Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

“Is there cake yet?”

Strike had never wanted children (an attitude Lucy deplored) and barely knew his nephews, whom he saw infrequently. The eldest and youngest trailed their mother out of the room to fetch his birthday cake; the middle boy, however, made a beeline for Strike and held out a homemade card.

“That’s you,” said Jack, pointing at the picture, “getting your medal.”

“Have you got a medal?” asked Nina, smiling and wide-eyed.

“Thanks, Jack,” said Strike.

“I want to be a soldier,” said Jack.

“Your fault, Corm,” said Greg, with what Strike could not help feeling was a certain animus. “Buying him soldier toys. Telling him about your gun.”

“Two guns,” Jack corrected his father. “You had two guns,” he told Strike. “But you had to give them back.”

“Good memory,” Strike told him. “You’ll go far.”

Lucy appeared with the homemade cake, blazing with thirty-six candles and decorated with what looked like hundreds of Smarties. As Greg turned out the light and everyone began to sing, Strike experienced an almost overwhelming desire to leave. He would ring a cab the instant he could escape the room; in the meantime, he hoisted a smile onto his face and blew out his candles, avoiding the gaze of Marguerite, who was smoldering at him with an unnerving lack of restraint from a nearby chair. It was not his fault that he had been made to play the decorated helpmeet of abandoned women by his well-meaning friends and family.

Strike called a cab from the downstairs bathroom and announced half an hour later, with a decent show of regret, that he and Nina would have to leave; he had to be up early the next day.

Out in the crowded and noisy hall, after Strike had neatly dodged being kissed on the mouth by Marguerite, while his nephews worked off their overexcitement and a late-night sugar rush, and Greg helped Nina officiously into her coat, Nick muttered to Strike:

“I didn’t think you fancied little women.”

“I don’t,” Strike returned quietly. “She nicked something for me yesterday.”

“Yeah? Well, I’d show your gratitude by letting her go on top,” said Nick. “You could squash her like a beetle.”

…let not our supper be raw, for you shall have blood enough, your belly full.

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton,

The Honest Whore

Strike knew immediately upon waking the following morning that he was not in his own bed. It was too comfortable, the sheets too smooth; the daylight stippling the covers fell from the wrong side of the room and the sound of the rain pattering against the window was muffled by drawn curtains. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, squinting around at Nina’s bedroom, glimpsed only briefly by lamplight the previous evening, and caught sight of his own naked torso in a mirror opposite, thick dark chest hair making a black blot against the pale blue wall behind him.

Nina was absent, but he could smell coffee. As he had anticipated, she had been enthusiastic and energetic in bed, driving away the slight melancholy that had threatened to follow him from his birthday celebrations. Now, though, he wondered how quickly he would be able to extricate himself. To linger would be to raise expectations he was not prepared to meet.

His prosthetic leg was propped against the wall beside the bed. On the point of sliding himself out of bed to reach it he drew back, because the bedroom door opened and in walked Nina, fully dressed and damp-haired, with newspapers under her arm, two mugs of coffee in one hand and a plate of croissants in the other.

“I nipped out,” she said breathlessly. “God, it’s horrible out there. Feel my nose, I’m frozen.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said, gesturing to the croissants.

“I’m starving and there’s a fabulous bakery up the road. Look at this— News of the World —Dom’s big exclusive!”

A photograph of the disgraced peer whose hidden accounts Strike had revealed to Culpepper filled the middle of the front page, flanked on three sides by pictures of two of his lovers and of the Cayman Island documents Strike had wrested from his PA. LORD PORKER OF PAYWELL screamed the headline. Strike took the paper from Nina and skim-read the story. Culpepper had kept his word: the heartbroken PA was not mentioned anywhere.

Nina was sitting beside Strike on the bed, reading along with him, emitting faintly amused comments: “Oh God, how anyone could, look at him” and “Oh wow, that’s disgusting.”

“Won’t do Culpepper any harm,” Strike said, closing the paper when both had finished. The date at the top of the front page caught his eye: 21 November. It was his ex-fiancée’s birthday.

A small, painful tug under the solar plexus and a sudden gush of vivid, unwelcome memories…a year ago, almost to the hour, he had woken up beside Charlotte in Holland Park Avenue. He remembered her long black hair, wide hazel-green eyes, a body the like of which he would never see again, never be permitted to touch…They had been happy, that morning: the bed a life raft bobbing on the turbulent sea of their endlessly recurring troubles. He had presented her with a bracelet, the purchase of which had necessitated (though she did not know it) the taking out of a loan at horrifying rates of interest…and two days later, on his own birthday, she had given him an Italian suit, and they had gone out to dinner and actually fixed on a date when they would marry at last, sixteen years after they had first met…

But the naming of a day had marked a new and dreadful phase in their relationship, as though it had damaged the precarious tension in which they were used to living. Charlotte had become steadily more volatile, more capricious. Rows and scenes, broken china, accusations of his unfaithfulness (when it had been she, as he now believed, who had been secretly meeting the man to whom she was now engaged)…they had struggled on for nearly four months until, in a final, filthy explosion of recrimination and rage, everything had ended for good.

A rustle of cotton: Strike looked around, almost surprised to find himself still in Nina’s bedroom. She was about to strip off her top, intending to get back into bed with him.

“I can’t stay,” he told her, stretching across for his prosthesis again.

“Why not?” she asked with her arms folded across her front, gripping the hem of her shirt. “Come on—it’s Sunday!”

“I’ve got to work,” he lied. “People need investigating on Sundays too.”

“Oh,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact but looking crestfallen.

He drank his coffee, keeping the conversation bright but impersonal. She watched him strap his leg on and head for the bathroom, and when he returned to dress she was curled up in a chair, munching a croissant with a slightly forlorn air.

“You’re sure you don’t know where this house was? The one Quine and Fancourt inherited?” he asked her as he pulled on his trousers.

“What?” she said, confused. “Oh—God, you’re not going looking for that, are you? I told you, it’ll have been sold years ago!”

“I might ask Quine’s wife about it,” said Strike.

He told her that he would call her, but briskly, so that she might understand these to be empty words, a matter of form, and left her house with a feeling of faint gratitude, but no guilt.

The rain jabbed again at his face and hands as he walked down the unfamiliar street, heading for the Tube station. Christmassy fairy lights twinkled from the window of the bakery where Nina had just bought croissants. Strike’s large hunched reflection slid across the rain-spotted surface, clutching in one cold fist the plastic carrier bag which Lucy had helpfully given him to carry his cards, his birthday whisky and the box of his shiny new watch.