‘In the backpack – a flask. I didn’t think we should stop unless we really have to. And there are biscuits.’
The windscreen wipers were carving their way through flecks of snow.
‘You’re a bloody marvel,’ said Strike, his reserve crumbling. He had not had breakfast: trying and failing to attach his false leg, finding a pin for his suit trousers, digging out his crutches and getting himself downstairs had taken twice the time he had allowed. And in spite of herself, Robin gave a small smile.
Strike poured himself coffee and ate several bits of shortbread, his appreciation of Robin’s deft handling of the strange car increasing as his hunger decreased.
‘What does Matthew drive?’ he asked as they sped over the Boston Manor viaduct.
‘Nothing,’ said Robin. ‘We haven’t got a car in London.’
‘Yeah, no need,’ said Strike, privately reflecting that if he ever gave Robin the salary she deserved they might be able to afford one.
‘So what are you planning to ask Daniel Chard?’ Robin asked.
‘Plenty,’ said Strike, brushing crumbs off his dark jacket. ‘First off, whether he’d fallen out with Quine and, if so, what about. I can’t fathom why Quine – total dickhead though he clearly was – decided to attack the man who had his livelihood in his hands and who had the money to sue him into oblivion.’
Strike munched shortbread for a while, swallowed, then added:
‘Unless Jerry Waldegrave’s right and Quine was having a genuine breakdown when he wrote it and lashed out at anyone he thought he could blame for his lousy sales.’
Robin, who had finished reading Bombyx Mori while Strike had been having lunch with Elizabeth Tassel the previous day, said:
‘Isn’t the writing too coherent for somebody having a breakdown?’
‘The syntax might be sound, but I don’t think you’d find many people who’d disagree that the content’s bloody insane.’
‘His other writing’s very like it.’
‘None of his other stuff’s as crazy as Bombyx Mori,’ said Strike. ‘Hobart’s Sin and The Balzac Brothers both had plots.’
‘This has got a plot.’
‘Has it? Or is Bombyx’s little walking tour just a convenient way of stringing together a load of attacks on different people?’
The snow fell thick and fast as they passed the exit to Heathrow, talking about the novel’s various grotesqueries, laughing a little over its ludicrous jumps of logic, its absurdities. The trees on either side of the motorway looked as though they had been dusted with tons of icing sugar.
‘Maybe Quine was born four hundred years too late,’ said Strike, still eating shortbread. ‘Elizabeth Tassel told me there’s a Jacobean revenge play featuring a poisoned skeleton disguised as a woman. Presumably someone shags it and dies. Not a million miles away from Phallus Impudicus getting ready to—’
‘Don’t,’ said Robin, with a half laugh and a shudder.
But Strike had not broken off because of her protest, or because of any sense of repugnance. Something had flickered deep in his subconscious as he spoke. Somebody had told him… someone had said… but the memory was gone in a flash of tantalising silver, like a minnow vanishing in pondweed.
‘A poisoned skeleton,’ Strike muttered, trying to capture the elusive memory, but it was gone.
‘And I finished Hobart’s Sin last night as well,’ said Robin, overtaking a dawdling Prius.
‘You’re a sucker for punishment,’ said Strike, reaching for a sixth biscuit. ‘I didn’t think you were enjoying it.’
‘I wasn’t, and it didn’t improve. It’s all about—’
‘A hermaphrodite who’s pregnant and gets an abortion because a kid would interfere with his literary ambitions,’ said Strike.
‘You’ve read it!’
‘No, Elizabeth Tassel told me.’
‘There’s a bloody sack in it,’ said Robin.
Strike looked sideways at her pale profile, serious as she watched the road ahead, her eyes flicking to the rear-view mirror.
‘What’s inside?’
‘The aborted baby,’ said Robin. ‘It’s horrible.’
Strike digested this information as they passed the turning to Maidenhead.
‘Strange,’ he said at last.
‘Grotesque,’ said Robin.
‘No, it’s strange,’ insisted Strike. ‘Quine was repeating himself. That’s the second thing from Hobart’s Sin he put in Bombyx Mori. Two hermaphrodites, two bloody sacks. Why?’
‘Well,’ said Robin, ‘they aren’t exactly the same. In Bombyx Mori the bloody sack doesn’t belong to the hermaphrodite and it hasn’t got an aborted baby in it… maybe he’d reached the end of his invention,’ she said. ‘Maybe Bombyx Mori was like a – a final bonfire of all his ideas.’
‘The funeral pyre for his career is what it was.’
Strike sat deep in thought while the scenery beyond the window became steadily more rural. Breaks in the trees showed wide fields of snow, white upon white beneath a pearly grey sky, and still the snow came thick and fast at the car.
‘You know,’ Strike said at last, ‘I think there are two alternatives here. Either Quine genuinely was having a breakdown, had lost touch with what he was doing and believed Bombyx Mori was a masterpiece – or he meant to cause as much trouble as possible, and the duplications are there for a reason.’
‘What reason?’
‘It’s a key,’ said Strike. ‘By cross-referencing his other books, he was helping people understand what he was getting at in Bombyx Mori. He was trying to tell without being had up for libel.’
Robin did not take her eyes off the snowy motorway, but inclined her face towards him, frowning.
‘You think it was all totally deliberate? You think he wanted to cause all this trouble?’
‘When you stop and think about it,’ said Strike, ‘it’s not a bad business plan for an egotistical, thick-skinned man who’s hardly selling any books. Kick off as much trouble as you can, get the book gossiped about all over London, threats of legal action, loads of people upset, veiled revelations about a famous writer… and then disappear where the writs can’t find you and, before anyone can stop you, put it out as an ebook.’
‘But he was furious when Elizabeth Tassel told him she wouldn’t publish it.’