Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

His thoughts slid irresistibly back to Charlotte, thirty-six but looking twenty-five, celebrating her birthday with her new fiancé. Perhaps she had received diamonds, Strike thought; she had always said she didn’t care for such things, but when they had argued the glitter of all he could not give her had sometimes been flung back hard in his face…

Successful bloke? Greg had asked of Owen Quine, by which he meant: “Big car? Nice house? Fat bank balance?”

Strike passed the Beatles Coffee Shop with its jauntily positioned black-and-white heads of the Fab Four peering out at him, and entered the relative warmth of the station. He did not want to spend this rainy Sunday alone in his attic rooms in Denmark Street. He wanted to keep busy on the anniversary of Charlotte Campbell’s birth.

Pausing to take out his mobile, he telephoned Leonora Quine.

“Hello?” she said brusquely.

“Hi, Leonora, it’s Cormoran Strike here—”

“Have you found Owen?” she demanded.

“Afraid not. I’m calling because I’ve just heard that your husband was left a house by a friend.”

“What house?”

She sounded tired and irritable. He thought of the various moneyed husbands he had come up against professionally, men who hid bachelor apartments from their wives, and wondered whether he had just given away something that Quine had been keeping from his family.

“Isn’t it true? Didn’t a writer called Joe North leave a house jointly to—?”

“Oh, that ,” she said. “Talgarth Road, yeah. That was thirty-odd years ago, though. What d’you wanna know about that for?”

“It’s been sold, has it?”

“No,” she said resentfully, “because bloody Fancourt never let us. Out of spite, it is, because he never uses it. It just sits there, no use to anyone, moldering away.”

Strike leaned back against the wall beside the ticket machines, his eyes fixed on a circular ceiling supported by a spider’s web of struts. This, he told himself again, is what comes of taking on clients when you’re wrecked. He should have asked if they owned any other properties. He should have checked.

“Has anyone gone to see whether your husband’s there, Mrs. Quine?”

She emitted a hoot of derision.

“He wouldn’t go there ! ” she said, as though Strike were suggesting that her husband had hidden in Buckingham Palace. “He hates it, he never goes near it! Anyway, I don’t think it’s got furniture or nothing.”

“Have you got a key?”

“I dunno. But Owen’d never go there! He hasn’t been near it in years. It’d be an ’orrible place to stay, old and empty.”

“If you could have a look for the key—”

“I can’t go tearing off to Talgarth Road, I’ve got Orlando!” she said, predictably. “Anyway, I’m telling you, he wouldn’t—”

“I’m offering to come over now,” said Strike, “get the key from you, if you can find it, and go and check. Just to make sure we’ve looked everywhere.”

“Yeah, but—it’s Sunday,” she said, sounding taken aback.

“I know it is. D’you think you could have a look for the key?”

“All right, then,” she said after a short pause. “But,” with a last burst of spirit, “he won’t be there!”

Strike took the Tube, changing once, to Westbourne Park and then, collar turned up against the icy deluge, marched towards the address that Leonora had scribbled down for him at their first meeting.

It was another of those odd pockets of London where millionaires sat within a stone’s throw of working-class families who had occupied their homes for forty years or more. The rain-washed scene presented an odd diorama: sleek new apartment blocks behind quiet nondescript terraces, the luxurious new and the comfortable old.

The Quines’ family home was in Southern Row, a quiet backstreet of small brick houses, a short walk from a whitewashed pub called the Chilled Eskimo. Cold and wet, Strike squinted up at the sign overhead as he passed; it depicted a happy Inuit relaxing beside a fishing hole, his back to the rising sun.

The door of the Quines’ house was a peeling sludge green. Everything about the frontage was dilapidated, including the gate hanging on by only one hinge. Strike thought of Quine’s predilection for comfortable hotel rooms as he rang the doorbell and his opinion of the missing man fell a little further.

“You were quick,” was Leonora’s gruff greeting on opening the door. “Come in.”

He followed her down a dim, narrow hallway. To the left, a door stood ajar onto what was clearly Owen Quine’s study. It looked untidy and dirty. Drawers hung open and an old electric typewriter sat skewed on the desk. Strike could picture Quine tearing pages from it in his rage at Elizabeth Tassel.

“Any luck with the key?” Strike asked Leonora as they entered the dark, stale-smelling kitchen at the end of the hall. The appliances all looked as though they were at least thirty years old. Strike had an idea that his Aunt Joan had owned the identical dark brown microwave back in the eighties.

“Well, I found them ,” Leonora told him, gesturing towards half a dozen keys lying on the kitchen table. “I dunno whether any of them’s the right one.”

None of them was attached to a key ring and one of them looked too big to open anything but a church door.

“What number Talgarth Road?” Strike asked her.

“Hundred and seventy-nine.”

“When were you last there?”

“Me? I never been there,” she said with what seemed genuine indifference. “I wasn’t int’rested. Silly thing to do.”

“What was?”

“Leaving it to them.” In the face of Strike’s politely inquiring face she said impatiently, “That Joe North, leaving it to Owen and Michael Fancourt. He said it was for them to write in. They’ve never used it since. Useless.”

“And you’ve never been there?”

“No. They got it round the time I had Orlando. I wasn’t int’rested,” she repeated.

“Orlando was born then?” Strike asked, surprised. He had been vaguely imagining Orlando as a hyperactive ten-year-old.

“In eighty-six, yeah,” said Leonora. “But she’s handicapped.”

“Oh,” said Strike. “I see.”

“Upstairs sulking now, cos I had to tell her off,” said Leonora, in one of her bursts of expansiveness. “She nicks things. She knows it’s wrong but she keeps doing it. I caught her taking Edna-Next-Door’s purse out of her bag when she come round yesterday. It wasn’t cos of the money,” she said quickly, as though he had made an accusation. “It’s cos she liked the color. Edna understands cos she knows her, but not everyone does. I tell her it’s wrong. She knows it’s wrong.”

“All right if I take these and try them, then?” Strike asked, scooping the keys into his hand.

“If y’want,” said Leonora, but she added defiantly, “He won’t be there.”

Strike pocketed his haul, turned down Leonora’s afterthought offer of tea or coffee and returned to the cold rain.

He found himself limping again as he walked towards Westbourne Park Tube station, which would mean a short journey with minimal changes. He had not taken as much care as usual in attaching his prosthesis in his haste to get out of Nina’s flat, nor had he been able to apply any of those soothing products that helped protect the skin beneath it.

Eight months previously (on the very day that he had later been stabbed in his upper arm) he had taken a bad fall down some stairs. The consultant who had examined it shortly afterwards had informed him that he had done additional, though probably reparable, damage to the medial ligaments in the knee joint of his amputated leg and advised ice, rest and further investigation. But Strike had not been able to afford rest and had not wished for further tests, so he had strapped up the knee and tried to remember to elevate his leg when sitting. The pain had mostly subsided but occasionally, when he had done a lot of walking, it began to throb and swell again.