14
There he sits a whole afternoon sometimes, reading of these same abominable, vile, (a pox on them, I cannot abide them!) rascally verses.
Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour
They marched against the war in which Strike had lost his leg the next day, thousands snaking their way through the heart of chilly London bearing placards, military families to the fore. Strike had heard through mutual army friends that the parents of Gary Topley – dead in the explosion that had cost Strike a limb – would be among the demonstrators, but it did not occur to Strike to join them. His feelings about the war could not be encapsulated in black on a square white placard. Do the job and do it well had been his creed then and now, and to march would be to imply regrets he did not have. And so he strapped on his prosthesis, dressed in his best Italian suit and headed off to Bond Street.
The treacherous husband he sought was insisting that his estranged wife, Strike’s brunette client, had lost, through her own drunken carelessness, several pieces of very valuable jewellery while the couple were staying at a hotel. Strike happened to know that the husband had an appointment in Bond Street this morning, and had a hunch that some of that allegedly lost jewellery might be making a surprise reappearance.
His target entered the jewellers while Strike examined the windows of a shop opposite. Once he had left, half an hour later, Strike took himself off for a coffee, allowed two hours to elapse, then strode inside the jewellers and proclaimed his wife’s love of emeralds, which pretence resulted, after half an hour’s staged deliberation over various pieces, in the production of the very necklace that the brunette had suspected her errant husband of having pocketed. Strike bought it at once, a transaction only made possible by the fact that his client had advanced him ten thousand pounds for the purpose. Ten thousand pounds to prove her husband’s deceit was as nothing to a woman who stood to receive a settlement of millions.
Strike picked up a kebab on his way home. After locking the necklace in a small safe he had installed in his office (usually used for the protection of incriminating photographs) he headed upstairs, made himself a mug of strong tea, took off the suit and put on the TV so that he could keep an eye on the build-up to the Arsenal–Spurs match. He then stretched out comfortably on his bed and started to read the manuscript he had stolen the night before.
As Elizabeth Tassel had told him, Bombyx Mori was a perverse Pilgrim’s Progress, set in a folkloric no-man’s-land in which the eponymous hero (a young writer of genius) set out from an island populated by inbred idiots too blind to recognise his talent on what seemed to be a largely symbolic journey towards a distant city. The richness and strangeness of the language and imagery were familiar to Strike from his perusal of The Balzac Brothers, but his interest in the subject matter drew him on.
The first familiar character to emerge from the densely written and frequently obscene sentences was Leonora Quine. As the brilliant young Bombyx journeyed through a landscape populated by various dangers and monsters he came across Succuba, a woman described succinctly as a ‘well-worn whore’, who captured and tied him up and succeeded in raping him. Leonora was described to the life: thin and dowdy, with her large glasses and her flat, deadpan manner. After being systematically abused for several days, Bombyx persuaded Succuba to release him. She was so desolate at his departure that Bombyx agreed to take her along: the first example of the story’s frequent strange, dream-like reversals, whereby what had been bad and frightening became good and sensible without justification or apology.
A few pages further on, Bombyx and Succuba were attacked by a creature called the Tick, which Strike recognised easily as Elizabeth Tassel: square-jawed, deep-voiced and frightening. Once again Bombyx took pity on the thing once it had finished violating him, and permitted it to join him. The Tick had an unpleasant habit of suckling from Bombyx while he slept. He started to become thin and weak.
Bombyx’s gender appeared strangely mutable. Quite apart from his apparent ability to breast-feed, he was soon showing signs of pregnancy, despite continuing to pleasure a number of apparently nymphomaniac women who strayed regularly across his path.
Wading through ornate obscenity, Strike wondered how many portraits of real people he was failing to notice. The violence of Bombyx’s encounters with other humans was disturbing; their perversity and cruelty left barely an orifice unviolated; it was a sadomasochistic frenzy. Yet Bombyx’s essential innocence and purity were a constant theme, the simple statement of his genius apparently all the reader needed to absolve him of the crimes in which he colluded as freely as the supposed monsters around him. As he turned the pages, Strike remembered Jerry Waldegrave’s opinion that Quine was mentally ill; he was starting to have some sympathy with his view…
The match was about to start. Strike set the manuscript down, feeling as though he had been trapped for a long time inside a dark, grubby basement, away from natural light and air. Now he felt only pleasurable anticipation. He was confident Arsenal were about to win – Spurs had not managed to beat them at home in seventeen years.
And for forty-five minutes Strike lost himself in pleasure and frequent bellows of encouragement while his team went two-nil up.
At half time, and with a feeling of reluctance, he muted the sound and returned to the bizarre world of Owen Quine’s imagination.
He recognised nobody until Bombyx drew close to the city that was his destination. Here, on a bridge over the moat that surrounded the city walls, stood a large, shambling and myopic figure: the Cutter.
The Cutter sported a low cap instead of horn-rimmed glasses, and carried a wriggling, bloodstained sack over his shoulder. Bombyx accepted the Cutter’s offer to lead him, Succuba and the Tick to a secret door into the city. Inured by now to sexual violence, Strike was unsurprised that the Cutter turned out to be intent on Bombyx’s castration. In the ensuing fight, the bag rolled off the Cutter’s back and a dwarfish female creature burst out of it. The Cutter let Bombyx, Succuba and the Tick escape while he pursued the dwarf; Bombyx and his companions managed to find a chink in the city’s walls and looked back to see the Cutter drowning the little creature in the moat.
Strike had been so engrossed in his reading that he had not realised the match had restarted. He glanced up at the muted TV.
‘Fuck!’
Two-all: unbelievably Spurs had drawn level. Strike threw the manuscript aside, appalled. Arsenal’s defence was crumbling before his eyes. This should have been a win. They had been set to go top of the league.
‘FUCK!’ Strike bellowed ten minutes later as a header soared past Fabiański.
Spurs had won.
He turned off the TV with several more expletives and checked his watch. There was only half an hour in which to shower and change before picking up Nina Lascelles in St John’s Wood; the round trip to Bromley was going to cost him a fortune. He contemplated the prospect of the final quarter of Quine’s manuscript with distaste, feeling much sympathy for Elizabeth Tassel, who had skimmed the final passages.
He was not even sure why he was reading it, other than curiosity.
Downcast and irritable, he moved off towards the shower, wishing that he could have spent the night at home and feeling, irrationally, that if he had not allowed his attention to be distracted by the obscene, nightmarish world of Bombyx Mori, Arsenal might have won.