The Silkworm (23 page)

‘But she got excited at the idea of being a writer. Have you any idea,’ said the agent harshly, ‘how many people think they can write? You cannot imagine the crap I am sent, day in, day out. Elspeth’s novel would have been rejected out of hand under normal circumstances, it was so pretentious and silly, but they weren’t normal circumstances. Having encouraged her to produce the damn thing, Michael didn’t have the balls to tell her it was awful. He gave it to his publisher and they took it to keep Michael happy. It had been out a week when the parody appeared.’

‘Quine implies in
Bombyx Mori
that Fancourt really wrote the parody,’ said Strike.

‘I know he does – and
I
wouldn’t want to provoke Michael Fancourt,’ she added in an apparent aside that begged to be heard.

‘What do you mean?’

There was a short pause in which he could almost see Elizabeth deciding what to tell him.

‘I met Michael,’ she said slowly, ‘in a tutorial group studying Jacobean revenge tragedies. Let’s just say it was his natural milieu. He adores those writers; their sadism and their lust for vengeance… rape and cannibalism, poisoned skeletons dressed up as women… sadistic retribution is Michael’s obsession.’

She glanced up at Strike, who was watching her.

‘What?’ she said curtly.

When, he wondered, were the details of Quine’s murder going to explode across the newspapers? The dam must already be straining, with Culpepper on the case.

‘Did Fancourt take sadistic retribution when you chose Quine over him?’

She looked down at the bowl of red liquid and pushed it abruptly away from her.

‘We were close friends, very close, but he’s never said a word to me from the day that I refused to sack Owen. He did his best to warn other writers away from my agency, said I was a woman of no honour or principle.

‘But I hold one principle sacred and he knew it,’ she said firmly. ‘Owen hadn’t done anything, in writing that parody, that Michael hadn’t done a hundred times to other writers. Of course I regretted the aftermath deeply, but it was one of the times – the few times – when I felt that Owen was morally in the clear.’

‘Must’ve hurt, though,’ Strike said. ‘You’d known Fancourt longer than Quine.’

‘We’ve been enemies longer than we’ve been friends, now.’

It was not, Strike noted, a proper answer.

‘You mustn’t think… Owen wasn’t always – he wasn’t
all
bad,’ Elizabeth said restlessly. ‘You know, he was obsessed with virility, in life and in his work. Sometimes it was a metaphor for creative genius, but at other times it’s seen as the bar to artistic fulfilment. The plot of
Hobart’s Sin
turns on Hobart, who’s both male and female, having to choose between parenthood and abandoning his aspirations as a writer: aborting his baby, or abandoning his brainchild.

‘But when it came to fatherhood in real life – you understand, Orlando wasn’t… you wouldn’t have chosen your child to… to… but he loved her and she loved him.’

‘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 offence, 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 enquiry 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?’

‘Why is the cave of her lair in
Bombyx Mori
full of rat skulls?’

Elizabeth said nothing.

‘I know Kathryn Kent’s Harpy, I’ve met her,’ said Strike patiently. ‘All you’re doing by explaining is saving me some time. I suppose you want to find out who killed Quine?’

‘So bloody transparent,’ she said witheringly. ‘Does that usually work on people?’

‘Yeah,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘it does.’

She frowned, then said abruptly and not altogether to his surprise:

‘Well, after all, I don’t owe Kathryn Kent any loyalty. If you must know, Owen was making a fairly crude reference to the fact that she works at an animal-testing facility. They do disgusting things there to rats, dogs and monkeys. I heard all about it at one of the parties Owen brought her to. There she was, falling out of her dress and trying to impress me,’ said Elizabeth, with contempt. ‘I’ve seen her work. She makes Dorcus Pengelly look like Iris Murdoch. Typical of the dross – the dross—’

Strike managed several mouthfuls of his crumble while she coughed hard into her napkin.

‘—the
dross
the internet has given us,’ she finished, her eyes watering. ‘And almost worse, she seemed to expect me to be on her side against the scruffy students who’d attacked their laboratories. I’m a vet’s daughter: I grew up with animals and I like them much better than I like people. I found Kathryn Kent a horrible person.’

‘Any idea who Harpy’s daughter Epicoene’s supposed to be?’ asked Strike.

‘No,’ said Elizabeth.

‘Or the dwarf in the Cutter’s bag?’

‘I’m not explaining any more of the wretched book!’

‘Do you know if Quine knew a woman called Pippa?’

‘I never met a Pippa. But he taught creative writing courses; middle-aged women trying to find their
raison d’être
. That’s where he picked up Kathryn Kent.’

She sipped her coffee and glanced at her watch.

‘What can you tell me about Joe North?’ Strike asked.

She glanced at him suspiciously.

‘Why?’

‘Curious,’ said Strike.

He did not know why she chose to answer; perhaps because North was long dead, or because of that streak of sentimentality he had first divined back in her cluttered office.

‘He was from California,’ she said. ‘He’d come over to London to find his English roots. He was gay, a few years younger than Michael, Owen and me, and writing a very frank first novel about the life he’d led in San Francisco.

‘Michael introduced him to me. Michael thought his stuff was first class, and it was, but he wasn’t a fast writer. He was partying hard, and also, which none of us knew for a couple of years, he was HIV-positive and not looking after himself. There came a point when he developed full-blown Aids.’ Elizabeth cleared her throat. ‘Well, you’ll remember how much hysteria there was about HIV when it first emerged.’

Strike was inured to people thinking that he was at least ten years older than he was. In fact, he had heard from his mother (never one to guard her tongue in deference to a child’s sensibilities) about the killer disease that was stalking those who fucked freely and shared needles.

‘Joe fell apart physically and all the people who’d wanted to know him when he was promising, clever and beautiful melted away, except – to do them credit—’ said Elizabeth grudgingly, ‘Michael and Owen. They rallied round Joe, but he died with his novel unfinished.

‘Michael was ill and couldn’t go to Joe’s funeral, but Owen was a pall bearer. In gratitude for the way they’d looked after him, Joe left the pair of them that rather lovely house, where they’d once partied and sat up all night discussing books. I was there for a few of those evenings. They were… happy times,’ said Elizabeth.

‘How much did they use the house after North died?’

‘I can’t answer for Michael, but I’d doubt he’s been there since he fell out with Owen, which was not long after Joe’s funeral,’ said Elizabeth with a shrug. ‘Owen never went there because he was terrified of running into Michael. The terms of Joe’s will were peculiar: I think they call it a restrictive covenant. Joe stipulated that the house was to be preserved as an artists’ refuge. That’s how Michael’s managed to block the sale all these years; the Quines have never managed to find another artist, or artists, to sell to. A sculptor rented it for a while, but that didn’t work out. Of course, Michael’s always been as picky as possible about tenants to stop Owen benefiting financially, and he can afford lawyers to enforce his whims.’

‘What happened to North’s unfinished book?’ asked Strike.

‘Oh, Michael abandoned work on his own novel and finished Joe’s posthumously. It’s called
Towards the Mark
and Harold Weaver published it: it’s a cult classic, never been out of print.’

She checked her watch again.

‘I need to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a meeting at two thirty. My coat, please,’ she called to a passing waiter.

‘Somebody told me,’ said Strike, who remembered perfectly well that it had been Anstis, ‘that you supervised work on Talgarth Road a while back?’

‘Yes,’ she said indifferently, ‘just one more of the unusual jobs Quine’s agent ended up doing for him. It was a matter of coordinating repairs, putting in workmen. I sent Michael a bill for half and he paid up through his lawyers.’

‘You had a key?’

‘Which I passed to the foreman,’ she said coldly, ‘then returned to the Quines.’

‘You didn’t go and see the work yourself?’

‘Of course I did; I needed to check it had been done. I think I visited twice.’

‘Was hydrochloric acid used in any of the renovation, do you know?’

‘The police asked me about hydrochloric acid,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘I can’t say.’

She glowered. He doubted that people often refused Elizabeth Tassel information.

‘Well, I can only tell you what I told the police: it was probably left there by Todd Harkness.’