The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(135)

Limping through the slippery grey snow required physical effort, which helped distract his busy mind, making moot the question of whether he was moving from suspect to suspect on Leonora’s behalf, or Charlotte’s. Let the latter continue towards the prison of her own choosing: he would not call, he would not text.

When he reached the Tube, he pulled out his phone and telephoned Jerry Waldegrave. He was sure that the editor had information that Strike needed, that he had not known he needed before his moment of revelation in the River Café, but Waldegrave did not pick up. Strike was not surprised. Waldegrave had a failing marriage, a moribund career and a daughter to worry about; why take a detective’s calls too? Why complicate your life when it did not need complicating, when you had a choice?

The cold, the ringing of unanswered phones, silent flats with locked doors: he could do nothing else today. Strike bought a newspaper and went to the Tottenham, sitting himself beneath one of the voluptuous women painted by a Victorian set-designer, cavorting with flora in their flimsy draperies. Today Strike felt strangely as though he was in a waiting room, whiling away the hours. Memories like shrapnel, for ever embedded, infected by what had come later… words of love and undying devotion, times of sublime happiness, lies upon lies upon lies… his attention kept sliding away from the stories he was reading.

His sister Lucy had once said to him in exasperation, ‘Why do you put up with it? Why? Just because she’s beautiful?’

And he had answered: ‘It helps.’

She had expected him to say ‘no’, of course. Though they spent so much time trying to make themselves beautiful, you were not supposed to admit to women that beauty mattered. Charlotte was beautiful, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he had never rid himself of a sense of wonder at her looks, nor of the gratitude they inspired, nor of pride by association.

Love, Michael Fancourt had said, is a delusion.

Strike turned the page on a picture of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s sulky face without seeing it. Had he imagined things in Charlotte that had never been there? Had he invented virtues for her, to add lustre to her staggering looks? He had been nineteen when they met. It seemed incredibly young to Strike now, as he sat in this pub carrying a good two stone of excess weight, missing half a leg.

Perhaps he had created a Charlotte in her own image who had never existed outside his own besotted mind, but what of it? He had loved the real Charlotte too, the woman who had stripped herself bare in front of him, demanding whether he could still love her if she did this, if she confessed to this, if she treated him like this… until finally she had found his limit and beauty, rage and tears had been insufficient to hold him, and she had fled into the arms of another man.

And maybe that’s love, he thought, siding in his mind with Michael Fancourt against an invisible and censorious Robin, who for some reason seemed to be sitting in judgement on him as he sat drinking Doom Bar and pretending to read about the worst winter on record. You and Matthew… Strike could see it even if she could not: the condition of being with Matthew was not to be herself.

Where was the couple that saw each other clearly? In the endless parade of suburban conformity that seemed to be Lucy and Greg’s marriage? In the tedious variations on betrayal and disillusionment that brought a never-ending stream of clients to his door? In the wilfully blind allegiance of Leonora Quine to a man whose every fault had been excused because ‘he’s a writer’, or the hero worship that Kathryn Kent and Pippa Midgley had brought to the same fool, trussed like a turkey and disembowelled?

Strike was depressing himself. He was halfway down his third pint. As he wondered whether he was going to have a fourth, his mobile buzzed on the table where he had laid it, face down.

He drank his beer slowly while the pub filled up around him, looking at his phone, taking bets against himself. Outside the chapel, giving me one last chance to stop it? Or she’s done it and wants to let me know?

He drank the last of his beer before flipping the mobile over.



Congratulate me. Mrs Jago Ross.





Strike stared at the words for a few seconds, then slid the phone into his pocket, got up, folded the newspaper under his arm and set off home.

As he walked with the aid of his stick back to Denmark Street he remembered words from his favourite book, unread for a very long time, buried at the bottom of the box of belongings on his landing.



… difficile est longum subito deponere amoren,



difficile est, uerum hoc qua lubet efficias…

… it is hard to throw off long-established love:

Hard, but this you must manage somehow…





The restlessness that had consumed him all day had gone. He felt hungry and in need of relaxation. Arsenal were playing Fulham at three; there was just time to cook himself a late lunch before kick-off.

And after that, he thought, he might go round to see Nina Lascelles. Tonight was not a night he fancied spending alone.





42





MATHEO:… an odd toy.



GIULIANO: Ay, to mock an ape withal.



Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour





Robin arrived at work on Monday morning feeling tired and vaguely battle-weary, but proud of herself.

She and Matthew had spent most of the weekend discussing her job. In some ways (strange to think this, after nine years together) it had been the deepest and most serious conversation that they had ever had. Why had she not admitted for so long that her secret interest in investigative work had long pre-dated meeting Cormoran Strike? Matthew had seemed stunned when she had finally confessed to him that she had had an ambition to work in some form of criminal investigation since her early teens.