48
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy
The garden was deserted and bitterly cold. Strike sank up to his ankles in snow, unable to feel the cold seeping through his right trouser leg. All the smokers who would ordinarily have congregated on the smooth lawns had chosen the street instead. He ploughed a solitary trench through the frozen whiteness, surrounded by silent beauty, coming to a halt beside a small round pond that had become a disc of thick grey ice. A plump bronze cupid sat in the middle on an oversized clam shell. It wore a wig of snow and pointed its bow and arrow, not anywhere that it might hit a human being, but straight up at the dark heavens.
Strike lit a cigarette and turned back to look at the blazing windows of the club. The diners and waiters looked like paper cutouts moving against a lit screen.
If Strike knew his man, he would come. Wasn’t this an irresistible situation to a writer, to the compulsive spinner of experience into words, to a lover of the macabre and the strange?
And sure enough, after a few minutes Strike heard a door open, a snatch of conversation and music hastily muffled, then the sound of deadened footsteps.
‘Mr Strike?’
Fancourt’s head looked particularly large in the darkness.
‘Would it not be easier to go on to the street?’
‘I’d rather do this in the garden,’ said Strike.
‘I see.’
Fancourt sounded vaguely amused, as though he intended, at least in the short term, to humour Strike. The detective suspected that it appealed to the writer’s sense of theatre that he should be the one summoned from the table of anxious people to talk to the man who was making them all so nervous.
‘What’s this about?’ asked Fancourt.
‘Value your opinion,’ said Strike. ‘Question of critical analysis of Bombyx Mori.’
‘Again?’ said Fancourt.
His good humour was cooling with his feet. He pulled his coat more closely around him and said, the snow falling thick and fast:
‘I’ve said everything I want to say about that book.’
‘One of the first things I was told about Bombyx Mori,’ said Strike, ‘was that it was reminiscent of your early work. Gore and arcane symbolism, I think were the words used.’
‘So?’ said Fancourt, hands in his pockets.
‘So, the more I’ve talked to people who knew Quine, the clearer it’s become that the book that everyone’s read bears only a vague resemblance to the one he claimed to be writing.’
Fancourt’s breath rose in a cloud before him, obscuring the little that Strike could see of his heavy features.
‘I’ve even met a girl who says she heard part of the book that doesn’t appear in the final manuscript.’
‘Writers cut,’ said Fancourt, shuffling his feet, his shoulders hunched up around his ears. ‘Owen would have done well to cut a great deal more. Several novels, in fact.’
‘There are also all the duplications from his earlier work,’ said Strike. ‘Two hermaphrodites. Two bloody bags. All that gratuitous sex.’
‘He was a man of limited imagination, Mr Strike.’
‘He left behind a scribbled note with what looks like a bunch of possible character names on it. One of those names appears on a used typewriter cassette that came out of his study before the police sealed it off, but it’s nowhere in the finished manuscript.’
‘So he changed his mind,’ said Fancourt irritably.
‘It’s an everyday name, not symbolic or archetypal like the names in the finished manuscript,’ said Strike.
His eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, Strike saw a look of faint curiosity on Fancourt’s heavy-featured face.
‘A restaurant full of people witnessed what I think is going to turn out to be Quine’s last meal and his final public performance,’ Strike went on. ‘A credible witness says that Quine shouted for the whole restaurant to hear that one of the reasons Tassel was too cowardly to represent the book was “Fancourt’s limp dick”.’
He doubted that he and Fancourt were clearly visible to the jittery people at the publisher’s table. Their figures would blend with the trees and statuary, but the determined or desperate might still be able to make out their location by the tiny luminous eye of Strike’s glowing cigarette: a marksman’s bead.
‘Thing is, there’s nothing in Bombyx Mori about your dick,’ continued Strike. ‘There’s nothing in there about Quine’s mistress and his young transgendered friend being “beautiful lost souls”, which is how he told them he was going to describe them. And you don’t pour acid on silkworms; you boil them to get their cocoons.’
‘So?’ repeated Fancourt.
‘So I’ve been forced to the conclusion,’ said Strike, ‘that the Bombyx Mori everyone’s read is a different book to the Bombyx Mori Owen Quine wrote.’
Fancourt stopped shuffling his feet. Momentarily frozen, he appeared to give Strike’s words serious consideration.
‘I – no,’ he said, almost, it seemed, to himself. ‘Quine wrote that book. It’s his style.’
‘It’s funny you should say that, because everyone else who had a decent ear for Quine’s particular style seems to detect a foreign voice in the book. Daniel Chard thought it was Waldegrave. Waldegrave thought it was Elizabeth Tassel. And Christian Fisher heard you.’
Fancourt shrugged with his usual easy arrogance.
‘Quine was trying to imitate a better writer.’
‘Don’t you think the way he treats his living models is strangely uneven?’
Fancourt, accepting the cigarette Strike offered him and a light, now listened in silence and with interest.
‘He says his wife and agent were parasites on him,’ Strike said. ‘Unpleasant, but the sort of accusation anyone could throw at the people who might be said to live off his earnings. He implies his mistress isn’t fond of animals and throws in something that could either be a veiled reference to her producing crap books or a pretty sick allusion to breast cancer. His transgendered friend gets off with a jibe about vocal exercises – and that’s after she claimed she showed him the life story she was writing and shared all her deepest secrets. He accuses Chard of effectively killing Joe North, and makes a crass suggestion of what Chard really wanted to do to him. And there’s the accusation that you were responsible for your first wife’s death.
‘All of which is either in the public domain, public gossip or an easy accusation to sling.’
‘Which isn’t to say it wasn’t hurtful,’ said Fancourt quietly.
‘Agreed,’ said Strike. ‘It gave plenty of people reason to be pissed off at him. But the only real revelation in the book is the insinuation that you fathered Joanna Waldegrave.’
‘I told you – as good as told you – last time we met,’ said Fancourt, sounding tense, ‘that that accusation is not only false but impossible. I am infertile, as Quine—’