Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

There was a short pause in which Strike hoped, irrelevantly, that he was not giving off whisky fumes.

“Will you keep working for me?” she asked him directly. “You’re better’n them, that’s why I wanted you in the first place. Will you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Cos I can tell they think I had something to do with it,” she repeated, standing up, “way they was talking to me.”

She drew her coat more tightly around her.

“I’d better get back to Orlando. I’m glad you’re all right.”

She shuffled off to her escort again. The female police officer looked taken aback to be treated like a taxi driver but after a glance at Anstis acceded to Leonora’s request for a lift home.

“The hell was that about?” Anstis asked him after the two women had passed out of earshot.

“She was worried you’d arrested me.”

“Bit eccentric, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

“You didn’t tell her anything, did you?” asked Anstis.

“No,” said Strike, who resented the question. He knew better than to pass information about a crime scene to a suspect.

“You wanna be careful, Bob,” said Anstis awkwardly, as they passed through the revolving doors into the rainy night. “Not to get under anyone’s feet. It’s murder now and you haven’t got many friends round these parts, mate.”

“Popularity’s overrated. Listen, I’ll get a cab—no,” he said firmly, over Anstis’s protestations, “I need to smoke before I go anywhere. Thanks, Rich, for everything.”

They shook hands; Strike turned up his collar against the rain and with a wave of farewell limped off along the dark pavement. He was almost as glad to have shaken off Anstis as to take the first sweet pull on his cigarette.

For this I find, where jealousy is fed,

Horns in the mind are worse than on the head.

Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour

Strike had completely forgotten that Robin had left the office in what he categorized as a sulk on Friday afternoon. He only knew that she was the one person he wanted to talk to about what had happened, and while he usually avoided telephoning her at weekends, the circumstances felt exceptional enough to justify a text. He sent it from the taxi he found after fifteen minutes tramping wet, cold streets in the dark.

Robin was curled up at home in an armchair with Investigative Interviewing: Psychology and Practice , a book she had bought online. Matthew was on the sofa, speaking on the landline to his mother in Yorkshire, who was feeling unwell again. He rolled his eyes whenever Robin reminded herself to look up and smile sympathetically at his exasperation.

When her mobile vibrated, Robin glanced at it irritably; she was trying to concentrate on Investigative Interviewing .

Found Quine murdered. C

She let out a mingled gasp and shriek that made Matthew start. The book slipped out of her lap and fell, disregarded, to the floor. Seizing the mobile, she ran with it to the bedroom.

Matthew talked to his mother for twenty minutes more, then went and listened at the closed bedroom door. He could hear Robin asking questions and being given what seemed to be long, involved answers. Something about the timbre of her voice convinced him that it was Strike on the line. His square jaw tightened.

When Robin finally emerged from the bedroom, shocked and awestruck, she told her fiancé that Strike had found the missing man he had been hunting, and that he had been murdered. Matthew’s natural curiosity tugged him one way, but his dislike of Strike, and the fact that he had dared contact Robin on a Sunday evening, pulled him another.

“Well, I’m glad something’s happened to interest you tonight,” he said. “I know you’re bored shitless by Mum’s health.”

“You bloody hypocrite!” gasped Robin, winded by the injustice.

The row escalated with alarming speed. Strike’s invitation to the wedding; Matthew’s sneering attitude to Robin’s job; what their life together was going to be; what each owed the other: Robin was horrified by how quickly the very fundamentals of their relationship were dragged out for examination and recrimination, but she did not back down. A familiar frustration and anger towards the men in her life had her in its grip—to Matthew, for failing to see why her job mattered to her so much; to Strike, for failing to recognize her potential.

(But he had called her when he had found the body…She had managed to slip in a question—“Who else have you told?”—and he had answered, without any sign that he knew what it would mean to her, “No one, only you.”)

Meanwhile, Matthew was feeling extremely hard done by. He had noticed lately something that he knew he ought not to complain about, and which grated all the more for his feeling that he must lump it: before she worked for Strike, Robin had always been first to back down in a row, first to apologize, but her conciliatory nature seemed to have been warped by the stupid bloody job…

They only had one bedroom. Robin pulled spare blankets from on top of the wardrobe, grabbed clean clothes from inside it and announced her intention to sleep on the sofa. Sure that she would cave before long (the sofa was hard and uncomfortable) Matthew did not try to dissuade her.

But he had been wrong in expecting her to soften. When he woke the following morning it was to find an empty sofa and Robin gone. His anger increased exponentially. She had doubtless headed for work an hour earlier than usual, and his imagination—Matthew was not usually imaginative—showed him that big, ugly bastard opening the door of his flat, not the office below…

…I to you will open

The book of a black sin, deep printed in me.

…my disease lies in my soul.

Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier

Strike had set his alarm for an early hour, with the intention of securing some peaceful, uninterrupted time without clients or telephone. He rose at once, showered and breakfasted, took great care over the fastening of the prosthesis onto a definitely swollen knee and, forty-five minutes after waking, limped into his office with the unread portion of Bombyx Mori under his arm. A suspicion that he had not confided to Anstis was driving him to finish the book as a matter of urgency.

After making himself a mug of strong tea he sat down at Robin’s desk, where the light was best, and began to read.

Having escaped the Cutter and entered the city that had been his destination, Bombyx decided to rid himself of the companions of his long journey, Succuba and the Tick. This he did by taking them to a brothel where both appeared satisfied to work. Bombyx departed alone in search of Vainglorious, a famous writer and the man whom he hoped would be his mentor.

Halfway along a dark alleyway, Bombyx was accosted by a woman with long red hair and a demonic expression, who was taking a handful of dead rats home for supper. When she learned Bombyx’s identity Harpy invited him to her house, which turned out to be a cave littered with animal skulls. Strike skim-read the sex, which took up four pages and involved Bombyx being strung up from the ceiling and whipped. Then, like the Tick, Harpy attempted to breast-feed from Bombyx, but in spite of being tied up he managed to beat her off. While his nipples leaked a dazzling supernatural light, Harpy wept and revealed her own breasts, from which leaked something dark brown and glutinous.

Strike scowled over this image. Not only was Quine’s style starting to seem parodic, giving Strike a sense of sickened surfeit, the scene read like an explosion of malice, an eruption of pent-up sadism. Had Quine devoted months, perhaps years, of his life to the intention of causing as much pain and distress as possible? Was he sane? Could a man in such masterly control of his style, little though Strike liked it, be classified as mad?