‘Well, I could’ve come if I’d got a first-class ticket,’ Robin admitted as the Labrador yawned, stretched and resettled himself on the hearthrug. ‘But I’d already paid for the sleeper.’
‘Matt’s always going on about how much more money you would have made if you’d taken that HR job,’ said her mother, her eyes on the TV screen. ‘I’d have thought he’d appreciate you saving the pennies. Now shush, I want to hear about revenge.’
The interviewer was trying to formulate a question.
‘But where women are concerned, you haven’t always – contemporary mores, so-called political correctness – I’m thinking particularly of your assertion that female writers—’
‘This again?’ said Fancourt, slapping his knees with his hands (the interviewer perceptibly jumped). ‘I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don’t retract a word. That is a fact.’
Robin was twisting her engagement ring on her finger, torn between her desire to follow Matt and persuade him she had done nothing wrong and anger that any such persuasion should be required. The demands of his job came first, always; she had never known him apologise for late hours, for jobs that took him to the far side of London and brought him home at eight o’clock at night…
‘I was going to say,’ the interviewer hurried on, with an ingratiating smile, ‘that this book might give those critics pause. I thought the central female character was treated with great understanding, with real empathy. Of course’ – he glanced down at his notes and up again; Robin could feel his nerves – ‘parallels are bound to be drawn – in dealing with the suicide of a young woman, I expect you’re braced – you must be expecting—’
‘That stupid people will assume that I have written an autobiographical account of my first wife’s suicide?’
‘Well, it’s bound to be seen as – it’s bound to raise questions—’
‘Then let me say this,’ said Fancourt, and paused.
They were sitting in front of a long window looking out onto a sunny, windswept lawn. Robin wondered fleetingly when the programme had been filmed – before the snows had come, clearly – but Matthew dominated her thoughts. She ought to go and find him, yet somehow she remained on the sofa.
‘When Eff – Ellie died,’ began Fancourt, ‘when she died—’
The close-up felt painfully intrusive. The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes deepened as he closed them; a square hand flew to conceal his face.
Michael Fancourt appeared to be crying.
‘So much for love being a mirage and a chimera,’ sighed Mrs Ellacott as she tossed down her pen. ‘This is no good. I wanted blood and guts, Michael. Blood and guts.’
Unable to stand inaction any longer, Robin got up and headed for the sitting-room door. These were not normal circumstances. Matthew’s mother had been buried that day. It behoved her to apologise, to make amends.
35
We are all liable to mistakes, sir; if you own it to be so, there needs no farther apology.
William Congreve, The Old Bachelor
The Sunday broadsheets next day strove to find a dignified balance between an objective assessment of Owen Quine’s life and work and the macabre, Gothic nature of his death.
‘A minor literary figure, occasionally interesting, tipping latterly into self-parody, eclipsed by his contemporaries but continuing to blaze his own outmoded trail,’ said the Sunday Times in a front-page column that led to a promise of much more excitement within: A sadist’s blueprint: see pages 10–11 and, beside a thumbnail photograph of Kenneth Halliwell: Books and Bookmen: literary killers p. 3 Culture.
‘Rumours about the unpublished book that allegedly inspired his murder are now spreading beyond London’s literary circles,’ the Observer assured its readers. ‘Were it not for the dictates of good taste, Roper Chard would have an instant bestseller on its hands.’
KINKY WRITER DISEMBOWELLED IN SEX GAME, declared the Sunday People.
Strike had bought every paper on his way home from Nina Lascelles’s, difficult though it was to manage them all and his stick over snowy pavements. It occurred to him as he struggled towards Denmark Street that he was unwisely encumbered, should his would-be assailant of the previous evening reappear, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Later that evening he worked his way through the news stories while eating chips, lying on his bed with his prosthetic leg mercifully removed once more.
Viewing the facts through the press’s distorting lens was stimulating to his imagination. At last, having finished Culpepper’s piece in the News of the World (‘Sources close to the story confirm that Quine liked to be tied up by his wife, who denies that she knew the kinky writer had gone to stay in their second home’) Strike slid the papers off his bed, reached for the notebook he kept by his bed and scribbled himself a list of reminders for the following day. He did not add Anstis’s initial to any of the tasks or questions, but bookshop man and MF when filmed? were both followed by a capital R. He then texted Robin, reminding her to keep her eyes peeled for a tall woman in a black coat the following morning and not to enter Denmark Street if she was there.
Robin saw nobody answering that description on her short journey from the Tube and arrived at the office at nine o’clock next morning to find Strike sitting at her desk and using her computer.
‘Morning. No nutters outside?’
‘No one,’ said Robin, hanging up her coat.
‘How’s Matthew?’
‘Fine,’ lied Robin.
The aftermath of their row about her decision to drive Strike to Devon clung to her like fumes. The argument had simmered and erupted repeatedly all through their car journey back to Clapham; her eyes were still puffy from crying and lack of sleep.
‘Tough for him,’ muttered Strike, still frowning at the monitor. ‘His mother’s funeral.’
‘Mm,’ said Robin, moving to fill the kettle and feeling annoyed that Strike chose to empathise with Matthew today, exactly when she would have welcomed an assurance that he was an unreasonable prick.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked, setting a mug of tea at Strike’s elbow, for which he gave her muttered thanks.
‘Trying to find out when Michael Fancourt’s interview was filmed,’ he said. ‘He was on telly on Saturday night.’
‘I watched that,’ said Robin.
‘Me too,’ said Strike.