The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(142)

‘She’ll be at Pinkelman’s party too, won’t she?’ said Strike, watching Fancourt for his reaction. ‘She still represents him, doesn’t she?’

‘It doesn’t matter to me if Liz is there. Does she imagine that I’m still burning with malice towards her?’ asked Fancourt, with his sour smile. ‘I don’t think I give Liz Tassel a thought from one year’s end to the next.’

‘Why did she refuse to ditch Quine when you asked her to?’ asked Strike.

Strike did not see why he should not deploy the direct attack to a man who had announced an ulterior motive for meeting within seconds of their first encounter.

‘It was never a question of me asking her to drop Quine,’ said Fancourt, still in measured cadences for the benefit of that invisible amanuensis. ‘I explained that I could not remain at her agency while he was there, and left.’

‘I see,’ said Strike, who was well used to the splitting of hairs. ‘Why d’you think she let you leave? You were the bigger fish, weren’t you?’

‘I think it’s fair to say that I was a barracuda compared to Quine’s stickleback,’ said Fancourt with a smirk, ‘but, you see, Liz and Quine were sleeping together.’

‘Really? I didn’t know that,’ said Strike, clicking out the nib of his pen.

‘Liz arrived at Oxford,’ said Fancourt, ‘this strapping great girl who’d been helping her father castrate bulls and the like on sundry northern farms, desperate to get laid, and nobody fancied the job much. She had a thing for me, a very big thing – we were tutorial partners, juicy Jacobean intrigue calculated to get a girl going – but I never felt altruistic enough to relieve her of her virginity. We remained friends,’ said Fancourt, ‘and when she started her agency I introduced her to Quine, who notoriously preferred to plumb the bottom of the barrel, sexually speaking. The inevitable occurred.’

‘Very interesting,’ said Strike. ‘Is this common knowledge?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Fancourt. ‘Quine was already married to his – well, his murderess, I suppose we have to call her now, don’t we?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’d imagine “murderess” trumps “wife” when defining a close relationship? And Liz would have threatened him with dire consequences if he’d been his usual indiscreet self about her bedroom antics, on the wild off-chance that I might yet be persuaded to sleep with her.’

Was this blind vanity, Strike wondered, a matter of fact, or a mixture of both?

‘She used to look at me with those big cow eyes, waiting, hoping…’ said Fancourt, a cruel twist to his mouth. ‘After Ellie died she realised that I wasn’t going to oblige her even when grief-stricken. I’d imagine she was unable to bear the thought of decades of future celibacy, so she stood by her man.’

‘Did you ever speak to Quine again after you left the agency?’ Strike asked.

‘For the first few years after Ellie died he’d scuttle out of any bar I entered,’ said Fancourt. ‘Eventually he got brave enough to remain in the same restaurant, throwing me nervous looks. No, I don’t think we ever spoke to each other again,’ said Fancourt, as though the matter were of little interest. ‘You were injured in Afghanistan, I think?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike.

It might work on women, Strike reflected, the calculated intensity of the gaze. Perhaps Owen Quine had fixed Kathryn Kent and Pippa Midgley with the identical hungry, vampiric stare when he told them he would be putting them into Bombyx Mori… and they had been thrilled to think of part of themselves, their lives, forever encased in the amber of a writer’s prose…

‘How did it happen?’ asked Fancourt, his eyes on Strike’s legs.

‘IED,’ said Strike. ‘What about Talgarth Road? You and Quine were co-owners of the house. Didn’t you ever need to communicate about the place? Did you ever run into each other there?’

‘Never.’

‘Haven’t you been there to check on it? You’ve owned it – what—?’

‘Twenty, twenty-five years, something like that,’ said Fancourt indifferently. ‘No, I haven’t been inside since Joe died.’

‘I suppose the police have asked you about the woman who thinks she saw you outside on the eighth of November?’

‘Yes,’ said Fancourt shortly. ‘She was mistaken.’

Beside them, the actor was still in full and loud flow.

‘… thought I’d bloody had it, couldn’t see where the f*ck I was supposed to be running, sand in my bloody eyes…’

‘So you haven’t been in the house since eighty-six?’

‘No,’ said Fancourt impatiently. ‘Neither Owen nor I wanted it in the first place.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because our friend Joe died there in exceptionally squalid circumstances. He hated hospitals, refused medication. By the time he fell unconscious the place was in a disgusting state and he, who had been the living embodiment of Apollo, was reduced to a sack of bones, his skin… it was a grisly end,’ said Fancourt, ‘made worse by Daniel Ch—’

Fancourt’s expression hardened. He made an odd chewing motion as though literally eating unspoken words. Strike waited.