’t he?’ – she looked up at Pippa, perched on the arm of the sofa beside her – ‘she never even read his books properly. He wanted someone to connect to on that level. He could really talk to me about literature.’
‘And me,’ said Pippa, launching at once into a speech: ‘He was interested in identity politics, you know, and he talked to me for hours about what it was like for me being born, basically, in the wrong—’
‘Yeah, he told me it was a relief to be able to talk to someone who actually understood his work,’ said Kathryn loudly, drowning Pippa out.
‘I thought so,’ said Strike, nodding. ‘And the police didn’t bother asking you about any of this, I take it?’
‘Well, they asked where we met and I told them: on his creative writing course,’ said Kathryn. ‘It was just gradual, you know, he was interested in my writing…’
‘… in our writing…’ said Pippa quietly.
Kathryn talked at length, Strike nodding with every appearance of interest at the gradual progression of the teacher–student relationship to something much warmer, Pippa tagging along, it seemed, and leaving Quine and Kathryn only at the bedroom door.
‘I write fantasy with a twist,’ said Kathryn and Strike was surprised and a little amused that she had begun to talk like Fancourt: in rehearsed phrases, in sound-bites. He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practised talking about their work during their coffee breaks and he remembered what Waldegrave had told him about Quine, that he had freely admitted to role-playing interviews with a biro. ‘It’s fantasy slash erotica really, but quite literary. And that’s the thing about traditional publishing, you know, they don’t want to take a chance on something that hasn’t been seen before, it’s all about what fits their sales categories, and if you’re blending several genres, if you’re creating something entirely new, they’re afraid to take a chance… I know that Liz Tassel,’ Kathryn spoke the name as though it were a medical complaint, ‘told Owen my work was too niche. But that’s the great thing about indie publishing, the freedom—’
‘Yeah,’ said Pippa, clearly desperate to put in her two pennys’ worth, ‘that’s true, for genre fiction I think indie can be the way to go—’
‘Except I’m not really genre,’ said Kathryn, with a slight frown, ‘that’s my point—’
‘—but Owen felt that for my memoir I’d do better going the traditional route,’ said Pippa. ‘You know, he had a real interest in gender identity and he was fascinated with what I’d been through. I introduced him to a couple of other transgendered people and he promised to talk to his editor about me, because he thought, with the right promotion, you know, and with a story that’s never really been told—’
‘Owen loved Melina’s Sacrifice, he
couldn’t wait to read on. He was practically ripping it out of my hand every time I finished a chapter,’ said Kathryn loudly, ‘and he told me—’
She stopped abruptly in mid-flow. Pippa’s evident irritation at being interrupted faded ludicrously from her face. Both of them, Robin could tell, had suddenly remembered that all the time Quine had been showering them with effusive encouragement, interest and praise, the characters of Harpy and Epicoene had been taking obscene shape on an old electric typewriter hidden from their eager gazes.
‘So he talked to you about his own work?’ Strike asked.
‘A bit,’ said Kathryn Kent in a flat voice.
‘How long was he working on Bombyx Mori, do you know?’
‘Most of the time I knew him,’ she said.
‘What did he say about it?’
There was a pause. Kathryn and Pippa looked at each other.
‘I’ve already told him,’ Pippa told Kathryn, with a significant glance at Strike, ‘that he told us it was going to be different.’
‘Yeah,’ said Kathryn heavily. She folded her arms. ‘He didn’t tell us it was going to be like that.’
Like that… Strike remembered the brown, glutinous substance that had leaked from Harpy’s breasts. It had been, for him, one of the most revolting images in the book. Kathryn’s sister, he remembered, had died of breast cancer.
‘Did he say what it was going to be like?’ Strike asked.
‘He lied,’ said Kathryn simply. ‘He said it was going to be the writer’s journey or something but he made out… he told us we were going to be…’
‘“Beautiful lost souls,”’ said Pippa, on whom the phrase seemed to have impressed itself.
‘Yeah,’ said Kathryn heavily.
‘Did he ever read any of it to you, Kathryn?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He said he wanted it to be a – a—’
‘Oh, Kath,’ said Pippa tragically. Kathryn had buried her face in her hands.