The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(70)

The future Viscountess is a not altogether uncontroversial addition to the Rosses of Croy, but Jago laughs at the idea that anyone in his family could be less than delighted to welcome the former wild child into his old and rather grand Scottish family.



‘Actually, my mother always hoped we’d marry,’ he says. ‘We were boyfriend and girlfriend at Oxford but I suppose we were just too young… found each other again in London… both just out of relationships…’





Were you? thought Strike. Were you both just out of relationships? Or were you f*cking her at the same time I was, so that she didn’t know which of us had fathered the baby she was worried she might be carrying? Changing the dates to cover every eventuality, keeping her options open…



… made headlines in her youth when she went missing from Bedales for seven days, causing a national search… admitted to rehab at the age of 25…



‘Old news, move on, nothing to see,’ says Charlotte brightly. ‘Look, I had a lot of fun in my youth, but it’s time to settle down and honestly, I can’t wait.’





Fun, was it? Strike asked her stunning picture. Fun, standing on that roof and threatening to jump? Fun, calling me from that psychiatric hospital and begging me to get you out?



Ross, fresh from a very messy divorce that has kept the gossip columns busy… ‘I wish we could have settled it without the lawyers,’ he sighs… ‘I can’t wait to be a step-mummy!’ trills Charlotte…





(‘If I have to spend one more evening with the Anstises’ bratty kids, Corm, I swear to God I’ll brain one of them.’ And, in Lucy’s suburban back garden, watching Strike’s nephews playing football, ‘Why are these children such shits?’ The expression on Lucy’s round face when she overheard it…)

His own name, leaping off the page.



… including a surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son Cormoran Strike, who made headlines last year…





… a surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son…

… Jonny Rokeby’s eldest…

He closed the magazine with a sudden, reflexive movement and slid it into his bin.

Sixteen years, on and off. Sixteen years of the torture, the madness and occasional ecstasy. And then – after all those times she had left him, throwing herself into the arms of other men as other women cast themselves onto railway tracks – he had walked out. In doing so, he had crossed an unforgivable Rubicon, for it had always been understood that he should stand rock-like, to be left and returned to, never flinching, never giving up. But on that night when he had confronted her with the tangle of lies she had told about the baby in her belly and she had become hysterical and furious, the mountain had moved at last: out of the door, with an ashtray flung after it.

His black eye had barely healed when she had announced her engagement to Ross. Three weeks it had taken her, because she knew only one way to respond to pain: to wound the transgressor as deeply as possible, with no thought for the consequences to herself. And he knew in his bones, no matter how arrogant his friends might tell him he was being, that the Tatler pictures, the dismissal of their relationship in the terms that would hurt him most (he could hear her spelling it out for the society mag: ‘he’s Jonny Rokeby’s son’); the Castle of Fucking Croy… all of it, all of it, was done with a view to hurting him, wanting him to watch and to see, to regret and to pity. She had known what Ross was; she had told Strike about the poorly disguised alcoholism and violence, passed through the blue-blooded network of gossip that had kept her informed through the years. She had laughed about her lucky escape. Laughed.

Self-immolation in a ball gown. Watch me burn, Bluey. The wedding was in ten days’ time and if he had ever been sure of anything in his life, it was that if he called Charlotte right now and said ‘Run away with me,’ even after their filthy scenes, the hateful things she had called him, the lies and the mess and the several tons of baggage under which their relationship had finally splintered, she would say yes. Running away was her life’s blood and he had been her favourite destination, freedom and safety combined; she had said it to him over and over again after fights that would have killed them both if emotional wounds could bleed: ‘I need you. You’re my everything, you know that. You’re the only place I’ve ever felt safe, Bluey…’

He heard the glass door on to the landing open and close, the familiar sounds of Robin arriving at work, removing her coat, filling the kettle.

Work had always been his salvation. Charlotte had hated the way he could switch, from crazy, violent scenes, from her tears and her pleas and her threats, to immerse himself totally in a case. She had never managed to stop him putting on his uniform, never prevented his return to work, never succeeded in forcing him away from an investigation. She deplored his focus, his allegiance to the army, his ability to shut her out, seeing it as a betrayal, as abandonment.

Now, on this cold winter’s morning, sitting in his office with her picture in the bin beside him, Strike found himself craving orders, a case abroad, an enforced sojourn on another continent. He did not want to trail after unfaithful husbands and girlfriends, or insert himself into the petty disputes of shoddy businessmen. Only one subject had ever matched Charlotte for the fascination it exercised over him: unnatural death.