The Silkworm (30 page)

‘Love is a mirage,’ said Michael Fancourt on the television screen. ‘A mirage, a chimera, a delusion.’

Robin was sitting between Matthew and her mother on the faded, sagging sofa. The chocolate Labrador lay on the floor in front of the fire, his tail thumping lazily on the rug in his sleep. Robin felt drowsy after two nights of very little sleep and days of unexpected stresses and emotion, but she was trying hard to concentrate on Michael Fancourt. Beside her Mrs Ellacott, who had expressed the optimistic hope that Fancourt might let drop some bons mots that would help with her essay on Webster, had a notebook and pen on her lap.

‘Surely,’ began the interviewer, but Fancourt talked over him.

‘We don’t love each other; we love the
idea
we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love.’

Mr Ellacott was asleep, his head back in the armchair closest to the fire and the dog. Gently he snored, with his spectacles halfway down his nose. All three of Robin’s brothers had slid discreetly from the house. It was Saturday night and their mates were waiting in the Bay Horse on the square. Jon had come home from university for the funeral but did not feel he owed it to his sister’s fiancé to forgo a few pints of Black Sheep with his brothers, sitting at the dimpled copper tables by the open fire.

Robin suspected that Matthew had wanted to join them but that he had felt it would be unseemly. Now he was stuck watching a literary programme he would never have tolerated at home. He would have turned over without asking her, taking it for granted that she could not possibly be interested in what this sour-looking, sententious man was saying. It was not easy to like Michael Fancourt, thought Robin. The curve of both his lip and his eyebrows implied an ingrained sense of superiority. The presenter, who was well known, seemed a little nervous.

‘And that is the theme of your new—?’

‘One of the themes, yes. Rather than castigating himself for his foolishness when the hero realises that he has simply imagined his wife into being, he seeks to punish the flesh-and-blood woman whom he believes has duped him. His desire for revenge drives the plot.’

‘Aha,’ said Robin’s mother softly, picking up her pen.

‘Many of us – most, perhaps,’ said the interviewer, ‘consider love a purifying ideal, a source of selflessness rather than—’

‘A self-justifying lie,’ said Fancourt. ‘We are mammals who need sex, need companionship, who seek the protective enclave of the family for reasons of survival and reproduction. We select a so-called loved one for the most primitive reasons – my hero’s preference for a pear-shaped woman is self-explanatory, I think. The loved one laughs or smells like the parent who gave one youthful succour and all else is projected, all else is invented—’

‘Friendship—’ began the interviewer a little desperately.

‘If I could have brought myself to have sex with any of my male friends, I would have had a happier and more productive life,’ said Fancourt. ‘Unfortunately, I’m programmed to desire the female form, however fruitlessly. And so I tell myself that one woman is more fascinating, more attuned to my needs and desires, than another. I am a complex, highly evolved and imaginative creature who feels compelled to justify a choice made on the crudest grounds. This is the truth that we’ve buried under a thousand years of courtly bullshit.’

Robin wondered what on earth Fancourt’s wife (for she seemed to remember that he was married) would make of this interview. Beside her, Mrs Ellacott had written a few words on her notepad.

‘He’s not talking about revenge,’ Robin muttered.

Her mother showed her the notepad. She had written:
What a shit he is.
Robin giggled.

Beside her, Matthew leaned over to the
Daily Express
that Jonathan had left abandoned on a chair. He turned past the front three pages, where Strike’s name appeared several times in the text alongside Owen Quine’s, and began to read a piece on how a high street chain of stores had banned Cliff Richard’s Christmas songs.

‘You’ve been criticised,’ said the interviewer bravely, ‘for your depiction of women, most particularly—’

‘I can hear the critics’ cockroach-like scurrying for their pens as we speak,’ said Fancourt, his lip curling in what passed for a smile. ‘I can think of little that interests me less than what critics say about me or my work.’

Matthew turned a page of the paper. Robin glanced sideways at a picture of an overturned tanker, an upside-down Honda Civic and a mangled Mercedes.

‘That’s the crash we were nearly in!’

‘What?’ said Matthew.

She had said it without thinking. Robin’s brain froze.

‘That happened on the M4,’ Matthew said, half laughing at her for thinking she could have been involved, that she could not recognise a motorway when she saw one.

‘Oh – oh yes,’ said Robin, pretending to peer more closely at the text beneath the picture.

But he was frowning now, catching up.

‘
Were
you nearly in a car crash yesterday?’

He was speaking quietly, trying not to disturb Mrs Ellacott, who was following Fancourt’s interview. Hesitation was fatal. Choose.

‘Yes, I was. I didn’t want to worry you.’

He stared at her. On Robin’s other side she could feel her mother making more notes.

‘This one?’ he said, pointing at the picture, and she nodded. ‘Why were you on the M4?’

‘I had to drive Cormoran to an interview.’

‘I’m thinking of women,’ said the interviewer, ‘your views on women—’

‘Where the hell was the interview?’

‘Devon,’ said Robin.

‘
Devon?
’

‘He’s buggered his leg again. He couldn’t have got there by himself.’

‘You drove him to
Devon
?’

‘Yes, Matt, I drove him to—’

‘So that’s why you didn’t come up yesterday? So you could—’

‘Matt, of course not.’

He flung down the paper, pulled himself up and strode from the room.

Robin felt sick. She looked around at the door, which he had not slammed, but closed firmly enough to make her father stir and mutter in his sleep and the Labrador wake up.

‘Leave him,’ advised her mother, her eyes still on the screen.

Robin swung round, desperate.

‘Cormoran had to get to Devon and he couldn’t drive with only one leg—’

‘There’s no need to defend yourself to
me
,’ said Mrs Ellacott.

‘But now he thinks I lied about not being able to get home yesterday.’

‘
Did
you?’ her mother asked, her eyes still fixed beadily upon Michael Fancourt. ‘Get
down
, Rowntree, I can’t see over you.’

‘Well, I could’ve come if I’d got a first-class ticket,’ Robin admitted as the Labrador yawned, stretched and resettled himself on the hearthrug. ‘But I’d already paid for the sleeper.’

‘Matt’s always going on about how much more money you would have made if you’d taken that HR job,’ said her mother, her eyes on the TV screen. ‘I’d have thought he’d appreciate you saving the pennies. Now shush, I want to hear about revenge.’

The interviewer was trying to formulate a question.

‘But where women are concerned, you haven’t always – contemporary
mores
, so-called political correctness – I’m thinking particularly of your assertion that female writers—’

‘This
again
?’ said Fancourt, slapping his knees with his hands (the interviewer perceptibly jumped). ‘I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature,
true
literature. I don’t retract a word. That is a
fact
.’

Robin was twisting her engagement ring on her finger, torn between her desire to follow Matt and persuade him she had done nothing wrong and anger that any such persuasion should be required. The demands of
his
job came first, always; she had never known him apologise for late hours, for jobs that took him to the far side of London and brought him home at eight o’clock at night…

‘I was going to say,’ the interviewer hurried on, with an ingratiating smile, ‘that this book might give those critics pause. I thought the central female character was treated with great understanding, with real empathy. Of course’ – he glanced down at his notes and up again; Robin could feel his nerves – ‘parallels are bound to be drawn – in dealing with the suicide of a young woman, I expect you’re braced – you must be expecting—’

‘That stupid people will assume that I have written an autobiographical account of my first wife’s suicide?’

‘Well, it’s bound to be seen as – it’s bound to raise questions—’

‘Then let me say this,’ said Fancourt, and paused.

They were sitting in front of a long window looking out onto a sunny, windswept lawn. Robin wondered fleetingly when the programme had been filmed – before the snows had come, clearly – but Matthew dominated her thoughts. She ought to go and find him, yet somehow she remained on the sofa.

‘When Eff – Ellie died,’ began Fancourt, ‘when she died—’

The close-up felt painfully intrusive. The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes deepened as he closed them; a square hand flew to conceal his face.

Michael Fancourt appeared to be crying.

‘So much for love being a mirage and a chimera,’ sighed Mrs Ellacott as she tossed down her pen. ‘This is no good. I wanted blood and guts, Michael.
Blood and guts.
’

Unable to stand inaction any longer, Robin got up and headed for the sitting-room door. These were not normal circumstances. Matthew’s mother had been buried that day. It behoved her to apologise, to make amends.

The Sunday broadsheets next day strove to find a dignified balance between an objective assessment of Owen Quine’s life and work and the macabre, Gothic nature of his death.

‘A minor literary figure, occasionally interesting, tipping latterly into self-parody, eclipsed by his contemporaries but continuing to blaze his own outmoded trail,’ said the
Sunday Times
in a front-page column that led to a promise of much more excitement within:
A sadist’s blueprint: see pages 10–11
and, beside a thumbnail photograph of Kenneth Halliwell:
Books and Bookmen: literary killers p. 3 Culture.

‘Rumours about the unpublished book that allegedly inspired his murder are now spreading beyond London’s literary circles,’ the
Observer
assured its readers. ‘Were it not for the dictates of good taste, Roper Chard would have an instant bestseller on its hands.’

KINKY
WRITER
DISEMBOWELLED
IN
SEX
GAME
,
declared the
Sunday People
.

Strike had bought every paper on his way home from Nina Lascelles’s, difficult though it was to manage them all and his stick over snowy pavements. It occurred to him as he struggled towards Denmark Street that he was unwisely encumbered, should his would-be assailant of the previous evening reappear, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Later that evening he worked his way through the news stories while eating chips, lying on his bed with his prosthetic leg mercifully removed once more.

Viewing the facts through the press’s distorting lens was stimulating to his imagination. At last, having finished Culpepper’s piece in the
News of the World
(‘Sources close to the story confirm that Quine liked to be tied up by his wife, who denies that she knew the kinky writer had gone to stay in their second home’) Strike slid the papers off his bed, reached for the notebook he kept by his bed and scribbled himself a list of reminders for the following day. He did not add Anstis’s initial to any of the tasks or questions, but
bookshop man
and
MF when filmed?
were both followed by a capital
R
. He then texted Robin, reminding her to keep her eyes peeled for a tall woman in a black coat the following morning and not to enter Denmark Street if she was there.

Robin saw nobody answering that description on her short journey from the Tube and arrived at the office at nine o’clock next morning to find Strike sitting at her desk and using her computer.

‘Morning. No nutters outside?’

‘No one,’ said Robin, hanging up her coat.

‘How’s Matthew?’

‘Fine,’ lied Robin.

The aftermath of their row about her decision to drive Strike to Devon clung to her like fumes. The argument had simmered and erupted repeatedly all through their car journey back to Clapham; her eyes were still puffy from crying and lack of sleep.

‘Tough for him,’ muttered Strike, still frowning at the monitor. ‘His mother’s funeral.’

‘Mm,’ said Robin, moving to fill the kettle and feeling annoyed that Strike chose to empathise with Matthew today, exactly when she would have welcomed an assurance that he was an unreasonable prick.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked, setting a mug of tea at Strike’s elbow, for which he gave her muttered thanks.

‘Trying to find out when Michael Fancourt’s interview was filmed,’ he said. ‘He was on telly on Saturday night.’

‘I watched that,’ said Robin.

‘Me too,’ said Strike.

‘Arrogant prat,’ said Robin, sitting down on the mock-leather sofa, which for some reason did not emit farting noises when she did it. Perhaps, Strike thought, it was his weight.

‘Notice anything funny when he was talking about his late wife?’ Strike asked.

‘The crocodile tears were a bit much,’ said Robin, ‘seeing how he’d just been explaining how love’s an illusion and all that rubbish.’

Strike glanced at her again. She had the kind of fair, delicate complexion that suffered from excess emotion; the swollen eyes told their own story. Some of her animosity towards Michael Fancourt, he guessed, might be displaced from another and perhaps more deserving target.

‘Thought he was faking, did you?’ Strike asked. ‘Me too.’

He glanced at his watch.

‘I’ve got Caroline Ingles arriving in half an hour.’

‘I thought she and her husband had reconciled?’

‘Old news. She wants to see me, something about a text she found on his phone over the weekend. So,’ said Strike, heaving himself up from the desk, ‘I need you to keep trying to find out when that interview was filmed, while I go and look over the case notes so I look like I can remember what the hell she’s on about. Then I’ve got lunch with Quine’s editor.’

‘And I’ve got some news about what the doctor’s surgery outside Kathryn Kent’s flat does with medical waste,’ said Robin.

‘Go on,’ said Strike.

‘A specialist company collects it every Tuesday. I contacted them,’ said Robin and Strike could tell by her sigh that the line of enquiry was about to fizzle out, ‘and they didn’t notice anything odd or unusual about the bags they collected the Tuesday after the murder. I suppose,’ she said, ‘it was a bit unrealistic, thinking they wouldn’t notice a bag of human intestines. They told me it’s usually just swabs and needles, and they’re all sealed up in special bags.’

‘Had to check it out, though,’ said Strike bracingly. ‘That’s good detective work – cross off all the possibilities. Anyway, there’s something else I need doing, if you can face the snow.’

‘I’d love to get out,’ said Robin, brightening at once. ‘What is it?’

‘That man in the bookshop in Putney who reckons he saw Quine on the eighth,’ said Strike. ‘He should be back off his holidays.’

‘No problem,’ said Robin.

She had not had an opportunity over the weekend to discuss with Matthew the fact that Strike wished to give her investigative training. It would have been the wrong time before the funeral, and after their row on Saturday night would have seemed provocative, even inflammatory. Today she yearned to get out onto the streets, to investigate, to probe, and to go home and tell Matthew matter-of-factly what she had done. He wanted honesty, she would give him honesty.

Caroline Ingles, who was a worn-out blonde, spent over an hour in Strike’s office that morning. When finally she had departed, looking tear-stained but determined, Robin had news for Strike.

‘That interview with Fancourt was filmed on the seventh of November,’ she said. ‘I phoned the BBC. Took ages, but got there in the end.’

‘The seventh,’ repeated Strike. ‘That was a Sunday. Where was it filmed?’

‘A film crew went down to his house in Chew Magna,’ said Robin. ‘What did you notice on the interview that’s making you this interested?’

‘Watch it again,’ said Strike. ‘See if you can get it on YouTube. Surprised you didn’t spot it at the time.’

Stung, she remembered Matthew beside her, interrogating her about the crash on the M4.

‘I’m going to change for Simpson’s,’ said Strike. ‘We’ll lock up and leave together, shall we?’

They parted forty minutes later at the Tube, Robin heading for the Bridlington Bookshop in Putney, Strike for the restaurant on the Strand, to which he intended to walk.

‘Spent way too much on taxis lately,’ he told Robin gruffly, unwilling to tell her how much it had cost him to take care of the Toyota Land Cruiser with which he had been stranded on Friday night. ‘Plenty of time.’

She watched him for a few seconds as he walked away from her, leaning heavily on his stick and limping badly. An observant childhood spent in the company of three brothers had given Robin an unusual and accurate insight into the frequently contrary reaction of males to female concern, but she wondered how much longer Strike could force his knee to support him before he found himself incapacitated for longer than a few days.

It was almost lunchtime and the two women opposite Robin on the train to Waterloo were chatting loudly, carrier bags full of Christmas shopping between their knees. The floor of the Tube was wet and dirty and the air full, again, of damp cloth and stale bodies. Robin spent most of her journey trying without success to view clips of Michael Fancourt’s interview on her mobile phone.

The Bridlington Bookshop stood on a main road in Putney, its old-fashioned paned windows crammed from top to bottom with a mixture of new and second-hand books, all stacked horizontally. A bell tinkled as Robin crossed the threshold into a pleasant, mildewed atmosphere. A couple of ladders stood propped against shelves crammed with more horizontally piled books reaching all the way to the ceiling. Hanging bulbs lit the space, dangling so low that Strike would have banged his head.

‘Good morning!’ said an elderly gentleman in an over-large tweed jacket, emerging with almost audible creaks from an office with a dimpled glass door. As he approached, Robin caught a strong whiff of body odour.

She had already planned her simple line of enquiry and asked at once whether he had any Owen Quine in stock.

‘Ah! Ah!’ he said knowingly. ‘I needn’t ask, I think, why the sudden interest!’

A self-important man in the common fashion of the unworldly and cloistered, he embarked without invitation into a lecture on Quine’s style and declining readability as he led her into the depths of the shop. He appeared convinced, after two seconds’ acquaintance, that Robin could only be asking for a copy of one of Quine’s books because he had recently been murdered. While this was of course the truth, it irritated Robin.

‘Have you got
The Balzac Brothers
?’ she asked.

‘You know better than to ask for
Bombyx Mori
, then,’ he said, shifting a ladder with doddery hands. ‘Three young journalists I’ve had in here, asking for it.’

‘Why are journalists coming here?’ asked Robin innocently as he began to climb the ladder, revealing an inch of mustard-coloured sock above his old brogues.

‘Mr Quine shopped here shortly before he died,’ said the old man, now peering at spines some six feet above Robin. ‘
Balzac Brothers
,
Balzac Brothers
…
should be here… dear, dear, I’m sure I’ve got a copy…’

‘He actually came in here, to your shop?’ asked Robin.

‘Oh yes. I recognised him instantly. I was a great admirer of Joseph North and they once appeared on the same bill at the Hay Festival.’

He was coming down the ladder now, feet trembling with every step. Robin was scared he might fall.

‘I’ll check the computer,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘I’m sure I’ve got a
Balzac Brothers
here.’

Robin followed him, reflecting that if the last time the old man had set eyes on Owen Quine had been in the mid-eighties, his reliability in identifying the writer again might be questionable.

‘I don’t suppose you could miss him,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen pictures of him. Very distinctive-looking in his Tyrolean cloak.’

‘His eyes are different colours,’ said the old man, now gazing at the monitor of an early Macintosh Classic that must, Robin thought, be twenty years old: beige, boxy, big chunky keys like cubes of toffee. ‘You see it close up. One hazel, one blue. I think the policeman was impressed by my powers of observation and recall. I was in intelligence during the war.’

He turned upon her with a self-satisfied smile.

‘I was right, we
do
have a copy – second hand. This way.’

He shuffled towards an untidy bin full of books.

‘That’s a very important bit of information for the police,’ said Robin, following him.

‘Yes, indeed,’ he said complacently. ‘Time of death. Yes, I could assure them that he was alive, still, on the eighth.’

‘I don’t suppose you could remember what he came in here for,’ said Robin with a small laugh. ‘I’d love to know what he read.’

‘Oh yes, I remember,’ said her companion at once. ‘He bought three novels: Jonathan Franzen’s
Freedom
, Joshua Ferris’s
The Unnamed
and… and I forget the third… told me he was going away for a break and wanted reading matter. We discussed the digital phenomenon – he more tolerant of reading devices than I…
somewhere
in here,’ he muttered, raking in the bin. Robin joined the search half-heartedly.

‘The eighth,’ she repeated. ‘How could you be so sure it was the eighth?’

For the days, she thought, must blend quite seamlessly into each other in this dim atmosphere of mildew.

‘It was a Monday,’ he said. ‘A pleasant interlude, discussing Joseph North, of whom he had very fond memories.’

Robin was still none the wiser as to why he believed this particular Monday to have been the eighth, but before she could enquire further he had pulled an ancient paperback from the depths of the bin with a triumphant cry.

‘There we are. There we are. I
knew
I had it.’

‘I can never remember dates,’ Robin lied as they returned to the till with their trophy. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any Joseph North, while I’m here?’

‘There was only one,’ said the old man. ‘
Towards the Mark
. Now, I know we’ve got that, one of my personal favourites…’

And he headed, once more, for the ladder.

‘I confuse days all the time,’ Robin soldiered on bravely as the mustard-coloured socks were revealed again.

‘Many people do,’ he said smugly, ‘but I am an adept at reconstructive deduction, ha ha. I remembered that it was a Monday, because always on a Monday I buy fresh milk and I had just returned from doing so when Mr Quine arrived at the shop.’