They climbed the mesh stairs, Strike relying heavily once more on the handrail. The icy night air scoured his lungs as they emerged on to the top of the building. Stretches of velvety lawn, tubs of flowers and young trees, benches dotted everywhere; there was even a floodlit pond where fish darted, flame-like, beneath the black lily pads. Outdoor heaters like giant steel mushrooms had been placed in groups between neat square lawns and people were huddled under them, their backs turned to the synthetic pastoral scene, looking inwards at their fellow smokers, cigarette tips glowing.
The view over the city was spectacular, velvet black and jewelled, the London Eye glowing neon blue, the Oxo Tower with its ruby windows, the Southbank Centre, Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster shining golden away to the right.
‘Come on,’ said Nina, and she boldly took Strike’s hand and led him towards an all-female trio, whose breath rose in gusts of white mist even when they were not exhaling smoke.
‘Hi guys,’ said Nina. ‘Anyone seen Jerry?’
‘He’s pissed,’ said a redhead baldly.
‘Oh no,’ said Nina. ‘And he was doing so well!’
A lanky blonde glanced over her shoulder and murmured:
‘He was half off his face in Arbutus last week.’
‘It’s Bombyx Mori,’ said an irritable-looking girl with short dark hair. ‘And the anniversary weekend in Paris didn’t come off. Fenella had another tantrum, I think. When is he going to leave her?’
‘Is she here?’ asked the blonde avidly.
‘Somewhere,’ said the dark girl. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us, Nina?’
There was a flurry of introduction that left Strike none the wiser as to which of the girls was Miranda, Sarah or Emma, before the four women plunged again into a dissection of the unhappiness and drunkenness of Jerry Waldegrave.
‘He should have ditched Fenella years ago,’ said the dark girl. ‘Vile woman.’
‘Shh!’ hissed Nina and all four of them became unnaturally still as a man nearly as tall as Strike ambled up to them. His round, doughy face was partly concealed by large horn-rimmed glasses and a tangle of brown hair. A brimming glass of red wine was threatening to spill over his hand.
‘Guilty silence,’ he noted with an amiable smile. His speech had a sonorous over-deliberation that to Strike declared a practised drunk. ‘Three guesses what you’re talking about: Bombyx – Mori – Quine. Hi,’ he added, looking at Strike and stretching out a hand: their eyes were on a level. ‘We haven’t met, have we?’
‘Jerry – Cormoran, Cormoran – Jerry,’ said Nina at once. ‘My date,’ she added, an aside directed more at the three women beside her than at the tall editor.
‘Cameron, was it?’ asked Waldegrave, cupping a hand around his ear.
‘Close enough,’ said Strike.
‘Sorry,’ said Waldegrave. ‘Deaf on one side. And have you ladies been gossiping in front of the tall dark stranger,’ he said, with rather ponderous humour, ‘in spite of Mr Chard’s very clear instructions that nobody outside the company should be made privy to our guilty secret?’
‘You won’t tell on us, will you, Jerry?’ asked the dark girl.
‘If Daniel really wanted to keep that book quiet,’ said the redhead impatiently, though with a swift glance over her shoulder to check that the boss was nowhere near by, ‘he shouldn’t be sending lawyers all over town trying to hush it up. People keep calling me, asking what’s going on.’
‘Jerry,’ said the dark girl bravely, ‘why did you have to speak to the lawyers?’
‘Because I’m in it, Sarah,’ said Waldegrave, with a wave of his glass that sent a slug of the contents slopping onto the manicured lawn. ‘In it up to my malfunctioning ears. In the book.’
The women all made sounds of shock and protestation.
‘What could Quine possibly say about you, when you’ve been so decent to him?’ demanded the dark girl.
‘The burden of Owen’s song is that I’m gratuitously brutal to his masterpieces,’ said Waldegrave, and he made a scissor-like gesture with the hand not grasping the glass.
‘Oh, is that all?’ said the blonde, with the faintest tinge of disappointment. ‘Big deal. He’s lucky to have a deal at all, the way he carries on.’
‘Starting to look like he’s gone underground again,’ commented Waldegrave. ‘Not answering any calls.’
‘Cowardly bastard,’ said the redhead.
‘I’m quite worried about him, actually.’
‘Worried?’ repeated the redhead incredulously. ‘You can’t be serious, Jerry.’
‘You’d be worried too, if you’d read that book,’ said Waldegrave, with a tiny hiccup. ‘I think Owen’s cracking up. It reads like a suicide note.’
The blonde let out a little laugh, hastily repressed when Waldegrave looked at her.
‘I’m not joking. I think he’s having a breakdown. The subtext, under all the usual grotesquerie, is: everyone’s against me, everyone’s out to get me, everyone hates me—’
‘Everyone does hate him,’ interjected the blonde.
‘No rational person would have imagined it could be published. And now he’s disappeared.’
‘He’s always doing that, though,’ said the redhead impatiently. ‘It’s his party piece, isn’t it, doing a runner? Daisy Carter at Davis-Green told me he went off in a huff twice when they were doing The Balzac Brothers with him.’
‘I’m worried about him,’ said Waldegrave stubbornly. He took a deep drink of wine and said, ‘Might’ve slit his wrists—’
‘Owen wouldn’t kill himself!’ scoffed the blonde. Waldegrave looked down at her with what Strike thought was a mixture of pity and dislike.
‘People do kill themselves, you know, Miranda, when they think their whole reason for living is being taken away from them. Even the fact that other people think their suffering is a joke isn’t enough to shake them out of it.’
The blonde girl looked incredulous, then glanced around the circle for support, but nobody came to her defence.
‘Writers are different,’ said Waldegrave. ‘I’ve never met one who was any good who wasn’t screwy. Something bloody Liz Tassel would do well to remember.’