The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(46)

If they thought they were inconveniencing him, they were wrong. He had nowhere else to be and they had fed him quite a decent meal. If they had only let him smoke, he would have been quite comfortable. The woman who had been questioning him for an hour had told him he might go outside, accompanied, into the rain for a cigarette, but inertia and curiosity had kept him in his seat. His birthday whisky sat beside him in its carrier bag. He thought that if they kept him here much longer he might break it open. They had left him a plastic beaker of water.

The door behind him whispered over the dense grey carpet.

‘Mystic Bob,’ said a voice.

Richard Anstis of the Metropolitan Police and the Territorial Army entered the room grinning, his hair wet with rain, carrying a bundle of papers under his arm. One side of his face was heavily scarred, the skin beneath his right eye pulled taut. They had saved his sight at the field hospital in Kabul while Strike had lain unconscious, doctors working to preserve the knee of his severed leg.

‘Anstis!’ said Strike, taking the policeman’s proffered hand. ‘What the—?’

‘Pulled rank, mate, I’m going to handle this one,’ said Anstis, dropping into the seat lately vacated by the surly female detective. ‘You’re not popular round here, you know. Lucky for you, you’ve got Uncle Dickie on your side, vouching for you.’

He always said that Strike had saved his life, and perhaps it was true. They had been under fire on a yellow dirt road in Afghanistan. Strike himself was not sure what had made him sense the imminent explosion. The youth running from the roadside ahead with what looked like his younger brother could simply have been fleeing the gunfire. All he knew was that he had yelled at the driver of the Viking to brake, an injunction not followed – perhaps not heard – that he had reached forward, grabbed Anstis by the back of the shirt and hauled him one-handed into the back of the vehicle. Had Anstis remained where he was he would probably have suffered the fate of young Gary Topley, who had been sitting directly in front of Strike, and of whom they could find only the head and torso to bury.

‘Need to run through this story one more time, mate,’ said Anstis, spreading out in front of him the statement that he must have taken from the female officer.

‘All right if I drink?’ asked Strike wearily.

Under Anstis’s amused gaze, Strike retrieved the Arran single malt from the carrier bag and added two fingers to the lukewarm water in his plastic cup.

‘Right: you were hired by his wife to find the dead man… we’re assuming the body’s this writer, this—’

‘Owen Quine, yeah,’ supplied Strike, as Anstis squinted over his colleague’s handwriting. ‘His wife hired me six days ago.’

‘And at that point he’d been missing—?’

‘Ten days.’

‘But she hadn’t been to the police?’

‘No. He did this regularly: dropped out of sight without telling anyone where he was, then coming home again. He liked taking off for hotels without his wife.’

‘Why did she bring you in this time?’

‘Things are difficult at home. There’s a disabled daughter and money’s short. He’d been away a bit longer than usual. She thought he’d gone off to a writer’s retreat. She didn’t know the name of the place, but I checked and he wasn’t there.’

‘Still don’t see why she called you rather than us.’

‘She says she called your lot in once before when he went walkabout and he was angry about it. Apparently he’d been with a girlfriend.’

‘I’ll check that,’ said Anstis, making a note. ‘What made you go to that house?’

‘I found out last night the Quines co-owned it.’

A slight pause.

‘His wife hadn’t mentioned it?’

‘No,’ said Strike. ‘Her story is that he hated the place and never went near it. She gave the impression she’d half forgotten they even owned it—’

‘Is that likely?’ murmured Anstis, scratching his chin. ‘If they’re skint?’

‘It’s complicated,’ said Strike. ‘The other owner’s Michael Fancourt—’

‘I’ve heard of him.’

‘—and she says he won’t let them sell. There was bad blood between Fancourt and Quine.’ Strike drank his whisky; it warmed throat and stomach. (Quine’s stomach, his entire digestive tract, had been cut out. Where the hell was it?) ‘Anyway, I went along at lunchtime and there he was – or most of him was.’

The whisky had made him crave a cigarette worse than ever.

‘The body’s a real f*cking mess, from what I’ve heard,’ said Anstis.

‘Wanna see?’

Strike pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, brought up the photographs of the corpse and handed it across the desk.

‘Holy shit,’ said Anstis. After a minute of silent contemplation of the rotting corpse he asked, disgusted, ‘What are those around him… plates?’

‘Yep,’ said Strike.

‘That mean anything to you?’

‘Nothing,’ said Strike.

‘Any idea when he was last seen alive?’

‘The last time his wife saw him was the night of the fifth. He’d just had dinner with his agent, who’d told him he couldn’t publish his latest book because he’s libelled Christ knows how many people, including a couple of very litigious men.’