The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(151)

The room seemed much smaller with his arrival. Next to Kathryn, Strike appeared huge and almost unnecessarily male; when she had swept it clear of Christmas ornaments, he dwarfed the only armchair. Pippa retreated to the end of the sofa and perched on the arm, throwing Strike looks composed of defiance and terror.

‘D’you want a drink of something?’ Kathryn threw at Strike in his heavy overcoat, with his size fourteen feet planted squarely on her swirly rug.

‘Cup of tea would be great,’ he said.

She left for the tiny kitchen. Finding herself alone with Strike and Robin, Pippa panicked and scuttled after her.

‘You’ve done bloody well,’ Strike murmured to Robin, ‘if they’re offering tea.’

‘She’s very proud of being a writer,’ Robin breathed back, ‘which means she could understand him in ways that other people…’

But Pippa had returned with a box of cheap biscuits and Strike and Robin fell silent at once. Pippa resumed her seat at the end of the sofa, casting Strike frightened sidelong glances that had, as when she had cowered in their office, a whiff of theatrical enjoyment about them.

‘This is very good of you, Kathryn,’ said Strike, when she had set a tray of tea on the table. One of the mugs, Robin saw, read Keep Clam and Proofread.

‘We’ll see,’ retorted Kent, her arms folded as she glared at him from a height.

‘Kath, sit,’ coaxed Pippa, and Kathryn sat reluctantly down between Pippa and Robin on the sofa.

Strike’s first priority was to nurse the tenuous trust that Robin had managed to foster; the direct attack had no place here. He therefore embarked on a speech echoing Robin’s, implying that the authorities were having second thoughts about Leonora’s arrest and that they were reviewing the current evidence, avoiding direct mention of the police yet implying with every word that the Met was now turning its attention to Kathryn Kent. As he spoke a siren echoed in the distance. Strike added assurances that he personally felt sure that Kent was completely in the clear, but that he saw her as a resource the police had failed to understand or utilise properly.

‘Yeah, well, you could be right there,’ she said. She had not so much blossomed under his soothing words as unclenched. Picking up the Keep Clam mug she said with a show of disdain, ‘All they wanted to know about was our sex life.’

The way Anstis had told it, Strike remembered, Kathryn had volunteered a lot of information on the subject without being put under undue pressure.

‘I’m not interested in your sex life,’ said Strike. ‘It’s obvious he wasn’t – to be blunt – getting what he wanted at home.’

‘Hadn’t slept with her in years,’ said Kathryn. Remembering the photographs in Leonora’s bedroom of Quine tied up, Robin dropped her gaze to the surface of her tea. ‘They had nothing in common. He couldn’t talk to her about his work, she wasn’t interested, didn’t give a damn. He told us – didn’t he?’ – she looked up at Pippa, perched on the arm of the sofa beside her – ‘she never even read his books properly. He wanted someone to connect to on that level. He could really talk to me about literature.’

‘And me,’ said Pippa, launching at once into a speech: ‘He was interested in identity politics, you know, and he talked to me for hours about what it was like for me being born, basically, in the wrong—’

‘Yeah, he told me it was a relief to be able to talk to someone who actually understood his work,’ said Kathryn loudly, drowning Pippa out.

‘I thought so,’ said Strike, nodding. ‘And the police didn’t bother asking you about any of this, I take it?’

‘Well, they asked where we met and I told them: on his creative writing course,’ said Kathryn. ‘It was just gradual, you know, he was interested in my writing…’

‘… in our writing…’ said Pippa quietly.

Kathryn talked at length, Strike nodding with every appearance of interest at the gradual progression of the teacher–student relationship to something much warmer, Pippa tagging along, it seemed, and leaving Quine and Kathryn only at the bedroom door.

‘I write fantasy with a twist,’ said Kathryn and Strike was surprised and a little amused that she had begun to talk like Fancourt: in rehearsed phrases, in sound-bites. He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practised talking about their work during their coffee breaks and he remembered what Waldegrave had told him about Quine, that he had freely admitted to role-playing interviews with a biro. ‘It’s fantasy slash erotica really, but quite literary. And that’s the thing about traditional publishing, you know, they don’t want to take a chance on something that hasn’t been seen before, it’s all about what fits their sales categories, and if you’re blending several genres, if you’re creating something entirely new, they’re afraid to take a chance… I know that Liz Tassel,’ Kathryn spoke the name as though it were a medical complaint, ‘told Owen my work was too niche. But that’s the great thing about indie publishing, the freedom—’

‘Yeah,’ said Pippa, clearly desperate to put in her two pennys’ worth, ‘that’s true, for genre fiction I think indie can be the way to go—’

‘Except I’m not really genre,’ said Kathryn, with a slight frown, ‘that’s my point—’