The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(72)

‘Oh bugger,’ said Robin.

Strike grinned. At times of tension, her Yorkshire accent became more pronounced: he had heard ‘boogger’.

They got onto a much emptier Piccadilly line train to Barons Court; relieved, Strike fell into a seat.

‘Jerry Waldegrave lives with his wife, right?’ he asked Robin.

‘Yes, if she’s called Fenella. In Hazlitt Road, Kensington. A Joanna Waldegrave lives in the basement—’

‘Their daughter,’ said Strike. ‘Budding novelist, she was at the Roper Chard party. And Daniel Chard?’

‘Sussex Street, Pimlico, with a couple called Nenita and Manny Ramos—’

‘Sound like servants.’

‘—and he’s got a property in Devon as well: Tithebarn House.’

‘Which is presumably where he’s currently laid up with his broken leg.’

‘And Fancourt’s ex-directory,’ she finished, ‘but there’s loads of biographical stuff about him online. He owns an Elizabethan place just outside Chew Magna called Endsor Court.’

‘Chew Magna?’

‘It’s in Somerset. He lives there with his third wife.’

‘Bit far to go today,’ said Strike regretfully. ‘No bachelor pad near Talgarth Road where he could stash guts in the freezer?’

‘Not that I could find.’

‘So where was he staying when he went to stare at the crime scene? Or had he come up for the day for a spot of nostalgia?’

‘If it really was him.’

‘Yeah, if it was him… and there’s Kathryn Kent too. Well, we know where she lives and we know it’s alone. Quine got dropped off in her vicinity on the night of the fifth, Anstis says, but she was away. Maybe Quine had forgotten she was at her sister’s,’ Strike mused, ‘and maybe when he found out she wasn’t home he went to Talgarth Road instead? She could have come back from the hospice to meet him there. We’ll have a look round her place second.’

As they moved west Strike told Robin about the different witnesses who claimed to have seen a woman in a burqa entering the building on the fourth of November and Quine himself leaving the building in the early hours of the sixth.

‘But one or both of them could be mistaken or lying,’ he concluded.

‘A woman in a burqa. You don’t think,’ said Robin tentatively, ‘the neighbour might be a mad Islamophobe?’

Working for Strike had opened her eyes to the array and intensity of phobias and grudges she had never realised burned in the public’s breast. The tide of publicity surrounding the solving of the Landry case had washed onto Robin’s desk a number of letters that had alternately disturbed and amused her.

There had been the man who had begged Strike to turn his clearly considerable talents to an investigation of the stranglehold of ‘international Jewry’ on the world banking system, a service for which he regretted he would not be able to pay but for which he did not doubt that Strike would receive worldwide acclaim. A young woman had written a twelve-page letter from a secure psychiatric unit, begging Strike to help her prove that everybody in her family had been spirited away and replaced with identical impostors. An anonymous writer of unknown gender had demanded that Strike help them expose a national campaign of satanic abuse which they knew to be operating through the offices of the Citizens Advice Bureau.

‘They could be loons,’ Strike agreed. ‘Nutters love murder. It does something to them. People have to listen to them, for a start.’

A young woman wearing a hijab was watching them talk from an opposite seat. She had large, sweet, liquid-brown eyes.

‘Assuming somebody really did enter the house on the fourth, I’ve got to say a burqa’s a bloody good way of getting in and out without being recognised. Can you think of another way of totally concealing your face and body that wouldn’t make people challenge you?’

‘And they were carrying a halal takeaway?’

‘Allegedly. Was his last meal halal? Is that why the killer removed the guts?’

‘And this woman—’

‘Could’ve been a man…’

‘—was seen leaving the house an hour later?’

‘That’s what Anstis said.’

‘So they weren’t lying in wait for Quine?’

‘No, but they could have been laying in plates,’ said Strike and Robin winced.

The young woman in the hijab got off at Gloucester Road.

‘I doubt there’d be closed-circuit cameras in a bookshop,’ sighed Robin. She had become quite preoccupied with CCTV since the Landry case.

‘I’d’ve thought Anstis would have mentioned it,’ agreed Strike.

They emerged at Barons Court into another squall of snow. Squinting against the feathery flakes they proceeded, under Strike’s direction, up to Talgarth Road. He was feeling the need for a stick ever more strongly. On his release from hospital, Charlotte had given him an elegant antique Malacca cane that she claimed had belonged to a great-grandfather. The handsome old stick had been too short for Strike, causing him to list to the right as he walked. When she had packaged up his things to remove from her flat, the cane had not been among them.

It was clear, as they approached the house, that the forensics team was still busy in number 179. The entrance was taped up and a single police officer, arms folded tightly against the cold, stood guard outside. She turned her head as they approached. Her eyes fixed on Strike and narrowed.