The Silkworm (27 page)

The provocative, slippery phrasing had its full effect.

‘The police have looked into
my
movements?’

Chard spoke like a frightened boy, unable to muster even a pretence of self-protective sangfroid.

‘Well, you know, everyone depicted in
Bombyx Mori
was bound to come in for scrutiny from the police,’ said Strike casually, sipping his tea, ‘and everything you people did after the fifth, when Quine walked out on his wife, taking the book with him, will be of interest to them.’

And to Strike’s great satisfaction, Chard began at once to review his own movements aloud, apparently for his own reassurance.

‘Well, I didn’t know anything about the book at all until the seventh,’ he said, staring at his bound-up foot again. ‘I was down here when Jerry called me… I headed straight back up to London – Manny drove me. I spent the night at home, Manny and Nenita can confirm that… on the Monday I met with my lawyers at the office, talked to Jerry… I was at a dinner party that night – close friends in Notting Hill – and again Manny drove me home… I turned in early on Tuesday because on Wednesday morning I was going to New York. I was there until the thirteenth… home all day the fourteenth… on the fifteenth…’

Chard’s mumbling deteriorated into silence. Perhaps he had realised that there was not the slightest need for him to explain himself to Strike. The darting look he gave the detective was suddenly cagey. Chard had wanted to buy an ally; Strike could tell that he had suddenly awoken to the double-edged nature of such a relationship. Strike was not worried. He had gained more from the interview than he had expected; to be unhired now would cost him only money.

Manny came padding back across the floor.

‘You want lunch?’ he asked Chard curtly.

‘In five minutes,’ Chard said, with a smile. ‘I must say goodbye to Mr Strike first.’

Manny stalked away on rubber-soled shoes.

‘He’s sulking,’ Chard told Strike, with an uncomfortable half-laugh. ‘They don’t like it down here. They prefer London.’

He retrieved his crutches from the floor and pushed himself back up into a standing position. Strike, with more effort, imitated him.

‘And how is – er – Mrs Quine?’ Chard said, with an air of belatedly ticking off the proprieties as they swung, like strange three-legged animals, back towards the front door. ‘Big red-headed woman, yes?’

‘No,’ said Strike. ‘Thin. Greying hair.’

‘Oh,’ said Chard, without much interest. ‘I met someone else.’

Strike paused beside the swing doors that led to the kitchen. Chard halted too, looking aggrieved.

‘I’m afraid I need to get on, Mr Strike—’

‘So do I,’ said Strike pleasantly, ‘but I don’t think my assistant would thank me for leaving her behind.’

Chard had evidently forgotten the existence of Robin, whom he had so peremptorily dismissed.

‘Oh, yes, of course – Manny! Nenita!’

‘She’s in the bathroom,’ said the stocky woman, emerging from the kitchen holding the linen bag containing Robin’s shoes.

The wait passed in a faintly uncomfortable silence. At last Robin appeared, her expression stony, and slipped her feet back into her shoes.

The cold air bit their warm faces as the front door swung open while Strike shook hands with Chard. Robin moved directly to the car and climbed into the driver’s seat without speaking to anyone.

Manny reappeared in his thick coat.

‘I’ll come down with you,’ he told Strike. ‘To check the gates.’

‘They can buzz the house if they’re stuck, Manny,’ said Chard, but the young man paid no attention, clambering into the car as before.

The three of them rode in silence back down the black-and-white drive, through the falling snow. Manny pressed the remote control he had brought with him and the gates slid open without difficulty.

‘Thanks,’ said Strike, turning to look at him in the back seat. ‘’Fraid you’ve got a cold walk back.’

Manny sniffed, got out of the car and slammed the door. Robin had just shifted into first gear when Manny appeared at Strike’s window. She applied the brake.

‘Yeah?’ said Strike, winding the window down.

‘I didn’t push him,’ said Manny fiercely.

‘Sorry?’

‘Down the stairs,’ said Manny. ‘I didn’t push him. He’s lying.’

Strike and Robin stared at him.

‘You believe me?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike.

‘OK then,’ said Manny, nodding at them. ‘OK.’

He turned and walked, slipping a little in his rubber-soled shoes, back up to the house.

At Strike’s insistence, they stopped for lunch at the Burger King at Tiverton Services.

‘You need to eat something before we go up the road.’

Robin accompanied him inside with barely a word, making no reference even to Manny’s recent, startling assertion. Her cold and slightly martyred air did not entirely surprise Strike, but he was impatient with it. She queued for their burgers, because he could not manage both tray and crutches, and when she had set down the loaded tray at the small Formica table he said, trying to defuse the tension:

‘Look, I know you expected me to tell Chard off for treating you like staff.’

‘I didn’t,’ Robin contradicted him automatically. (Hearing him say it aloud made her feel petulant, childish.)

‘Have it your own way,’ said Strike with an irritable shrug, taking a large bite of his first burger.

They ate in disgruntled silence for a minute or two, until Robin’s innate honesty reasserted itself.

‘All right, I did, a bit,’ she said.

Mellowed by greasy food and touched by her admission, Strike said:

‘I was getting good stuff out of him, Robin. You don’t start picking arguments with interviewees when they’re in full flow.’

‘Sorry for my amateurishness,’ she said, stung all over again.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Who’s calling you—?’

‘What were you intending, when you took me on?’ she demanded suddenly, letting her unwrapped burger fall back onto the tray.

The latent resentment of weeks had suddenly burst its bounds. She did not care what she heard; she wanted the truth. Was she a typist and a receptionist, or was she something more? Had she stayed with Strike, and helped him climb out of penury, merely to be shunted aside like domestic staff?

‘Intending?’ repeated Strike, staring at her. ‘What d’you mean, intend—?’

‘I thought you meant me to be – I thought I was going to get some – some training,’ said Robin, pink-cheeked and unnaturally bright-eyed. ‘You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but then lately you’ve been talking about getting someone else in. I took a pay cut,’ she said tremulously. ‘I turned down better-paid jobs. I thought you meant me to be—’

Her anger, so long suppressed, was bringing her to the verge of tears, but she was determined not to give in to them. The fictional partner whom she had been imagining for Strike would never cry; not that no-nonsense ex-policewoman, tough and unemotional through every crisis…

‘I thought you meant me to be – I didn’t think I was just going to answer the phone.’

‘You don’t just answer the phone,’ said Strike, who had just finished his first burger and was watching her struggle with her anger from beneath his heavy brows. ‘You’ve been casing murder suspects’ houses with me this week. You just saved both our lives on the motorway.’

But Robin was not to be deflected.

‘What were you expecting me to do when you kept me on?’

‘I don’t know that I had any particular plan,’ Strike said slowly and untruthfully. ‘I didn’t know you were this serious about the job – looking for training—’

‘
How could I not be serious?
’ demanded Robin loudly.

A family of four in the corner of the tiny restaurant was staring at them. Robin paid them no attention. She was suddenly livid. The long cold journey, Strike eating all the food, his surprise that she could drive properly, her relegation to the kitchen with Chard’s servants and now this—

‘You give me half –
half
–
what that human resources job would have paid! Why do you think I stayed? I helped you. I helped you solve the Lula Landry—’

‘OK,’ said Strike, holding up a large, hairy-backed hand. ‘OK, here it is. But don’t blame me if you don’t like what you’re about to hear.’

She stared at him, flushed, straight-backed on her plastic chair, her food untouched.

‘I
did
take you on thinking I could train you up. I didn’t have any money for courses, but I thought you could learn on the job until I could afford it.’

Refusing to feel mollified until she heard what was coming next, Robin said nothing.

‘You’ve got a lot of aptitude for the job,’ said Strike, ‘but you’re getting married to someone who hates you doing it.’

Robin opened her mouth and closed it again. A sensation of having been unexpectedly winded had robbed her of the power of speech.

‘You leave on the dot every day—’

‘I do not!’ said Robin, furious. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I turned down a day off to be here now, driving you all the way to Devon—’

‘Because he’s away,’ said Strike. ‘Because he won’t know.’

The feeling of having been winded intensified. How could Strike know that she had lied to Matthew, if not in fact, then by omission?

‘Even if that – whether that’s true or not,’ she said unsteadily, ‘it’s up to me what I do with my – it’s not up to Matthew what career I have.’

‘I was with Charlotte sixteen years, on and off,’ said Strike, picking up his second burger. ‘Mostly off. She hated my job. It’s what kept breaking us up – one of the things that kept breaking us up,’ he corrected himself, scrupulously honest. ‘She couldn’t understand a vocation. Some people can’t; at best, work’s about status and pay cheques for them, it hasn’t got value in itself.’

He began unwrapping the burger while Robin glared at him.

‘I need a partner who can share the long hours,’ said Strike. ‘Someone who’s OK with weekend work. I don’t blame Matthew for worrying about you—’

‘He doesn’t.’

The words were out of her mouth before Robin could consider them. In her blanket desire to refute everything that Strike was saying she had let an unpalatable truth escape her. The fact was that Matthew had very little imagination. He had not seen Strike covered in blood after the killer of Lula Landry had stabbed him. Even her description of Owen Quine lying trussed and disembowelled seemed to have been blurred for him by the thick miasma of jealousy through which he heard everything connected to Strike. His antipathy for her job owed nothing to protectiveness and she had never admitted as much to herself before.

‘It can be dangerous, what I do,’ said Strike through another huge bite of burger, as though he had not heard her.

‘I’ve been useful to you,’ said Robin, her voice thicker than his, though her mouth was empty.

‘I know you have. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t had you,’ said Strike. ‘Nobody was ever more grateful than me for a temping agency’s mistake. You’ve been incredible, I couldn’t have – don’t bloody cry, that family’s gawping enough already.’

‘I don’t give a monkey’s,’ said Robin into a handful of paper napkins and Strike laughed.

‘If it’s what you want,’ he told the top of her red-gold head, ‘you can go on a surveillance course when I’ve got the money. But if you’re my partner-in-training, there’ll be times that I’m going to have to ask you to do stuff that Matthew might not like. That’s all I’m saying. You’re the one who’s going to have to work it out.’

‘And I will,’ said Robin, fighting to contain the urge to bawl. ‘That’s what I want. That’s why I stayed.’

‘Then cheer the fuck up and eat your burger.’

Robin found it hard to eat with the huge lump in her throat. She felt shaken but elated. She had not been mistaken: Strike had seen in her what he possessed himself. They were not people who worked merely for the pay cheque…

‘So, tell me about Daniel Chard,’ she said.

He did so while the nosy family of four gathered up their things and left, still throwing covert glances at the couple they could not quite work out (had it been a lovers’ tiff? A family row? How had it been so speedily resolved?).

‘Paranoid, bit eccentric, self-obsessed,’ concluded Strike five minutes later, ‘but there might be something in it. Jerry Waldegrave could’ve collaborated with Quine. On the other hand, he might’ve resigned because he’d had enough of Chard, who I don’t think would be an easy bloke to work for.

‘D’you want a coffee?’

Robin glanced at her watch. The snow was still falling; she feared delays on the motorway that would prevent her catching the train to Yorkshire, but after their conversation she was determined to demonstrate her commitment to the job, so she agreed to one. In any case, there were things she wished to say to Strike while she was still sitting opposite him. It would not be nearly as satisfying to tell him while in the driver’s seat, where she could not watch his reaction.

‘I found out a bit about Chard myself,’ she said when she had returned with two cups and an apple pie for Strike.

‘Servants’ gossip?’

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘They barely said a word to me while I was in the kitchen. They both seemed in foul moods.’

‘According to Chard, they don’t like it in Devon. Prefer London. Are they brother and sister?’

‘Mother and son, I think,’ said Robin. ‘He called her Mamu.

‘Anyway, I asked to go to the bathroom and the staff loo’s just next to an artist’s studio. Daniel Chard knows a lot about anatomy,’ said Robin. ‘There are prints of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings all over the walls and an anatomical model in one corner. Creepy – wax. And on the easel,’ she said, ‘was a very detailed drawing of Manny the Manservant. Lying on the ground, in the nude.’

Strike put down his coffee.

‘Those are very interesting pieces of information,’ he said slowly.

‘I thought you’d like them,’ said Robin, with a demure smile.

‘Shines an interesting side-light on Manny’s assurance that he didn’t push his boss down the stairs.’

‘They really didn’t like you being there,’ said Robin, ‘but that might have been my fault. I said you were a private detective, but Nenita – her English isn’t as good as Manny’s – didn’t understand, so I said you were a kind of policeman.’

‘Leading them to assume that Chard had invited me over to complain about Manny’s violence towards him.’

‘Did Chard mention it?’

‘Not a word,’ said Strike. ‘Much more concerned about Waldegrave’s alleged treachery.’

After visits to the bathroom they returned to the cold, where they had to screw up their eyes against oncoming snow as they traversed the car park. A light frosting had already settled over the top of the Toyota.

‘You’re going to make it to King’s Cross, right?’ said Strike, checking his watch.

‘Unless we hit trouble on the motorway,’ said Robin, surreptitiously touching the wood trim on the door’s interior.

They had just reached the M4, where there were weather warnings on every sign and where the speed limit had been reduced to sixty, when Strike’s mobile rang.

‘Ilsa? What’s going on?’

‘Hi, Corm. Well, it could be worse. They haven’t arrested her, but that was some intense questioning.’

Strike turned the mobile onto speakerphone for Robin’s benefit and together they listened, similar frowns of concentration on their faces as the car moved through a vortex of swirling snow, rushing the windscreen.

‘They definitely think it’s her,’ said Ilsa.

‘Based on what?’

‘Opportunity,’ said Ilsa, ‘and her manner. She really doesn’t help herself. Very grumpy at being questioned and kept talking about you, which put their backs up. She said you’ll find out who really did it.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Strike, exasperated. ‘And what was in the lock-up?’

‘Oh yeah, that. It was a burned, bloodstained rag in among a pile of junk.’

‘Big effing deal,’ said Strike. ‘Could’ve been there years.’

‘Forensics will find out, but I agree, it’s not much to go on seeing as they haven’t even found the guts yet.’

‘You know about the guts?’

‘Everyone knows about the guts now, Corm. It’s been on the news.’

Strike and Robin exchanged fleeting looks.

‘When?’

‘Lunchtime. I think the police knew it was about to break and brought her in to see if they could squeeze anything out of her before it all became common knowledge.’

‘It’s one of their lot who’s leaked it,’ said Strike angrily.

‘That’s a big accusation.’

‘I had it from the journalist who was paying the copper to talk.’

‘Know some interesting people, don’t you?’

‘Comes with the territory. Thanks for letting me know, Ilsa.’

‘No problem. Try and keep her out of jail, Corm. I quite like her.’

‘Who is that?’ Robin asked as Ilsa hung up.

‘Old school friend from Cornwall; lawyer. She married one of my London mates,’ said Strike. ‘I put Leonora onto her because – shit.’

They had rounded a bend to find a huge tailback ahead of them. Robin applied the brake and they drew up behind a Peugeot.

‘
Shit,
’ repeated Strike, with a glance at Robin’s set profile.

‘Another accident,’ said Robin. ‘I can see flashing lights.’

Her imagination showed her Matthew’s face if she had to telephone him and say that she was not coming, that she had missed the sleeper. His mother’s funeral…
who
misses a funeral
? She should have been there already, at Matt’s father’s house, helping with arrangements, taking some of the strain. Her weekend bag ought already to have been sitting in her old bedroom at home, her funeral clothes pressed and hanging in her old wardrobe, everything ready for the short walk to the church the following morning. They were burying Mrs Cunliffe, her future mother-in-law, but she had chosen to drive off into the snow with Strike, and now they were gridlocked, two hundred miles from the church where Matthew’s mother would be laid to rest.

He’ll never forgive me. He’ll never forgive me if I miss the funeral because I did this
…

Why did she have to have been presented with such a choice, today of all days? Why did the weather have to be so bad? Robin’s stomach churned with anxiety and the traffic did not move.