The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(120)

‘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.’