‘He showed it to me before he sent it to the magazine. I’m afraid,’ Elizabeth met Strike’s gaze with cold defiance, ‘it made me laugh. It was painfully accurate and very funny. Owen was always a good literary mimic.’
‘But then Fancourt’s wife killed herself.’
‘Which was a tragedy, of course,’ said Elizabeth, without noticeable emotion, ‘although nobody could have reasonably expected it. Frankly, anybody who’s going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place. But naturally enough, Michael was livid with Owen and I think the more so because Owen got cold feet and denied authorship once he heard about Elspeth’s suicide. It was, perhaps, a surprisingly cowardly attitude for a man who liked to be thought of as fearless and lawless.
‘Michael wanted me to drop Owen as a client. I refused. Michael hasn’t spoken to me since.’
‘Was Quine making more money for you than Fancourt at the time?’ Strike asked.
‘Good God, no,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t to my pecuniary advantage to stick with Owen.’
‘Then why—?’
‘I’ve just told you,’ she said impatiently. ‘I believe in freedom of speech, up to and including upsetting people. Anyway, days after Elspeth killed herself, Leonora gave birth to premature twins. Something went badly wrong at the birth; the boy died and Orlando is… I take it you’ve met her by now?’
As he nodded, Strike’s dream of the other night came back to him suddenly: the baby that Charlotte had given birth to, but that she would not let him see…
‘Brain damaged,’ Elizabeth went on. ‘So Owen was going through his own personal tragedy at the time, and unlike Michael, he hadn’t b-brought any of it on h-himself—’
Coughing again, she caught Strike’s look of faint surprise and made an impatient staying gesture with her hand, indicating that she would explain when the fit had passed. Finally, after another sip of water, she croaked:
‘Michael only encouraged Elspeth to write to keep her out of his hair while he worked. They had nothing in common. He married her because he’s terminally touchy about being lower middle class. She was an earl’s daughter who thought marrying Michael would mean non-stop literary parties and sparkling, intellectual chat. She didn’t realise she’d be alone most of the time while Michael worked. She was,’ said Elizabeth with disdain, ‘a woman of few resources.
‘But she got excited at the idea of being a writer. Have you any idea,’ said the agent harshly, ‘how many people think they can write? You cannot imagine the crap I am sent, day in, day out. Elspeth’s novel would have been rejected out of hand under normal circumstances, it was so pretentious and silly, but they weren’t normal circumstances. Having encouraged her to produce the damn thing, Michael didn’t have the balls to tell her it was awful. He gave it to his publisher and they took it to keep Michael happy. It had been out a week when the parody appeared.’
‘Quine implies in Bombyx Mori that Fancourt really wrote the parody,’ said Strike.
‘I know he does – and I wouldn’t want to provoke Michael Fancourt,’ she added in an apparent aside that begged to be heard.
‘What do you mean?’
There was a short pause in which he could almost see Elizabeth deciding what to tell him.
‘I met Michael,’ she said slowly, ‘in a tutorial group studying Jacobean revenge tragedies. Let’s just say it was his natural milieu. He adores those writers; their sadism and their lust for vengeance… rape and cannibalism, poisoned skeletons dressed up as women… sadistic retribution is Michael’s obsession.’
She glanced up at Strike, who was watching her.
‘What?’ she said curtly.
When, he wondered, were the details of Quine’s murder going to explode across the newspapers? The dam must already be straining, with Culpepper on the case.
‘Did Fancourt take sadistic retribution when you chose Quine over him?’
She looked down at the bowl of red liquid and pushed it abruptly away from her.
‘We were close friends, very close, but he’s never said a word to me from the day that I refused to sack Owen. He did his best to warn other writers away from my agency, said I was a woman of no honour or principle.
‘But I hold one principle sacred and he knew it,’ she said firmly. ‘Owen hadn’t done anything, in writing that parody, that Michael hadn’t done a hundred times to other writers. Of course I regretted the aftermath deeply, but it was one of the times – the few times – when I felt that Owen was morally in the clear.’
‘Must’ve hurt, though,’ Strike said. ‘You’d known Fancourt longer than Quine.’
‘We’ve been enemies longer than we’ve been friends, now.’
It was not, Strike noted, a proper answer.
‘You mustn’t think… Owen wasn’t always – he wasn’t all bad,’ Elizabeth said restlessly. ‘You know, he was obsessed with virility, in life and in his work. Sometimes it was a metaphor for creative genius, but at other times it’s seen as the bar to artistic fulfilment. The plot of Hobart’s Sin turns on Hobart, who’s both male and female, having to choose between parenthood and abandoning his aspirations as a writer: aborting his baby, or abandoning his brainchild.
‘But when it came to fatherhood in real life – you understand, Orlando wasn’t… you wouldn’t have chosen your child to… to… but he loved her and she loved him.’
‘Except for the times he walked out on the family to consort with mistresses or fritter away money in hotel rooms,’ suggested Strike.
‘All right, he wouldn’t have won Father of the Year,’ snapped Elizabeth, ‘but there was love there.’
A silence fell over the table and Strike decided not to break it. He was sure that Elizabeth Tassel had agreed to this meeting, as she had requested the last, for reasons of her own and he was keen to hear them. He therefore ate his fish and waited.
‘The police have asked me,’ she said finally, when his plate was almost clear, ‘whether Owen was blackmailing me in some way.’
‘Really?’ said Strike.
The restaurant clattered and chattered around them, and outside the snow fell thicker than ever. Here again was the familiar phenomenon of which he had spoken to Robin: the suspect who wished to re-explain, worried that they had not made a good enough job of it on their first attempt.
‘They’ve taken note of the large dollops of money passing from my account to Owen’s over the years,’ said Elizabeth.
Strike said nothing; her ready payment of Quine’s hotel bills had struck him as out of character in their previous meeting.
‘What do they think anyone could blackmail me for?’ she asked him with a twist to her scarlet mouth. ‘My professional life has been scrupulously honest. I have no private life to speak of. I’m the very definition of a blameless spinster, aren’t I?’