The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(39)

‘Christ almighty,’ said Strike, advancing to shake the outstretched hand with genuine pleasure. Nick and Ilsa were two of his oldest friends and they were the only place where the two halves of his early life intersected: London and Cornwall, happily married.

‘No one told me you were going to be here!’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the surprise, Oggy,’ said Nick as Strike kissed Ilsa. ‘D’you know Marguerite?’

‘No,’ said Strike, ‘I don’t.’

So this was why Lucy had wanted to check whether he was bringing anyone with him; this was the sort of woman she imagined him falling for, and living with for ever in a house with a magnolia tree in the front garden. Marguerite was dark, greasy skinned and morose-looking, wearing a shiny purple dress that appeared to have been bought when she was a little thinner. Strike was sure she was a divorcée. He was developing second sight on that subject.

‘Hi,’ she said, while thin Nina in her strappy black dress chatted with Greg; the short greeting contained a world of bitterness.

So seven of them sat down to dinner. Strike had not seen much of his civilian friends since he had been invalided out of the army. His voluntarily heavy workload had blurred the boundaries between weekday and weekend, but now he realised anew how much he liked Nick and Ilsa, and how infinitely preferable it would have been if the three of them had been alone somewhere, enjoying a curry.

‘How do you know Cormoran?’ Nina asked them avidly.

‘I was at school with him in Cornwall,’ said Ilsa, smiling at Strike across the table. ‘On and off. Came and went, didn’t you, Corm?’

And the story of Strike and Lucy’s fragmented childhood was trotted out over the smoked salmon, their travels with their itinerant mother and their regular returns to St Mawes and the aunt and uncle who had acted as surrogate parents throughout their childhood and teens.

‘And then Corm got taken to London by his mother again when he was, what, seventeen?’ said Ilsa.

Strike could tell that Lucy was not enjoying the conversation: she hated talk about their unusual upbringing, their notorious mother.

‘And he ended up at a good rough old comprehensive with me,’ said Nick. ‘Good times.’

‘Nick was a useful bloke to know,’ said Strike. ‘Knows London like the back of his hand; his dad’s a cabbie.’

‘Are you a cabbie too?’ Nina asked Nick, apparently exhilarated by the exoticism of Strike’s friends.

‘No,’ said Nick cheerfully, ‘I’m a gastroenterologist. Oggy and I had a joint eighteenth birthday party—’

‘—and Corm invited his friend Dave and me up from St Mawes for it. First time I’d ever been to London, I was so excited—’ said Ilsa.

‘—and that’s where we met,’ finished Nick, grinning at his wife.

‘And still no kids, all these years later?’ asked Greg, smug father of three sons.

There was the tiniest pause. Strike knew that Nick and Ilsa had been trying for a child, without success, for several years.

‘Not yet,’ said Nick. ‘What d’you do, Nina?’

The mention of Roper Chard brought some animation to Marguerite, who had been regarding Strike sullenly from the other end of the table, as though he were a tasty morsel placed remorselessly out of reach.

‘Michael Fancourt’s just moved to Roper Chard,’ she stated. ‘I saw it on his website this morning.’

‘Blimey, that was only made public yesterday,’ said Nina. The ‘blimey’ reminded Strike of the way Dominic Culpepper called waiters ‘mate’; it was, he thought, for Nick’s benefit, and perhaps to demonstrate to Strike that she too could mingle happily with the proletariat. (Charlotte, Strike’s ex-fiancée, had never altered her vocabulary or accent, no matter where she found herself. Nor had she liked any of his friends.)

‘Oh, I’m a big fan of Michael Fancourt’s,’ said Marguerite. ‘House of Hollow’s one of my favourite novels. I adore the Russians, and there’s something about Fancourt that makes me think of Dostoevsky…’

Lucy had told her, Strike guessed, that he had been to Oxford, that he was clever. He wished Marguerite a thousand miles away and that Lucy understood him better.

‘Fancourt can’t write women,’ said Nina dismissively. ‘He tries but he can’t do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.’

Nick had snorted into his wine at the sound of the unexpected word ‘tits’; Strike laughed at Nick laughing; Ilsa said, giggling:

‘You’re thirty-six, both of you. For God’s sake.’

‘Well, I think he’s marvellous,’ repeated Marguerite, without the flicker of a smile. She had been deprived of a potential partner, one-legged and overweight though he might be; she was not going to give up Michael Fancourt. ‘And incredibly attractive. Complicated and clever, I always fall for them,’ she sighed in an aside to Lucy, clearly referring to past calamities.

‘His head’s too big for his body,’ said Nina, cheerfully disowning her excitement of the previous evening at the sight of Fancourt, ‘and he’s phenomenally arrogant.’

‘I’ve always thought it was so touching, what he did for that young American writer,’ said Marguerite as Lucy cleared the starters away and motioned to Greg to help her in the kitchen. ‘Finishing his novel for him – that young novelist who died of Aids, what was his—?’