Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

“They could be loons,” Strike agreed. “Nutters love murder. It does something to them. People have to listen to them, for a start.”

A young woman wearing a hijab was watching them talk from an opposite seat. She had large, sweet, liquid-brown eyes.

“Assuming somebody really did enter the house on the fourth, I’ve got to say a burqa’s a bloody good way of getting in and out without being recognized. Can you think of another way of totally concealing your face and body that wouldn’t make people challenge you?”

“And they were carrying a halal takeaway?”

“Allegedly. Was his last meal halal? Is that why the killer removed the guts?”

“And this woman—”

“Could’ve been a man…”

“—was seen leaving the house an hour later?”

“That’s what Anstis said.”

“So they weren’t lying in wait for Quine?”

“No, but they could have been laying in plates,” said Strike and Robin winced.

The young woman in the hijab got off at Gloucester Road.

“I doubt there’d be closed-circuit cameras in a bookshop,” sighed Robin. She had become quite preoccupied with CCTV since the Landry case.

“I’d’ve thought Anstis would have mentioned it,” agreed Strike.

They emerged at Barons Court into another squall of snow. Squinting against the feathery flakes they proceeded, under Strike’s direction, up to Talgarth Road. He was feeling the need for a stick ever more strongly. On his release from hospital, Charlotte had given him an elegant antique Malacca cane that she claimed had belonged to a great-grandfather. The handsome old stick had been too short for Strike, causing him to list to the right as he walked. When she had packaged up his things to remove from her flat, the cane had not been among them.

It was clear, as they approached the house, that the forensics team was still busy in number 179. The entrance was taped up and a single police officer, arms folded tightly against the cold, stood guard outside. She turned her head as they approached. Her eyes fixed on Strike and narrowed.

“Mr. Strike,” she said sharply.

A male plainclothes officer with ginger hair who had been standing in the doorway talking to somebody just inside whipped around, caught sight of Strike and descended the slippery steps at speed.

“Morning,” said Strike brazenly. Robin was torn between admiration for his cheek and trepidation; she had an innate respect for the law.

“What are you doing back here, Mr. Strike?” asked the ginger-haired man suavely. His eyes wandered over Robin in a way that she found vaguely offensive. “You can’t come in.”

“Pity,” said Strike. “We’ll just have to peruse the perimeter, then.”

Ignoring the pair of officers watching his every move, Strike limped past them to number 183 and proceeded through the gates and up the front steps. Robin could think of nothing to do but follow him; she did it self-consciously, aware of the eyes on her back.

“What are we doing?” she muttered as they reached the shelter of the brick canopy and were hidden from the staring police. The house seemed empty, but she was a little worried that someone might be about to open the front door.

“Gauging whether the woman who lives here could’ve seen a cloaked figure carrying a holdall leaving 179 at two in the morning,” said Strike. “And you know what? I think she could, unless that streetlamp’s out. OK, let’s try the other side.

“Parky, isn’t it?” Strike said to the frowning constable and her companion as he and Robin walked back past them. “Four doors down, Anstis said,” he added quietly to Robin. “So that’ll be 171…”

Again, Strike marched up the front steps, Robin walking foolishly after him.

“You know, I was wondering whether he could’ve mistaken the house, but 177’s got that red plastic dustbin in front. Burqa would’ve walked up the steps right behind it, which would’ve made it easy to tell—”

The front door opened.

“Can I help you?” said a well-spoken man in thick-lensed glasses.

As Strike began to apologize for coming to the wrong house, the ginger-haired officer shouted something incomprehensible from the pavement outside 179. When nobody responded, he climbed over the plastic tape blocking entrance to the property and began to jog towards them.

“That man,” he shouted absurdly, pointing at Strike, “is not a policeman!”

“He didn’t say he was,” replied the spectacled man in meek surprise.

“Well, I think we’re done here,” Strike told Robin.

“Aren’t you worried,” Robin asked him as they walked back towards the Tube station, a little amused but mostly eager to leave the scene, “what your friend Anstis is going to say about you skulking around the crime scene like this?”

“Doubt he’ll be happy,” Strike said, looking around for CCTV cameras, “but keeping Anstis happy isn’t in my job description.”

“It was decent of him to share the forensic stuff with you,” Robin said.

“He did that to try and warn me off the case. He thinks everything points to Leonora. Trouble is, at the moment, everything does.”

The road was packed with traffic, which was watched by a single camera as far as Strike could see, but there were many side roads leading off it down which a person wearing Owen Quine’s Tyrolean cloak, or a burqa, might slide out of sight without anyone being the wiser as to their identity.

Strike bought two takeaway coffees in the Metro Café that stood in the station building, then they passed back through the pea-green ticket hall and set off for West Brompton.

“What you’ve got to remember,” said Strike as they stood at Earl’s Court waiting to change trains, Robin noticing how Strike kept all his weight on his good leg, “is that Quine disappeared on the fifth. Bonfire night.”

“God, of course!” said Robin.

“Flashes and bangs,” said Strike, gulping coffee fast so as to empty his cup before they had to get on; he did not trust himself to balance coffee and himself on the wet, icy floors. “Rockets going off in every direction, drawing everyone’s attention. No big surprise that nobody saw a figure in a cloak entering the building that night.”

“You mean Quine?”

“Not necessarily.”

Robin pondered this for a while.

“Do you think the man in the bookshop’s lying about Quine going in there on the eighth?”

“I don’t know,” said Strike. “Too early to say, isn’t it?”

But that, he realized, was what he believed. The sudden activity around a deserted house on the fourth and fifth was strongly suggestive.

“Funny, the things people notice,” said Robin as they climbed the red-and-green stairs at West Brompton, Strike now grimacing every time he put down his right leg. “Memory’s an odd thing, isn’t—”

Strike’s knee suddenly felt red hot and he slumped against the railings along the bridge over the tracks. A suited man behind him swore impatiently at finding a sudden, sizable impediment in his path and Robin walked on a few paces, still talking, before realizing that Strike was no longer beside her. She hurried back to find him pale, sweating and obliging commuters to take a detour around him as he stood slumped against the railings.

“Felt something go,” he said through gritted teeth, “in my knee. Shit… shit ! ”

“We’ll get a taxi.”

“Never get one in this weather.”

“Then let’s get back on the train and go back to the office.”

“No, I want—”

He had never felt his dearth of resources more keenly than at this moment, standing on the iron lattice bridge beneath the arched glass ceiling where snow was settling. In the old days there had always been a car for him to drive. He could have summoned witnesses to him. He had been Special Investigation Branch, in charge, in control.