The Silkworm (45 page)

‘Must’ve really pissed you off when Quine got carried away and started shouting about the contents of the real
Bombyx Mori
in the River Café, did it, Elizabeth? After you’d warned him not to breathe a word about the contents?’

‘Insane. You’re insane,’ she whispered, with a forced smile beneath the shark eyes, her big yellow teeth glinting. ‘The war didn’t just cripple you—’

‘Nice,’ said Strike appreciatively. ‘There’s the bullying bitch everyone’s told me you are—’

‘You hobble around London trying to get in the papers,’ she panted. ‘You’re just like poor Owen, just like him… how he loved the papers, didn’t he, Michael?’ She turned to appeal to Fancourt. ‘Didn’t Owen adore publicity? Running off like a little boy playing hide-and-seek…’

‘You encouraged Quine to go and hide in Talgarth Road,’ said Strike. ‘That was all your idea.’

‘I won’t listen to any more,’ she whispered and her lungs were whistling as she gasped the winter air and she raised her voice: ‘
I’m not listening, Mr Strike, I’m not listening. Nobody’s listening to you, you poor silly man
…’

‘You told me Quine was a glutton for praise,’ said Strike, raising his voice over the high-pitched chant with which she was trying to drown out his words. ‘I think he told you his whole prospective plot for
Bombyx Mori
months ago and I think Michael here was in there in some form – nothing as crude as Vainglorious, but mocked for not getting it up, perhaps? “Payback time for both of you”, eh?’

And as he had expected, she gave a little gasp at that and stopped her frantic chanting.

‘You told Quine that
Bombyx Mori
sounded brilliant, that it would be the best thing he’d ever done, that it was going to be a massive success, but that he ought to keep the contents very, very quiet in case of legal action, and to make a bigger splash when it was unveiled. And all the time you were writing your own version. You had plenty of time on your hands to get it right, didn’t you, Elizabeth? Twenty-six years of empty evenings, you could have written plenty of books by now, with your first from Oxford… but what would you write about? You haven’t exactly lived a full life, have you?’

Naked rage flickered across her face. Her fingers flexed, but she controlled herself. Strike wanted her to crack, wanted her to give in, but the shark’s eyes seemed to be waiting for him to show weakness, for an opening.

‘You crafted a novel out of a murder plan. The removal of the guts and the covering of the corpse in acid weren’t symbolic, they were designed to screw forensics – but everyone bought it as literature.

‘And you got that stupid, egotistical bastard to collude in planning his own death. You told him you had a great idea for maximising his publicity and his profits: the pair of you would stage a very public row – you saying the book was too contentious to put out there – and he’d disappear. You’d circulate rumours about the book’s contents and finally, when Quine allowed himself to be found, you’d secure him a big fat deal.’

She was shaking her head, her lungs audibly labouring, but her dead eyes did not leave his face.

‘He delivered the book. You delayed a few days, until bonfire night, to make sure you had lots of nice diversionary noise, then you sent out copies of the fake
Bombyx
to Fisher – the better to get the book talked about – to Waldegrave and to Michael here. You faked your public row, then you followed Quine to Talgarth Road—’

‘No,’ said Fancourt, apparently unable to help himself.

‘Yes,’ said Strike, pitiless. ‘Quine didn’t realise he had anything to fear from Elizabeth – not from his co-conspirator in the comeback of the century. I think he’d almost forgotten by then that what he’d been doing to you for years was blackmail, hadn’t he?’ he asked Tassel. ‘He’d just developed the habit of asking you for money and being given it. I doubt you ever even talked about the parody any more, the thing that ruined your life…

‘And you know what I think happened once he let you in, Elizabeth?’

Against his will, Strike remembered the scene: the great vaulted window, the body centred there as though for a grisly still life.

‘I think you got that poor naive, narcissistic sod to pose for a publicity photograph. Was he kneeling down? Did the hero in the real book plead, or pray? Or did he get tied up like
your
Bombyx? He’d have liked that, wouldn’t he, Quine, posing in ropes? It would’ve made it nice and easy to move behind him and smash his head in with the metal doorstop, wouldn’t it? Under cover of the neighbourhood fireworks, you knocked Quine out, tied him up, sliced him open and—’

Fancourt let out a strangled moan of horror, but Tassel spoke again, crooning at him in a travesty of consolation:

‘You ought to see someone, Mr Strike.
Poor
Mr Strike,’ and to his surprise she reached out to lay one of her big hands on his snow-covered shoulder. Remembering what those hands had done, Strike stepped back instinctively and her arm fell heavily back to her side, hanging there, the fingers clenching reflexively.

‘You filled a holdall with Owen’s guts and the real manuscript,’ said the detective. She had moved so close that he could again smell the combination of perfume and stale cigarettes. ‘Then you put on Quine’s own cloak and hat and left. Off you went, to feed a fourth copy of the fake
Bombyx Mori
through Kathryn Kent’s letter box, to maximise suspects and incriminate another woman who was getting what you never got – sex. Companionship. At least one friend.’

She feigned laughter again but this time the sound was manic. Her fingers were still flexing and unflexing.

‘You and Owen would have got on so well,’ she whispered. ‘Wouldn’t he, Michael? Wouldn’t he have got on marvellously with Owen? Sick fantasists… people will laugh at you, Mr Strike.’ She was panting harder than ever, those dead, blank eyes staring out of her fixed white face. ‘A poor cripple trying to recreate the sensation of success, chasing your famous fath—’

‘Have you got proof of any of this?’ Fancourt demanded in the swirling snow, his voice harsh with the desire not to believe. This was no ink-and-paper tragedy, no greasepaint death scene. Here beside him stood the living friend of his student years and whatever life had subsequently done to them, the idea that the big, ungainly, besotted girl whom he had known at Oxford could have turned into a woman capable of grotesque murder was almost unbearable.

‘Yeah, I’ve got proof,’ said Strike quietly. ‘I’ve got a second electric typewriter, the exact model of Quine’s, wrapped up in a black burqa and hydrochloric-stained overalls and weighted with stones. An amateur diver I happen to know pulled it out of the sea just a few days ago. It was lying beneath some notorious cliffs at Gwithian: Hell’s Mouth, a place featured on Dorcus Pengelly’s book cover. I expect she showed it to you when you visited, didn’t she, Elizabeth? Did you walk back there alone with your mobile, telling her you needed to find better reception?’

She let out a ghastly low moan, like the sound of a man who has been punched in the stomach. For a second nobody moved, then Tassel turned clumsily and began running and stumbling away from them, back towards the club. A bright yellow rectangle of light shivered then disappeared as the door opened and closed.

‘But,’ said Fancourt, taking a few steps and looking back at Strike a little wildly, ‘you can’t – you’ve got to stop her!’

‘Couldn’t catch her if I wanted to,’ said Strike, throwing the butt of his cigarette down into the snow. ‘Dodgy knee.’

‘She could do anything—’

‘Off to kill herself, probably,’ agreed Strike, pulling out his mobile.

The writer stared at him.

‘You – you cold-blooded bastard!’

‘You’re not the first to say it,’ said Strike, pressing keys on his phone. ‘Ready?’ he said into it. ‘We’re off.’

Out past the smokers at the front of the club the large woman came, blindly, slipping a little in the snow. She began to run up the dark street, her fur-collared coat flapping behind her.

A taxi, its ‘For Hire’ light on, slid out of a side road and she hailed it, flapping her arms madly. The cab slid to a halt, its headlamps making two cones of light whose trajectory was cut by the thickly falling snow.

‘Fulham Palace Road,’ said the harsh, deep voice, breaking with sobs.

They pulled slowly away from the kerb. The cab was old, the glass partition scratched and a little stained by years of its owner’s smoking. Elizabeth Tassel was visible in the rear-view mirror as the street light slid over her, sobbing silently into her large hands, shaking all over.

The driver did not ask what was the matter but looked beyond the fare to the street behind, where the shrinking figures of two men could be seen, hurrying across the snowy road to a red sports car in the distance.

The taxi turned left at the end of the road and still Elizabeth Tassel cried into her hands. The driver’s thick woollen hat was itchy, grateful though she had been for it during the long hours of waiting. On up the King’s Road the taxi sped, over thick powdery snow that resisted tyres’ attempts to squash it to slush, the blizzard swirling remorselessly, rendering the roads increasingly lethal.

‘You’re going the wrong way.’

‘There’s a diversion,’ lied Robin. ‘Because of the snow.’

She met Elizabeth’s eyes briefly in the mirror. The agent looked over her shoulder. The red Alfa Romeo was too far behind to see. She stared wildly around at the passing buildings. Robin could hear the eerie whistling from her chest.

‘We’re going in the opposite direction.’

‘I’m going to turn in a minute,’ said Robin.

She did not see Elizabeth Tassel try the door, but heard it. They were all locked.

‘You can let me out here,’ she said loudly. ‘Let me out, I say!’

‘You won’t get another cab in this weather,’ said Robin.

They had counted on Tassel being too distraught to notice where they were going for a little while longer. The cab was barely at Sloane Square. There was over a mile to go to New Scotland Yard. Robin’s eyes flickered again to her rear-view mirror. The Alfa Romeo was a tiny red dot in the distance.

Elizabeth had undone her seatbelt.

‘Stop this cab!’ she shouted. ‘Stop it and let me out!’

‘I can’t stop here,’ said Robin, much more calmly than she felt, because the agent had left her seat and her large hands were scrabbling at the partition. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to sit down, madam—’

The screen slid open. Elizabeth’s hand seized Robin’s hat and a handful of hair, her head almost side by side with Robin’s, her expression venomous. Robin’s hair fell into her eyes in sweaty strands.

‘Get off me!’

‘Who are you?’ screeched Tassel, shaking Robin’s head with the fistful of hair in her hand. ‘Ralph said he saw a blonde going through the bin –
who are you?
’

‘Let go!’ shouted Robin, as Tassel’s other hand grabbed her neck.

Two hundred yards behind them, Strike roared at Al:

‘Put your fucking foot down, there’s something wrong, look at it—’

The taxi ahead was careering all over the road.

‘It’s always been shit in ice,’ moaned Al as the Alfa skidded a little and the taxi took the corner into Sloane Square at speed and disappeared from view.

Tassel was halfway into the front of the taxi, screaming from her ripped throat – Robin was trying to beat her back one-handed while maintaining a grip on the wheel – she could not see where she was going for hair and snow and now both Tassel’s hands were at her throat, squeezing – Robin tried to find the brake, but as the taxi leapt forwards realised she had hit the accelerator – she could not breathe – taking both hands off the wheel she tried to prise away the agent’s tightening grip – screams from pedestrians, a huge jolt and then the ear-splitting crunch of glass, of metal on concrete and the searing pain of the seatbelt against her as the taxi crashed, but she was sinking, everything going black—

‘Fuck the car, leave it, we’ve got to get in there!’ Strike bellowed at Al over the wail of a shop alarm and the screams of the scattered bystanders. Al brought the Alfa to an untidy skidding halt in the middle of the road a hundred yards from where the taxi had smashed its way into a plate glass window. Al jumped out as Strike struggled to stand. A group of passers-by, some of them Christmas party-goers in black tie who had sprinted out of the way as the taxi mounted the kerb, watched, stunned, as Al ran, slipping and almost falling, over the snow towards the crash.

The rear door of the cab opened. Elizabeth Tassel flung herself from the back seat and began to run.

‘Al, get her!’ Strike bellowed, still struggling through the snow. ‘Get her, Al!’

Le Rosey had a superb rugby team. Al was used to taking orders. A short sprint and he had taken her down in a perfect tackle. She hit the snowy street with a hard bang over the screamed protests of many women watching and he pinned her there, struggling and swearing, repelling every attempt of chivalrous men to help his victim.

Strike was immune to all of it: he seemed to be running in slow motion, trying not to fall, staggering towards the ominously silent and still cab. Distracted by Al and his struggling, swearing captive, nobody had a thought to spare for the driver of the taxi.

‘Robin…’

She was slumped sideways, still held to her seat by the belt. There was blood on her face, but when he said her name she responded with a muddled groan.

‘Thank fuck… thank fuck…’

Police sirens were already filling the square. They wailed over the shop alarm, the mounting protests of the shocked Londoners, and Strike, undoing Robin’s seatbelt, pushing her gently back into the cab as she attempted to get out, said:

‘Stay there.’

‘She knew we weren’t going to her house,’ mumbled Robin. ‘Knew straight away I was going the wrong way.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ panted Strike. ‘You’ve brought Scotland Yard to us.’

Diamond-bright lights were twinkling from the bare trees around the square. Snow poured down upon the gathering crowd, the taxi protruding from the broken window and the sports car parked untidily in the middle of the road as the police cars came to a halt, their flashing blue lights sparkling on the glittering glass-strewn ground, their sirens lost in the wail of the shop alarm.

As his half-brother tried to shout an explanation as to why he was lying on top of a sixty-year-old woman, the relieved, exhausted detective slumped down beside his partner in the cab and found himself – against his will and against the dictates of good taste – laughing.