Robert Galbraith - The Silkworm

Orlando took her gift with parted lips, staring at it.

“Say thank you to the lady,” prompted Edna.

“Thank you,” said Orlando and she slid the mirror inside the pajama case.

“Is he a bag?” asked Robin with bright interest.

“My monkey,” said Orlando, clutching the orangutan closer. “My daddy give him to me. My daddy died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Robin quietly, wishing that the image of Quine’s body had not slid instantly into her mind, his torso as hollow as a pajama case…

Strike surreptitiously checked his watch. The appointment with Fancourt was drawing ever closer. Robin sipped some coffee and asked:

“Do you keep things in your monkey?”

“I like your hair,” said Orlando. “It’s shiny and yellow.”

“Thank you,” said Robin. “Have you got any other pictures in there?”

Orlando nodded.

“C’n I have a biscuit?” she asked Edna.

“Can I see your other pictures?” Robin asked as Orlando munched.

And after a brief pause for consideration, Orlando opened up her orangutan.

A sheaf of crumpled pictures came out, on an assortment of different sized and colored papers. Neither Strike nor Robin turned them over at first, but made admiring comments as Orlando spread them out across the table, Robin asking questions about the bright starfish and the dancing angels that Orlando had drawn in crayon and felt tip. Basking in their appreciation, Orlando dug deeper into her pajama case for her working materials. Up came a used typewriter cartridge, oblong and gray, with a thin strip tape carrying the reversed words it had printed. Strike resisted the urge to palm it immediately as it disappeared beneath a tin of colored pencils and a box of mints, but kept his eye on it as Orlando laid out a picture of a butterfly through which could be seen traces of untidy adult writing on the back.

Encouraged by Robin, Orlando now brought out more: a sheet of stickers, a postcard of the Mendip Hills, a round fridge magnet that read Careful! You may end up in my novel! Last of all she showed them three images on better-quality paper: two proof book illustrations and a mocked-up book cover.

“My daddy gave me them from his work,” Orlando said. “Dannulchar touched me when I wanted it,” she said, pointing at a brightly colored picture that Strike recognized: Kyla the Kangaroo Who Loved to Bounce. Orlando had added a hat and handbag to Kyla and colored in the line drawing of a princess talking to a frog with neon felt tips.

Delighted to see Orlando so chatty, Edna made more coffee. Conscious of the time, but aware of the need not to provoke a row and a protective grab of all her treasures, Robin and Strike chatted as they picked up and examined each of the pieces of paper on the table. Whenever she thought something might be helpful, Robin slid it sideways to Strike.

There was a list of scribbled names on the back of the butterfly picture:

Sam Breville. Eddie Boyne? Edward Baskinville? Stephen Brook?

The postcard of the Mendip Hills had been sent in July and carried a brief message:

Weather great, hotel disappointing, hope the book’s going well! V xx

Other than that, there was no trace of handwriting. A few of Orlando’s pictures were familiar to Strike from his last visit. One had been drawn on the reverse of a child’s restaurant menu, another on the Quines’ gas bill.

“Well, we’d better head off,” said Strike, draining his coffee cup with a decent show of regret. Almost absentmindedly he continued to hold the cover image for Dorcus Pengelly’s Upon the Wicked Rocks . A bedraggled woman lay supine on the stony sands of a steep cliff-enclosed cove, with the shadow of a man falling across her midriff. Orlando had drawn thickly lined black fish in the seething blue water. The used typewriter cassette lay beneath the image, nudged there by Strike.

“I don’t want you to go,” Orlando told Robin, suddenly tense and tearful.

“It’s been lovely, hasn’t it?” said Robin. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again. You’ll keep your flamingo mirror, won’t you, and I’ve got my robin picture—”

But Orlando had begun to wail and stamp. She did not want another good-bye. Under cover of the escalating furor Strike wrapped the typewriter cassette smoothly in the cover illustration for Upon the Wicked Rocks and slid it into his pocket, unmarked by his fingerprints.

They reached the street five minutes later, Robin a little shaken because Orlando had wailed and tried to grab her as she headed down the hall. Edna had had to physically restrain Orlando from following them.

“Poor girl,” said Robin under her breath, so that the staring PC could not hear them. “Oh God, that was dreadful.”

“Useful, though,” said Strike.

“You got that typewriter ribbon?”

“Yep,” said Strike, glancing over his shoulder to check that the PC was out of sight before taking out the cassette, still wrapped in Dorcus’s cover, and tipping it into a plastic evidence bag. “And a bit more than that.”

“You did?” said Robin, surprised.

“Possible lead,” said Strike, “might be nothing.”

He glanced again at his watch and sped up, wincing as his knee throbbed in protest.

“I’m going to have to get a move on if I’m not going to be late for Fancourt.”

As they sat on the crowded Tube train carrying them back to central London twenty minutes later, Strike said:

“You’re clear about what you’re doing this afternoon?”

“Completely clear,” said Robin, but with a note of reservation.

“I know it’s not a fun job—”

“That’s not what’s bothering me.”

“And like I say, it shouldn’t be dangerous,” he said, preparing to stand as they approached Tottenham Court Road. “But…”

Something made him reconsider, a slight frown between his heavy eyebrows.

“Your hair,” he said.

“What’s wrong with it?” said Robin, raising her hand self-consciously.

“It’s memorable,” said Strike. “Haven’t got a hat, have you?”

“I—I could buy one,” said Robin, feeling oddly flustered.

“Charge it to petty cash,” he told her. “Can’t hurt to be careful.”

Hoy-day, what a sweep of vanity comes this way!

William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

Strike walked up crowded Oxford Street, past snatches of canned carols and seasonal pop songs, and turned left into the quieter, narrower Dean Street. There were no shops here, just block-like buildings packed together with their different faces, white, red and dun, opening into offices, bars, pubs or bistro-type restaurants. Strike paused to allow boxes of wine to pass from delivery van to catering entrance: Christmas was a more subtle affair here in Soho, where the arts world, the advertisers and publishers congregated, and nowhere more so than at the Groucho Club.

A gray building, almost nondescript, with its black-framed windows and small topiaries sitting behind plain, convex balustrades. Its cachet lay not in its exterior but in the fact that relatively few were allowed within the members-only club for the creative arts. Strike limped over the threshold and found himself in a small hall area, where a girl behind a counter said pleasantly:

“Can I help you?”

“I’m here to meet Michael Fancourt.”

“Oh yes—you’re Mr. Strick?”

“That’s me,” said Strike.

He was directed through a long barroom with leather seats packed with lunchtime drinkers and up the stairs. As he climbed Strike reflected, not for the first time, that his Special Investigation Branch training had not envisaged him conducting interviews without official sanction or authority, on a suspect’s own territory, where his interviewee had the right to terminate the encounter without reason or apology. The SIB required its officers to organize their questioning in a template of people, places, things …Strike never lost sight of the effective, rigorous methodology, but these days it was essential to disguise the fact that he was filing facts in mental boxes. Different techniques were required when interviewing those who thought they were doing you a favor.