The Silkworm

In this section, the case itself gains momentum, Leonora is arrested, suspects lash out, and a stabbing attempt is made on Strike. These plot developments unfold in tandem with increasing personal reflections within Strike and Ellacott. Strike’s inner world comes to the forefront in this section, beginning with the visceral memory of a childhood friend nearly killed by a shark. The image, grotesque and sudden, forms a psychological metaphor for how he views the killer; a lurking predator drawn out by provocation. Strike’s analogy casts the murderer as a creature of instinct and rage, but it also implies that Quine, in publishing Bombyx Mori, deliberately stirred the waters. This idea that language can provoke violence reinforces the novel’s central concern with Ego and Vanity as a Destructive Force. This section also sees Strike reaching out to his estranged brother, a rare moment of openness that suggests he is beginning to accept that his instincts, while sharp, may need outside insight.

The tension then shifts to Ellacott, who arrives in Yorkshire for her future mother-in-law’s funeral. Upon arriving at her childhood home, her emotional landscape is in flux. Though her feelings toward Matthew temporarily soften amid family grief, they remain precarious. Even in this domestic setting, she cannot escape the shadow of the case. Her mother and brother bring up Quine, drawing the investigation into her family life and unsettling the boundary between work and home. When she receives news that Strike may have been hurt, Matthew’s resentment resurfaces. This moment reflects the central conflict of her arc. Her dedication to her job continually strains the traditional gender roles Matthew expects of her, and her warm feelings toward Strike make him jealous. Ellacott’s growth as a detective is thus paralleled by a slow disintegration of her identity as a fiancée. Her emotional labor—soothing Matthew, managing guilt, hiding elements of her work—is framed explicitly through the novel’s exploration of Gender and Power. Robin must constantly prove herself to men who feel entitled to her time and identity.

Violence takes on a more active narrative function, as Strike is attacked on the street in Chapter 33, seemingly at random, just before meeting Nina Lascelles for dinner. The encounter leaves him shaken but not injured—physically, at least. The dinner itself underscores how fragile human connection is in his world. Though Nina provides valuable information, the atmosphere sours, and her interest in Strike fades when it becomes clear he is emotionally unavailable. The phone call from Al during the meal acts as both a thematic interruption and a reminder of Strike’s distracted loyalties: He is pulled in by trauma, not attraction. Strike’s inability to perform emotional intimacy even in moments of peace continues to echo the theme of Identity and Performance. His detachment serves as form of emotional protection, allowing him to appear casually cold despite the heavy emotions he feels because of a series of personal traumas. 

In Ellacott’s parallel storyline, she watches a televised interview with Fancourt in Chapter 34. Her interest in Fancourt’s comments about women in literature resonates on a deeper level; Ellacott has spent the entire novel being undervalued by men, both in work and at home, while slowly proving herself the most perceptive investigator in the room. Fancourt’s vague misogyny in the interview subtly mirrors Matthew’s overt condescension and Strike’s blind spots. The three men represent different faces of the same theme, Gender and Power, and who gets to shape the dominant narrative.

The press coverage in Chapter 35 offers a metatextual critique of storytelling itself. Strike reads every article about the murder, watching how Quine’s death is twisted into spectacle—pornographic, literary, psychological—depending on the audience. Galbraith uses this to explore the idea that once a narrative leaves your hands, it belongs to public imagination. Even Ellacott’s interview with a bookseller shows this: The man’s testimony is only semi-reliable, yet it becomes part of the patchwork Strike must navigate. In Chapter 36, a long, increasingly unhinged dinner with Jerry Waldegrave offers emotional texture to that patchwork. Waldegrave is broken, both personally and professionally, and his drunken spiral of grief, anger, and confession paints a portrait of someone not guilty of murder, but certainly guilty of cruelty, and of standing by while others wielded narratives like knives. His bitter tirade about Elizabeth Tassel’s bullying is especially important, as it seeds doubt about who really influenced Quine, and whether Bombyx Mori was as wholly his as others believe. The question of authorship is also a question of control, a recurring motif tied to Ego and Vanity as a Destructive Force. If the book was not fully Quine’s, then neither is the fallout, and every character is scrambling to avoid being labeled the villain.

In these chapters, Strike begins to lose patience with the ordinary way of doing things. His excitement at the news that Fancourt wants to meet is undercut by Leonora’s arrest, which he fears is based more on optics than evidence. Her strange demeanor, her lack of social graces, and her perceived stupidity all make her an easy scapegoat for the police but also the perpetrators. This assumption further emphasizes the class and gender-based biases that mark much of the novel’s content. Her true claims, like that she never used the credit card the police say ties her to the murder, are brushed off. In contrast to figures like Tassel or Charlotte, who are very manipulative, Leonora’s raw but emotionally undramatic grief and awkwardness leave her vulnerable. Leonora’s lack of performance is taken as proof of guilt, reinforcing the novel’s claim that identity and performance determine who is believed. Women like Charlotte are forgiven for being artful; women like Leonora are punished for being unvarnished. 

These three women—Leonora, Ellacott, and Charlotte—form a kind of emotional triangulation for Strike, revealing different facets of his personality and internal contradictions. His fierce protectiveness of Leonora suggests a moral compass finely tuned to the vulnerable and misread, yet his own treatment of Ellacott often echoes the same paternalism and dismissal he resents in others. He is emotionally dependent on Ellacott, relying on her instincts and presence to navigate both the case and his own life, but continues to belittle her contributions in ways that mirror the very power dynamics he critiques. In contrast, Charlotte represents everything he cannot forgive: manipulation, volatility, and performative emotion deployed as control. His fear of falling back into Charlotte’s orbit bleeds into his dynamic with Ellacott, creating an emotional push-pull where desire is masked as condescension and care as irritation. Together, these women expose Strike’s central contradiction: He is a man who sees through artifice in others but remains blind to the emotional performances that govern his own behavior.



Beneath the emotional complexity of this section, the plot continues to build a subtle but mounting case against Elizabeth Tassel. Clues accumulate slowly: Waldegrave drunkenly accuses her of bullying Quine, Orlando recalls seeing her in Quine’s office before his disappearance, and Fancourt’s evasiveness around his wife’s death by suicide suggests deeper entanglements. Yet Galbraith carefully keeps suspicion diffused. Chard remains a possibility, particularly after claiming Quine couldn’t have written the entire manuscript alone; Pippa’s outburst points to motive and volatility; and Waldegrave’s emotional unraveling suggests guilt, if not violence. Strike begins to intuit that Bombyx Mori was co-authored or altered by someone with both access and agenda, and that the crime scene was not only symbolic, but staged to mislead. As the threads begin to converge, Tassel’s proximity to every player starts to place her at the center of a carefully constructed illusion. The case against Leonora looks increasingly like a distraction.

The section ends with Strike meeting with his brother, Al, whom he is not close to but who he believes might be able to help with the case. Their conversation is somewhat shallow on a personal level, but Strike gleans a vital clue from an unexpected witness that Al alerts him to, a waitress named Loulou. Her account of Quine’s public outburst, and Tassel’s emotional response, reorients the timeline and the tone of the night in question. Quine’s behavior is theatrical and performative, and Strike suspects that it was a set up. This final note restores ambiguity to a case that had seemed to reach an institutional conclusion, at least in Strike’s mind. It also highlights Strikes status as an intuitive detective, as he can sense and find clues in the most unlikely places and has conveniently well-connected people in his circle who are able to provide him the information he needs exactly at the right time. The fact that Quine may have orchestrated his own symbolic downfall further blurs the boundary between performance and truth. His obsession with legacy, outrage, and provocation points once again to Ego and Vanity as a Destructive Force, not only in life, but in the shape his death takes.