The Silkworm

“Oh, him,” said Strike, without enthusiasm. “I knew a Tom Jones in the army.”

“Did you see the story?”

“No.”

“Nice long interview he gave. He says he’s never met his father, never had a word from him. I bet he got more than your bill is going to be.”

“You haven’t seen my invoice yet,” said Strike.

“Just saying. One nice little interview and you could take a few nights off from interviewing secretaries.”

“You’re going to have to stop suggesting this,” said Strike, “or I’m going to have to stop working for you, Culpepper.”

“Course,” said Culpepper, “I could run the story anyway. Rock star’s estranged son is a war hero, never knew his father, working as a private—”

“Instructing people to hack phones is illegal as well, I’ve heard.”

At the top of Long Lane they slowed and turned to face each other. Culpepper’s laugh was uneasy.

“I’ll wait for your invoice, then.”

“Suits me.”

They set off in different directions, Strike heading towards the Tube station.

“Strike!” Culpepper’s voice echoed through the darkness behind him. “Did you fuck her?”

“Looking forward to reading it, Culpepper,” Strike shouted wearily, without turning his head.

He limped into the shadowy entrance of the station and was lost to Culpepper’s sight.

2

How long must we fight? for I cannot stay,

Nor will not stay! I have business

Francis Beaumont and Philip Massinger,

The Little French Lawyer

The Tube was filling up already. Monday-morning faces: sagging, gaunt, braced, resigned. Strike found a seat opposite a puffy-eyed young blonde whose head kept sinking sideways into sleep. Again and again she jerked herself back upright, scanning the blurred signs of the stations frantically in case she had missed her stop.

The train rattled and clattered, speeding Strike back towards the meager two and a half rooms under a poorly insulated roof that he called home. In the depths of his tiredness, surrounded by these blank, sheep-like visages, he found himself pondering the accidents that had brought all of them into being. Every birth was, viewed properly, mere chance. With a hundred million sperm swimming blindly through the darkness, the odds against a person becoming themselves were staggering. How many of this Tube-full had been planned, he wondered, light-headed with tiredness. And how many, like him, were accidents?

There had been a little girl in his primary school class who had a port-wine stain across her face and Strike had always felt a secret kinship with her, because both of them had carried something indelibly different with them since birth, something that was not their fault. They couldn’t see it, but everybody else could, and had the bad manners to keep mentioning it. The occasional fascination of total strangers, which at five years old he had thought had something to do with his own uniqueness, he eventually realized was because they saw him as no more than a famous singer’s zygote, the incidental evidence of a celebrity’s unfaithful fumble. Strike had only met his biological father twice. It had taken a DNA test to make Jonny Rokeby accept paternity.

Dominic Culpepper was a walking distillation of the prurience and presumptions that Strike met on the very rare occasions these days that anybody connected the surly-looking ex-soldier with the aging rock star. Their thoughts leapt at once to trust funds and handsome handouts, to private flights and VIP lounges, to a multimillionaire’s largesse on tap. Agog at the modesty of Strike’s existence and the punishing hours he worked, they asked themselves: what must Strike have done to alienate his father? Was he faking penury to wheedle more money out of Rokeby? What had he done with the millions his mother had surely squeezed out of her rich paramour?

And at such times, Strike would think nostalgically of the army, of the anonymity of a career in which your background and your parentage counted for almost nothing beside your ability to do the job. Back in the Special Investigation Branch, the most personal question he had faced on introduction was a request to repeat the odd pair of names with which his extravagantly unconventional mother had saddled him.

Traffic was already rolling busily along Charing Cross Road by the time Strike emerged from the Tube. The November dawn was breaking now, gray and halfhearted, full of lingering shadows. He turned into Denmark Street feeling drained and sore, looking forward to the short sleep he might be able to squeeze in before his next client arrived at nine thirty. With a wave at the girl in the guitar shop, with whom he often took cigarette breaks on the street, Strike let himself in through the black outer door beside the 12 Bar Café and began to climb the metal staircase that curled around the broken birdcage lift inside. Up past the graphic designer on the first floor, past his own office with its engraved glass door on the second; up to the third and smallest landing where his home now lay.