The Silkworm (33 page)

‘We know she hired you to frame us,’ croaked Pippa.

‘Who,’ growled Strike, ‘is “
she
” and who is “
us
”?’

‘Leonora Quine!’ said Pippa. ‘We know what she’s like and we know what she’s capable of! She hates us, me and Kath, she’d do anything to get us. She murdered Owen and she’s trying to pin it on us! You can look like that all you want!’ she shouted at Strike, whose heavy eyebrows had risen halfway to his thick hairline. ‘She’s a crazy bitch, she’s jealous as hell – she couldn’t stand him seeing us and now she’s got you poking around trying to get stuff to use against us!’

‘I don’t know whether you believe this paranoid bollocks—’

‘We know what’s going on!’ shouted Pippa.

‘
Shut up.
Nobody except the killer knew Quine was dead when you started stalking me. You followed me the day I found the body and I know you were following Leonora for a week before that. Why?’ And when she did not answer, he repeated: ‘Last chance: why did you follow me from Leonora’s?’

‘I thought you might lead me to where he was,’ said Pippa.

‘Why did you want to know where he was?’

‘So I could fucking kill him!’ yelled Pippa, and Robin was confirmed in her impression that Pippa shared Martin’s almost total lack of self-preservation.

‘And why did you want to kill him?’ asked Strike, as though she had said nothing out of the ordinary.

‘Because of what he did to us in that horrible fucking book! You know – you’ve read it – Epicoene – that bastard, that bastard—’

‘Bloody calm down! So you’d read
Bombyx Mori
by then?’

‘Yeah, of course I had—’

‘And that’s when you started putting shit through Quine’s letter box?’

‘Shit for a shit!’ she shouted.

‘Witty. When did you read the book?’

‘Kath read the bits about us on the phone and then I went round and—’

‘When did she read you the bits on the phone?’

‘W-when she came home and found it lying on her doormat. Whole manuscript. She could hardly get the door open. He’d fed it through her door with a note,’ said Pippa Midgley. ‘She showed me.’

‘What did the note say?’

‘It said “Payback time for both of us. Hope you’re happy! Owen.”’

‘“Payback time for both of us”?’ repeated Strike, frowning. ‘D’you know what that meant?’

‘Kath wouldn’t tell me but I know she understood. She was d-devastated,’ said Pippa, her chest heaving. ‘She’s a – she’s a wonderful person. You don’t know her. She’s been like a m-mother to me. We met on his writing course and we were like – we became like—’ She caught up her breath and whimpered: ‘He was a bastard. He lied to us about what he was writing, he lied about – about everything—’

She began to cry again, wailing and sobbing, and Robin, worried about Mr Crowdy, said gently:

‘Pippa, just tell us what he lied about. Cormoran only wants the truth, he’s not trying to frame anyone…’

She did not know whether Pippa had heard or believed her; perhaps she simply wanted to relieve her overwrought feelings, but she took a great shuddering breath and out spilled a torrent of words:

‘He said I was like his second daughter, he
said
that to me; I told him
everything
, he knew my mum threw me out and
everything
. And I showed him m-m-my book about my life and he w-was so k-kind and interested and he said he’d help me get it p-published and he t-told us both, me and Kath, that we were in his n-new novel and he said I w-was a “b-beautiful lost soul” –
that’s what he said to me,
’ gasped Pippa, her mobile mouth working, ‘and he p-pretended to read a bit out to me one day, over the phone, and it was – it was lovely and then I r-read it and he’d – he’d written
that
…
Kath was in b-bits… the cave… Harpy and Epicoene…’

‘So Kathryn came home and found it all over the doormat, did she?’ said Strike. ‘Came home from where – work?’

‘From s-sitting in the hospice with her dying sister.’

‘And that was
when
?’ said Strike for the third time.

‘Who cares when it—?’

‘
I fucking care!
’

‘Was it the ninth?’ Robin asked. She had brought up Kathryn Kent’s blog on her computer, the screen angled away from the sofa where Pippa was sitting. ‘Could it have been Tuesday the ninth, Pippa? The Tuesday after bonfire night?’

‘It was… yeah, I think it was!’ said Pippa, apparently awestruck by Robin’s lucky guess. ‘Yeah, Kath went away on bonfire night because Angela was so ill—’

‘How d’you know it was bonfire night?’ Strike asked.

‘Because Owen told Kath he c-couldn’t see her that night, because he had to do fireworks with his daughter,’ said Pippa. ‘And Kath was really upset, because he was supposed to be leaving! He’d promised her, he’d promised at
long bloody last
he’d leave his bitch of a wife, and then he says he’s got to play sparklers with the reta—’

She drew up short, but Strike finished for her.

‘With the retard?’

‘It’s just a joke,’ muttered Pippa, shamefaced, showing more regret about her use of the word than she had about trying to stab Strike. ‘Just between me and Kath: his daughter was always the excuse why Owen couldn’t leave and be with Kath…’

‘What did Kathryn do that night, instead of seeing Quine?’ asked Strike.

‘I went over to hers. Then she got the call that her sister Angela was a lot worse and she left. Angela had cancer. It had gone everywhere.’

‘Where was Angela?’

‘In the hospice in Clapham.’

‘How did Kathryn get there?’

‘Why’s that matter?’

‘Just answer the bloody question, will you?’

‘I don’t know – Tube, I s’pose. And she stayed with Angela for three days, sleeping on a mattress on the floor by her bed because they thought Angela was going to die any moment, but Angela kept hanging on so Kath had to go home for clean clothes and that’s when she found the manuscript all over the doormat.’

‘Why are you sure she came home on the Tuesday?’ Robin asked and Strike, who had been about to ask the same thing, looked at her in surprise. He did not know about the old man in the bookshop and the German sinkhole.

‘Because on Tuesday nights I work on a helpline,’ said Pippa, ‘and I was there when Kath called me in f-floods, because she’d put the manuscript in order, and read what he’d written about us—’

‘Well, this is all very interesting,’ said Strike, ‘because Kathryn Kent told the police that she’d never read
Bombyx Mori
.’

Pippa’s horrified expression might, under other circumstances, have been amusing.

‘
You fucking tricked me!
’

‘Yeah, you’re a really tough nut to crack,’ said Strike. ‘Don’t even
think
about it,’ he added, standing over her as she tried to get up.

‘He was a – a shit!’ shouted Pippa seething with impotent rage. ‘He was a user! Pretending to be interested in our work and using us all along, that l-lying b-bastard… I thought he understood what my life’s been about – we used to talk for hours about it and he encouraged me with my life story – he t-told me he was going to help me get a publishing deal—’

Strike felt a sudden weariness wash over him. What was this mania to appear in print?

‘—and he was just trying to keep me sweet, telling him all my most private thoughts and feelings, and Kath – what he did to Kath – you
don’t understand
–
I’m glad his bitch wife killed him! If she hadn’t—’

‘Why,’ demanded Strike, ‘d’you keep saying his wife killed Quine?’

‘Because Kath’s got proof!’

A short pause.

‘What proof?’ asked Strike.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know!’ shouted Pippa with a cackle of hysterical laughter. ‘Never you mind!’

‘If she’s got proof, why hasn’t she taken it to the police?’

‘Out of compassion!’ shouted Pippa. ‘Something
you
wouldn’t—’

‘Why,’ came a plaintive voice from outside the glass door, ‘is there still all this
shouting
?’

‘Oh bloody hell,’ said Strike as the fuzzy outline of Mr Crowdy from downstairs pressed close to the glass.

Robin moved to unlock the door.

‘Very sorry, Mr Crow—’

Pippa was off the sofa in an instant. Strike made a grab for her but his knee buckled agonisingly as he lunged. Knocking Mr Crowdy aside she was gone, clattering down the stairs.

‘Leave her!’ Strike said to Robin, who looked braced to give chase. ‘Least I’ve got her knife.’

‘Knife?’ yelped Mr Crowdy and it took them fifteen minutes to persuade him not to contact the landlord (for the publicity following the Lula Landry case had unnerved the graphic designer, who lived in dread that another murderer might come seeking Strike and perhaps wander by mistake into the wrong office).

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ said Strike when they had at last persuaded Crowdy to leave. He slumped down on the sofa; Robin took her computer chair and they looked at each other for a few seconds before starting to laugh.

‘Decent good cop, bad cop routine we had going there,’ said Strike.

‘I wasn’t faking,’ said Robin, ‘I really did feel a bit sorry for her.’

‘I noticed. What about me, getting attacked?’

‘Did she
really
want to stab you, or was it play-acting?’ asked Robin sceptically.

‘She might’ve liked the idea of it more than the reality,’ acknowledged Strike. ‘Trouble is, you’re just as dead if you’re knifed by a self-dramatising twat as by a professional. And what she thought she’d gain by stabbing me—’

‘Mother love,’ said Robin quietly.

Strike stared at her.

‘Her own mother’s disowned her,’ said Robin, ‘and she’s going through a really traumatic time, I expect, taking hormones and God knows what else she’s got to do before she has the operation. She thought she had a new family, didn’t she? She thought Quine and Kathryn Kent were her new parents. She told us Quine said she was a second daughter to him and he put her in the book as Kathryn Kent’s daughter. But in
Bombyx Mori
he revealed her to the world as half male, half female. He also suggested that, beneath all the filial affection, she wanted to sleep with him.

‘Her new father,’ said Robin, ‘had let her down very badly. But her new mother was still good and loving, and she’d been betrayed as well, so Pippa set out to get even for both of them.’

She could not stop herself grinning at Strike’s looked of stunned admiration.

‘Why the hell did you give up that psychology degree?’

‘Long story,’ said Robin, looking away towards the computer monitor. ‘She’s not very old… twenty, d’you think?’

‘Looked about that,’ agreed Strike. ‘Pity we never got round to asking her about her movements in the days after Quine disappeared.’

‘She didn’t do it,’ said Robin with certainty, looking back at him.

‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ sighed Strike, ‘if only because shoving dog shit through his letter box might’ve felt a bit anticlimactic after carving out his guts.’

‘And she doesn’t seem very strong on planning or efficiency, does she?’

‘An understatement,’ he agreed.

‘Are you going to call the police about her?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. But shit,’ he said, thumping himself on the forehead, ‘we didn’t even find out why she was bloody singing in the book!’

‘I think I might know,’ said Robin after a short burst of typing and reading the results on her computer monitor. ‘Singing to soften the voice… vocal exercises for transgendered people.’

‘Was that all?’ asked Strike in disbelief.

‘What are you saying – that she was wrong to take offence?’ said Robin. ‘Come on – he was jeering at something really personal in a public—’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Strike.

He frowned out of the window, thinking. The snow was falling thick and fast.

After a while he said:

‘What happened at the Bridlington Bookshop?’

‘God, yes, I nearly forgot!’

She told him all about the assistant and his confusion between the first and the eighth of November.

‘Stupid old sod,’ said Strike.

‘That’s a bit mean,’ said Robin.

‘Cocky, wasn’t he? Mondays are always the same, goes to his friend Charles every Monday…’

‘But how do we know whether it was the Anglican bishop night or the sinkhole night?’

‘You say he claims Charles interrupted him with the sinkhole story while he was telling him about Quine coming into the shop?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Then it’s odds on Quine was in the shop on the first, not the eighth. He remembers those two bits of information as connected. Silly bugger’s got confused. He
wanted
to have seen Quine after he’d disappeared, he wanted to be able to help establish time of death, so he was subconsciously looking for reasons to think it was the Monday in the time frame for the murder, not an irrelevant Monday a whole week before anyone was interested in Quine’s movements.’

‘There’s still something odd, though, isn’t there, about what he claims Quine said to him?’ asked Robin.

‘Yeah, there is,’ said Strike. ‘Buying reading matter because he was going away for a break… so he was already planning to go away, four days before he rowed with Elizabeth Tassel? Was he already planning to go to Talgarth Road, after all those years he was supposed to have hated and avoided the place?’

‘Are you going to tell Anstis about this?’ Robin asked.

Strike gave a wry snort of laughter.

‘No, I’m not going to tell Anstis. We’ve got no real proof Quine was in there on the first instead of the eighth. Anyway, Anstis and I aren’t on the best terms just now.’

There was another long pause, and then Strike startled Robin by saying:

‘I’ve got to talk to Michael Fancourt.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘A lot of reasons,’ said Strike. ‘Things Waldegrave said to me over lunch. Can you get on to his agent or whatever contact you can find for him?’