The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(94)

‘Resentment about what?’ asked Strike.

‘Jerry isn’t fond of Michael Fancourt,’ mumbled Chard, his eyes on the flames in the wood-burner. ‘Michael had a – a flirtation, a long time ago, with Fenella, Jerry’s wife. And as it happens, I actually warned Michael off, because of my friendship with Jerry. Yes!’ said Chard, nodding, deeply impressed by the memory of his own actions. ‘I told Michael it was unkind and unwise, even in his state of… because Michael had lost his first wife, you see, not very long before.

‘Michael didn’t appreciate my unsolicited advice. He took offence; he took off for a different publisher. The board was very unhappy,’ said Chard. ‘It’s taken us twenty-odd years to lure Michael back.

‘But after all this time,’ Chard said, his bald pate merely one more reflective surface among the glass, polished wood and steel, ‘Jerry can hardly expect his personal animosities to govern company policy. Ever since Michael agreed to come back to Roper Chard, Jerry has made it his business to – to undermine me, subtly, in a hundred little ways.

‘What I believe happened is this,’ said Chard, glancing from time to time at Strike, as though to gauge his reaction. ‘Jerry took Owen into his confidence about Michael’s deal, which we were trying to keep under wraps. Owen had, of course, been an enemy of Fancourt’s for a quarter of a century. Owen and Jerry decided to concoct this… this dreadful book, in which Michael and I are subjected to – to disgusting calumnies as a way of drawing attention away from Michael’s arrival and as an act of revenge on both of us, on the company, on anyone else they cared to denigrate.

‘And, most tellingly,’ said Chard, his voice echoing now through the empty space, ‘after I told Jerry, explicitly, to make sure the manuscript was locked safely away he allowed it to be read widely by anyone who cared to do so, and having made sure it’s being gossiped about all over London, he resigns and leaves me looking—’

‘When did Waldegrave resign?’ asked Strike.

‘The day before yesterday,’ said Chard, before plunging on: ‘and he was extremely reluctant to join me in legal action against Quine. That in itself shows—’

‘Perhaps he thought bringing in lawyers would draw more attention to the book?’ Strike suggested. ‘Waldegrave’s in Bombyx Mori himself, isn’t he?’

‘That!’ said Chard and sniggered. It was the first sign of humour Strike had seen in him and the effect was unpleasant. ‘You don’t want to take everything at face value, Mr Strike. Owen never knew about that.’

‘About what?’

‘The Cutter character is Jerry’s own work – I realised it on a third reading,’ said Chard. ‘Very, very clever: it looks like an attack on Jerry himself, but it’s really a way of causing Fenella pain. They are still married, you see, but very unhappily. Very unhappily.

‘Yes, I saw it all, on re-reading,’ said Chard. The spotlights in the hanging ceiling made rippled reflections on his skull as he nodded. ‘Owen didn’t write the Cutter. He barely knows Fenella. He didn’t know about that old business.’

‘So what exactly are the bloody sack and the dwarf supposed to—?’

‘Get it out of Jerry,’ said Chard. ‘Make him tell you. Why should I help him spread slander around?’

‘I’ve been wondering,’ Strike said, obediently dropping that line of enquiry, ‘why Michael Fancourt agreed to come to Roper Chard when Quine was working for you, given that they were on such bad terms?’

There was a short pause.

‘We were under no legal obligation to publish Owen’s next book,’ said Chard. ‘We had a first-look option. That was all.’

‘So you think Jerry Waldegrave told Quine that he was about to be dropped, to keep Fancourt happy?’

‘Yes,’ said Chard, staring at his own fingernails. ‘I do. Also, I had offended Owen the last time I saw him, so the news that I might be about to drop him no doubt swept away any last vestige of loyalty he might once have felt towards me, because I took him on when every other publisher in Britain had given up on—’

‘How did you offend him?’

‘Oh, it was when he last came into the office. He brought his daughter with him.’

‘Orlando?’

‘Named, he told me, for the eponymous protagonist of the novel by Virginia Woolf.’ Chard hesitated, his eyes flickering to Strike and then back to his nails. ‘She’s – not quite right, his daughter.’

‘Really?’ said Strike. ‘In what way?’

‘Mentally,’ mumbled Chard. ‘I was visiting the art department when they came in. Owen told me he was showing her around – something he had no business doing, but Owen always made himself at home… great sense of entitlement and self-importance, always…

‘His daughter grabbed at a mock-up cover – grubby hands – I seized her wrist to stop her ruining it—’ He mimed the action in mid-air; with the remembrance of this act of near desecration came a look of distaste. ‘It was instinctive, you know, a desire to protect the image, but it upset her very much. There was a scene. Very embarrassing and uncomfortable,’ mumbled Chard, who seemed to suffer again in retrospect. ‘She became almost hysterical. Owen was furious. That, no doubt, was my crime. That, and bringing Michael Fancourt back to Roper Chard.’