Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

“Is that why you were so keen to see me?” asked Strike. “Have you got something on Quine?”

“No,” said Fisher with a laugh. “I’m just nosy. Wanted to know what’s going on.”

He checked his watch, turned over a copy of a book cover in front of him and pushed out his chair a little. Strike took the hint.

“Thanks for your time,” he said, standing up. “If you hear from Owen Quine, will you let me know?”

He handed Fisher a card. Fisher frowned at it as he moved around his desk to show Strike out.

“Cormoran Strike… Strike …I know that name, don’t I…?”

The penny dropped. Fisher was suddenly reanimated, as though his batteries had been changed.

“Bloody hell, you’re the Lula Landry guy!”

Strike knew that he could have sat back down, ordered a latte and enjoyed Fisher’s undivided attention for another hour or so. Instead, he extricated himself with firm friendliness and, within a few minutes, reemerged alone on the cold misty street.

I’ll be sworn, I was ne’er guilty of reading the like.

Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour

When informed by telephone that her husband was not, after all, at the writer’s retreat, Leonora Quine sounded anxious.

“Where is he, then?” she asked, more of herself, it seemed, than Strike.

“Where does he usually go when he walks out?” Strike asked.

“Hotels,” she said, “and once he was staying with some woman but he don’t know her no more. Orlando,” she said sharply, away from the receiver, “put that down , it’s mine. I said, it’s mine . What?” she said, loudly in Strike’s ear.

“I didn’t say anything. D’you want me to keep looking for your husband?”

“Course I do, who else is gonna bloody find him? I can’t leave Orlando. Ask Liz Tassel where he is. She found him before. Hilton,” said Leonora unexpectedly. “He was at the Hilton once.”

“Which Hilton?”

“I dunno, ask Liz. She made him go off, she should be bloody helping bring him back. She won’t take my calls. Orlando, put it down .”

“Is there anyone else you can think—?”

“No, or I’d’ve bloody asked them, wouldn’t I?” snapped Leonora. “You’re the detective, you find him! Orlando! ”

“Mrs. Quine, we’ve got—”

“Call me Leonora.”

“Leonora, we’ve got to consider the possibility that your husband might have done himself an injury. We’d find him more quickly,” said Strike, raising his voice over the domestic clamor at the other end of the line, “if we involved the police.”

“I don’t wanna. I called them that time he was gone a week and he turned up at his lady friend’s and they weren’t happy. He’ll be angry if I do that again. Anyway, Owen wouldn’t— Orlando, leave it! ”

“The police could circulate his picture more effectively and—”

“I just want him home quietly. Why doesn’t he just come back?” she added pettishly. “He’s had time to calm down.”

“Have you read your husband’s new book?” Strike asked.

“No. I always wait till they’re finished and I can read ’em with proper covers on and everything.”

“Has he told you anything about it?”

“No, he don’t like talking about work while he’s— Orlando, put it down! ”

He was not sure whether she had hung up deliberately or not.

The fog of early morning had lifted. Rain was speckling his office windows. A client was due imminently, yet another divorcing woman who wanted to know where her soon-to-be-ex-husband was burying assets.

“Robin,” said Strike, emerging into the outer office, “will you print me out a picture of Owen Quine off the internet, if you can find one? And call his agent, Elizabeth Tassel, and see if she’s willing to answer a few quick questions.”

About to return to his own office, he thought of something else.

“And could you look up ‘bombyx mori’ for me, and see what it means?”

“How are you spelling that?”

“God knows,” said Strike.

The soon-to-be divorcée arrived on time, at eleven thirty. She was a suspiciously youthful-looking forty-something who exuded fluttery charm and a musky scent that always made the office feel cramped to Robin. Strike disappeared into his office with her, and for two hours Robin heard only the gentle rise and fall of their voices over the steady thrumming of the rain and the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard; calm and placid sounds. Robin had become used to hearing sudden outbreaks of tears, moans, even shouting from Strike’s office. Sudden silences could be the most ominous of all, as when a male client had literally fainted (and, they had learned later, suffered a minor heart attack) on seeing the photographs of his wife and her lover that Strike had taken through a long lens.

When Strike and his client emerged at last, and she had taken fulsome farewell of him, Robin handed her boss a large picture of Owen Quine, taken from the website of the Bath Literature Festival.

“Jesus Christ almighty,” said Strike.

Owen Quine was a large, pale and portly man of around sixty, with straggly yellow-white hair and a pointed Van Dyke beard. His eyes appeared to be of different colors, which gave a peculiar intensity to his stare. For the photograph he had wrapped himself in what seemed to be a Tyrolean cape and was wearing a feather-trimmed trilby.

“You wouldn’t think he’d be able to stay incognito for long,” commented Strike. “Can you make a few copies of this, Robin? We might have to show it around hotels. His wife thinks he once stayed at a Hilton, but she can’t remember which one, so could you start ringing round to see if he’s booked in? Can’t imagine he’d use his own name, but you could try describing him…Any luck with Elizabeth Tassel?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “Believe it or not, I was just about to call her when she called me.”

“She called here? Why?”

“Christian Fisher’s told her you’ve been to see him.”

“And?”

“She’s got meetings this afternoon, but she wants to meet you at eleven o’clock tomorrow at her office.”

“Does she, now?” said Strike, looking amused. “More and more interesting. Did you ask her if she knows where Quine is?”

“Yes; she says she hasn’t got a clue, but she was still adamant she wants to meet you. She’s very bossy. Like a headmistress. And Bombyx mori ,” she finished up, “is the Latin name for a silkworm.”

“A silkworm?”

“Yeah, and you know what? I always thought they were like spiders spinning their webs, but you know how they get silk from the worms?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“They boil them,” said Robin. “Boil them alive, so that they don’t damage their cocoons by bursting out of them. It’s the cocoons that are made of silk. Not very nice, really, is it? Why did you want to know about silkworms?”

“I wanted to know why Owen Quine might have called his novel Bombyx Mori ,” said Strike. “Can’t say I’m any the wiser.”

He spent the afternoon on tedious paperwork relating to a surveillance case and hoping the weather might improve: he would need to go out as he had virtually nothing to eat upstairs. After Robin had left, Strike continued working while the rain pounding his window became steadily heavier. Finally he pulled on his overcoat and walked, in what was now a downpour, down a sodden, dark Charing Cross Road to buy food at the nearest supermarket. There had been too many takeaways lately.

On the way back up the road, with bulging carrier bags in both hands, he turned on impulse into a secondhand bookshop that was about to close. The man behind the counter was unsure whether they had a copy of Hobart’s Sin , Owen Quine’s first book and supposedly his best, but after a lot of inconclusive mumbling and an unconvincing perusal of his computer screen, offered Strike a copy of The Balzac Brothers by the same author. Tired, wet and hungry, Strike paid two pounds for the battered hardback and took it home to his attic flat.