Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

“See the clock over the doors as you come in here?” Waldegrave asked Strike, pushing his glasses up his nose again. “They say it stopped when the first woman came in here in 1984. Little in-joke. And on the menu, it says ‘bill of fare.’ They wouldn’t use ‘menu,’ you see, because it was French. My father loved that stuff. I’d just got into Oxford, that’s why he brought me here. He hated foreign food.”

Strike could feel Waldegrave’s nervousness. He was used to having that effect on people. Now was not the moment to ask whether Waldegrave had helped Quine write the blueprint for his murder.

“What did you do at Oxford?”

“English,” said Waldegrave with a sigh. “My father was putting a brave face on it; he wanted me to do medicine.”

The fingers of Waldegrave’s right hand played an arpeggio on the tablecloth.

“Things tense at the office, are they?” asked Strike.

“You could say that,” replied Waldegrave, looking around again for the wine waiter. “It’s sinking in, now we know how Owen was killed. People erasing emails like idiots, pretending they never looked at the book, don’t know how it ends. It’s not so funny now.”

“Was it funny before?” asked Strike.

“Well…yeah, it was, when people thought Owen had just done a runner. People love seeing the powerful ridiculed, don’t they? They aren’t popular men, either of them, Fancourt and Chard.”

The wine waiter arrived and handed the list to Waldegrave.

“I’ll get a bottle, shall I?” said Waldegrave, scanning it. “I take it this is on you?”

“Yeah,” said Strike, not without trepidation.

Waldegrave ordered a bottle of Château Lezongars, which Strike saw with profound misgiving cost nearly fifty quid, though there were bottles on the list that cost nearly two hundred.

“So,” said Waldegrave with sudden bravado, as the wine waiter retreated, “any leads yet? Know who did it?”

“Not yet,” said Strike.

An uncomfortable beat followed. Waldegrave pushed his glasses up his sweaty nose.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Crass—defense mechanism. It’s—I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it happened.”

“No one ever can,” said Strike.

On a rush of confidence, Waldegrave said:

“I can’t shake this mad bloody idea that Owen did it to himself. That he staged it.”

“Really?” said Strike, watching Waldegrave closely.

“I know he can’t have done, I know that.” The editor’s hands were playing a deft scale on the edge of the table now. “It’s so—so theatrical , how he was—how he was killed. So—so grotesque. And…the awful thing…best publicity any author ever got his book. God, Owen loved publicity. Poor Owen. He once told me—this isn’t a joke—he once told me in all seriousness that he liked to get his girlfriend to interview him. Said it clarified his thought processes. I said, ‘What do you use as a mic?’ taking the mickey, you know, and you know what the silly sod said? ‘Biros mostly. Whatever’s around.’”

Waldegrave burst into panting chuckles that sounded very like sobs.

“Poor bastard,” he said. “Poor silly bastard. Lost it completely at the end, didn’t he? Well, I hope Elizabeth Tassel’s happy. Winding him up.”

Their original waiter returned with a notebook.

“What are you having?” the editor asked Strike, focusing short-sightedly on his bill of fare.

“The beef,” said Strike, who had had time to watch it being carved from the silver salver on a trolley that circulated the tables. He had not had Yorkshire pudding in years; not, in fact, since the last time he had gone back to St. Mawes to see his aunt and uncle.

Waldegrave ordered Dover sole, then craned his neck again to see whether the wine waiter was returning. When he caught sight of the man approaching with the bottle he noticeably relaxed, sinking more comfortably into his chair. His glass filled, he drank several mouthfuls before sighing like a man who had received urgent medical treatment.

“You were saying Elizabeth Tassel wound Quine up,” Strike said.

“Eh?” said Waldegrave, cupping his right hand around his ear.

Strike remembered his one-sided deafness. The restaurant was indeed filling up, becoming noisier. He repeated his question more loudly.

“Oh yeah,” said Waldegrave. “Yeah, about Fancourt. The pair of them liked brooding on the wrongs Fancourt did them.”

“What wrongs?” asked Strike, and Waldegrave swigged more wine.

“Fancourt’s been badmouthing them both for years.” Waldegrave scratched his chest absentmindedly through his creased shirt and drank more wine. “Owen, because of that parody of his dead wife’s novel; Liz, because she stuck by Owen—mind you, nobody’s ever blamed Fancourt for leaving Liz Tassel. The woman’s a bitch. Down to about two clients now. Twisted. Probably spends her evenings working out how much she lost: fifteen percent of Fancourt’s royalties is big money. Booker dinners, film premieres…instead she gets Quine interviewing himself with a biro and burnt sausages in Dorcus Pengelly’s back garden.”

“How do you know there were burnt sausages?” asked Strike.

“Dorcus told me,” said Waldegrave, who had already finished his first glass of wine and was pouring a second. “She wanted to know why Liz wasn’t at the firm’s anniversary party. When I told her about Bombyx Mori , Dorcus assured me Liz was a lovely woman. Lovely. Couldn’t have known what was in Owen’s book. Never have hurt anyone’s feelings—wouldn’t hurt a bloody fly—ha!”

“You disagree?”

“Bloody right I disagree. I’ve met people who got their start in Liz Tassel’s office. They talk like kidnap victims who’ve been ransomed. Bully. Scary temper.”

“You think she put Quine up to writing the book?”

“Well, not directly,” said Waldegrave. “But you take a deluded writer who was convinced he wasn’t a bestseller because people were jealous of him or not doing their jobs right and lock him in with Liz, who’s always angry, bitter as sin, banging on about Fancourt doing them both down, and is it a surprise he gets wound up to fever pitch?

“She couldn’t even be bothered to read his book properly. If he hadn’t died, I’d say she got what she deserved. Silly mad bastard didn’t just do over Fancourt, did he? Went after her as well, ha ha! Went after bloody Daniel, went after me, went after ev’ryone. Ev’ryone. ”

In the manner of other alcoholics Strike had known, Jerry Waldegrave had crossed the line into drunkenness with two glasses of wine. His movements were suddenly clumsier, his manner more flamboyant.

“D’you think Elizabeth Tassel egged Quine on to attack Fancourt?”

“Not a doubt of it,” said Waldegrave. “Not a doubt.”

“But when I met her, Elizabeth Tassel said that what Quine wrote about Fancourt was a lie,” Strike told Waldegrave.

“Eh?” said Waldegrave again, cupping his ear.

“She told me,” said Strike loudly, “that what Quine writes in Bombyx Mori about Fancourt is false. That Fancourt didn’t write the parody that made his wife kill herself—that Quine wrote it.”

“I’m not talking about that ,” said Waldegrave, shaking his head as though Strike were being obtuse. “I don’t mean—forget it. Forget it.”

He was more than halfway down the bottle already; the alcohol had induced a degree of confidence. Strike held back, knowing that to push would only induce the granite stubbornness of the drunk. Better to let him drift where he wanted to go, keeping one light hand on the tiller.

“Owen liked me,” Waldegrave told Strike. “Oh yeah. I knew how to handle him. Stoke that man’s vanity and you could get him to do anything you wanted. Half an hour’s praise before you asked him to change anything in a manuscript. ’Nother half hour’s praise before you asked him to make another change. Only way.