The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(49)

It was routine, but he could see how she would feel this to be intrusive and ominous.

‘Does Orlando know what’s happened?’ he asked.

‘I told her but I don’t think she realises,’ said Leonora, and for the first time he saw tears in her eyes. ‘She says, “Like Mr Poop” – he was our cat that was run over – but I don’t know if she understands, not really. You can’t always tell with Orlando. I haven’t told her someone killed him. Can’t get my head around it.’

There was a short pause in which Strike hoped, irrelevantly, that he was not giving off whisky fumes.

‘Will you keep working for me?’ she asked him directly. ‘You’re better’n them, that’s why I wanted you in the first place. Will you?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Cos I can tell they think I had something to do with it,’ she repeated, standing up, ‘way they was talking to me.’

She drew her coat more tightly around her.

‘I’d better get back to Orlando. I’m glad you’re all right.’

She shuffled off to her escort again. The female police officer looked taken aback to be treated like a taxi driver but after a glance at Anstis acceded to Leonora’s request for a lift home.

‘The hell was that about?’ Anstis asked him after the two women had passed out of earshot.

‘She was worried you’d arrested me.’

‘Bit eccentric, isn’t she?’

‘Yeah, a bit.’

‘You didn’t tell her anything, did you?’ asked Anstis.

‘No,’ said Strike, who resented the question. He knew better than to pass information about a crime scene to a suspect.

‘You wanna be careful, Bob,’ said Anstis awkwardly, as they passed through the revolving doors into the rainy night. ‘Not to get under anyone’s feet. It’s murder now and you haven’t got many friends round these parts, mate.’

‘Popularity’s overrated. Listen, I’ll get a cab – no,’ he said firmly, over Anstis’s protestations, ‘I need to smoke before I go anywhere. Thanks, Rich, for everything.’

They shook hands; Strike turned up his collar against the rain and with a wave of farewell limped off along the dark pavement. He was almost as glad to have shaken off Anstis as to take the first sweet pull on his cigarette.





18





For this I find, where jealousy is fed,



Horns in the mind are worse than on the head.



Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour





Strike had completely forgotten that Robin had left the office in what he categorised as a sulk on Friday afternoon. He only knew that she was the one person he wanted to talk to about what had happened, and while he usually avoided telephoning her at weekends, the circumstances felt exceptional enough to justify a text. He sent it from the taxi he found after fifteen minutes tramping wet, cold streets in the dark.

Robin was curled up at home in an armchair with Investigative Interviewing: Psychology and Practice, a book she had bought online. Matthew was on the sofa, speaking on the landline to his mother in Yorkshire, who was feeling unwell again. He rolled his eyes whenever Robin reminded herself to look up and smile sympathetically at his exasperation.

When her mobile vibrated, Robin glanced at it irritably; she was trying to concentrate on Investigative Interviewing.



Found Quine murdered. C





She let out a mingled gasp and shriek that made Matthew start. The book slipped out of her lap and fell, disregarded, to the floor. Seizing the mobile, she ran with it to the bedroom.

Matthew talked to his mother for twenty minutes more, then went and listened at the closed bedroom door. He could hear Robin asking questions and being given what seemed to be long, involved answers. Something about the timbre of her voice convinced him that it was Strike on the line. His square jaw tightened.

When Robin finally emerged from the bedroom, shocked and awestruck, she told her fiancé that Strike had found the missing man he had been hunting, and that he had been murdered. Matthew’s natural curiosity tugged him one way, but his dislike of Strike, and the fact that he had dared contact Robin on a Sunday evening, pulled him another.

‘Well, I’m glad something’s happened to interest you tonight,’ he said. ‘I know you’re bored shitless by Mum’s health.’

‘You bloody hypocrite!’ gasped Robin, winded by the injustice.

The row escalated with alarming speed. Strike’s invitation to the wedding; Matthew’s sneering attitude to Robin’s job; what their life together was going to be; what each owed the other: Robin was horrified by how quickly the very fundamentals of their relationship were dragged out for examination and recrimination, but she did not back down. A familiar frustration and anger towards the men in her life had her in its grip – to Matthew, for failing to see why her job mattered to her so much; to Strike, for failing to recognise her potential.

(But he had called her when he had found the body… She had managed to slip in a question – ‘Who else have you told?’ – and he had answered, without any sign that he knew what it would mean to her, ‘No one, only you.’)

Meanwhile, Matthew was feeling extremely hard done by. He had noticed lately something that he knew he ought not to complain about, and which grated all the more for his feeling that he must lump it: before she worked for Strike, Robin had always been first to back down in a row, first to apologise, but her conciliatory nature seemed to have been warped by the stupid bloody job…