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 colours, 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 second-hand 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.
Having put away his provisions and cooked himself pasta, Strike stretched out on his bed as night pressed dense, dark and cold at his windows, and opened the missing man’s book.
The style was ornate and florid, the story gothic and surreal. Two brothers by the names of Varicocele and Vas were locked inside a vaulted room while the corpse of their older brother decayed slowly in a corner. In between drunken arguments about literature, loyalty and the French writer Balzac, they attempted to co-author an account of their decomposing brother’s life. Varicocele constantly palpated his aching balls, which seemed to Strike to be a clumsy metaphor for writer’s block; Vas seemed to be doing most of the work.
After fifty pages, and with a murmur of ‘Bollocks is right’, Strike threw the book aside and began the laborious process of turning in.
The deep and blissful stupor of the previous night eluded him. Rain hammered against the window of his attic room and his sleep was disturbed; confused dreams of catastrophe filled the night. Strike woke in the morning with the uneasy aftermath clinging over him like a hangover. The rain was still pounding on his window, and when he turned on his TV he saw that Cornwall had been hit by severe flooding; people were trapped in cars, or evacuated from their homes and now huddled in emergency centres.
Strike snatched up his mobile phone and called the number, familiar to him as his own reflection in the mirror, that all his life had represented security and stability.
‘Hello?’ said his aunt.
‘It’s Cormoran. You all right, Joan? I’ve just seen the news.’
‘We’re all right at the moment, love, it’s up the coast it’s bad,’ she said. ‘It’s wet, mind you, blowing up a storm, but nothing like St Austell. Just been watching it on the news ourselves. How are you, Corm? It’s been ages. Ted and I were just saying last night, we haven’t heard from you, and we were wanting to say, why don’t you come for Christmas as you’re on your own again? What do you think?’
He was unable to dress or to fasten on his prosthesis while holding the mobile. She talked for half an hour, an unstoppable gush of local chat and sudden, darting forays into personal territory he preferred to leave unprobed. At last, after a final blast of interrogation about his love life, his debts and his amputated leg, she let him go.