The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(91)

He backed away on his crutches to let them move over the threshold onto highly polished floorboards the colour of honey.

‘Would you mind removing your shoes?’

A stocky, middle-aged Filipina woman with her black hair in a bun emerged from a pair of swing doors set into the brick wall on their right. She was clothed entirely in black and holding two white linen bags into which Strike and Robin were evidently expected to put their footwear. Robin handed hers over; it made her feel strangely vulnerable to feel the boards beneath her soles. Strike merely stood there on his single foot.

‘Oh,’ said Chard, staring again. ‘No, I suppose… Mr Strike had better keep his shoe on, Nenita.’

The woman retired wordlessly into the kitchen.

Somehow, the interior of Tithebarn House increased Robin’s unpleasant sensation of vertigo. No walls divided its vast interior. The first floor, which was reached by a steel and glass spiral staircase, was suspended on thick metal cables from the high ceiling. Chard’s huge double bed, which seemed to be of black leather, was visible, high above them, with what looked like a huge crucifix of barbed wire hanging over it on the brick wall. Robin dropped her gaze hastily, feeling sicker than ever.

Most of the furniture on the lower level comprised cubes of white or black leather. Vertical steel radiators were interspersed with artfully simple bookshelves of more wood and metal. The dominant feature of the under-furnished room was a life-size white marble sculpture of an angel, perched on a rock and partially dissected to expose half of her skull, a portion of her guts and a slice of the bone in her leg. Her breast, Robin saw, unable to tear her eyes away, was revealed as a mound of fat globules sitting on a circle of muscle that resembled the gills of a mushroom.

Ludicrous to feel sick when the dissected body was made of cold, pure stone, mere insentient albescence, nothing like the rotting carcass preserved on Strike’s mobile… don’t think about that… she ought to have made Strike leave at least one biscuit… sweat had broken out on her upper lip, her scalp…

‘You all right, Robin?’ asked Strike sharply. She knew she must have changed colour from the look on the two men’s faces, and to her fear that she might pass out was added embarrassment that she was being a liability to Strike.

‘Sorry,’ she said through numb lips. ‘Long journey… if I could have a glass of water…’

‘Er – very well,’ said Chard, as though water were in short supply. ‘Nenita?’

The woman in black reappeared.

‘The young lady needs a glass of water,’ said Chard.

Nenita gestured to Robin to follow her. Robin heard the publisher’s crutches making a gentle thump, thump behind her on the wooden floor as she entered the kitchen. She had a brief impression of steel surfaces and whitewashed walls, and the young man to whom she had given a lift prodding at a large saucepan, then found herself sitting on a low stool.

Robin had assumed that Chard had followed to see that she was all right, but as Nenita pressed a cold glass into her hand she heard him speak somewhere above her.

‘Thanks for fixing the gates, Manny.’

The young man did not reply. Robin heard the clunk of Chard’s crutches recede and the swinging of the kitchen doors.

‘That’s my fault,’ Strike told Chard, when the publisher rejoined him. He felt truly guilty. ‘I ate all the food she brought for the journey.’

‘Nenita can give her something,’ said Chard. ‘Shall we sit down?’

Strike followed him past the marble angel, which was reflected mistily in the warm wood below, and they headed on their four crutches to the end of the room, where a black iron wood-burner made a pool of welcome warmth.

‘Great place,’ said Strike, lowering himself onto one of the larger cubes of black leather and laying his crutches beside him. The compliment was insincere; his preference was for utilitarian comfort and Chard’s house seemed to him to be all surface and show.

‘Yes, I worked closely with the architects,’ said Chard, with a small flicker of enthusiasm. ‘There’s a studio’ – he pointed through another discreet pair of doors – ‘and a pool.’

He too sat down, stretching out the leg that ended in the thick, strapped boot in front of him.

‘How did it happen?’ Strike asked, nodding towards the broken leg.

Chard pointed with the end of his crutch at the metal and glass spiral staircase.

‘Painful,’ said Strike, eyeing the drop.

‘The crack echoed all through the space,’ said Chard, with an odd relish. ‘I hadn’t realised one can actually hear it happening.

‘Would you like a tea or coffee?’

‘Tea would be great.’

Strike saw Chard place his uninjured foot on a small brass plate beside his seat. Slight pressure, and Manny emerged again from the kitchen.

‘Tea, please, Manny,’ said Chard with a warmth conspicuously absent in his usual manner. The young man disappeared again, sullen as ever.

‘Is that St Michael’s Mount?’ Strike asked, pointing to a small picture hanging near the wood-burner. It was a naive painting on what seemed to be board.

‘An Alfred Wallis,’ said Chard, with another minor glow of enthusiasm. ‘The simplicity of the forms… primitive and naive. My father knew him. Wallis only took up painting seriously in his seventies. You know Cornwall?’