Roper Chard
‘The view over the city was spectacular, velvet black and jewelled, the London Eye glowing neon blue, the Oxo Tower with its ruby windows, the Southbank Centre, Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster shining golden away to the right.’
Galbraith, Robert. The Silkworm: Cormoran Strike Book 2 (p. 90)
Roper Chard’s offices are on Victoria Embankment, a few minutes’ walk from the ancient pub, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. The pub, up a side alley off Fleet Street, is a labyrinth of connected rooms and bars built in the aftermath of the great fire of London of 1666, and writers have congregated here for centuries, from Samuel Johnson who lived near by, to Charles Dickens and Yeats. It was also, for forty years, home to a famously rude parrot. It is an appropriate place then for Strike to meet the honourable Nina Lascelles who works at publishers Roper Chard and is a cousin of Strike’s journalist contact, Dominic Culpepper. Nina is Strike’s way into the anniversary party at Roper Chard where many figures featured in the scandalous manuscript by the missing writer Owen Quine will be.
The roof garden, reached up a mesh staircase, provides a perfect view of London from the splendour of the Houses of Parliament, to the London Eye, the huge ferris wheel constructed in 1999 on the south bank of the Thames which has since become a permanent tourist destination. If Strike looked east, he would see Tower Bridge, designed by the same architect responsible for Smithfield Market where Strike met Dominic on the morning of his first meeting with Leonora Quine. Behind the Oxo tower, once derelict and now home to a swanky restaurant with dramatic views of its own, is Roupell Street where he, Robin and her fiancé, Matthew recently had their awkward drinks.
As well as a first look at some of the characters associated with Owen Quine, and the view, Strike also manages to get hold of a copy of the infamous manuscript of Bombyx Mori. Nina, obviously charmed with his company opens Jerry Waldegrave’s safe and makes a copy for him, receiving in exchange an invitation to a dinner party at Strike’s sister’s home the following night.