Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

“ Oh, ” said Robin, on a long drawn-out sigh of comprehension.

“ Oooooh , you’re so clever , Mr. Butch,” said Pippa in spiteful imitation.

“D’you know Kathryn Kent personally, or are you just cyber-friends?”

“Why? Is knowing Kath Kent a crime now?”

“How did you know Owen Quine?”

“I don’t want to talk about that bastard,” she said, her chest heaving. “What he’s done to me…what he’s done…pretending…he lied…lying fucking bastard…”

Fresh tears splattered down her cheeks and she dissolved into hysterics. Her scarlet-tipped hands clawed at her hair, her feet drummed on the floor, she rocked backwards and forwards, wailing. Strike watched her with distaste and after thirty seconds said:

“Will you shut the fuck —”

But Robin quelled him with a glance, tore a handful of tissues out of the box on her desk and pushed them into Pippa’s hand.

“T-t-ta—”

“Would you like a tea or coffee, Pippa?” asked Robin kindly.

“Co…fee…pl…”

“She’s just tried to bloody knife me, Robin!”

“Well, she didn’t manage it, did she?” commented Robin, busy with the kettle.

“Ineptitude,” said Strike incredulously, “is no fucking defense under the law!”

He rounded on Pippa again, who had followed this exchange with her mouth agape.

“Why have you been following me? What are you trying to stop me doing? And I’m warning you—just because Robin here’s buying the sob stuff—”

“You’re working for her ! ” yelled Pippa. “That twisted bitch, his widow! She’s got his money now, hasn’t she—we know what you’ve been hired to do, we’re not fucking stupid!”

“Who’s ‘we’?” demanded Strike, but Pippa’s dark eyes slid again towards the door. “I swear to God,” said Strike, whose much-tried knee was now throbbing in a way that made him want to grind his teeth, “if you go for that door one more fucking time I’m calling the police and I’ll testify and be glad to watch you go down for attempted murder. And it won’t be fun for you inside, Pippa,” he added. “Not pre-op.”

“Cormoran!” said Robin sharply.

“Stating facts,” said Strike.

Pippa had shrunk back onto the sofa and was staring at Strike in unfeigned terror.

“Coffee,” said Robin firmly, emerging from behind the desk and pressing the mug into one of the long-taloned hands. “Just tell him what all this is about, for God’s sake, Pippa. Tell him. ”

Unstable and aggressive though Pippa seemed, Robin could not help pitying the girl, who appeared to have given almost no thought to the possible consequences of lunging at a private detective with a blade. Robin could only assume that she possessed in extreme form the trait that afflicted her own younger brother Martin, who was notorious in their family for the lack of foresight and love of danger that had resulted in more trips to casualty than the rest of his siblings combined.

“We know she hired you to frame us,” croaked Pippa.

“Who,” growled Strike, “is ‘ she ’ and who is ‘ us ’?”

“Leonora Quine!” said Pippa. “We know what she’s like and we know what she’s capable of! She hates us, me and Kath, she’d do anything to get us. She murdered Owen and she’s trying to pin it on us! You can look like that all you want!” she shouted at Strike, whose heavy eyebrows had risen halfway to his thick hairline. “She’s a crazy bitch, she’s jealous as hell—she couldn’t stand him seeing us and now she’s got you poking around trying to get stuff to use against us!”

“I don’t know whether you believe this paranoid bollocks—”

“We know what’s going on!” shouted Pippa.

“ Shut up. Nobody except the killer knew Quine was dead when you started stalking me. You followed me the day I found the body and I know you were following Leonora for a week before that. Why?” And when she did not answer, he repeated: “Last chance: why did you follow me from Leonora’s?”

“I thought you might lead me to where he was,” said Pippa.

“Why did you want to know where he was?”

“So I could fucking kill him!” yelled Pippa, and Robin was confirmed in her impression that Pippa shared Martin’s almost total lack of self-preservation.

“And why did you want to kill him?” asked Strike, as though she had said nothing out of the ordinary.

“Because of what he did to us in that horrible fucking book! You know—you’ve read it—Epicoene—that bastard, that bastard—”

“Bloody calm down! So you’d read Bombyx Mori by then?”

“Yeah, of course I had—”

“And that’s when you started putting shit through Quine’s letter box?”

“Shit for a shit!” she shouted.

“Witty. When did you read the book?”

“Kath read the bits about us on the phone and then I went round and—”

“When did she read you the bits on the phone?”

“W-when she came home and found it lying on her doormat. Whole manuscript. She could hardly get the door open. He’d fed it through her door with a note,” said Pippa Midgley. “She showed me.”

“What did the note say?”

“It said ‘Payback time for both of us. Hope you’re happy! Owen.’”

“‘Payback time for both of us’?” repeated Strike, frowning. “D’you know what that meant?”

“Kath wouldn’t tell me but I know she understood. She was d-devastated,” said Pippa, her chest heaving. “She’s a—she’s a wonderful person. You don’t know her. She’s been like a m-mother to me. We met on his writing course and we were like—we became like—” She caught up her breath and whimpered: “He was a bastard. He lied to us about what he was writing, he lied about—about everything—”

She began to cry again, wailing and sobbing, and Robin, worried about Mr. Crowdy, said gently:

“Pippa, just tell us what he lied about. Cormoran only wants the truth, he’s not trying to frame anyone…”

She did not know whether Pippa had heard or believed her; perhaps she simply wanted to relieve her overwrought feelings, but she took a great shuddering breath and out spilled a torrent of words:

“He said I was like his second daughter, he said that to me; I told him everything , he knew my mum threw me out and everything . And I showed him m-m-my book about my life and he w-was so k-kind and interested and he said he’d help me get it p-published and he t-told us both, me and Kath, that we were in his n-new novel and he said I w-was a ‘b-beautiful lost soul’— that’s what he said to me, ” gasped Pippa, her mobile mouth working, “and he p-pretended to read a bit out to me one day, over the phone, and it was—it was lovely and then I r-read it and he’d—he’d written that …Kath was in b-bits…the cave…Harpy and Epicoene…”

“So Kathryn came home and found it all over the doormat, did she?” said Strike. “Came home from where—work?”

“From s-sitting in the hospice with her dying sister.”

“And that was when ? ” said Strike for the third time.

“Who cares when it—?”

“ I fucking care! ”

“Was it the ninth?” Robin asked. She had brought up Kathryn Kent’s blog on her computer, the screen angled away from the sofa where Pippa was sitting. “Could it have been Tuesday the ninth, Pippa? The Tuesday after bonfire night?”

“It was…yeah, I think it was!” said Pippa, apparently awestruck by Robin’s lucky guess. “Yeah, Kath went away on bonfire night because Angela was so ill—”

“How d’you know it was bonfire night?” Strike asked.