The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(115)

Busy though the restaurant was, Strike heard the response: shrill, distant screaming down the line. Waldegrave looked horrified.

‘JoJo? Are you—?’

But then the doughy, amiable face became tauter than Strike could have believed. Veins stood out on Waldegrave’s neck and his mouth stretched in an ugly snarl.

‘Fuck you!’ he said, and his voice carried loudly to all the surrounding tables so that fifty heads jerked upwards, conversations stalled. ‘Do not call me on JoJo’s number! No, you drunken f*cking – you heard me – I drink because I’m f*cking married to you, that’s why!’

The overweight woman behind Waldegrave looked around, outraged. Waiters were glaring; one had so far forgotten himself as to have paused with a Yorkshire pudding halfway to a Japanese businessman’s plate. The decorous gentleman’s club had doubtless seen other drunken brawls, but they could not fail to shock among the dark wood panels, the glass chandeliers and the bills of fare, where everything was stolidly British, calm and staid.

‘Well, whose f*cking fault’s that?’ shouted Waldegrave.

He staggered to his feet, ramming his unfortunate neighbour yet again, but this time there was no remonstrance from her companion. The restaurant had fallen silent. Waldegrave was weaving his way out of it, a bottle and a third to the bad, swearing into his mobile, and Strike, stranded at the table, was amused to find in himself some of the disapproval felt in the mess for the man who cannot hold his drink.

‘Bill, please,’ said Strike to the nearest gaping waiter. He was disappointed that he had not gotten to sample the spotted dick, which he had noted on the bill of fare, but he must catch Waldegrave if he could.

While the diners muttered and watched him out of the corners of their eyes, Strike paid, pulled himself up from the table and, leaning on his stick, followed in Waldegrave’s ungainly footsteps. From the outraged expression of the ma?tre d’ and the sound of Waldegrave still yelling just outside the door, Strike suspected that Waldegrave had taken some persuasion to leave the premises.

He found the editor propped up against the cold wall to the left of the doors. Snow was falling thickly all around them; the pavements were crunchy with it, passers-by muffled to the ears. The backdrop of solid grandeur removed, Waldegrave no longer looked like a vaguely scruffy academic. Drunk, grubby and crumpled, swearing into a phone disguised by his large hand, he might have been a mentally ill down-and-out.

‘… not my f*cking fault, you stupid bitch! Did I write the f*cking thing? Did I?… you’d better f*cking talk to her then, hadn’t you?… If you don’t, I will… Don’t you threaten me, you ugly f*cking slut… if you’d kept your legs closed… you f*cking heard me—’

Waldegrave saw Strike. He stood gaping for a few seconds then cut the call. The mobile slipped through his fumbling fingers and landed on the snowy pavement.

‘Bollocks,’ said Jerry Waldegrave.

The wolf had turned back into the sheep. He groped with bare fingers for the phone in the slush around his feet and his glasses fell off. Strike picked them up for him.

‘Thanks. Thanks. Sorry about that. Sorry…’

Strike saw tears on Waldegrave’s puffy cheeks as the editor rammed his glasses back on. Stuffing the cracked phone into his pocket, he turned an expression of despair upon the detective.

‘’S ruined my f*cking life,’ he said. ‘That book. ’N I thought Owen… one thing he held sacred. Father daughter. One thing…’

With another dismissive gesture, Waldegrave turned and walked away, weaving badly, thoroughly drunk. He had had, the detective guessed, at least a bottle before they met. There was no point following him.

Watching Waldegrave disappear into the swirling snow, past the Christmas shoppers scrambling, laden, along the slushy pavements, Strike remembered a hand closing ungently on an upper arm, a stern man’s voice, an angrier young woman’s. ‘Mummy’s made a beeline, why don’t you grab her?’

Turning up his coat collar Strike thought he knew, now, what the meaning was: of a dwarf in a bloody bag, of the horns under the Cutter’s cap and, cruellest of all, the attempted drowning.





37





… when I am provok’d to fury, I cannot incorporate with patience and reason.



William Congreve, The Double-Dealer





Strike set out for his office beneath a sky of dirty silver, his feet moving with difficulty through the rapidly accumulating snow, which was still falling fast. Though he had touched nothing but water, he felt a little drunk on good rich food, which gave him the false sense of well-being that Waldegrave had probably passed some time mid-morning, drinking in his office. The walk between Simpson’s-in-the-Strand and his draughty little office on Denmark Street would take a fit and unimpaired adult perhaps a quarter of an hour. Strike’s knee remained sore and overworked, but he had just spent more than his entire week’s food budget on a single meal. Lighting a cigarette, he limped away through the knife-sharp cold, head bowed against the snow, wondering what Robin had found out at the Bridlington Bookshop.

As he walked past the fluted columns of the Lyceum Theatre, Strike pondered the fact that Daniel Chard was convinced that Jerry Waldegrave had helped Quine write his book, whereas Waldegrave thought that Elizabeth Tassel had played upon his sense of grievance until it had erupted into print. Were these, he wondered, simple cases of displaced anger? Having been baulked of the true culprit by Quine’s gruesome death, were Chard and Waldegrave seeking living scapegoats on whom to vent their frustrated fury? Or were they right to detect, in Bombyx Mori, a foreign influence?