‘I think it’s fair to say that I was a barracuda compared to Quine’s stickleback,’ said Fancourt with a smirk, ‘but, you see, Liz and Quine were sleeping together.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that,’ said Strike, clicking out the nib of his pen.
‘Liz arrived at Oxford,’ said Fancourt, ‘this strapping great girl who’d been helping her father castrate bulls and the like on sundry northern farms, desperate to get laid, and nobody fancied the job much. She had a thing for me, a very big thing – we were tutorial partners, juicy Jacobean intrigue calculated to get a girl going – but I never felt altruistic enough to relieve her of her virginity. We remained friends,’ said Fancourt, ‘and when she started her agency I introduced her to Quine, who notoriously preferred to plumb the bottom of the barrel, sexually speaking. The inevitable occurred.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Strike. ‘Is this common knowledge?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Fancourt. ‘Quine was already married to his – well, his murderess, I suppose we have to call her now, don’t we?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’d imagine “murderess” trumps “wife” when defining a close relationship? And Liz would have threatened him with dire consequences if he’d been his usual indiscreet self about her bedroom antics, on the wild off-chance that I might yet be persuaded to sleep with her.’
Was this blind vanity, Strike wondered, a matter of fact, or a mixture of both?
‘She used to look at me with those big cow eyes, waiting, hoping…’ said Fancourt, a cruel twist to his mouth. ‘After Ellie died she realised that I wasn’t going to oblige her even when grief-stricken. I’d imagine she was unable to bear the thought of decades of future celibacy, so she stood by her man.’
‘Did you ever speak to Quine again after you left the agency?’ Strike asked.
‘For the first few years after Ellie died he’d scuttle out of any bar I entered,’ said Fancourt. ‘Eventually he got brave enough to remain in the same restaurant, throwing me nervous looks. No, I don’t think we ever spoke to each other again,’ said Fancourt, as though the matter were of little interest. ‘You were injured in Afghanistan, I think?’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike.
It might work on women, Strike reflected, the calculated intensity of the gaze. Perhaps Owen Quine had fixed Kathryn Kent and Pippa Midgley with the identical hungry, vampiric stare when he told them he would be putting them into Bombyx Mori… and they had been thrilled to think of part of themselves, their lives, forever encased in the amber of a writer’s prose…
‘How did it happen?’ asked Fancourt, his eyes on Strike’s legs.
‘IED,’ said Strike. ‘What about Talgarth Road? You and Quine were co-owners of the house. Didn’t you ever need to communicate about the place? Did you ever run into each other there?’
‘Never.’
‘Haven’t you been there to check on it? You’ve owned it – what—?’
‘Twenty, twenty-five years, something like that,’ said Fancourt indifferently. ‘No, I haven’t been inside since Joe died.’
‘I suppose the police have asked you about the woman who thinks she saw you outside on the eighth of November?’
‘Yes,’ said Fancourt shortly. ‘She was mistaken.’
Beside them, the actor was still in full and loud flow.
‘… thought I’d bloody had it, couldn’t see where the fuck I was supposed to be running, sand in my bloody eyes…’
‘So you haven’t been in the house since eighty-six?’
‘No,’ said Fancourt impatiently. ‘Neither Owen nor I wanted it in the first place.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because our friend Joe died there in exceptionally squalid circumstances. He hated hospitals, refused medication. By the time he fell unconscious the place was in a disgusting state and he, who had been the living embodiment of Apollo, was reduced to a sack of bones, his skin… it was a grisly end,’ said Fancourt, ‘made worse by Daniel Ch—’
Fancourt’s expression hardened. He made an odd chewing motion as though literally eating unspoken words. Strike waited.
‘He’s an interesting man, Dan Chard,’ said Fancourt, with a palpable effort at reversing out of a cul-de-sac into which he had driven himself. ‘I thought Owen’s treatment of him in Bombyx Mori was the biggest missed opportunity of all – though future scholars are hardly going to look to Bombyx Mori for subtlety of characterisation, are they?’ he added with a short laugh.
‘How would you have written Daniel Chard?’ Strike asked and Fancourt seemed surprised by the question. After a moment’s consideration he said: ‘Dan’s the most unfulfilled man I’ve ever met. He works in a field where he’s competent but unhappy. He craves the bodies of young men but can bring himself to do no more than draw them. He’s full of inhibitions and self-disgust, which explains his unwise and hysterical response to Owen’s caricature of him. Dan was dominated by a monstrous socialite mother who wanted her pathologically shy son to take over the family business. I think,’ said Fancourt, ‘I’d have been able to make something interesting of all that.’
‘Why did Chard turn down North’s book?’ Strike asked.
Fancourt made the chewing motion again, then said:
‘I like Daniel Chard, you know.’
‘I had the impression that there had been a grudge at some point,’ said Strike.
‘What gave you that idea?’
‘You said that you “certainly didn’t expect to find yourself” back at Roper Chard when you spoke at their anniversary party.’
‘You were there?’ said Fancourt sharply and when Strike nodded he said: ‘Why?’
‘I was looking for Quine,’ said Strike. ‘His wife had hired me to find him.’
‘But, as we now know, she knew exactly where he was.’
‘No,’ said Strike, ‘I don’t think she did.’
‘You genuinely believe that?’ asked Fancourt, his large head tilted to one side.
‘Yeah, I do,’ said Strike.
Fancourt raised his eyebrows, considering Strike intently as though he were a curiosity in a cabinet.
‘So you didn’t hold it against Chard that he turned down North’s book?’ Strike asked, returning to the main point.
After a brief pause Fancourt said:
‘Well, yes, I did hold it against him. Exactly why Dan changed his mind about publishing it only Dan could tell you, but I think it was because there was a smattering of press around Joe’s condition, drumming up middle-England disgust about the unrepentant book he was about to publish, and Dan, who had not realised that Joe now had full-blown Aids, panicked. He didn’t want to be associated with bathhouses and Aids, so he told Joe he didn’t want the book after all. It was an act of great cowardice and Owen and I—’
Another pause. How long had it been since Fancourt had bracketed himself and Quine together in amity?
‘Owen and I believed that it killed Joe. He could hardly hold a pen, he was virtually blind, but he was trying desperately to finish the book before he died. We felt that was all that was keeping him alive. Then Chard’s letter arrived cancelling their contract; Joe stopped work and within forty-eight hours he was dead.’