The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(48)

‘Cormoran Strike?’

‘It’s me, Leonora,’ she said, sounding almost exactly as she usually did, except that her voice was perhaps a little less flat.

Strike gestured to Anstis that he was not ready to enter the lift and drew aside from the policeman, to a dark window beneath which traffic was winding in the endless rain.

‘Have the police been to see you?’ he asked her.

‘Yeah. I’m with them now.’

‘I’m very sorry, Leonora,’ he said.

‘You all right?’ she asked gruffly.

‘Me?’ said Strike, surprised. ‘I’m fine.’

‘They ain’t giving you a hard time? They said you was being interviewed. I said to ’em, “He only found Owen cos I asked him, what’s he bin arrested for?”’

‘They hadn’t arrested me,’ said Strike. ‘Just needed a statement.’

‘But they’ve kept you all this time.’

‘How d’you know how long—?’

‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’m downstairs in the lobby. I wanna see you, I made ’em bring me.’

Astonished, with the whisky sitting on his empty stomach, he said the first thing that occurred to him.

‘Who’s looking after Orlando?’

‘Edna,’ said Leonora, taking Strike’s concern for her daughter as a matter of course. ‘When are they gonna let you go?’

‘I’m on my way out now,’ he said.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Anstis when Strike had rung off. ‘Charlotte worrying about you?’

‘Christ, no,’ said Strike as they stepped together into the lift. He had completely forgotten that he had never told Anstis about the break-up. As a friend from the Met, Anstis was sealed off in a compartment on his own where gossip could not travel. ‘That’s over. Ended months ago.’

‘Really? Tough break,’ said Anstis, looking genuinely sorry as the lift began to move downwards. But Strike thought that some of Anstis’s disappointment was for himself. He had been one of the friends most taken with Charlotte, with her extraordinary beauty and her dirty laugh. ‘Bring Charlotte over’ had been Anstis’s frequent refrain when the two men had found themselves free of hospitals and the army, back in the city that was their home.

Strike felt an instinctive desire to shield Leonora from Anstis, but it was impossible. When the lift doors slid open there she was, thin and mousy, with her limp hair in combs, her old coat wrapped around her and an air of still wearing bedroom slippers even though her feet were clad in scuffed black shoes. She was flanked by the two uniformed officers, one female, who had evidently broken the news of Quine’s death and then brought her here. Strike deduced from the guarded glances they gave Anstis that Leonora had given them reason to wonder; that her reaction to the news that her husband was dead had struck them as unusual.

Dry-faced and matter-of-fact, Leonora seemed relieved to see Strike.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Why’d they keep you so long?’

Anstis looked at her curiously, but Strike did not introduce them.

‘Shall we go over here?’ he asked her, indicating a bench along the wall. As he limped off beside her he felt the three police officers draw together behind them.

‘How are you?’ he asked her, partly in the hope that she might exhibit some sign of distress, to assuage the curiosity of those watching.

‘Dunno,’ she said, dropping onto the plastic seat. ‘I can’t believe it. I never thought he’d go there, the silly sod. I s’pose some burglar got in and done it. He should’ve gone to a hotel like always, shouldn’t he?’

They had not told her much, then. He thought that she was more shocked than she appeared, more than she knew herself. The act of coming to him seemed the disorientated action of somebody who did not know what else to do, except to turn to the person who was supposed to be helping her.

‘Would you like me to take you home?’ Strike asked her.

‘I ’spect they’ll give me a lift back,’ she said, with the same sense of untroubled entitlement she had brought to the statement that Elizabeth Tassel would pay Strike’s bill. ‘I wanted to see you to check you was all right and I hadn’t got you in trouble, and I wanted to ask you if you’ll keep working for me.’

‘Keep working for you?’ Strike repeated.

For a split-second he wondered whether it was possible that she had not quite grasped what had happened, that she thought Quine was still out there somewhere to be found. Did her faint eccentricity of manner mask something more serious, some fundamental cognitive problem?

‘They think I know something about it,’ said Leonora. ‘I can tell.’

Strike hesitated on the verge of saying ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ but it would have been a lie. He was only too aware that Leonora, wife of a feckless, unfaithful husband, who had chosen not to contact the police and to allow ten days to elapse before making a show of looking for him, who had a key to the empty house where his body had been found and who would undoubtedly be able to take him by surprise, would be the first and most important suspect. Nevertheless, he asked: ‘Why d’you think that?’

‘I can tell,’ she repeated. ‘Way they were talking to me. And they’ve said they wanna look in our house, in his study.’