The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(32)
‘Anyway,’ said Nina, shaking back her light brown fringe and changing the subject abruptly, ‘how are you and I supposed to know each other, once we get to the party? Are you my boyfriend, or what?’
‘Are partners allowed at this thing?’
‘Yeah, but I haven’t told anyone I’m seeing you, so we can’t have been going out long. We’ll say we got together at a party last weekend, OK?’
Strike heard, with almost identical amounts of disquiet and gratified vanity, the enthusiasm with which she suggested a fictional tryst.
‘Need a pee before we go,’ he said, raising himself heavily from the wooden bench as she drained her third glass.
The stairs down to the bathroom in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese were vertiginous and the ceiling so low that he smacked his head even while stooping. As he rubbed his temple, swearing under his breath, it seemed to Strike that he had just been given a divine clout over the head, to remind him what was, and what was not, a good idea.
13
It is reported, you possess a book
Wherein you have quoted by intelligence
The names of all notorious offenders,
Lurking about the city.
John Webster, The White Devil
Experience had taught Strike that there was a certain type of woman to whom he was unusually attractive. Their common characteristics were intelligence and the flickering intensity of badly wired lamps. They were often attractive and usually, as his very oldest friend Dave Polworth liked to put it, ‘total f*cking flakes’. Precisely what it was about him that attracted the type, Strike had never taken the time to consider, although Polworth, a man of many pithy theories, took the view that such women (‘nervy, overbred’) were subconsciously looking for what he called ‘carthorse blood’.
Strike’s ex-fiancée, Charlotte, might have been said to be queen of the species. Beautiful, clever, volatile and damaged, she had returned again and again to Strike in the face of familial opposition and her friends’ barely veiled disgust. He had finally put an end to sixteen years of their on-again, off-again relationship in March and she had become engaged almost immediately to the ex-boyfriend from whom Strike, so many years ago in Oxford, had won her. Barring one exceptional night since, Strike’s love life had been voluntarily barren. Work had filled virtually every waking hour and he had successfully resisted advances, subtle or overt, from the likes of his glamorous brunette client, soon-to-be divorcées with time to kill and loneliness to assuage.
But there was always the dangerous urge to submit, to brave complications for a night or two of consolation, and now Nina Lascelles was hurrying along beside him in the dark Strand, taking two strides to his one, and informing him of her exact address in St John’s Wood ‘so it looks like you’ve been there’. She barely came up to his shoulder and Strike had never found very small women attractive. Her torrent of chat about Roper Chard was laden with more laughter than was strictly necessary and once or twice she touched his arm to emphasise a point.
‘Here we are,’ she said at last, as they approached a tall modern building with a revolving glass door and the words ‘Roper Chard’ picked out in shining orange Perspex across the stonework.
A wide lobby dotted with people in evening dress faced a line of metal sliding doors. Nina pulled an invitation out of her bag and showed it to what looked like hired help in a badly fitting tuxedo, then she and Strike joined twenty others in a large mirrored lift.
‘This floor’s for meetings,’ Nina shouted up to him as they debouched into a crowded open-plan area where a band was playing to a sparsely populated dance floor. ‘It’s usually partitioned. So – who do you want to meet?’
‘Anyone who knew Quine well and might have an idea where he is.’
‘That’s only Jerry, really…’
They were buffeted by a fresh consignment of guests from the lift behind them and moved into the crowd. Strike thought he felt Nina grab the back of his coat, like a child, but he did not reciprocate by taking her hand or in any way reinforce the impression that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Once or twice he heard her greet people in passing. They eventually won through to the far wall, where tables manned by white-coated waiters groaned with party food and it was possible to make conversation without shouting. Strike took a couple of dainty crab cakes and ate them, deploring their minuscule size, while Nina looked around.
‘Can’t see Jerry anywhere, but he’s probably up on the roof, smoking. Shall we try up there? Oooh, look there – Daniel Chard, mingling with the herd!’
‘Which one?’
‘The bald one.’
A respectful little distance had been left around the head of the company, like the flattened circle of corn that surrounds a rising helicopter, as he talked to a curvaceous young woman in a tight black dress.
Phallus Impudicus; Strike could not repress a grin of amusement, yet Chard’s baldness suited him. He was younger and fitter-looking than Strike had expected and handsome in his way, with thick dark eyebrows over deep-set eyes, a hawkish nose and a thin-lipped mouth. His charcoal suit was unexceptional but his tie, which was pale mauve, was much wider than the average and bore drawings of human noses. Strike, whose dress sense had always been conventional, an instinct honed by the sergeants’ mess, could not help but be intrigued by this small but forceful statement of non-conformity in a CEO, especially as it was drawing the occasional glance of surprise or amusement.