This is not a proper ‘Pregnancy Trap’ post but a hurried catalogue of all the “coercive love” relationships in the first four Strike-Ellacott mysteries. I have written longish posts about the ‘Big Four’ Pregnancy Traps that play defining roles in the Harry Potter novels (Merope and Tom, Sr.), in Casual Vacancy (Krystal and Fats), in Cursed Child (Bellatrix and Tom, Jr.), and in the Strike series (Leda and Jonny); with this post and one other that surveys The Ickabog, Christmas Pig, and Beedle the Bard, I’ll wrap up this Golden Thread in an article on the Substack page for subscribers before moving on to the next Rowling Studies ‘common denominator.’
Book-by-book, then, shall we, Cuckoo’s Calling to Lethal White?
Cuckoo’s Calling
- Charlotte Campbell trap to win Cormoran Strike
He closed his eyes. There could be no going back from this morning. She had lied once too often, about something too serious. But he went over it all again, like a sum he had long since solved, afraid he had made some elementary mistake. Painstakingly he added together the constantly shifting dates, the refusal to check with chemist or doctor, the fury with which she had countered any request for clarification, and then the sudden announcement that it was over, with never a shred of proof that it had been real. Along with every other suspicious circumstance, there was his hard-won knowledge of her mythomania, her need to provoke, to taunt, to test.
‘Don’t you dare fucking investigate me. Don’t you dare treat me like some drugged-up squaddie. I am not a fucking case to be solved; you’re supposed to love me and you won’t take my word even on this…’ Cuckoo, Part One, Chapter Seven
Jago Ross. She must have been in touch with him, seeing him, while they were still living together. Even Charlotte, with all her mesmeric power over men, her astonishing sure-handed skill, could not have moved from reacquaintance to engagement in three weeks. She had been meeting Ross on the sly, while swearing undying love to Strike.
This put a very different light on the bombshell she had dropped on him a month before the end, and the refusal to show him proof, and the shifting dates, and the sudden conclusion of it all. Cuckoo, Part Four, Chapter Five
The opening chaos on Denmark Street for the entire Cormoran Strike series, the opening that makes possible his first meeting with Robin Ellacott, is the Peg-Legged PI’s break-up with his on-and-off girlfriend of seventeen years, Charlotte Campbell. The ‘inciting incident’ for that key relationship inciting incident was Campbell’s having told her live-in lover and fiancée that she was pregnant and then saying that she no longer was pregnant. For Strike, with all his doubts about his own mother’s motives in conceiving him (?), this was a lie-too-far from a congenitally dishonest woman. Wrapped as it is in her probable relationship with Ross, in Cuckoo he resolves and keeps to his resolve never to renew their relationship.
In Silkworm, she sends him a text the day before her wedding to Ross, seemingly to rebuke him on this score, the simple message being “It was yours” (Silkworm, chapter 40). The first time they meet in the series post Calling is in Lethal White at the Paralympians Ball — and this is Strike’s first thought on seeing her:
“Corm, don’t go,” she said, reaching out. Her fingers did not quite make contact with his sleeve; she let her hand fall back by her side. “Don’t, not yet, I—you’ve done such incredible things. I read about them all in the papers.”
The last time they had seen each other he had been bleeding, too, because of the flying ashtray that had caught him in the face as he left her. He remembered the text, “It was yours,” sent on the eve of her wedding to Ross, referring to another baby she had claimed to be bearing, which had vanished before he ever saw proof of its existence. He remembered, too, the picture she had sent to his office of herself, minutes after saying “I do” to Jago Ross, beautiful and stricken, like a sacrificial victim.
“Congratulations,” he said, keeping his eyes on her face. White, Chapter Thirty-three
He keeps “his eyes on her face,” of course, because she is enormously pregnant with Ross’ babies, twins, at that time.
After Ink Black Heart’s confrontation with Jago Ross in which Strike reveals the video evidence to him and Charlotte of child abuse, she runs ‘Corm’ down in the street to share her elation about being freed to be with her old beaux again. Strike rebuffs her by saying that there is no way he was going to help her raise the children of Jago Ross, to which she replies that isn’t really a concern because she would not be pursuing sole custody of James and Mary. Strike is appalled by her indifference to the safety of her own children and whatever feelings he has for her are extinguished (Chapter 87). He recalls this moment in Running Graves’ dialogue with dead Charlotte in the Norfolk tower church, in his meeting with her sister Amelia Crichton, and, most importantly, in his final chapter conversation with Robin in the office.
Charlotte’s bizarro mysterious pregnancy drives Strike’s away from her at the start of Cuckoo’s Calling, his remembrance of her ‘It was yours’ claim at their meeting at the central part of the central novel in the series, and his return to the theme of her being someone with whom he had nothing in common and could have no relationship in the light of her indifference about parenting makes the first pregnancy, real or feigned as with her breast cancer, seem at least potentially to have been a pregnancy trap. [I have searched for but been unable to find the passage in which Strike thinks Charlotte sprung the trap to win him away from his obsession with his detective agency.] The beginning, middle, and end of the seven book series — and the longer the delay in producing Hallmarked Man, the more I am convinced the series was originally plotted as a seven rather than ten book epic — all turn on this subject, as explored in the Charlotte was Murdered substack posts and podcast.
All the allusions to this pregnancy in the books in Strike’s musings and Charlotte’s texts are without mention of “pregnancy” or “baby” or “abortion.” [Whoops! Strike thinks in Career, “Robin was one of only three people (he suspected) who knew about that putative baby that Charlotte claimed to have lost, but which might never have existed, or was aborted.” Chapter Forty] Rowling does her best here to keep those subjects in our mind by forcing us to think of them rather than sharing those ideas herself. If Hallmarked Man or Strike 9 turns on the murder of Charlotte Campbell, as Nick Jeffery and I believe one will, the mystery of the phantom pregnancy that drove Strike from Charlotte will be solved at last. With the equally mysterious but assumed pregnancy trap of Leda Strike to capture Jonny Rokeby, the series can conclude.
- Marlene Higson’s trap to win Josiah Agyeman
‘Yeah, an’ I told ’er ev’rything I knew. ’E was an African student. Lived upstairs from me, jus’ along the road ’ere, Barking Road, wiv two others. There’s the bookie’s downstairs now. Very good-looking boy. ’Elped me with me shopping a couple of times.’
To hear Marlene Higson tell it, the courtship had proceeded with an almost Victorian respectability; she and the African student seemed barely to have progressed past handshakes during the first months of their acquaintance.
‘And then, ’cos ’e’d ’elped me all them times, one day I asked ’im in, y’know, jus’ as a thank-you, really. I’m not a prejudiced person. Ev’ryone’s the same to me. Fancy a cuppa, I sez, that were all. And then,’ said Marlene, harsh reality clanging down amidst the vague impressions of teacups and doilies, ‘I finds out I’m expecting.’
‘Did you tell him?’
‘Oh yeah, an’ ’e was full of ’ow ’e was gonna ’elp, an’ shoulder ’is respons’bilities, an’ make sure I wuz all right. An’ then it was the college ’olidays. ’E said ’e was coming back,’ said Marlene, contemptuously. ‘Then ’e ran a mile. Don’t they all? And what was I gonna do, run off to Africa to find ’im?
‘It was no skin off my nose, anyway. I wasn’t breaking me ’eart; I was seeing Dez by then. ’E didn’t mind the baby. I moved in with Dez not long after Joe left.’ …
‘It mighta bin somethin’ to do with a museum. Attached, like.’
‘Attached to a museum?’
‘Yeah, ’cause I remember ’im sayin’ “Ay sometimes visit the museum in my free ahrs.”’ Her imitation made the African student sound like an upper-class Englishman. She was smirking, as though this choice of recreation was absurd, ludicrous. Cuckoo, Part Four Chapter Four
Marlene Higson was not a woman of “Victorian morality.” One newspaper report about her included this from a neighbor:
‘She was turning tricks,’ says Vivian Cranfield, who lived in the flat above Higson’s at the time she fell pregnant with Landry. ‘There were men coming in and out of her place every hour of the day and night. She never knew who that baby’s father was, it could have been any of them. She never wanted the baby. I can still remember her out in the hall, crying, on her own, while her mum was busy with a punter. Tiny little thing in her nappy, hardly walking… someone must have called Social Services, and not before time. Best thing that ever happened to that girl, getting adopted.’ Cuckoo, Part Two, Chapter One
As she explained it to Strike in her interview, she became pregnant with the student Agyeman, whom she imagined because of his accent to have belonged to a higher social standing than she could ever dream of, then with ‘Dev,’ and then once more with another man. Lula was taken off her hands by Social Services when she was a young child and the two sons as babies. I think it credible that all three Higson children were conceived as pregnancy traps to win her a husband and meal ticket. Cranfield’s testimony makes clear that the young Marlene was not naive about the consequences of unprotected sex, experienced as she was with her “punters,” and the aside about Agyeman’s accent suggests strongly that she liked the possibilities of the student from Ghana.
And she almost got her man! As Jonah relates to Strike in the Cuckoo epilogue:
‘[My mother] never knew my dad had another kid. He never told her. He was never even sure that Marlene woman was telling the truth about being pregnant. Right before he died, when he knew he had days left, he told me. “Don’t upset your mother,” he said. “I’m telling you this because I’m dying, and I don’t know whether you’ve got a half-brother or sister out there.” He said the mother had been white, and that she’d disappeared. She might have aborted it. Fuck me. If you’d known my dad. Never missed a Sunday at church. Took communion on his deathbed. I’d never expected anything like that, never.’
The note “that she disappeared” means that Josiah had looked for her on his return to do his paternal duties. So, it seems that the inciting incident of the series, Strike’s break-up with Charlotte, and the conception of the murder victim in the first book of the series, not to mention that her successfully finding her half-brother Jonah and making him her heir is the reason she is killed, are all down to pregnancy traps, although neither is spelled out as such. Add in the equally mysterious Leda Strike seeming pregnancy trap for Jonny Rokeby that gave the world Cormoran Strike that was introduced in Cuckoo and that book seems a catalog of pregnancy traps.
The Silkworm
- Fenella Waldegrave’s affair with Michael Fancourt?
One of the only truly pathetic figures in Rowling-Galbraith’s most literary novels (and the novel that is perhaps the key to the entire series, being the first story the author imagined) is Jerry Waldegrave, Quine’s editor at Roper-Chard, a man very unhappy in his marriage. We learn in wonderfully spaced information drops — the party featuring Fancourt’s return to Roper-Chard, Strike’s interview with Daniel Chard at his country estate, Waldegrave’s hysterical rantings on the phone in and outside a restaurant, in Strike’s talk with Fancort at Groucho’s Club, and finally in the big reveal in the garden with Tassel and Fancourt — that Fenella had an affair with Michael Fancourt in the wake of his first wife’s suicide.
Jerry lived with the belief that his daughter Joanna was conceived during that adulterous liaison and he only stayed in the marriage because of his love for the daughter he did not believe was his own. When I write that he was one of the only truly pathetic figures in Silkworm, I mean, of course, one of the cast truly deserving of pity (Leonora and Orlando joining him in that small club).
This sub-plot in the novel with its delayed narrative release is something of a plot-hole in my favorite Strike novel after Troubled Blood. Jerry only learns that Fancourt was infertile and could not have been Joanna’s father just before the novel’s ending, news which comes as a surprise and great relief to him seemingly. It is no struggle to understand his agonies about Fenella’s infidelity, but why he would not have long ago done a DNA test of Joanna’s background is an open question. Was he that frightened to know the answer for certain that he wouldn’t put his suspicions to the test? That mystery and the question of what importance we are to place on the child who grows up to be a novelist being named “Joanna” but called “Jo” intrigue me, I confess.
The matter of Fancourt’s infertility consequent to mumps is the clue that eventually solves the case for Strike, so this is no small thing (not a reference, I promise, to Quine’s calling out Fancourt’s “limp dick” in his faux fight with Tassel). Liz Tassel did not know Fancourt was incapable of fathering children so the Cutter-Cuckold figure representing Jerry Waldegrave in her Bombyx Mori wants to drown the girl child he as cuckold carries with him as a burden in his sack. Quine would not have written that.
But is the Fenella affair a ‘pregnancy trap’? I confess it is a real stretch, especially as Fenella did not get Joanna tested to see if Jerry or Michael was the father, as she would have, you’d think, if she was trying to hook a better husband than Jerry. {As Fancourt dumped her at Daniel Chard’s insistence, a break-up that led to his leaving that publisher, perhaps she realized she had no chance? I have fallen into the True Fan’s error of thinking and writing about these characters as if they were real people and the author has thought all this through…} I think the relationship only qualifies as a “trap” in the sense that the woman-trapper-adulteress held her cuckolded husband captive to the story and held on to her feelings for her lover, hence her making a “bee-line” to speak with him at the Roper-Chard dinner.
That’s not at all the desperate woman using her body and sex to shame a lover into “doing the right thing” about the consequent pregnancy that we see in most of Rowling’s pregnancy traps. Given the Fenella-Fancourt relationship’s importance to The Silkworm‘s plot-line, though, I felt obliged to list it here. I’ll leave it to others to speculate if Leonora’s marriage to Owen Quine was won via a pregnancy trap. I don’t think so, if only because of the self-important author’s only saving point seems to be his devotion to his handicapped daughter, Orlando.
Career of Evil
- Mrs Laing’s pregnancy trap for “One of the Local Policemen”
Donnie Laing, the lead psychopathic murderer in a novel of nut cases who abuse rape and butcher women, was conceived in what might have been a classic pregnancy trap. Maragaret Bunyan, the mother of Laing’s first wife Rhona, explained it to Strike succinctly in the Melford Ship’s Inn:
“Oh yes. They’re a rough family,” said Mrs. Bunyan, with the sort of prim small-town snobbery that Strike knew well from his own upbringing. “All those brothers, they were always fighting, in trouble with the police, but he was the worst of them. His own brothers didn’t like him. I don’t think his mother liked him much, tae tell the truth. There was a rumor,” she said in a burst of confidence, “that he wasnae the father’s. The parents were always fighting and they separated round about the time she got pregnant with Donnie. They say she had a run-around with one of the local policemen, as a matter of fact. I don’t know whether it’s true. The policeman moved on and Mr. Laing moved back in, but Mr. Laing never liked Donnie, I know that. Never liked him at all. People said it was because he knew Donnie wasn’t his.” Career, Chapter Sixteen
Mrs. Laing makes a cameo appearance in Career but her first name is never shared and she says nothing of value to Strike due to her advanced Alzheimer’s disease. It seems credible, though, that her son Donnie, the illegitimate son of an affair with a policeman when she was separated from her husband, was the fruit of her attempt to land a better husband than the father of her other sons. Mr. Laing, who was obliged to play the part of being Donnie’s biological father, clearly didn’t rise to the occasion as had Jerry Waldegrave and the creation of Career’s horrifying villain was the result.
- Jeff Whittaker’s pregnancy trap for Leda Strike
Robin reviews Jeff Whittaker’s wikipedia page early in Career of Evil. The possibility that he had caught Leda Strike in a pregnancy trap is implicit in the ‘personal’ sub-section:
In 1991 Whittaker met Leda Strike, ex-girlfriend of Jonny Rokeby and Rick Fantoni, who was working for the record company considering signing Necromantic.[citation needed] Whittaker and Strike were married in 1992. In December of that year she gave birth to a son, Switch LaVey Bloom Whittaker.[5] In 1993 Whittaker was sacked from Necromantic due to his drug abuse.[citation needed] (Chapter Six)
The passage does not specify the month of their marriage in 1991, but the December birth of Switch means that if it was in any of the months after March that year than Leda’s second marriage can be assumed to have been consequent to his conception. Why would Jeff Whittaker have wanted to trap the mother of two older children, all of whom lived in poverty? Strike explains why he thinks his step-father joined himself to Leda:
However, Leda’s fame was not all that attracted Whittaker. His lover had borne children to two wealthy rock stars who provided child support. Whittaker had entered the squat under the clear impression that it was part of Leda’s style to dwell in impoverished bohemia, but that somewhere nearby was a vast pool of money into which Strike and Lucy’s fathers—Jonny Rokeby and Rick Fantoni respectively—were pouring money. He did not seem to understand or believe the truth: that years of Leda’s financial mismanagement and profligacy had led both men to tie up the money in such a way that Leda could not fritter it away. Gradually, over the months, Whittaker’s spiteful asides and jibes on the subject of Leda’s reluctance to spend money on him had become more frequent. There were grotesque tantrums when Leda would not fork out for the Fender Stratocaster on which he had set his heart, would not buy him the Jean Paul Gaultier velvet jacket for which, stinking and shabby though he was, he suddenly had a yen. (Chapter Ten)
Though there is a reversal in the sexual roles of the typical pregnancy trap, the trapper here being a man and the trapped a woman, insomuch as the death of Leda Strike is the over-arching mystery of the Strike series and Whittaker the primary suspect as the murderer in the seemingly staged-suicide, it’s hard to overlook again the centrality of this “coercive love” relationship in Rowling-Galbraith’s work. Leda, if indeed she’d been caught in Whittaker’s trap, had become both a trapper of men (Rokeby and Fantoni) and a trapped spouse.
Lethal White
- Ornella Serafin’s pregnancy trap for Jasper Chiswell
The murder victim in Strike 4 is a government Minister on his second marriage, the first marriage having ended due to an affair with an Italian journalist. Robin, in her testing before going undercover, reviewed Jasper Chiswell’s life details to Cormoran:
“Born 1944,” Robin said at once, without reading her notes. “Studied Classics at Merton College, Oxford, then joined Queen’s Own Hussars, saw active service in Aden and Singapore.
“First wife, Lady Patricia Fleetwood, three children: Sophia, Isabella and Freddie. Sophia’s married and lives in Northumberland, Isabella runs Chiswell’s Parliamentary office—”
“Does she?” said Strike, sounding vaguely surprised, and Robin was pleased to know that she had discovered something he did not.
“Wouldn’t go as far as ‘knew.’ I met her a couple of times with Charlotte. Everyone called her ‘Izzy Chizzy.’ One of those upper-class nicknames.”
“Lady Patricia divorced Chiswell after he got a political journalist pregnant—”
“—which resulted in the disappointing son at the art gallery.”
“Exactly –“
Robin moved the mouse around to bring up a saved picture, this time of a dark and rather beautiful young man in a charcoal suit, heading up courtroom steps accompanied by a stylish, black-haired woman in sunglasses whom he closely resembled, though she looked hardly old enough to be his mother.
“—but Chiswell and the journalist split up not long after Raphael was born,” said Robin.
“The family calls him ‘Raff,’” said Strike, “and the second wife doesn’t like him, thinks Chiswell should have disowned him after the car crash.” (Lethal White, Chapter 12)
The journalist’s name is Ornella Serafin. Her affair with the then Minister of Trade derailed his successful climb up the UK political ladder to the summit of 10 Downing Street and destroyed his first marriage. It did produce a child, Raphael Chiswell, a “disappointing son.” After Papa Chiswell’s murder and Robin’s separation from her husband Matt, she met with ‘Raff’ to talk. He spilled the beans on his mother’s habit of winning men by becoming pregnant:
“Is that where your mother lives? Siena?”
“Yeah. She’s shacked up with an Italian count these days, and believe me, the last thing he wants is her twenty-nine-year-old son moving in. He’s showing no sign of wanting to marry her and she’s starting to worry about her old age, hence the idea of flogging the flat here. She’s getting a bit long in the tooth to pull the trick she did on my father.”
“What d’you—?”
“She got pregnant on purpose. Don’t look so shocked. My mother doesn’t believe in shielding me from the realities of life. She told me the story years ago. I’m a gamble that didn’t come off. She thought he’d marry her if she got pregnant, but as you’ve just pointed out—”
“I said I’m sorry,” said Robin. “I am. It was really insensitive and—and stupid.” (Chapter 58)
Jasper Chiswell didn’t care for this son and the boy wound up murdering him; note that once again the murderer in a Strike novel was the fruit of “coercive love,” a pregnancy trap.
- Raphael Chiswell’s trap for Kinvara Chiswell
Raphael, the product of a pregnancy trap himself, ran a similar game to capture his step-mother, a woman in line to own with her husband, Raff’s biological father, or to inherit at his death a Stubbs painting worth millions of pounds sterling. She was perhaps too old for him to make pregnant and marry as Whittaker had Leda Strike but she could be convinced that he was passionately in love with her, sufficiently won by his passion to join him in murdering her husband (and to be murdered in turn after she made him the benefactor of her will).
Raff’s most concise explanation of his plan came in his pistol-to-forehead interrogation of Robin on the houseboat in the thrilling climax of Strike 4:
“This is where [Kinvara’s] well-known instability and unhappiness with my father works in my favor. Izzy and Fizzy will line up to tell the world that she never paid much attention to what he was up to, because she didn’t love him and was only in it for the money. Reasonable doubt is all I need.”
“What’s going to happen when the police put it to Kinvara that you only restarted the affair because you realized she might be about to become fantastically wealthy?”
Raphael let out a long, slow hiss.
“Well,” he said quietly, “if they can make Kinvara believe that, I’m fucked, aren’t I? But right now, Kinvara believes her Raffy loves her more than anything in the world, and she’s going to take a lot of convincing that’s not true, because her whole life’s going to fall apart otherwise. I drilled it into her: if they don’t know about the affair, they can’t touch us. I virtually had her reciting it while I fucked her. And I warned her they’d try and turn us against each other if either one of us was suspected. I’ve got her very well-schooled and I said, when in doubt, cry your eyes out, tell them nobody ever tells you anything and act bloody confused.” (Chapter 69)
Can you say “coercive love”?
In conclusion to this ‘First Four Book Pregnancy Trap Review,’ I hope you are as startled and impressed as I am by the number of traps that play significant part in the plot lines of the series or the specific novel or in the development of the life of psychopaths in the story. And there are many more in the longer Strike mysteries. In my next Pregnancy Trap post, I’ll look at the traps laid in the most recent three Strike-Ellacott novels: Troubled Blood, Ink Black Heart, and Running Grave. Stay tuned!
Speak Your Mind