Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

Pippa returned carrying clinking glasses and a bottle of brandy, and Kathryn fell silent.

“We were saving this for the Christmas pudding,” said Pippa, deftly uncorking the cognac. “There you go, Kath.”

Kathryn took a large brandy and swigged it down in one. It seemed to have the desired effect. With a sniff, she straightened her back. Robin accepted a small measure. Strike declined.

“When did you read the manuscript?” he asked Kathryn, who was already helping herself to more brandy.

“Same day I found it, on the ninth, when I got home to grab some more clothes. I’d been staying with Angela at the hospice, see…he hadn’t picked up any of my calls since bonfire night, not one, and I’d told him Angela was really bad, I’d left messages. Then I came home and found the manuscript all over the floor. I thought, Is that why he’s not picking up, he wants me to read this first? I took it back to the hospice with me and read it there, while I was sitting by Angela.”

Robin could only imagine how it would have felt to read her lover’s depiction of her while she sat beside her dying sister’s bed.

“I called Pip—didn’t I?” said Kathryn; Pippa nodded, “—and told her what he’d done. I kept calling him, but he still wouldn’t pick up. Well, after Angela had died I thought, Screw it. I’m coming to find you .” The brandy had given color to Kathryn’s wan cheeks. “I went to their house but when I saw her—his wife—I could tell she was telling the truth. He wasn’t there. So I told her to tell him Angela was dead. He’d met Angela,” said Kathryn, her face crumpling again. Pippa set down her own glass and put her arms around Kathryn’s shaking shoulders, “I thought he’d realize at least what he’d done to me when I was losing…when I’d lost…”

For over a minute there were no sounds in the room but Kathryn’s sobs and the distant yells of the youths in the courtyard below.

“I’m sorry,” said Strike formally.

“It must have been awful for you,” said Robin.

A fragile sense of comradeship bound the four of them now. They could agree on one thing, at least; that Owen Quine had behaved very badly.

“It’s your powers of textual analysis I’m really here for,” Strike told Kathryn when she had again dried her eyes, now swollen to slits in her face.

“What d’you mean?” she asked, but Robin heard gratified pride behind the curtness.

“I don’t understand some of what Quine wrote in Bombyx Mori .”

“It isn’t hard,” she said, and again she unknowingly echoed Fancourt: “It won’t win prizes for subtlety, will it?”

“I don’t know,” said Strike. “There’s one very intriguing character.”

“Vainglorious?” she said.

Naturally, he thought, she would jump to that conclusion. Fancourt was famous.

“I was thinking of the Cutter.”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said, with a sharpness that took Robin aback. Kathryn glanced at Pippa and Robin recognized the mutual glow, poorly disguised, of a shared secret.

“He pretended to be better than that,” said Kathryn. “He pretended there were some things that were sacred. Then he went and…”

“Nobody seems to want to interpret the Cutter for me,” said Strike.

“That’s because some of us have some decency,” said Kathryn.

Strike caught Robin’s eye. He was urging her to take over.

“Jerry Waldegrave’s already told Cormoran that he’s the Cutter,” she said tentatively.

“I like Jerry Waldegrave,” said Kathryn defiantly.

“You met him?” asked Robin.

“Owen took me to a party, Christmas before last,” she said. “Waldegrave was there. Sweet man. He’d had a few,” she said.

“Drinking even then, was he?” interjected Strike.

It was a mistake; he had encouraged Robin to take over because he guessed that she seemed less frightening. His interruption made Kathryn clam up.

“Anyone else interesting at the party?” Robin asked, sipping her brandy.

“Michael Fancourt was there,” said Kathryn at once. “People say he’s arrogant, but I thought he was charming.”

“Oh—did you speak to him?”

“Owen wanted me to stay well away,” she said, “but I went to the Ladies and on the way back I just told him how much I’d loved House of Hollow . Owen wouldn’t have liked that,” she said with pathetic satisfaction. “Always going on about Fancourt being overrated, but I think he’s marvelous. Anyway, we talked for a while and then someone pulled him away, but yes,” she repeated defiantly, as though the shade of Owen Quine were in the room and could hear her praising his rival, “he was charming to me . Wished me luck with my writing,” she said, sipping her brandy.

“Did you tell him you were Owen’s girlfriend?” asked Robin.

“Yes,” said Kathryn, with a twist to her smile, “and he laughed and said, ‘You have my commiserations.’ It didn’t bother him. He didn’t care about Owen anymore, I could tell. No, I think he’s a nice man and a marvelous writer. People are envious, aren’t they, when you’re successful?”

She poured herself more brandy. She was holding it remarkably well. Other than the flush it had brought to her face, there was no sign of tipsiness at all.

“And you liked Jerry Waldegrave,” said Robin, almost absentmindedly.

“Oh, he’s lovely,” said Kathryn, on a roll now, praising anyone that Quine might have attacked. “Lovely man. He was very, very drunk, though. He was in a side room and people were steering clear, you know. That bitch Tassel told us to leave him to it, that he was talking gibberish.”

“Why do you call her a bitch?” asked Robin.

“Snobby old cow,” said Kathryn. “Way she spoke to me, to everyone. But I know what it was: she was upset because Michael Fancourt was there. I said to her—Owen had gone off to see if Jerry was all right, he wasn’t going to leave him passed out in a chair, whatever that old bitch said—I told her: ‘I’ve just been talking to Fancourt, he was charming.’ She didn’t like that,” said Kathryn with satisfaction. “Didn’t like the idea of him being charming to me when he hates her. Owen told me she used to be in love with Fancourt and he wouldn’t give her the time of day.”

She relished the gossip, however old. For that night, at least, she had been an insider.

“She left soon after I told her that,” said Kathryn with satisfaction. “Horrible woman.”

“Michael Fancourt told me,” said Strike, and the eyes of Kathryn and Pippa were instantly riveted on him, eager to hear what the famous writer might have said, “that Owen Quine and Elizabeth Tassel once had an affair.”

One moment of stupefied silence and then Kathryn Kent burst out laughing. It was unquestionably genuine: raucous, almost joyful, shrieks filled the room.

“Owen and Elizabeth Tasse l ? ”

“That’s what he said.”

Pippa beamed at the sight and sound of Kathryn Kent’s exuberant, unexpected mirth. She rolled against the back of the sofa, trying to catch her breath; brandy slopped onto her trousers as she shook with what seemed entirely genuine amusement. Pippa caught the hysteria from her and began to laugh too.

“Never,” panted Kathryn, “in…a… million …years…”

“This would have been a long time ago,” said Strike, but her long red mane shook as she continued to roar with unfeigned laughter.

“Owen and Liz…never. Never, ever…you don’t understand,” she said, now dabbing at eyes wet with mirth. “He thought she was awful . He would’ve told me…Owen talked about everyone he’d slept with, he wasn’t a gentleman like that, was he, Pip? I’d have known if they’d ever…I don’t know where Michael Fancourt got that from. Never, ” said Kathryn Kent, with unforced merriment and total conviction.