The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(118)

‘Will you shut the f*ck—’

But Robin quelled him with a glance, tore a handful of tissues out of the box on her desk and pushed them into Pippa’s hand.

‘T-t-ta—’

‘Would you like a tea or coffee, Pippa?’ asked Robin kindly.

‘Co… fee… pl…’

‘She’s just tried to bloody knife me, Robin!’

‘Well, she didn’t manage it, did she?’ commented Robin, busy with the kettle.

‘Ineptitude,’ said Strike incredulously, ‘is no f*cking defence under the law!’

He rounded on Pippa again, who had followed this exchange with her mouth agape.

‘Why have you been following me? What are you trying to stop me doing? And I’m warning you – just because Robin here’s buying the sob stuff—’

‘You’re working for her!’ yelled Pippa. ‘That twisted bitch, his widow! She’s got his money now, hasn’t she – we know what you’ve been hired to do, we’re not f*cking stupid!’

‘Who’s “we”?’ demanded Strike, but Pippa’s dark eyes slid again towards the door. ‘I swear to God,’ said Strike, whose much-tried knee was now throbbing in a way that made him want to grind his teeth, ‘if you go for that door one more f*cking time I’m calling the police and I’ll testify and be glad to watch you go down for attempted murder. And it won’t be fun for you inside, Pippa,’ he added. ‘Not pre-op.’

‘Cormoran!’ said Robin sharply.

‘Stating facts,’ said Strike.

Pippa had shrunk back onto the sofa and was staring at Strike in unfeigned terror.

‘Coffee,’ said Robin firmly, emerging from behind the desk and pressing the mug into one of the long-taloned hands. ‘Just tell him what all this is about, for God’s sake, Pippa. Tell him.’

Unstable and aggressive though Pippa seemed, Robin could not help pitying the girl, who appeared to have given almost no thought to the possible consequences of lunging at a private detective with a blade. Robin could only assume that she possessed in extreme form the trait that afflicted her own younger brother Martin, who was notorious in their family for the lack of foresight and love of danger that had resulted in more trips to casualty than the rest of his siblings combined.

‘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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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—’