The Running Grave

K’un/Oppression (Exhaustion)

There is no water in the lake:

The image of EXHAUSTION.

Thus the superior man stakes his life

On following his will.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

52

Nine in the second place means…

There is some gossip.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

I’m so tired… you wouldn’t believe how tired I am… I just want to leave…

Robin was addressing her detective partner inside her head while forking manure out of the Shire horses’ stable. Five days had passed since her demotion from the high-level group, but her relegation to the lowest level of farm workers showed no sign of being reversed, nor was she any the wiser about what she’d done to merit punishment. Aside from very brief spells of chanting in the temple, all of Robin’s time was now devoted to manual labour: looking after livestock, cleaning, or working in the laundry and kitchens.

A new intake of prospective members had arrived for their Week of Service, but Robin had nothing to do with them. She saw them being moved around the farm, doing their different tasks, but evidently she wasn’t considered sufficiently trustworthy to shepherd them around, as Vivienne and Amandeep were doing.

Those doing hard domestic and farm work received no more food than those sitting in lectures and seminars, and had less time to sleep, waking early to collect breakfast eggs and cleaning dishes every night after dinner for a hundred people. Robin’s exhaustion had reached such levels that her hands shook whenever they were free of tools or stacks of plates, shadows flickered regularly in her peripheral vision and every muscle in her body ached as though she were suffering from flu.

Resting for a moment on the handle of her pitchfork – the spring day wasn’t particularly warm, but she was sweating nonetheless – Robin looked into the pigsty visible through the stable door, where a couple of very large sows were snoozing in the intermittent sunshine, both covered in mud and faeces, a sulphurous and ammoniac smell wafting over to Robin in the damp air. As she contemplated their naked snouts, tiny eyes and the coarse hair covering their bodies, she remembered that Abigail, Wace’s daughter, had once been forced to sleep naked beside them, in all that filth, and felt repulsed.

She could hear voices over on the vegetable patch, where a few people were planting and hoeing. Robin knew for certain now that the scant number of vegetables produced on the patch by the pigsty were there merely to keep up the pretence that church members were living off the land, because she’d seen the cavernous pantry containing shelves of dehydrated noodles, own-brand tinned tomatoes and catering-sized tubs of powdered soup.

Robin had just returned to her mucking-out when a commotion over on the vegetable patch reached her ears. Moving back to the stable entrance, she saw Emily Pirbright and Jiang Wace shouting at each other while the other workers stared, aghast.

‘You’ll do as you’re told!’

‘I won’t,’ shouted Emily, who was scarlet in the face.

Jiang attempted to force a hoe into Emily’s hands, so forcefully that she staggered back a few paces, yet stood her ground.

‘I’m not fucking doing it!’ she yelled at Jiang. ‘I won’t and you can’t fucking make me!’

Jiang raised the hoe over Emily’s head, advancing on her. A few of those watching shouted ‘No!’ and Robin, pitchfork in hand, dashed out of the stable.

‘Leave her alone!’

‘You get back to work!’ Jiang shouted at Robin, but he seemed to think better of hitting Emily, instead grabbing her by the wrist and attempting to drag her onto the vegetable patch.

‘Fuck off!’ she yelled, beating him with her free hand. ‘Fuck off, you fucking freak!’

Two of the young men in scarlet tracksuits now hurried to the struggling pair and in a few seconds had managed to persuade Jiang to release Emily, who immediately sprinted around the corner of the stable block and out of sight.

‘You’re in trouble now!’ bellowed Jiang, who was sweating. ‘Mama Mazu’ll teach you!’

‘What happened?’ said a voice behind Robin, who turned and saw, with a sinking heart, the bespectacled young woman with the large mole on her chin whom Robin had first met on the vegetable patch. The girl’s name was Shawna, and in the last few days Robin had seen far more of her than she’d have liked.

‘Emily didn’t want to work on the vegetable patch,’ said Robin, who was still wondering what could have inspired Emily’s act of resistance. However sullen she generally was, from Robin’s observation she usually accepted her work stoically.

‘She’ll pay for that,’ said Shawna, with great satisfaction. ‘You’re coming with me to the clarssrooms. We’re taking Clarss One for an hour. Oi got to choose moi own ’elper,’ she added proudly.

‘What about mucking out the stables?’ said Robin.

‘One of them can do it,’ said Shawna, waving grandly towards the workers on the vegetable patch. ‘Come on.’

So Robin propped her pitchfork against the stable wall and followed Shawna out into the misty rain, still pondering Emily’s behaviour, which she’d just connected with her refusal to eat vegetables at dinner.

‘She’s trouble, Emily,’ Shawna informed Robin, as they passed the pigsty. ‘Yew want to stay away from her.’

‘Why’s she trouble?’ asked Robin.

‘Ha ha, that’s for me to know,’ said Shawna, maddeningly smug.

Given Shawna’s lowly status, Robin imagined the eighteen-year-old had very few opportunities to condescend to anyone at Chapman Farm, and she seemed to want to make the most of a rare opportunity. As Robin had found out in the last few days, Shawna’s silence during Will Edensor’s lecture on church doctrine had been far from representative of the girl’s true nature. She was, in fact, an exhausting, non-stop talker.

Over the last few days Shawna had sought Robin out wherever possible, taking it upon herself to test Robin’s understanding of various UHC terms, then rewording Robin’s answers back to her, usually making definitions less precise or simply wrong. Their conversations had revealed Shawna’s belief that the sun rotated around the earth, that the leader of the country was called the Pry Mister and that Papa J was in regular contact with extra-terrestrials, a claim Robin had heard nobody else at Chapman Farm make. Robin didn’t think Shawna could read, because she shied away from written material, even instructions on the backs of seed packets.

Shawna had met Papa J through one of the UHC’s projects for underprivileged children. Her conversion to believer and church member appeared to have been almost instantaneous, yet key parts of the UHC’s teaching had failed to penetrate Shawna’s otherwise highly permeable mind. She routinely forgot that nobody was supposed to name family relationships and, in spite of the UHC’s insistence that fame and riches were meaningless attributes of the materialist world, evinced a breathless interest in the high-profile visitors to the farmhouse, even speculating on the cost and make of Noli Seymour’s shoes.

‘Yew hear about Jacob?’ she asked Robin, as they passed the old barn where the latter had found the biscuit tin and the Polaroids.

‘No,’ said Robin, who was still wondering why Emily had such a strong aversion to vegetables.

‘Papa J visited with him yesterday.’

‘Oh, is he back?’

‘He don’ need to come. ’E can visit people in spirit.’

Shawna looked sideways at Robin through the dirty lenses of her glasses.

‘Don’tchew believe me?’

‘Of course I do,’ said Robin, making an effort to sound convinced. ‘I’ve seen amazing things in here. I saw the Drowned Prophet appear when Papa J summoned her.’

‘It’s not appearing,’ said Shawna, at once. ‘It’s manny-fisting.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Robin.

‘Papa J says it’s toime for Jacob to pass. The soul’s too diseased. ’E won’t come roight now.’

‘I thought Dr Zhou was helping him?’ asked Robin.

‘’E’s done way more’n they do outsoide for someone like Jacob,’ said Shawna, echoing Penny Brown, ‘but Papa J says there’s no point goin’ on any more.’

‘What exactly’s wrong with Jacob?’

‘’E’s marked.’

‘He’s what?’

‘Marked,’ whispered Shawna, ‘boi the devil.’

‘How can you tell someone’s been marked by the devil?’ asked Robin.

‘Papa J can always tell. There’s marked people everywhere. Their souls aren’ normal. Some of ’em are in governments, so we gotta weed ’em out.’

‘What d’you mean, “weed them out”?’

‘Get rid of ’em,’ said Shawna, with a shrug.

‘How?’

‘’Owever we ’ave to, because thass one of the ways we’ll git the Lotus Way farster. You know what the Lotus Way is, roight?’

Robin started saying that the Lotus Way was a term for the earthly paradise that would descend once the UHC won its battle against the materialist world, and which would segue smoothly into the afterlife, but Shawna interrupted.

‘Thar she goes. BP, look.’

Becca Pirbright was crossing the yard ahead of them, her glossy hair shining in the sun. Robin had already overheard mutterings about Becca from the farmhands and kitchen workers. The consensus was that Becca was too young to have ascended so rapidly in the church, and had a very inflated opinion of herself.

‘Know why we all call ’er “BP”?’

‘Because her initials are the same as a bubble person?’ Robin guessed.

‘Yeah,’ said Shawna, who seemed disappointed Robin had got the joke. ‘Gawn,’ she muttered scornfully, as Becca kneeled quickly at the fountain of the Drowned Prophet. ‘She’s always showin’ off about ’ow she and Daiyu were mates, but she’s lying. Sita told me. Yew know Sita?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin. She’d met the elderly Sita during her last session in the kitchens.

‘She says BP an’ Daiyu never loiked each other. Sita can remember all of that, what ’appened.’

‘About Daiyu’s drowning, you mean?’ asked Robin, watching Becca disappear into the temple.

‘Yeah, an’ all the miracles BP says she saw ’er doin’. Sita dunt reckon BP saw all what she says she did. And Emily’s BP’s sister.’

‘Yes, I—’

‘We think that’s why Papa J won’t increase with BP, like she wants.’

‘He won’t what?’ said Robin innocently.

‘Increase with her,’ said Shawna, as they stopped at Daiyu’s pool to kneel and dab their foreheads with water. ‘The Drowned Prophet will bless all ’oo worship ’er. Yew don’t know nuffing, do yew?’ said Shawna, standing up again. ‘Increase means ’ave a baby! Oi’ve ’ad two in ’ere,’ said Shawna proudly.

‘Two?’ said Robin.

‘Yeah, one right after I got ’ere, an’ ’e went to Birmingham, an’ one that’s spirit born, so she’s gonna be better than the firs’ one. We all know BP wants to increase by Papa J, but ’e won’t. She’s got a disruptive sister and there’s Jacob too.’

Thoroughly confused, Robin said,

‘What’s Jacob got to do with it?’

‘Yew don’t know nuffing, do yew?’ said Shawna again, chuckling.

They passed under the archway to the area where the children’s dormitory and classrooms were and entered a door numbered one.

The classroom was a ramshackle, shabby space with children’s pictures pinned haphazardly on the walls. Twenty small children in scarlet tracksuits were already sitting at the tables, their ages, Robin guessed, between two and five. She was surprised that there weren’t more of them, given that there were a hundred people at the farm having unprotected sex, but was primarily struck by their strange passivity. Their eyes wandered, their faces blank, and very few were fidgeting, the exception being little Qing, who was currently crouched under her desk pressing blobs of plasticine onto the floor, her mop of white hair contrasting with the rest of the class’s buzz cuts.

On Robin and Shawna’s appearance, the woman who’d been reading to them got to her feet with an appearance of relief.

‘We’re on page thirty-two,’ she told Shawna, handing over the book. Shawna waited until the woman had closed the classroom door before throwing the book down on the teacher’s desk and saying.

‘Orlroight, less get ’em started on somefing.’

She took up a pile of colouring sheets.

‘Yew can do us a nice picture of a prophet,’ she informed the class, and she passed half the pile to Robin to hand out. ‘Thass mine,’ Shawna added carelessly, pointing to a colourless shrimp of a girl, before barking ‘git back on yer chair!’ at Qing, who started to wail. ‘Ignore ’er,’ Shawna advised Robin. ‘She’s gotta learn, that one.’

So Robin handed out colouring sheets, all of which featured a line drawing of a prophet of the UHC. The Stolen Prophet’s noose, which Robin might have expected to be omitted from colouring pictures for such young children, hung proudly around his neck. When she passed Qing’s desk she surreptitiously bent down, prised the plasticine off the floor and handed it back to the little girl, whose tears somewhat abated.

Moving among the children to offer encouragement and sharpen pencils, Robin found herself still more disturbed by their behaviour. Now that she paid them individual attention, they were unnervingly ready to be affectionate to her, even though she was a complete stranger. One little girl climbed into Robin’s lap unasked; others played with her hair or cuddled her arm. Robin found their craving for the kind of loving closeness that was forbidden by the church pitiful and distressing.

‘Stop that,’ Shawna told Robin from the front of the class. ‘Thass material possessiveness.’

So Robin gently disengaged herself from the clinging children and moved instead to examine some of the pictures pinned up on the wall, some of which had clearly been drawn by older students, as their subject matter was discernible. Most depicted daily life at Chapman Farm, and she recognised the tower like a giant chess piece which was visible on the horizon.

One picture caught Robin’s attention. It was captioned Aks Tre and showed a large tree with what appeared to be a hatchet drawn on the base of its trunk. She was still looking at this picture, which had evidently been drawn recently given the freshness of the paper, when the classroom door opened behind her.

Turning, Robin saw Mazu, who was wearing long scarlet robes. Total silence fell inside the classroom. The children appeared frozen.

‘I sent Vivienne to the stables to fetch Rowena,’ said Mazu quietly, ‘and I was told you’d removed her from the task I set her.’

‘Oi was told I could choose moi own helper,’ said Shawna, who looked suddenly terrified.

‘From your own group,’ said Mazu. Her calm voice belied the expression of her thin white face with its crooked near-black eyes. ‘Not from any other group.’

‘Oi’m sorry,’ whispered Shawna. ‘I thort—’

‘You can’t think, Shawna. You’ve proven that time and again. But you’ll be made to think.’

Mazu’s gaze ranged over the seated children, alighting on Qing.

‘Cut her hair,’ she told Shawna. ‘I’m tired of seeing that mess. Rowena,’ she said, now looking directly at Robin for the first time, ‘come with me.’

53

A yang line develops below two yin lines and presses upward forcibly. This movement is so violent that it arouses terror…

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Light-headed with fear, Robin crossed the classroom and followed Mazu outside. She wanted to apologise, to tell Mazu she’d had no idea she was transgressing by agreeing to accompany Shawna to the classroom, but she feared unwittingly making her predicament worse.

Mazu paused, a few steps outside the classroom, and turned to look at Robin, who also halted. This was physically the closest the two women had ever been and Robin now realised that, like Taio, Mazu didn’t seem to care much for washing. She could smell her body odour, which was poorly masked by a heavy incense perfume. Mazu said nothing, but simply looked at Robin with her dark, crookedly set eyes, and the latter felt obliged to break the silence.

‘I – I’m really sorry. I didn’t realise Shawna didn’t have the authority to take me from the stables.’

Mazu continued to stare at her without speaking, and Robin again felt a strange, visceral fear tinged with revulsion that couldn’t be entirely explained away by the power the woman held in the church. Niamh Doherty had described Mazu as a large spider; Robin herself had seen her as some malign, slimy thing lurking in a rockpool; yet neither quite captured her strangeness. Robin felt now as though she was staring into a yawning abyss of which the depths were unseeable.

She assumed Mazu expected something more than an apology, but Robin had no idea what it was. Then she heard a rustle of fabric. Glancing down, she saw that Mazu had raised the hem of her robe a few inches to reveal a dirty, sandalled foot. Robin looked back up into those strange, mismatched eyes. A hysterical impulse to laugh rose in her – Mazu couldn’t, surely, be expecting Robin to kiss her foot, as the girls who’d let the toddler escape from the dormitory had done? – but it died at the look on Mazu’s face.

For perhaps five seconds, Robin and Mazu stared at each, and Robin knew this was a test, and that to ask aloud whether Mazu genuinely wanted this tribute would be as dangerous as revealing her disgust or her incredulity.

Just do it.

Robin knelt, bent quickly over the foot, with its black toenails, grazed it with her lips and then stood up again.

Mazu gave no sign that she’d even noticed the tribute, but dropped her robes and walked on as though nothing had happened.

Robin felt shaken and humiliated. She glanced around to see whether anyone had witnessed what had just happened. She tried to imagine what Strike would say, if he’d seen her, and felt another wave of embarrassment pass over her. How could she ever explain why she’d done it? He’d think she was mad.

At Daiyu’s pool, Robin knelt and mumbled the usual observance. Beside her, Mazu said in a low voice,

‘Bless me, my child, and may your righteous punishment fall upon all who stray from The Way.’

Mazu then got up, still without looking at or speaking to Robin, and headed towards the temple. With an upsurge of panic, Robin followed, with a presentiment of what was about to happen. Sure enough, on entering the temple, Robin saw all her former high-level associates, including Amandeep, Walter, Vivienne and Kyle, sitting in a circle on chairs set upon the shining black pentagon-shaped stage. All looked stern. With an increase of her awful foreboding, Robin saw that Taio Wace was also present.

‘Rowena had taken it upon herself to do a different task to the one she was assigned, which is why you couldn’t find her, Vivienne,’ said Mazu, climbing the stairs to the stage and sitting down in a free seat, spreading out her glittering blood red robes as she did so. ‘She has paid the tribute of humility, but we will now find out whether that was an empty gesture. Move your chair into the centre of the circle, please, Rowena. Welcome to Revelation.’

Robin picked up an empty chair and moved it to the centre of the black stage, beneath which lay the deep, dark baptismal pool. She sat down and tried to still her legs, which were shaking, by pressing down on them with palms that had become damp.

The temple lights began to dim, leaving only a spotlight on the stage. Robin couldn’t remember the lights being lowered for any of the other Revelation sessions.

Get a grip, she told herself. She tried to picture Strike grinning at her, but it didn’t work: the present was too real, closing in upon her, even as the faces and figures of those surrounding her grew indistinct in the dark, and her lips were tingling strangely, as though contact with Mazu’s foot had left some acidic residue.

Mazu pointed a long, pale finger and the temple doors banged closed behind Robin, making her jump.

‘A reminder,’ said Mazu calmly, addressing those in the circle, ‘Primal Response Therapy is a form of spiritual cleansing. In this safe, holy space, we use words from the materialist world to counter materialist ideas and behaviours. There will be a purging, not only of Rowena, but of ourselves, as we unearth and dispatch terms we no longer use, but which still linger in our subconsciousness.’

Robin saw the dark figures around her nodding. Her mouth was completely dry.

‘So, Rowena,’ said Mazu, whose face was so pale that Robin could still make it out, with those dark, crookedly set eyes shining. ‘This is the moment for you to confess to things you may have done, or thought, about which you feel deep shame. What would you like to reveal first?’

For what felt like a long time, though was doubtless only seconds, Robin couldn’t think of anything to say at all.

‘Well,’ she began at last, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silent temple, ‘I used to work in PR and I suppose there was a lot of focus on appearances and what other people—’

The end of her sentence was drowned in an outbreak of jeering from the circle.

‘False self!’ barked Walter.

‘Deflecting,’ said a female voice.

‘You can’t blame your profession for your behaviour,’ said Amandeep.

Robin’s thought processes were sluggish after days of manual labour. She needed something that would satisfy her inquisitors, but her panicked mind was blank.

‘Nothing to say?’ said Mazu, and Robin could just make out her yellowish teeth in the gloom as she smiled. ‘Well, let’s see whether we can find a way in. Since entering our community, you felt entitled to criticise the colour of my hair, didn’t you?’

There was an intake of breath all around the circle. Robin felt a wave of cold sweat pass over her. Was this why she’d been demoted to farm worker? Because she’d wondered to Penny Brown why Mazu’s hair was still jet black in her forties?

‘What,’ said Mazu, speaking now to the rest of the circle, ‘would you call somebody who judged another person’s looks?’

‘Spiteful,’ said a voice out of the darkness.

‘Shallow,’ said a second.

‘Bitch,’ said a third.

‘I’m sorry,’ Robin said hoarsely, ‘I honestly didn’t mean to—’

‘No, no, there’s no need to apologise to me,’ said Mazu softly. ‘I set no store on physical appearance. But it’s an indication, isn’t it, of what you think is important?’

‘Judge people’s looks a lot, do you?’ asked a female voice from behind Robin.

‘I – I suppose—’

“‘Suppose” is obfuscatory,’ snarled Kyle.

‘You either do or you don’t,’ said Amandeep.

‘Then – I did,’ said Robin. ‘When I worked in PR, there was a tendency—’

‘Never mind tendencies,’ boomed Walter. ‘Never mind PR! What did you do? What did you say?’

‘I remember saying a client looked too big for her dress,’ invented Robin, ‘and she heard me and I felt terrible about it.’

A storm of jeering broke over her. Taio, who was sitting beside his mother, was the only person remaining silent, but he was smiling as he watched Robin.

‘Did you feel terrible, Rowena?’ asked Mazu quietly. ‘Or are you just giving us token examples, to avoid admitting to real shame?’

‘I—’

‘Why was your wedding called off, Rowena?’

‘I – we were arguing a lot.’

‘Whose fault was that?’ demanded Vivienne.

‘Mine,’ said Robin desperately.

‘What did you argue about?’ asked Amandeep.

There shouldn’t be any points of resemblance between your own life and Rowena’s, Strike had said, but he wasn’t here, stupefied by tiredness and fear, forced to come up with a story on the spot.

‘I… thought my fiancé was kind of… he didn’t have a proper job, wasn’t earning much…’

She was reversing the truth: it was Matthew who’d complained about her poor salary when she’d started working for Strike, Matthew who’d thought private detection a joke of a career.

The rest of the group began to call her names, their voices echoing off the dark walls, and Robin could make out only a few individual words: mercenary fucking bitch, gold-digger, greedy slag. Taio’s smile was broadening.

‘Tell us specifically what you said to your fiancé,’ demanded Walter.

‘That his boss was taking advantage of him—’

‘The exact words.’

‘“She’s taking advantage of you”, “she’s only keeping you on because you’re cheap”—’

While they jeered at and insulted her, she dredged her memory for the things Matthew had said about Strike during their marriage.

‘—“she fancies you”, “it’s a matter of time before she makes a move”—’

Now the surrounding circle began to shout.

‘Controlling cow!’

‘Jealous, self-centred—’

‘Stuckup, selfish bitch!’

‘Go on,’ Mazu said to Robin.

‘—and he loved the job,’ said Robin, her mouth now so dry her lips were sticking to her teeth, ‘and I made it as hard as I could for him to continue with it—’

The shouts became louder, echoing off the temple walls. In the dim light she could see fingers pointing at her, flashes of teeth, and still Taio smiled. Robin knew she was supposed to cry, that mercy came only once the person in the middle of the circle had broken down, but even though she could now see little dots of light popping in front of her eyes, something stubborn in her resisted.

Now the circle demanded the excavation of intimate details and ugly scenes. Robin embellished scenes from her marriage, reversing her and Matthew’s positions: now it was she who’d thought her partner was taking too many risks.

‘What risks?’ demanded Amandeep. ‘What was his job?’

‘He was kind of—’

But Robin couldn’t think: what risky job could her imaginary partner have had?

‘—I don’t mean physical risks, it was more that he was sacrificing our financial security—’

‘Money’s very important to you, isn’t it, Rowena?’ called Mazu, over the continuing abuse of the circle.

‘I suppose it was before I came here—’

The slurs became more derisory: the group didn’t believe that she’d changed. Mazu let the insults roll over Robin for a full minute. Voices echoed off the dark walls, calling her worthless, pathetic, a craven snob, a narcissist, a materialist, contemptible—

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something white and glowing high above her on the balcony running round the temple. Vivienne screamed and rose from her seat, pointing.

‘Look! Look! Up there! A little girl, looking down at us! I saw her!’

‘That will be Daiyu,’ said Mazu calmly, glancing up at the now empty balcony. ‘She manifests sometimes when psychic energy is particularly strong. Or she may have come as a warning.’

Silence fell. The group was unsettled. Some continued to stare up at the balcony, others glanced over their shoulders, as though they feared the spirit would come closer. Robin seemed to feel the dull thud of her heart in her throat.

‘What finally made your fiancé end the relationship, Rowena?’ asked Mazu.

Robin opened her mouth, then closed it. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, use Matthew as her model here. She refused to pretend she’d slept with someone else.

‘Come on!’ barked Walter. ‘Out with it!’

‘She’s trying to invent something,’ sneered Vivienne.

‘Tell us the truth!’ said Amandeep, his eyes shining through his glasses, ‘Nothing but the truth!’

‘I lied to him,’ said Robin hoarsely. ‘His mother died, and I lied about being able to get back in time to help with the funeral, because there was something I wanted to do at work.’

‘You selfish, self-centred bitch,’ spat Kyle.

‘You piece of shit,’ said Vivienne.

Hot tears burst from Robin’s eyes. She doubled over, feigning nothing. Her shame was real: she really had lied to Matthew as she’d described, and she’d felt guilty about it for months afterwards. The cacophony of insults and taunts of the group continued until Robin heard, with a thrill of terror, a high-pitched childish voice joining in, louder than all of the others.

‘You’re nasty. You’re a nasty person.’

The stage tilted. With a shriek, Robin fell sideways off her chair as it tipped over. The rest of the circle were also thrown off balance: they, too, fell off their lurching chairs, Walter crashing to the ground with a yell of pain. Kyle’s chair leg caught Robin on the shoulder as she slid across the smooth surface of the tipping lid, preventing herself from falling into the sliver of black water revealed beneath only by throwing out her arm and pushing against the rim of the pool.

‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ whimpered Vivienne, scrambling to reach the foot-wide rim of the stage, where Mazu and Taio stood, untroubled.

Everyone was fighting to make their way off the slippery, tilted surface: all seemed to have a horror of slipping into the dark water, welcoming as it had seemed during their baptisms. Most of the group helped each other, but no hands were offered to Robin, who had to heave herself onto the ledge of the pool alone, her shoulder smarting where Kyle’s chair had hit it. When everyone had got off the tilted stage, Mazu waved her hand. The lid covering the water moved gently back into place and the temple lights went up.

‘Daiyu’s very sensitive to certain kinds of wickedness,’ said Mazu, her dark eyes on Robin, who stood tear stained and breathless. ‘She had no funeral herself, and so she’s particularly sensitive about the sanctity of rituals surrounding death.’

Though most of Robin’s group mates looked merely frightened, and continued to peer around them for a further sign of Daiyu, a few were looking accusingly at Robin. She couldn’t find her voice to say that she had, in fact, attended Matthew’s mother’s funeral. She was certain any attempt at self-defence would make things worse.

‘We’ll end Revelation here,’ said Mazu. ‘When Daiyu manifests in the temple, things can become dangerous. You may leave for lunch.’

Robin turned to leave, but before she’d taken a step towards the temple doors, a hand closed around her upper arm.

54

Six in the second place

Difficulties pile up…

He wants to woo when the time comes.

The maiden is chaste,

She does not pledge herself.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

‘You’re all right now,’ said a low voice in Robin’s ear, as Mazu swept past. ‘It’s over. You did well.’

Robin turned, realised it was Taio Wace who’d taken hold of her, and wrenched her arm free. His expression darkened.

‘Sorry,’ said Robin, mopping her tearstained face on her sleeve. ‘I – thank you—’

‘That’s better.’

Taio replaced his hand around her upper arm, the knuckles pressing into her breast, and this time, Robin didn’t resist.

‘Revelation’s always difficult, the first time you do it,’ said Taio.

Robin permitted him to lead her out of the temple, trying to stem the streaming of her nose with her free forearm. Mazu had disappeared, but the rest of the group was now heading for Daiyu’s pool. They threw furtive glances at Taio and Robin as they crossed the courtyard without stopping.

It wasn’t until he led her down the passage between the men’s and women’s dormitories, which was so familiar to her from her nocturnal journeys into the woods, that Robin realised where he was leading her. Sure enough, moments later they were pushing through the bushes that screened the Retreat Rooms. Robin had a split second to decide what to do: she was certain there’d be no going back if she pulled away from Taio, that her status would plummet to a point from which there’d be no recovery. She also knew Strike would advise freeing herself and leaving immediately; she could see her partner’s expression now, hear his anger that she hadn’t taken his warnings, and she remembered assuring him that the UHC only used emotional coercion, that there was no possibility of rape.

The glass door of the nearest Retreat Room slid open. Author Giles Harmon stood there, wearing a velvet jacket, his hand still on the flies he’d clearly just zipped up, his dandyish hair silver in the midday sunshine.

‘Giles,’ said Taio, sounding surprised and none too pleased.

‘Ah, hello, Taio,’ said Harmon, smiling.

There was a small movement in the cabin behind Harmon and to Robin’s horror, Lin emerged, looking dishevelled and slightly sick. Without meeting anyone’s eyes she walked quickly away.

‘I didn’t know you were here,’ said Taio, maintaining his hold on Robin’s upper arm.

‘Arrived this morning,’ said Harmon, who seemed untroubled by Taio’s tone. ‘I’ve spotted a marvellous opportunity. The British Association of Creatives is looking for sponsorship for their Ethics and Art project. If the UHC were minded to, I think we could broker a really fruitful partnership.’

‘That’ll need discussion by the Council,’ said Taio.

‘I’ve emailed Papa J,’ said Harmon, ‘but I know he’s busy, so I thought I’d come down here and talk over the practicalities with you and Mazu. Thinking of staying a few days,’ he said, theatrically breathing in the country air. ‘Such a blissful change after London.’

‘OK, well, we can talk in the farmhouse later,’ said Taio.

‘Oh, of course, of course,’ said Harmon, with a small smile, and for the first time his eyes alighted briefly on Robin. ‘See you there.’

Harmon walked away, humming to himself.

‘Come on,’ said Taio, and he tugged Robin into the cabin Harmon and Lin had just vacated.

The dingy, wood-walled interior was roughly fifteen feet square and dominated by a double bed covered with a much-stained and crumpled sheet. Two grubby pillows lay on the floor and a naked lightbulb hung from its flex over the bed. The shed-like smell of pine and dust mingled with a strong odour of unwashed human.

As Taio pulled a thin curtain over the sliding glass doors, Robin blurted,

‘I can’t.’

‘Can’t what?’ said Taio, turning to face her. His scarlet tracksuit top stretched over his large belly, he smelled stale; his hair was greasy and his pointed nose and small mouth had never seemed more rat-like.

‘You know what,’ said Robin. ‘I just can’t.’

‘This’ll make you feel better,’ said Taio, now advancing on her. ‘Much better.’

He reached for her, but Robin threw out a hand, holding him at arm’s length with as much force as she’d used to prevent herself falling into the baptismal pool. He tried to push past it, but when she continued to resist he took half a step backwards. Evidently some wariness of the law beyond Chapman Farm lingered in him, and Robin, still determined to remain at the centre if she could, said,

‘It isn’t right. I’m not worthy.’

‘I’m a Principal. I decide who’s worthy and who isn’t.’

‘I shouldn’t be here!’ said Robin, allowing herself to start crying again and adding a hysterical note to her voice. ‘You heard me, in the temple. It’s all true, all of it. I’m bad, I’m rotten, I’m impure—’

‘Spirit bonding purifies,’ said Taio, again trying to push past her resisting hands. ‘You’ll feel much better for this. Come—’

He attempted to take her in his arms.

‘No,’ gasped Robin, wriggling free of him to stand with her back to the glass doors. ‘You can’t want to be with me now you’ve heard what I’m like.’

‘You need this,’ said Taio insistently. ‘Here.’

He sat down on the grubby bed and patted the space beside him. Robin exaggerated her distress, crying still more loudly, her wails echoing off the wooden walls, her nose running freely, taking deep gasps of air as though she might be on the verge of a panic attack.

‘Control yourself!’ commanded Taio.

‘I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, I’m being punished and I don’t know why, I can’t get any of it right, I’ve got to go—’

‘Come here,’ said Taio more insistently, again patting the bed.

‘I wanted to do this, I really believed, but I’m not what you’re looking for, I realise that now—’

‘That’s your false self talking!’

‘It isn’t, it’s my honest self—’

‘You’re currently demonstrating high levels of egomotivity,’ said Taio harshly. ‘You think you know better than I do. You don’t. This is why you drove away your fiancé, because you couldn’t subsume your ego. You learned all this in lectures: there is no self, only fragments of the whole. You must surrender to the group, to union… sit down,’ he added forcefully, but Robin remained standing.

‘I want to leave. I want to go.’

She was gambling on the fact that Taio Wace wouldn’t want to be responsible for her leaving. She was supposed to be rich and was definitely articulate and educated, which meant she might be taken seriously if she talked about her negative experiences of the church. Most importantly, she’d just witnessed a well-known writer leaving a Retreat Room with a girl who looked barely over-age.

The naked light falling from the overhead bulb highlighted Taio’s rat-like nose and dirty hair. After a moment or two’s silence he said coldly,

‘You underwent spiritual demarcation because you’ve fallen behind the other recruits.’

‘How?’ said Robin, injecting a note of desperation into her voice and still failing to wipe her nose, because she wanted to repel Taio as much as possible. ‘I’ve tried—’

‘You make disruptive statements, like that comment about Mazu’s hair. You haven’t fully integrated, you’ve failed in simple duties to the church—’

‘Like what?’ said Robin in genuine anger, every inch of her body sore after long days of manual labour.

‘Relinquishment of materialist values.’

‘But I—’

‘Step three to pure spirit: divestment.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Everyone else who joined with you has made donations to the church.’

‘I wanted to,’ lied Robin, ‘but I didn’t know how!’

‘Then you should have asked. Non-materialists offer freely, they don’t wait for forms or invoices. They offer. Wipe your nose, for God’s sake.’

Robin deliberately smeared the snot across her face with her sleeve and gave a loud, wet sniff.

‘“I live to love and give”,’ quoted Taio. ‘You were Typed as a Gift-Bearer, like the Golden Prophet, but you’re hoarding your resources instead of sharing them.’

As he said it, his eyes rolled down her body to her breasts.

‘And I know you’ve got no physical hang-ups about sex,’ he added, with the ghost of a smirk. ‘Apparently, you orgasm every time.’

‘I think I should go to temple,’ said Robin a little wildly. ‘The Blessed Divinity’s telling me to chant, I can feel it.’

She knew she’d angered and offended him, and that he didn’t believe any divinity was speaking to her; but he was the one who’d conducted seminars in the basement room about opening the mind and heart to the divine force, and to contradict her was to undermine words he himself had spoken. Perhaps, too, his desire had been quenched by her deliberate smearing of snot over her face, because after a few seconds he got slowly to his feet.

‘I think you’d do better to perform penance to the community,’ he said. ‘Fetch cleaning products from the kitchen, fresh sheets from the laundry and muck out these three Retreat Rooms.’

He ripped back the curtain, slid back the glass door and left.

Weak with immediate relief, yet full of dread of what harm she might have done in refusing him, Robin leaned for a moment against the wall, cleaned her face as best she could with her sweatshirt, then glanced around.

A tap was fixed to the wall in a corner, with a short length of hose attached and a drain hole beneath it. A slimy bottle of liquid soap and a dirty wet flannel stood beside the hole on a patch of mildewed floorboard. Presumably people washed themselves before having sex. Trying to dismiss a horrible mental image of Taio lathering his erection before joining her on the bed, Robin set off to find a bucket and mop. However, as she emerged from the bushes screening the Retreat Rooms from the courtyard, she stumbled to a halt.

Emily Pirbright was standing alone in front of the Drowned Prophet’s fountain, on a wooden crate. Her head was bowed and she was holding a piece of cardboard on which words had been written.

Robin didn’t want to approach the pool with Emily standing there, but she feared being punished if she was seen failing to make her tribute to Daiyu. Pretending she couldn’t even see Emily, she advanced on the fountain, but almost against her will her eyes were drawn to the silent figure.

Emily’s face and hair had been smeared with earth, as had her scarlet tracksuit. She was staring at the ground, as determinedly insensible of Robin’s presence as the latter had meant to be of Emily’s.

The words scrawled on the cardboard sign held between Emily’s mud-stained hands read: I AM A DIRTY PIG.

55

Heaven and earth do not unite…

Thus the superior man falls back upon his inner worth

In order to escape the difficulties.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

… and Tao took me into one of the [illegible] rooms and wanted Spirit bonding but I managed to fend him off. Giles Harman had just been in there with Lin. She’s barely of age, might be underage, I don’t know.

Emily and [illegible] (can’t remember if I told you about her, she’s quite yung young) have been punished for disobedence. Emily had to stand on a crate with a sign saying she was a dirty pig but Shawna just [illegible] and came back 48 hours & looked terrible.

I found out why I’ve been [illegible] from top group. It’s because I haven’t given any money. I’ll have to go to Mazu and offer a donation, but how do we [illegible] this, can you think of anything because it’s the only way I’m going to be able to stay.

I was also in the little kids’ classroom for the first time and they’re not right, brainwashed and strange, it’s horrible.

Shawna says Becca Pirbright is lying about her [illegible] with Daiyu. I’m going to try and find out more. Think that’s everyting. Shawna also said [illegible] about Jacob being the reason Papa J won’t have kids with Becca. She also says Jacob’s [illegible] by the devil.

R x

I forgot, there’s a picture of a tree with axe in it on the kid’s [illegible], looks recent I’ll try and find it if I can but its hard to think up a reason to come into the woods by daylight.

Strike, who was sitting at the partners’ desk in the office, read Robin’s letter through twice, noting the deterioration of her handwriting and misspellings. This was the first of her reports to contain concrete leads, not to mention information the church definitely wouldn’t want made public, but his expression betrayed no pleasure; on the contrary, he was frowning as he re-read the line about spirit bonding. Hearing footsteps he said, eyes still on the page,

‘Bit worried about her.’

‘Why?’ asked Pat in her usual baritone, setting a mug down beside Strike.

‘Sorry, thought you were Midge,’ said Strike. The subcontractor had just handed him the letter, which she’d retrieved overnight.

‘She had to go, she’s on the Franks. What’s wrong with Robin?’

‘Exhaustion and underfeeding, probably. Cheers,’ he added, picking up his tea.

‘Ryan just called,’ said Pat.

‘Who? Oh, Murphy?’

‘He wanted to know whether he’s had a message from Robin.’

‘Yeah, he has,’ said Strike, handing the folded paper over. He’d resisted reading it, but had been glad to see through the back of the paper that it looked as though it only comprised two or three lines. ‘Don’t tell him I said I’m worried about Robin,’ Strike added.

‘Why would I?’ said Pat, scowling. ‘And you’ve had some voicemail messages. One at nine o’clock last night, from a man called Lucas Messenger. He says he’s Jacob’s brother.’

‘Shit,’ said Strike, who was now ignoring all office phone calls that diverted to his mobile in the evening, on the assumption they were from Charlotte. ‘OK, I’ll call him back.’

‘And three more from the same woman,’ said Pat, her expression austere, ‘all early hours of the morning. She didn’t give her name, but—’

‘Delete them,’ said Strike, reaching for his phone.

‘I think you should listen to them.’

‘Why?’

‘She gets threatening.’

They looked at each other for a few seconds. Strike broke eye contact first.

‘I’ll call Messenger, then I’ll listen to them.’

When Pat had closed the door to the outer office, Strike called Lucas Messenger. After a few rings, a male voice said,

‘Yeah?’

‘Cormoran Strike here. You left a message for me yesterday evening.’

‘Oh—’ A slight distortion on the line told Strike he’d been switched to speakerphone. ‘You’re the detective, yeah? What’s Jacob done? Driven froo annuver window?’

Strike heard a few background sniggers and surmised that Lucas was sharing the conversation with workmates.

‘I’m trying to find out where he is.’

‘Why d’you wanna know? What’s he done?’

‘Did your brother join the Universal Humanitarian Church?’

The laughter on the other end of the line was louder this time.

‘He did, yeah. Twat.’

‘And where is he now?’

‘Germany, I fink. We’re not in touch. He’s me half-brother. We don’t get on.’

‘When did he go to Germany, do you know?’

‘Dunno, some time last year?’

‘Was this a UHC thing? Was he sent to the centre in Munich?’

‘Nah, I fink he met a girl. He’s full of it, I don’t listen to half what he tells me.’

‘Would your parents know where Jacob is?’

‘They’re not talking to him neither. They had a row.’

‘Can you think of anyone who might be in contact with Jacob?’

‘No,’ said Lucas. ‘Like I say, we don’t get on.’

This being the extent of Lucas’ information, Strike hung up a minute later having written only the words Jacob Messenger Germany? on his notepad. Turning in his swivel chair, he looked up at the board on the wall onto which he’d pinned various pictures and notes concerning the UHC case.

In a column on the left-hand side were pictures of people Strike was still trying to locate. At the top were the pictures of the girl who’d variously called herself Carine, Cherie and Cherry, and a printout of the Facebook profile of Carrie Curtis Woods, who he hoped might prove to be the same person.

Beneath Cherie’s pictures was a photo of dark-haired and tanned Jacob Messenger, who stood posing on a beach in his swimming shorts, tensing his abdominal muscles and beaming at the camera. Strike now knew Messenger’s brief flicker of fame had peaked when he came third on a reality show, for which this was a publicity picture. Jacob’s trial and imprisonment for driving under the influence had put his name back in the papers, and his last press appearance had featured photos of him at a UHC addiction services clinic, wearing a tight white T-shirt with the UHC’s logo on it, and announcing how much he’d gained from joining the church. Since then, he’d disappeared from public view.

Strike got to his feet, tore out the page with Jacob Messenger Germany? written on it and pinned it beside the young man’s photo, before picking up Robin’s letter again and re-reading the lines about Jacob. Shawna also said something about Jacob being the reason Papa J won’t have kids with Becca. I didn’t understand that, will try and find out more. She says Jacob’s [illegible] by the devil. Frowning slightly, Strike looked from the letter to the picture of beaming Jacob, with his tropical print swimming trunks and bright white teeth, wondering whether Messenger was indeed the Jacob lying ill at Chapman Farm, and if so, how this fact could possibly relate to Jonathan Wace’s lack of interest in having children with Becca Pirbright.

His gaze moved to the next picture in the left-hand column: the faded photo of bespectacled Deirdre Doherty. In spite of Strike’s best efforts, he still hadn’t found any trace of Deirdre online or off.

The bottom picture on the left-hand side of the board was a drawing: Torment Town’s strange depiction of a fair-haired woman in glasses floating in a dark pool. Strike was still trying to find the true identity of Torment Town, who’d finally responded to his online message.

To Strike’s comment, Amazing pictures. Do you draw from imagination? the anonymous artist had written:

Thanks. Kind of.

Strike had replied:

You’re really talented. You should do a comic book. Horror.

To which Torment Town had responded,

Nobody would want to read that lol

Strike had then said,

You really don’t like the UHC, do you?

But to this, Torment Town had made no reply. Strike was afraid he’d come to the point too quickly and regretted, not for the first time, that he couldn’t set Robin to work on extracting confidences out of whoever had drawn these pictures. Robin was good at building trust online, as she’d proven when she’d persuaded a teenager to give her vital information in one of their previous cases.

Strike closed Pinterest and opened Facebook instead. Carrie Curtis Woods still hadn’t accepted his follower request.

With a sigh, he pushed himself reluctantly up from his chair, and carried his mug of tea and vape pen into the outer office, where Pat sat typing, e-cigarette clamped between her teeth as usual.

‘All right,’ Strike said, sitting down on the red sofa opposite Pat’s desk, ‘let’s hear these threats.’

Pat pressed a button on her desk phone, and Charlotte’s voice, slurred with drink as Strike had expected, filled the room.

‘’S me, pick up, you fucking coward. Pick up…’

A few moments’ silence, then Charlotte’s voice came almost in a shout.

‘OK, then, I’ll leave a fucking message for your precious fucking Robin to hear when she picks up your messages, before giving you your morning blow job. I was there when your leg got blown off, even though we were split up, I stayed with you an’ I visit’d you ev’ry single day, an’ I gave you a place to stay when your whole shitty family gave up on you, and ev’ryone around me saying, “You know he’s on the make” an’ “What’re you doing, he’s an abusive shit?” an’ I wouldn’t listen, even after ev’rything you’d done to me, I was there for you, an’ now when I need a friend you can’t even fucking meet me fr’a coffee when I’ve got fucking cancer, you fucking leech, you user, an’ I’m still protecting you to the fucking press even though I could tell them things that’d fucking finish you, I could finish you if I told them, and why should I be fucking loyal wh—’

A loud beep cut the message off. Pat’s expression was impassive. There was a click, then a second message began.

‘Pick up. Fucking pick up, you cowardly bastard… after everything you did to me, you expect me to defend you to the press. You walked out after I miscarried, you fucking threw me across that fucking boat, you fucked every girl that moved when we were together, does precious Robin know what she’s letting hersel—’

This time there was no beep: Pat had slammed her hand onto a button on the phone, silencing voicemail. Littlejohn’s silhouette had appeared outside the frosted glass in the door onto the stairwell. The door opened.

‘Morning,’ said Strike.

‘Morning,’ said Littlejohn, looking down at Strike through his heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Need to file my report on Toy Boy.’

Strike watched in silence as Littlejohn retrieved the file from the drawer and added a couple of sheets of notes. Pat had begun typing again, e-cigarette waggling between her teeth, ignoring both men. When Littlejohn had replaced the file in the drawer, he turned to Strike and for the first time in their acquaintance, initiated conversation.

‘Think you should know, I might be being followed.’

‘Followed?’ repeated Strike, eyebrows raised.

‘Yeah. Pretty sure I’ve seen the same guy watching me, three days apart.’

‘Any reason someone would be watching you?’

‘No,’ said Littlejohn, with a trace of defiance.

‘Nothing you’re not telling me?’

‘Like what?’ said Littlejohn.

‘Wife not planning a divorce? Creditors trying to track you down?’

‘’Course not,’ said Littlejohn. ‘I thought it might be something to do with this place.’

‘What, the agency?’ said Strike.

‘Yeah… made a few enemies along the way, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, after a sip of tea, ‘but they’re nearly all in jail.’

‘You tangled with terrorists last year,’ said Littlejohn.

‘What did the person watching you look like?’ asked Strike.

‘Skinny black guy.’

‘Probably not a neo-Nazi, then,’ said Strike, making a mental note to tell Shanker the skinny black guy would need replacing.

‘Could be press,’ said Littlejohn. ‘That Private Eye story about you.’

‘Think they’ve mistaken you for me, do you?’

‘No,’ said Littlejohn.

‘Well, if you want to hand in your notice because you’re scared of—’

‘I’m not scared,’ said Littlejohn curtly. ‘Just thought you ought to know.’

When Strike didn’t respond, Littlejohn said,

‘Maybe I made a mistake.’

‘No, it’s good you’re keeping your eyes open,’ said Strike insincerely. ‘Let me know if you see the guy again.’

‘Will do.’

Littlejohn left the office without another word, casting a sideways look at Pat as he passed her. The office manager continued to stare determinedly at her monitor. Once Littlejohn’s footsteps had died away, Strike pointed at the phone.

‘Is there much more of that?’

‘She called again,’ said Pat, ‘but it’s more of the same. Threatening to go to the press with all her made-up nonsense.’

‘How d’you know it’s made-up nonsense?’ said Strike perversely.

‘You never assaulted her, I know that.’

‘You don’t know anything of the bloody sort,’ said Strike irritably, getting up from the sofa to fetch a banana from the kitchen area, instead of the chocolate biscuit he really fancied.

‘You might be a grumpy sod,’ said Pat, scowling, ‘but I can’t see you knocking a woman around.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,’ said Strike. ‘Be sure and tell the Mail that when they come calling – and delete those messages.’

Well aware that he was venting his anger on the office manager, he forced himself to say,

‘You’re right: I never threw her across a boat and I never did any of the other stuff she’s shouting about, either.’

‘She doesn’t like Robin,’ said Pat, looking up at him, her dark eyes shrewd behind the lenses of her reading glasses. ‘Jealous.’

‘There’s nothing—’

‘I know that,’ said Pat. ‘She’s with Ryan, isn’t she?’

Strike took a moody bite of banana.

‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Pat.

‘Nothing,’ said Strike, his mouth full. ‘I don’t negotiate with terrorists.’

‘Hm,’ said Pat. She took a deep drag on her e-cigarette then spoke through a cloud of vapour. ‘You can’t trust a drinker. Never know what they might do when the brakes are off.’

‘I’m not going to be held over a barrel for the rest of my life,’ said Strike. ‘She had sixteen fucking years from me. That’s enough.’

Throwing the banana skin into the bin, he headed back to the inner office.

Charlotte’s swerve from kindliness to vehement recrimination and threats came as no surprise to Strike, who’d endured her mood swings for years. Clever, funny and often endearing, Charlotte was also capable of fathomless spite, not to mention a self-destructive recklessness that had led her to sever relationships on a whim or to take extreme physical risks. Various psychiatrists and therapists had had their say over the years, each trying to corral her unpredictability and unhappiness into some neat medical classification. She’d been prescribed drugs, ricocheted between counsellors and been admitted to therapeutic facilities, yet Strike knew something in Charlotte herself had stubbornly resisted help. She’d always insisted that nothing the medical or psychiatric profession offered would ever, or could ever, help her. Only Strike could do that, she’d insisted time and again: only Strike could save her from herself.

Without realising it, he’d sat down in Robin’s chair instead of his own, facing the board on which he’d pinned the notes and pictures related to the UHC case, but thinking about Charlotte. He well remembered the night on the barge owned by one of her friends, the vicious row that had erupted after Charlotte had consumed a bottle and a half of wine, and the hasty departure of the rest of the intoxicated party, who’d left Strike alone to deal with a knife-wielding Charlotte who was threatening to stab herself. He’d disarmed her physically, and in the process she’d slipped over onto the floor. Ever afterwards, when she lost her temper, she’d claimed he’d thrown her. Doubtless if he’d listened to the third message he’d have been accused of other assaults, of infidelity and cruelty: in Charlotte’s telling, whenever she was drunk or angry, he was a monster of unparalleled sadism.

Six years since the relationship had ended for good, Strike had come to see that the unfixable problem between them was that he and Charlotte could never agree what reality was. She disputed everything: times, dates and events, who’d said what, how rows started, whether they were together or had broken up when he’d had other relationships. He still didn’t know whether the miscarriage she claimed she’d had shortly before they parted forever had been real: she’d never shown him proof of pregnancy, and the shifting dates might have suggested either that she wasn’t sure who the father was, or that the whole thing was imaginary. Sitting here today, he asked himself how he, whose entire professional life was an endless quest for truth, could have endured it all for so long.

With a grimace, Strike got to his feet yet again, picked up his notebook and pen and approached the board on the wall, willing himself to focus, because the following morning he’d be heading up to HMP Bedford to interview Jordan Reaney. His eyes travelled back up the left-hand column to the picture of Cherie Gittins, whose spell at Chapman Farm had overlapped with that of Reaney. After a few moments’ contemplation of her pictures, he called Pat through to the inner office.

‘You’ve got a daughter, right?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said Pat, frowning.

‘How old is she?’

‘The hell are you asking me that for?’ said Pat, her simian face turning red. Strike, who’d never seen her blush before, had no idea what had engendered this strange reaction. Wondering whether she could possibly have imagined he had dishonourable designs on her daughter, whom he’d never met, he said,

‘I’m trying to get access to this woman’s Facebook profile. It’s set to private and she hasn’t accepted my follow request. I thought, if your daughter’s already on Facebook, with an established history, she might have a better chance. Another mother might seem less—’

‘My daughter’s not on Facebook.’

‘OK,’ said Strike. ‘Sorry,’ he added, though he wasn’t sure why he was apologising.

Strike had the impression Pat wanted to say something else, but after a few seconds, she returned to the outer office. The tapping of computer keys resumed shortly afterwards.

Still puzzled by her reaction, he turned back to the board, eyes now on the pictures in the right-hand column, which featured four people who’d lived at Chapman Farm and met unnatural deaths.

At the top was an old news clipping about the death of Paul Draper, which Strike had found a couple of days earlier. Headlined ‘Couple Sentenced for Killing of “Modern Slave”’, the article detailed how Draper had been sleeping rough when a couple offered him a bed for the night. Both of his putative rescuers had previous convictions for violence, and had set Draper to doing building work for them, forcing him to sleep in their shed. Draper’s death six months later had occurred during a beating. His starved and partially burned body had been discovered on a nearby building site. The detective had had no success in tracing any living relative of Draper, whose picture showed a timid-looking, moon-faced youth of nineteen with short, wispy hair.

Strike’s gaze now moved to the Polaroids Robin had sent from Chapman Farm, showing the naked foursome in pig masks. The hair of the male being sodomised by the tattooed man might possibly be Draper’s, although given the age of the Polaroids, it was impossible to be certain.

Beneath Draper’s picture was the only photo of Kevin Pirbright Strike had been able to find, again taken from the news report of his murder. It showed a pale, apologetic-looking young man whose skin was pitted with acne scars. Beside the picture of Kevin was that of the murder scene. For the umpteenth time, Strike stared at that bit of gouged-out wall, and the single word ‘pigs’ that remained.

The last two pictures on the board were the oldest: those of Jonathan Wace’s first wife, Jennifer, and of Daiyu.

Jennifer Wace’s teased and permed hairstyle reminded Strike of the girls he’d known during his school days in the mid-eighties, but she’d been a very attractive woman. Nothing Strike had found out so far contradicted her daughter’s belief that her drowning had been a complete accident.

Lastly, he turned his attention to the picture of Daiyu. Rabbity-faced, with her overbite and her missing tooth, she beamed out of the blurry newsprint picture at the detective: dead at seven years old, on the same beach as Jennifer Wace.

He turned from the board and reached for his phone again. He’d already made multiple fruitless attempts to contact the Heatons, who’d witnessed Cherie running screaming up the beach after Daiyu’s drowning. Nevertheless, more in hope than expectation, he called their number again.

To his amazement, the phone was answered after three rings.

‘Hello?’ said a female voice.

‘Hi,’ said Strike, ‘is this Mrs Heaton?’

‘No, iss me, Gillian,’ said the woman, who had a strong Norfolk accent. ‘Who’s this?’

‘I’m trying to contact Mr and Mrs Heaton,’ said Strike. ‘Have they sold their house?’

‘No,’ said Gillian, ‘I’m jus’ here waterin’ the plants. They’re still in Spain. Who’s this?’ she asked again.

‘My name’s Cormoran Strike. I’m a private detective, and I was wondering whether I could speak—’

‘Strike?’ said the woman on the end of the line. ‘You’re not him who got that strangler?’

‘That’s me. I was hoping to speak to Mr and Mrs Heaton about the drowning of a little girl in 1995. They were witnesses at the inquest.’

‘Blimey, yeah,’ said Gillian. ‘I remember that. We’re old friends.’

‘Are they likely to be back in the country soon? I’d rather speak to them in person, but if they can’t—’

‘Well, Leonard broke his leg, see,’ said Gillian, ‘so they stopped out in Fuengirola a bit longer. They’ve got a place out there. He’s getting better, though. Shelley reckons they’ll be back in a couple of weeks.’

‘Would you mind asking if they’d be prepared to speak to me when they get home? I’m happy to come to Cromer,’ added Strike, who wanted to take a look at the place Jennifer and Daiyu had died.

‘Oh,’ said Gillian, who sounded quite excited. ‘Right. I’m sure they’d be happy to help.’

Strike gave the woman his number, thanked her, hung up, then turned to face the board on the wall once more.

There was only one other item pinned to it: a few lines of a poem, which had been printed in a local Norfolk newspaper as part of a grieving widower’s tribute to his dead wife.

Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave

Beside her as she struck

Wildly towards the shore, but the blackcapped wave

Crossed her and swung her back…

The imagery was powerful, but it wasn’t Wace’s. Strike had had a feeling upon reading the lines that he’d heard something like them before, and sure enough, he’d traced them to poet George Barker’s ‘On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast’. Wace had taken the opening lines of Barker’s poem and switched the pronouns, for Barker’s friend had been male.

It was a shameless piece of plagiarism and Strike was surprised that nobody at the newspaper had spotted it. He was interested not only in the brazenness of the theft, but in the egoism of the widower who’d wanted to figure as a man of poetic gifts in the immediate wake of his wife’s drowning, not to mention the choice of a poem that described the way in which Jennifer must have died, rather than her qualities in life. Even though Abigail had painted her father as a grifter and a narcissist, she’d claimed Wace had been genuinely upset about her mother’s death. The tawdry act of stealing Barker’s poem to get himself into the local paper was not, in Strike’s view, the act of a man truly grieving at all.

For another minute he stood contemplating the pictures of individuals who’d met unnatural deaths, two by drowning, one by beating, and one by a single gunshot to the head. His gaze moved again to the Polaroids of the four young people in pig masks. Then he sat back down at the desk, and scribbled a few more questions for Jordan Reaney.

56

Six at the beginning means…

Even a lean pig has it in him to rage around.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

The following morning, Strike’s bathroom scales informed him that he was now a mere eight pounds off his target weight. This boost to his morale enabled him to resist the temptation of stopping for a doughnut at the service station en route to HMP Bedford.

The prison was an ugly building of red and yellow brick. After queuing to present his visiting permit, he and the rest of the families and friends were shown into a visitors’ hall that resembled a white and green gym, with square tables set at evenly spaced intervals. Strike recognised Reaney, who was already seated, from across the room.

The prisoner, who was wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt, looked what he undoubtedly was: a dangerous man. Over six feet tall, thin but broad-shouldered, his head was shaven and his teeth a yellowish brown. Almost every visible inch of his skin was tattooed, including his throat, which was covered by a tiger’s face, and part of his gaunt face, where an ace of spades adorned most of his left cheek.

As Strike sat down opposite him, Reaney glanced towards a large black prisoner watching him in silence from a table away, and in those few seconds Strike noticed a series of tattooed lines, three broken, three solid, on the back of Reaney’s left hand, and also saw that the ace of spades tattoo was partially concealing what looked like an old facial scar.

‘Thanks for agreeing to see me,’ said Strike, as the prisoner turned to look at him.

Reaney grunted. He blinked, Strike noticed, in an exaggerated fashion, keeping his eyes closed a fraction longer than was usual. The effect was strange, as though his large, thick-lashed, bright blue eyes were surprised to find themselves in such a face.

‘As I said on the phone,’ said Strike, drawing out his notebook, ‘I’m after information on the Universal Humanitarian Church.’

Reaney folded his arms across his chest, and placed both hands beneath his armpits.

‘How old were you when you joined?’ asked Strike.

‘Seven’een.’

‘What made you join?’

‘Needed somewhere to kip.’

‘Bit out of your way, Norfolk. You grew up in Tower Hamlets, right?’

Reaney looked unhappy that Strike knew this.

‘I was on’y in Tower ’Amlets from when I was twelve.’

‘Where were you before that?’

‘Wiv me mum, in Norfolk.’ Reaney swallowed, and his prominent Adam’s apple caused the tiger tattooed on his throat to ripple. ‘After she died I ’ad to go to London, live wiv me old man. Then I was in care, then I was ’omeless for a bit, then I went to Chapman Farm.’

‘Born in Norfolk, then?’

‘Yeah.’

This explained how a young man of Reaney’s background had ended up in deep countryside. Strike’s experience of Reaney’s type was that they rarely, if ever, broke free of the gravitational pull of the capital.

‘Did you have family there?’

‘Nah. Jus’ fancied a change.’

‘Police after you?’

‘They usually were,’ said Reaney, unsmiling.

‘How did you hear about Chapman Farm?’

‘Me an’ anuvver kid was sleeping rough in Norwich an’ we met a couple of girls collecting for the UHC. They got us into it.’

‘Was the other kid Paul Draper?’

‘Yeah,’ said Reaney, again with displeasure that Strike knew so much.

‘What d’you think made the girls from the UHC so keen to recruit two men sleeping rough?’

‘Needed people to do the ’eavy stuff on the farm.’

‘You had to join the church, as a condition of living there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How long did you stay?’

‘Free years.’

‘Long time, at that age,’ said Strike.

‘I liked the animals,’ said Reaney.

‘But not the pigs, as we’ve already established.’

Reaney ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, blinked hard, then said,

‘No. They stink.’

‘Thought they were supposed to be clean?’

‘You fort wrong.’

‘D’you often have bad dreams about things, because they stink?’

‘I jus’ don’ like pigs.’

‘Nothing to do with the pig “acting in the abysmal”?’

‘Wha’?’ said Reaney.

‘I’ve been told the pig has a particular significance in the I Ching.’

‘In the wha’?’

‘The book where you got the hexagram tattooed on the back of your left hand. Can I have a look?’

Reaney complied, though unwillingly, pulling his hand out from under his armpit and extending it towards Strike.

‘Which hexagram’s that?’ asked Strike.

Reaney looked as though he’d rather not answer, but finally said,

‘Fifty-six.’

‘What does it mean?’

Reaney blinked hard twice before muttering.

‘The wanderer.’

‘Why the wanderer?’

‘“’E ’oo ’as few friends: this is the wanderer.” I was a kid when I done it,’ he muttered, shoving his hand back under his armpit.

‘Made a believer of you, did they?’

Reaney said nothing.

‘No opinion on the UHC’s religion?’

Reaney cast another glance towards the large prisoner at the next table, who wasn’t talking to his visitor, but glaring at Reaney. With an irritable movement of his shoulders, Reaney muttered unwillingly,

‘I seen fings.’

‘Like what?’

‘Jus’ fings what they could do.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

‘Them. That Jonafun an’… is she still alive?’ asked Reaney. ‘Mazu?’

‘Why wouldn’t she be?’

Reaney didn’t answer.

‘What things did you see the Waces do?’

‘Jus’… makin’ stuff disappear. An’… spirits an’ stuff.’

‘Spirits?’

‘I seen ’er make a spirit appear.’

‘What did the spirit look like?’ asked Strike.

‘Like a ghost,’ said Reaney, his expression daring Strike to find this funny. ‘In temple. I seen it. Like… transparent.’

Reaney gave another hard blink, then said,

‘You talked to anyone else ’oo was in there?’

‘Did you believe the ghost was real?’ Strike asked, ignoring Reaney’s question.

‘I dunno – yeah, maybe,’ said Reaney. ‘You weren’ fuckin’ there,’ he added, with a slight show of temper, but after a glance over Strike’s head at a hovering warder, he added, with effortful calmness, ‘but maybe it was a trick. I dunno.’

‘I heard Mazu forced you to whip yourself across the face,’ said Strike, watching Reaney closely, and sure enough, a tremor passed over the prisoner’s face. ‘What had you done?’

‘Smacked a bloke called Graves.’

‘Alexander Graves?’

Reaney looked still more uncomfortable at this further evidence Strike had done his homework.

‘Yeah.’

‘Why did you smack him?’

‘’E was a tit.’

‘In what way?’

‘Fuckin’ annoying. Talkin’ fuckin’ gibberish all the time. An’ ’e got in me face a lot. It got on me wick so one night, yeah, I smacked ’im. But we weren’ s’posed to get angry wiv each ovver in there. Bruvverly love,’ said Reaney, ‘an’ all that shit.’

‘You don’t strike me as a man who’d agree to whip himself.’

Reaney said nothing.

‘Is that scar on your face from the whipping?’

Still Reaney didn’t speak.

‘What was she threatening you with, to make you whip yourself?’ asked Strike. ‘The police? Did Mazu Wace know you had a criminal record?’

Again, those bright blue, thickly lashed eyes blinked, hard, but at last Reaney spoke.

‘Yeah.’

‘How did they know?’

‘You ’ad to confess stuff. In front of the group.’

‘And you told them you were on the run from the police?’

‘Said I’d ’ad some trouble. You got… sucked in,’ said Reaney. The tiger rippled again. ‘You can’ unnerstand, unless you was part of it. ’Oo else you spoken to, ’oo was in there?’

‘A few people,’ said Strike.

‘’Oo?’

‘Why d’you want to know?’

‘Wondered, tha’s all.’

‘Who would you say you were closest to, at Chapman Farm?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Because “the wanderer has few friends”?’

Possibly because no other form of retaliation to this mild sarcasm was possible, Reaney freed his right hand to pick his nose. After examining his fingertip, then flicking the result of this operation away onto the floor, he reinserted his hand back under his armpit and glared at Strike.

‘Me an’ Dopey was mates.’

‘He had a bad experience with some pigs, I heard. Let some out accidentally and got beaten for it.’

‘Don’ remember that.’

‘Really? It was going to be a whipping, but two girls stole the whip, so church members were instructed to beat him up instead.’

‘Don’ remember that,’ repeated Reaney.

‘My information is, the beating was so severe it might’ve left Draper with brain damage.’

Reaney chewed the inside of his cheek for a few seconds, then repeated,

‘You weren’ fuckin’ there.’

‘I know,’ said Strike, ‘which is why I’m asking you what happened.’

‘Dopey wasn’t all there before ’e got beat up,’ said Reaney, but he looked as though he regretted these words as soon as they’d escaped him and added forcefully, ‘You can’t pin Draper on me. There was a ton of people kicking and punching him. Wha’re you after, anyway?’

‘So you weren’t friendly with anyone except Draper, at Chapman Farm?’ asked Strike, ignoring Reaney’s question.

‘No,’ said Reaney.

‘Did you know Cherie Gittins?’

‘Knew ’er a bit.’

Strike detected unease in Reaney’s tone.

‘Would you happen to know where she went, after she left Chapman Farm?’

‘No idea.’

‘What about Abigail Wace, did you know her?’

‘A bit,’ repeated Reaney, still looking uneasy.

‘What about Kevin Pirbright?’

‘No.’

‘He’d have been a kid when you were there.’

‘I didn’t ’ave nuffing to do with the kids.’

‘Has Kevin Pirbright contacted you lately?’

‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m fucking sure. I know ’oo’s contacted me an’ ’oo ’asn’t.’

‘He was writing a book about the UHC. I’d have expected him to try and find you. He remembered you.’

‘So wha’? ’E never found me.’

‘Pirbright was shot and killed in his flat, last August.’

‘I was in ’ere last August. ’Ow’m I s’posed to ’ave fuckin’ shot ’im?’

‘There was a two-month period when Kevin was alive and writing his book, and you were still at liberty.’

‘So?’ said Reaney again, blinking furiously.

‘Kevin’s laptop was stolen by his killer.’

‘I’ve just told you, I was in ’ere when ’e was shot, so ’ow’m I s’posed to ’ave nicked ’is fucking laptop?’

‘I’m not suggesting you stole it. I’m telling you that whoever’s got that laptop probably knows whether or not you spoke to Pirbright. It’s not difficult to get a password out of someone, if you’re pointing a gun at them.’

‘I dunno what you’re fuckin’ talkin’ about,’ said Reaney. ‘I never spoke to ’im.’

But there was sweat on Reaney’s upper lip.

‘Can you imagine the Waces killing in defence of the church?’

‘No,’ said Reaney automatically. Then, ‘I dunno. ’Ow the fuck would I know?’

Strike turned a page in his notebook.

‘Did you ever see guns when you were at Chapman Farm?’

‘No.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘Yeah, ’course I’m fucking sure.’

‘You didn’t take guns there?’

‘No I fucking didn’t. ’Oo says I did?’

‘Were livestock slaughtered at the farm?’

‘Wha’?’

‘Did church members personally wring chickens’ necks? Slaughter pigs?’

‘Chickens, yeah,’ said Reaney. ‘Not the pigs. They wen’ to the abattoir.’

‘Did you ever witness anyone killing an animal with a hatchet?’

‘No.’

‘Ever hide a hatchet in a tree in the woods?’

‘The fuck you tryin’ to pin on me?’ snarled Reaney, now openly aggressive. ‘Wha’re you up to?’

‘I’m trying to find out why there was a hatchet hidden in a tree.’

‘I don’ fuckin’ know. Why would I know? Give a dog a bad name, is it? First guns and now you’re tryna pin a fuckin’ hatchet on me? I never killed nobody at Chapman Farm, if that’s what you’re fuckin’—’

Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw the large black prisoner watching Reaney shift in his seat. Reaney appeared to sense the larger man’s scrutiny, because he broke off again, though he found it harder to contain his agitation, fidgeting in his seat, blinking furiously.

‘You seem upset,’ said Strike, watching him.

‘Fuckin’ upset?’ snarled Reaney. ‘You come in ’ere sayin’ I fuckin’ killed—’

‘I never mentioned killing anyone. I asked about livestock being slaughtered.’

‘I never fuckin’ – stuff at that farm – you weren’ there. You don’ fuckin’ know what went on.’

‘The point of this interview is to find out what went on.’

‘What ’appened in there, what you were made to do, it plays on your fuckin’ mind, that’s why I still ’ave fuckin’ nightmares, but I never killed nobody, all right? An’ I don’ know nuffin’ about no fuckin’ hatchet,’ Reaney added, although he looked away from Strike as he said it, those hard-blinking eyes roaming over the visitors’ room as though seeking safe haven.

‘What d’you mean by “what you were made to do”?’

Reaney was chewing the inside of his cheek again. Finally he looked back at Strike and said forcefully,

‘Ev’ryone ’ad to do stuff we didn’ wanna do.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like all of it.’

‘Give me examples.’

‘Doin’ stuff that – jus’ to ’umiliate people. Shovellin’ shit an’ cleanin’ up after them.’

‘Who’s “them”?’

‘Them. The family, the Waces.’

‘Any particular things you had to do that keep playing on your mind?’

‘All of it,’ said Reaney.

‘What d’you mean by “cleaning up” after the Waces?’

‘Jus’ – you unnerstand fuckin’ English – cleanin’ the bogs an’ stuff.’

‘Sure that’s all it was?’

‘Yeah, I’m fuckin’ sure.’

‘You were at the farm when Daiyu Wace drowned, weren’t you?’

He saw the muscles in Reaney’s jaw tighten.

‘Why?’

‘You were there, right?’

‘I slept froo the ole fuckin’ thing.’

‘Were you supposed to be in the truck that morning? With Cherie?’

‘’Oo’ve you talked to?’

‘Why does that matter?’

When Reaney merely blinked, Strike became more specific.

‘Were you supposed to be on the vegetable run?’

‘Yeah, bu’ I overslept.’

‘When did you wake up?’

‘Why’re you askin’ abou’ this?’

‘I told you, I want information. When did you wake up?’

‘I dunno. When ev’ryone was kickin’ off because the little b—’

Reaney cut himself off.

‘The little—?’ prompted Strike. When Reaney didn’t answer, he said,

‘I take it you didn’t like Daiyu?’

‘Nobody fuckin’ liked ’er. Fuckin’ spoiled fuckin’ rotten. Ask anyone ’oo was there.’

‘So you woke up when everyone was kicking off because Daiyu had disappeared?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you hear the people on early duty telling the Waces they’d seen her leaving on the truck with Cherie?’

‘Why the fuck d’you wanna know tha’?’

‘Did you hear them saying she’d left in the truck?’

‘I’m not gonna talk for them. Ask them what they seen.’

‘I’m asking what you heard, when you woke up.’

Apparently deciding this answer couldn’t incriminate him, Reaney finally muttered,

‘Yeah… they seen ’er leave.’

‘Were Jonathan and Mazu both present at the farm when you woke up?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How soon did you find out Daiyu had drowned?’

‘Can’ remember.’

‘Try.’

The tiger rippled yet again. The blue eyes blinked, over-hard.

‘Later that mornin’. The police come. Wiv Cherie.’

‘Was she distressed about Daiyu drowning?’

‘’Course she fuckin’ was,’ said Reaney.

‘Cherie left the farm for good shortly before you did, right?’

‘Can’ remember.’

‘I think you can.’

Reaney sucked in his hollow cheeks. Strike had a feeling this was a habitual expression prior to violence. He looked steadily back at Reaney, who blinked first, hard.

‘Yeah, she wen’ after the inquiry fing.’

‘The inquest?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And she didn’t tell you where she was going?’

‘Didn’t tell no one. She left in the middle of the night.’

‘And what made you leave?’

‘Jus’ ’ad enough of the place.’

‘Did Draper leave when you did?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you stay in touch?’

‘No.’

‘Did you keep in contact with anyone from the UHC?’

‘No.’

‘You like tattoos,’ said Strike.

‘Wha’?’

‘Tattoos. You’ve got a lot of them.’

‘So?’

‘Anything on your upper right arm?’ said Strike.

‘Why?’

‘Could I have a look?’

‘No, you fuckin’ can’t,’ snarled Reaney.

‘I’ll ask that again,’ said Strike quietly, leaning forwards, ‘this time reminding you what’s likely to happen to you once this interview’s over, when I inform my friend you weren’t cooperative.’

Reaney slowly pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. There was no skull on the bicep, but a large, jet black devil with red eyes.

‘Is that covering anything up?’

‘No,’ said Reaney, tugging his sleeve back down.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

‘I’m asking,’ said Strike, now reaching into an inner pocket of his jacket, withdrawing a couple of the Polaroids Robin had found in the barn at Chapman Farm, ‘because I thought you might once have had a skull where that devil is.’

He laid the two photos down on the table, facing Reaney. One showed the tall, skinny man with the skull tattoo penetrating the chubby, dark-haired girl, the other the same man sodomising the smaller man whose short, wispy hair might have been Paul Draper’s.

Reaney’s forehead had started shining in the harsh overhead light.

‘That ain’t me.’

‘You sure?’ said Strike. ‘Because I thought this might explain the pig nightmares better than the smell of pig shit.’

Sweaty and pale, Reaney shoved the photos away from him so violently that one of them fell onto the floor. Strike retrieved it and replaced both in his pocket.

‘This spirit you saw,’ he said, ‘what did it look like?’

Reaney didn’t answer.

‘Were you aware Daiyu re-materialises regularly now at Chapman Farm?’ Strike asked. ‘They call her the Drowned—’

Without warning, Reaney got to his feet. Had his plastic chair and the table not been fastened to the floor, Strike was prepared to bet the prisoner would have kicked them over.

‘Oi!’ said a nearby warder, but Reaney was walking fast towards the door into the main prison. A couple more warders caught up with him, and escorted him through the door out of the hall. Prisoners and visitors had turned to watch Reaney storm out, but swiftly turned back to their own conversations, afraid of wasting precious minutes.

Strike met the eyes of the large prisoner one table along, which were asking a silent question. Strike made a small, negative gesture. Further beatings wouldn’t make Jordan Reaney any more cooperative, Strike was sure of that. He’d met terrified men before, men who feared something worse than physical pain. The question was, what exactly was putting Jordan Reaney into such a state of alarm that he was prepared to face the worst kind of prison justice rather than divulge it?

57

Nine at the beginning…

When you see evil people,

Guard yourself against mistakes.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

To Robin’s relief, Strike’s next letter offered a solution to the problem of giving money to the UHC.

I’ve spoken to Colin Edensor and he’s prepared to make £1000 available for a donation. If you get their account details, we’ll set up a bank transfer.

In consequence, Robin asked permission to visit Mazu in the farmhouse the following morning.

‘I want to make a donation to the church,’ she explained to the hard-faced woman who’d been supervising her stint in the kitchens.

‘All right. Go now, before lunch,’ said the woman, with the first smile Robin had received from her. Glad to escape the fug of boiling noodles and turmeric, Robin pulled off her apron and left.

The June day was overcast, but as Robin crossed the deserted courtyard the sun slid out from behind a cloud and turned Daiyu’s fountain-dappled pool into a basin of diamonds. Thankfully, Emily was no longer standing on her crate. She’d remained there for a full forty-eight hours, ignored and unmentioned by all who passed, as though she’d always stood there and always would. Robin had pitied Emily doubly by the time urine stains had appeared on the inside of her tracksuit bottoms and track marks of tears had striped her muddy face, but she’d imitated all other church members and acted as though the woman was invisible.

The other absence currently improving life at Chapman Farm was that of Taio Wace, who was visiting the Glasgow centre. The removal of the ever-present fear that he’d try and take her into a Retreat Room again was such a relief that Robin even felt less tired than usual, although her regime of manual labour continued.

She knelt at Daiyu’s pool, made the usual tribute, then approached the carved double doors of the farmhouse. As she reached them, Sita, a brown-skinned, elderly woman with a long rope of steel-grey hair opened it from the inside, carrying a bulging plastic sack. As they passed each other, Robin smelled a foul odour of faeces.

‘Could you tell me where Mazu’s office is?’ she asked Sita.

‘Straight through the house, at the back.’

So Robin walked past the staircase, along the red-carpeted corridor lined with Chinese masks and painted panels, right into the heart of the farmhouse. Walking past what she assumed to be the kitchen she smelled roasting lamb, which was in stark contrast to the depressing miasma of boiling tinned vegetables she’d just left.

At the very end of the corridor, facing her, was a closed black lacquer door. As she approached, she heard voices inside.

‘… ethical question, surely?’ said a man she was almost certain was Giles Harmon. Though he’d said he was staying only a few days, he’d now been at the farm a week, and Robin had spotted him leading other teenaged girls towards the Retreat Rooms. Harmon, who never wore the scarlet tracksuit of ordinary members, was usually attired in jeans and what looked like expensive shirts. His bedroom in the farmhouse overlooked the yard and he was often to be seen typing at the desk in front of the window.

Harmon’s voice wasn’t as carefully modulated as usual. In fact, Robin thought she heard a trace of panic.

‘Everything we do here is ethical,’ said a second male voice, which she recognised at once as that of Andy Zhou. ‘This is the ethical course. Remember, he doesn’t feel as we do. There is no soul there.’

‘You approve?’ Harmon asked someone.

‘Absolutely,’ said a voice Robin had no trouble identifying as Becca Pirbright’s.

‘Well, if you think so. After all, he’s your—’

‘There’s no connection, Giles,’ said Becca, almost angrily. ‘No connection at all. I’m surprised you—’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Harmon placatingly. ‘Materialist values – I’ll meditate now. I’m sure whatever you all think is best. You’ve been dealing with the situation far longer than I have, of course.’

Robin thought he said it as though rehearsing a defence. She heard footsteps, and had seconds to dash back along the hall, making as little noise as possible on her trainered feet, so that when Harmon opened the office door, she appeared to be walking towards it from ten yards away.

‘Is Mazu free?’ Robin asked. ‘I’ve been given permission to see her.’

‘She will be, in a few minutes,’ said Harmon. ‘You should probably wait here.’

He passed her and headed upstairs. Seconds later, the study door opened for a second time and Dr Zhou and Becca emerged.

‘What are you doing here, Rowena?’ said Becca, and Robin thought her bright smile was a little more forced than usual.

‘I want to make a donation to the church,’ said Robin. ‘I was told I should see Mazu about it.’

‘Oh, I see. Yes, carry on, she’s in there,’ said Becca, pointing towards the office. She and Zhou walked away, their voices too low for Robin to catch what they were saying.

Bracing herself slightly, Robin approached the office door and knocked.

‘Come,’ said Mazu, and Robin entered.

The office, which had been added to the rear of the building, was so cluttered and colourful, and smelled so strongly of incense, that Robin felt as though she’d stepped through a portal into a bazaar. A profusion of statuettes, deities and idols were crammed onto the shelves.

Daiyu’s enlarged photograph sat in a golden frame on top of a Chinese cabinet, where joss paper was burning in a dish. Flowers and small offerings of food had been laid out in front of her. For a split second Robin felt a wholly unexpected spasm of compassion for Mazu, who sat facing her at an ebony desk that resembled Zhou’s, wearing her long blood-red dress, her black waist-length hair falling either side of her white face, her mother-of-pearl fish pendant glimmering on her chest.

‘Rowena,’ she said, unsmiling, and Robin’s moment of kindness vanished as though it had never been, as she seemed again to smell Mazu’s dirty foot, revealed for her to kiss.

‘Um – I’d like to make a donation to the church.’

Mazu surveyed her unsmilingly for a moment, then said,

‘Sit down.’

Robin did as she was told. As she did so, she noticed an incongruous object on a shelf behind Mazu’s head: a small, white plastic air freshener, which seemed entirely pointless in this room full of incense.

‘So you’ve decided you want to give us money, have you?’ said Mazu, scrutinising Robin with those dark, crooked eyes.

‘Yes. Taio talked to me,’ Robin said, certain that Mazu would know this, ‘and I’ve been doing some hard thinking, and, well, I see he was right, I am still struggling with materialism, and it’s time to put my money where my mouth is.’

A small smile appeared on the long, pale face.

‘Yet you refused spirit bonding.’

‘I felt so awful after Revelation, I didn’t think I was worthy,’ said Robin. ‘But I want to eradicate the false self, I really do. I know I’ve got a lot of work to do.’

‘How are you intending to donate? You didn’t bring any credit cards with you.’

Robin registered this admission that her locker had been opened and searched.

‘Theresa told me not to. Theresa’s my sister, she – she didn’t want me to come here at all. She said the UHC’s a cult,’ said Robin apologetically.

‘And you listened to your sister.’

‘No, but I really came here just to explore things. I didn’t know I’d stay. If I’d known how I’d feel once I’d had my Week of Service I’d have brought my bank cards – but if you let me write to Theresa, I’ll be able to arrange a bank transfer to the church’s account. I’d like to donate a thousand pounds.’

She saw, by the slight widening of Mazu’s eyes, that she hadn’t expected so large a donation.

‘Very well,’ she said, opening a drawer in her desk and withdrawing a pen, writing paper and a blank envelope. She also pushed a template letter to copy and a card printed with the UHC’s bank account details across the desk. ‘You can do that now. Luckily,’ said Mazu, taking a ring of keys from another drawer, ‘your sister wrote to you just this morning. I was going to ask somebody to give you her letter at lunch.’

Mazu now headed towards the cabinet on which Daiyu’s portrait stood and unlocked it. Robin caught a glimpse of piles of envelopes held together with elastic bands. Mazu extracted one of these, relocked the cabinet and said, still holding the letter,

‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

When the door had closed behind Mazu, Robin took a quick look around the office, her eye falling on a plug socket in the skirting board, into which nothing was plugged. With the camera she believed was hidden in the air freshener recording her every move she didn’t dare examine it, but she suspected, having used such devices herself, that this innocent socket was also a covert recording device. Possibly Mazu had left the room to see what she’d do if left alone, so Robin didn’t move from her chair, but set to work copying out the template letter.

Mazu returned a few minutes later.

‘Here,’ she said, holding out the letter addressed to Robin.

‘Thank you,’ said Robin, opening it. She was certain it had already been opened and read, judging by the suspiciously strong glue used to reseal it. ‘Oh good,’ said Robin, scanning the letter in Midge’s handwriting, ‘she’s given me her new address, I didn’t have it.’

She finished copying out the template letter, addressed the envelope and sealed it.

‘I can get that posted for you,’ said Mazu, holding out a hand.

‘Thank you,’ said Robin, getting to her feet. ‘I feel much better for doing this.’

‘You shouldn’t be giving money to “feel better”,’ said Mazu.

They were the same height, but somehow, Robin still felt as though Mazu was the taller.

‘Your personal bar to pure spirit is egomotivity, Rowena,’ said Mazu. ‘You continue to put the materialist self ahead of the collective.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘I – I am trying.’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Mazu, with a little waggle of the letter Robin had just handed her, and the latter surmised that not until the funds were safely in the UHC’s bank account would she be deemed to have made spiritual progress.

Robin left the farmhouse holding her letter. Though it was lunchtime, and she was very hungry, she made a detour to the women’s bathroom to examine the page in her hand more closely.

Robin noticed, tilting the paper beneath the overhead light in the toilet cubicle, there was an almost imperceptible line of strip Tippex: somebody had obliterated the date on which it had been sent. Flipping the envelope over she saw that the time and date of the postmark had also been blurred. So exhausted she could no longer estimate lengths of time with much accuracy, and having no recourse to any calendar, Robin couldn’t remember exactly when she’d requested the fake letter from Theresa, but she doubted she’d ever have known it existed had Mazu not wanted her to have Theresa’s address.

For the first time, it occurred to Robin that one reason for Will Edensor’s lack of response to the letters informing him that his mother was dying might be that he’d never received them. Will was in possession of a large trust fund, and it was surely in the church’s interests that he remain at the farm, meekly handing over money, rather than discover, on learning of his mother’s death, that he couldn’t see her as a flesh object, or treat her love as materialist possession.

58

Two daughters live together, but their minds are not directed to common concerns.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Robin knew Colin Edensor’s one thousand pounds must have reached the UHC’s bank account because a few days after she’d given Mazu her letter ordering the bank transfer she was reunited with her original group of high-level recruits. Nobody mentioned her Revelation session, nor did anyone welcome her back; all behaved as though she’d never been away.

This mutually agreed silence extended to Kyle’s unexplained absence from the group. Robin knew better than to ask how he’d transgressed, but she was certain he’d done something wrong because she soon spotted him doing the kind of hard manual work she’d just been allowed to give up. Robin also noticed that Vivienne now averted her eyes whenever her group and Kyle’s passed each other.

Robin found out what Kyle’s crime had been when she sat down opposite Shawna at dinner that night.

Following Shawna’s ill-advised recruitment of Robin to help with the children’s lessons, her head had been shaved. While she’d seemed cowed when she first appeared in her newly bald state, her fundamentally garrulous and indiscreet nature had now reasserted itself, and her first proud words to Robin were,

‘Oi’m increasing again.’

She patted her lower belly.

‘Oh,’ said Robin. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Yew don’t say that,’ scoffed Shawna. ‘Oi’m not doing it for me. Yew should be congratulating the church.’

‘Right,’ said Robin wearily. She’d deliberately sat with Shawna in the hopes of hearing more news about Jacob, because she had a hunch it was his fate she’d overheard Harmon, Zhou and Becca discussing in Mazu’s office, but she’d forgotten how exasperating the girl could be.

‘Did yew hear about him?’ Shawna asked Robin in a gleeful whisper, as Kyle passed the end of the table.

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘Hahaha,’ said Shawna.

The people beside them were locked in their own intense conversation. Shawna glanced sideways to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard before leaning in and whispering to Robin,

‘He says he carn’t spirit bond with, you know… women. Said it right to Mazu’s face.’

‘Well,’ said Robin cautiously, also whispering, ‘I mean… he’s gay, isn’t he? So—’

‘Thass materialism,’ said Shawna, louder than she’d intended, and one of the young men beside them glanced around and Shawna, greatly against Robin’s wishes, said loudly to them,

‘She thinks there’s such a thing as “gay”.’

Clearly deciding no good would come of responding to Shawna, the young man turned back to his conversation.

‘Bodies don’t matter,’ Shawna told Robin firmly. ‘On’y spirit matters.’

She leaned in again, once more talking in a conspiratorial whisper.

‘Vivienne wanted to spirit bond with ’im and I ’eard ’e ran out there, loike, crying, hahaha. Thass proper egomotability, thinking people aren’ good enough to sleep with.’

Robin nodded silently, which appeared to satisfy Shawna. As they ate, Robin tried to lead Shawna onto the subject of Jacob, but other than Shawna’s confident assertion that he was bound to pass soon, because Papa J had decreed it, found out no more information.

Robin’s next letter to Strike was devoid of useful information. However, two days after placing it in the plastic rock, she and the rest of the high-level recruits, minus Kyle, were led to another crafting session by Becca Pirbright.

It was a hot, cloudless June day, and Becca was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the church’s logo instead of a sweatshirt, although the ordinary members continued to wear their heavy tracksuits. Field poppies and daisies had bloomed along the path to the Portakabins, and Robin might have felt uplifted but for the fact that fine weather at Chapman Farm turned her thoughts to all the places she’d rather have been. Even central London, never the most comfortable place in a heatwave, had a halcyon quality to her these days. She could have put on a summer dress instead of this thick tracksuit, bought herself a bottle of water at will, walked anywhere, freely…

A startled mutter issued from the group as they approached the Portakabin where they usually made corn dollies. The tables had been moved outside, so that they wouldn’t have to endure the stuffiness of the crafting room, but their surprise had nothing to do with the relocated tables.

Several church members were constructing a twelve-foot-high man of straw beside the Portakabin. It appeared to have a strong wire frame, and Robin now realised that the large straw sculpture she’d previously seen Wan working on had been the head.

‘We make one of these every year, in celebration of the Manifestation of the Stolen Prophet,’ the smiling Becca told the group, who were all contemplating the large straw man as they sat down at the crafting tables. ‘The prophet was a gifted craftsman himself, so—’

Becca’s voice faltered. Emily had just emerged from behind the straw sculpture, hands full of twine. Emily’s head was freshly shaven; like Louise, she clearly hadn’t been given permission to let her hair regrow yet. Emily threw Becca a cold, challenging look before returning to her work.

‘—so we celebrate him by the means he chose to express himself,’ Becca finished.

As the group reached automatically for their piles of hollow straws, Robin saw that her companions had now graduated to making Norfolk lanterns, which were more complex than those she’d previously made. As nobody seemed inclined to help her, she reached for the laminated instructions on the table to see what she had to do, the sun beating down upon her back.

Becca disappeared into the crafting room and returned with the leatherbound copy of The Answer from which Mazu had previously read while they worked. Removing a silk bookmark indicating where they’d last got to, Becca cleared her throat and began to read.

‘“I come now to a part of my personal faith story that’s as dreadful as it’s miraculous, as heartrending as it’s joyful.

‘“Let me first state that to those who live in the bubble world, what I’m about to relate – or at least, my reaction to it, and my understanding of it – is likely to be baffling, even shocking. How, they’ll ask, can the death of a child ever be miraculous or joyful?

‘“I must begin by describing Daiyu. Materialists would call her my daughter, although I’d have loved her just the same had there been no fleshly bond.

‘“From her earliest childhood, it was evident that Daiyu would never need awakening. She’d been born awake, and her metaphysical abilities were extraordinary. She could tame wild livestock with a glance and locate lost objects unerringly, no matter how far away they were. She showed no interest in childish games or toys, but turned instinctively towards scripture, able to read before being taught, and to speak truths it takes many people a lifetime to understand.”’

‘And she could turn herself invisible,’ said a cool voice from over beside the towering straw man.

Several of the group glanced at Emily, but Becca ignored the interruption.

‘“As she grew, her powers became only more exceptional. The idea of a four- or five-year-old having her degree of spiritual calling would have seemed nonsensical to me had I not witnessed it. Every day she grew in wisdom and gave further proofs of her pure communication with the Blessed Divinity. Even as a child, she far surpassed me in understanding. I’d spent years struggling to understand and harness my own spiritual gifts. Daiyu simply accepted her abilities as natural, without inner conflict, without confusion.

‘“I look back now and wonder how I didn’t understand what her destiny was, although she spoke to me of it, a few short days before her earthly end.

‘“‘Papa, I must visit the Blessed Divinity soon, but don’t worry, I’ll come back.’

‘“I imagined she was speaking of the state pure spirits attain when they see the face of the Divinity clearly, and which I have achieved myself, through chanting, fasting and meditation. I knew that Daiyu, like me, had already seen and spoken to the Divinity. The word ‘visit’ should have warned me, but I was blind where she saw plainly.

‘“The Divinity’s chosen instrument was a young woman who took Daiyu to the dark sea while I slept. Daiyu walked joyfully towards the horizon before the sun had risen and disappeared from the material world, her fleshly body dissolving into the ocean. She was what the world calls dead.

‘“My despair was unconfined. It was weeks before I understood that this is why she was sent to us. Hadn’t she said to me, many times, ‘Papa, I exist beyond mere matter’? She’d been sent to teach us all, but to teach me particularly, that the only truth, the only reality, is spirit. And when I fully understood as much, and after I’d humbly told the Blessed Divinity so, Daiyu returned.

‘“‘Yes, she came back to me, I saw her as plainly—’”

Emily laughed scornfully. Becca slammed the book shut and got to her feet while the apprehensive corn dolly-makers pretended not to be watching.

‘Come in here for a moment, Emily, please,’ Becca told her sister.

Her expression defiant, Emily set down the straw she’d been binding to the torso of the gigantic statue and followed Becca into the cabin. Determined to know what was going on, Robin, who knew there was a small portable toilet to the rear of the crafting rooms, muttered, ‘Loo,’ and left the group.

All the windows of the Portakabin were open, doubtless in an effort to make it cool enough to work in. Robin moved round the building until she was out of sight of the other workers, then crept to stand beneath a window at the back, through which Becca and Emily’s voices, though low, were just audible.

‘… don’t understand what the problem is, I was agreeing with you.’

‘Why did you laugh?’

‘Why d’you think? Don’t you remember, when we recognised Lin—’

‘Shut up. Shut up now.’

‘Fine, I’ll—’

‘Come back. Come back here. Why did you say that, about invisibility?’

‘Oh, I’m allowed to speak now, am I? Well, that’s what you said happened. You were the one who told me what to say.’

‘That’s a lie. If you want to tell a different story now, go ahead, nobody’s stopping you!’

Emily let out something between a gasp and a laugh.

‘You filthy hypocrite.’

‘Says the person who’s back here because her EM’s out of control!’

‘My EM? Look at you!’ said Emily, with contempt. ‘There’s more EM in this place than in any of the other centres.’

‘Well, you’d know, you’ve been kicked out of enough of them. I’d have thought you’d realise you’re hanging by a thread, Emily.’

‘Says who?’

‘Says Mazu. You’re lucky you’re not Mark Three, after Birmingham, but it could still happen.’

Robin heard footsteps and guessed Becca had chosen to leave on her threatening line, but Emily spoke again, now sounding desperate.

‘You’d rather I went the same way as Kevin, wouldn’t you? Just kill myself.’

‘You dare talk about Kevin, to me?’

‘Why shouldn’t I talk about him?’

‘I know what you did, Emily.’

‘What did I do?’

‘You spoke to Kevin, for his book.’

‘What?’ said Emily, now sounding blank. ‘How?’

‘The disgusting room where he shot himself was covered with writing, and he’d written my name on the wall, and something about a plot.’

‘You think Kevin would have wanted contact with me, after we—?’

‘Shut up, for God’s sake, shut up! You don’t care about anyone except yourself, do you? Not about Papa J or the mission—’

‘If Kevin knew something about you and a plot, I didn’t tell him. But he always agreed with me that you’re full of shit.’

Robin didn’t know what Becca did next, but Emily let out a gasp of what sounded like pain.

‘You need to eat your vegetables,’ said Becca, her menacing voice unrecognisable, compared to the bright tone in which she generally spoke. ‘You hear me? And you’ll work on the vegetable patch and you’ll like it, or I’ll tell the Council I know you cooperated with Kevin.’

‘You won’t,’ said Emily, now sobbing, ‘you won’t, you bloody coward, because you know what I could tell them if I wanted!’

‘If you’re talking about Daiyu, go right ahead. I’ll be informing Papa J and Mazu of this conversation, so—’

‘No – no, Becca, don’t—’

‘It’s my duty,’ said Becca. ‘You can tell them what you think you saw.’

‘No, Becca, please don’t tell them—’

‘Could Daiyu become invisible, Emily?’

There was a short silence.

‘Yes,’ said Emily, her voice quaking, ‘but—’

‘Either she could or she couldn’t. Which is it?’

‘She… could.’

‘Correct. So don’t let me hear you saying anything different, ever again, you filthy little pig.’

Robin heard footsteps, and the door of the cabin slammed.

59

… to the thoughtful man such occurrences are grave omens that he does not neglect.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

The Frank brothers’ purchase of rope while wearing dubious disguises had now been followed by the acquisition of a very old van. Considered alongside their continued surveillance of the actress’s house and both brothers’ previous court appearances for sex offences, Strike had been forced to the conclusion that the twosome might indeed be planning an abduction. He’d contacted the Met a second time, and given them his most recent information, which included pictures of both brothers lurking around the client’s house, and warned Tasha Mayo to take all possible precautions.

‘I’d strongly advise you to change your routine,’ he told her over the phone. ‘Vary the time you go to the gym and so on.’

‘I like my routine,’ she grumbled. ‘Are you sure you aren’t taking this a bit too seriously?’

‘Well, the joke’s on me if it turns out they’re planning a camping trip, but they’ve definitely stepped up their surveillance of you lately.’

There was a slight pause.

‘You’re scaring me.’

‘It’d be remiss not to give you my honest opinion. Is there anyone who could come and stay with you for a bit? A friend, a family member?’

‘Maybe,’ she said gloomily. ‘God. I thought they were just a bit weird and annoying, not actually dangerous.’

The following day found Strike sitting at a table in the Connaught Hotel’s Jean-Georges restaurant, from which he could watch the antics of their most recently acquired client’s wealthy mother, who was seventy-four and lunching with her forty-one-year-old male companion. Strike was wearing glasses he didn’t need, but which had a minuscule camera hidden in the frame. He’d so far recorded a good deal of giggling from the woman, particularly after her dark-suited companion, who’d been solicitous in assisting her with her coat and making sure that she was comfortably seated, had been mistaken for a waiter by the diners at the next table.

Having watched the couple order food and wine, Strike asked for a chicken salad, took off his glasses, positioning them on the table so that they’d continue recording. As he did so, he caught the eye of a very good-looking dark-haired woman in a black dress, who was also dining alone. She smiled.

Strike looked away without returning the smile, picked up his phone to read the day’s news, which was, inevitably, Brexit dominated. The referendum would be happening in a week’s time and Strike was thoroughly bored of the febrile coverage it was generating.

Then he spotted a link to a story titled:

Viscountess Arrested for Assault on Billionaire Boyfriend

He clicked on the link. A dishevelled Charlotte appeared on the phone screen, flanked by a policewoman on a dark street.

Former nineties It-Girl Charlotte Campbell, 41, now Viscountess Ross, has been arrested on a charge of assault against billionaire American hotelier, Landon Dormer, 49.

Dormer’s Mayfair neighbours called police in the early hours of June 14th, concerned about the noises coming from the residence. One, who asked not to be named, told The Times,

‘We heard screams, shouting and breaking glass. We were really concerned, so we called 999. We weren’t sure what was going on. We thought it might have been a break-in.’

Ross, whose marriage to the Viscount of Croy ended in divorce last year, is the mother of twins and has a well-documented history of substance abuse. Previously admitted to Symonds House, a psychiatric facility patronised by the wealthy and famous, the part-time model and journalist has been a staple of the gossip columns ever since running away from Cheltenham Ladies’ College in her teens. With by-lines at Harpers & Queen and Vogue, she makes frequent appearances in the front row at both London and Paris fashion weeks, and was voted London’s Most Eligible Singleton in 1995. She was previously in a long-term relationship with Cormoran Strike, private detective and son of rock star Jonny Rokeby.

Rumours of an imminent engagement to billionaire Dormer have circulated in gossip columns for months, but a source close to the hotelier told The Times, ‘Landon wasn’t intending to marry her even before this happened, but after this, believe me, they’ll be finished. He isn’t a man who likes drama or tantrums.’

Ross’s sister, interior decorator Amelia Crichton, 42, told The Times,

‘This is now a legal matter, so I’m afraid I can’t say any more than that I’m confident that if this comes to court Charlotte will be fully exonerated.’

The Times approached both Charlotte Ross and Landon Dormer for comment.

There were multiple links below the article: Charlotte at the launch of a jewellery collection the previous year, Charlotte admitted to Symonds House the year before that, and Landon Dormer’s acquisition of one of the oldest five-star hotels in London. Strike ignored these, instead scrolling back up the page to look again at the photograph at the top. Charlotte’s make-up was smeared, her hair tousled, and she faced the camera defiantly as she was led away by the policewoman.

Strike glanced up at the table his glasses were filming. The elderly woman was feeding her companion something. As his chicken salad was deposited in front of him, his phone rang. Recognising the Spanish country code, he picked up.

‘Cormoran Strike.’

‘Leonard Heaton here,’ said a jocular voice with a strong Norfolk accent. ‘I hear you’re ahter me.’

‘After information, anyway,’ said Strike. ‘Thanks for calling me back, Mr Heaton.’

‘I navver strangled anyone. I wus home all night with the wife.’

Evidently Mr Heaton considered himself something of a card. Somebody – Strike assumed his wife – was chortling in the background.

‘Did you neighbour tell you what this is about, Mr Heaton?’

‘Ah, the little gal that drowned,’ said Heaton. ‘Wut’re you digging around in that fur?’

‘A client of mine’s interested in the Universal Humanitarian Church,’ said Strike.

‘Ah,’ said Heaton. ‘All right, we’re game. We’ll be home in a week, that suit you?’

After agreeing a time and date, Strike hung up and began to eat his salad, still letting his glasses do the surveillance for him, his mind unavoidably on Charlotte.

While she’d generally done most damage to herself when angry or distressed, Strike still bore a small scar over his eyebrow from the ashtray Charlotte had thrown at him as he walked out of her flat for the last time. She’d launched herself at him many times during rows, attempting to either claw his face or punch him, but this had been far easier to deal with than flying missiles, given that he was considerably larger than her and, as an ex-boxer, good at parrying attacks.

Nevertheless, at least four of their break-ups had come in the aftermath of her attempting to physically hurt him. He remembered the sobs afterwards, the desperate apologies, the vows made never to do it again, vows she sometimes kept for as much as a year.

Barely noticing what he was eating, Strike’s eyes roamed over the chattering lunchers, the stained-glass windows and tasteful grey upholstery. Between Bijou and her QC lover, and Charlotte’s alleged assault of a billionaire, his name was appearing a little too frequently in the press for his liking. He picked up the glasses concealing the hidden camera, and rammed them back on.

‘Excuse me.’

He looked up. It was the woman in black, who’d stopped at his table on her way out.

‘You aren’t Corm—?’

‘No, sorry, you must have me confused with someone,’ he said, drowning out her voice, which was fairly loud. His target and her young friend seemed too immersed in their conversion to have noticed anything, but a couple of other heads had turned.

‘I’m sorry, I thought I recognised—’

‘You’re mistaken.’

She was blocking his view of his target.

‘Sorry,’ she said again, smiling. ‘But you do look awfully—’

‘You’re mistaken,’ he repeated firmly.

She pressed her lips together, but her eyes looked amused as she passed out of the restaurant.

60

Six in the third place means:

Contemplation of my life

Decides the choice

Between advance and retreat.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

On Friday night Robin waited until the women around her had fallen asleep before slipping out of the dormitory yet again. Tonight she was more nervous and stressed than she’d been since the very first time she’d journeyed through the dark to the plastic rock in the woods, because she was twenty-four hours late in producing her letter, so felt an increased pressure to reassure the agency that she was all right. She climbed over the five-bar gate as usual, hurried across the dark field and entered the woods.

Inside the plastic rock she found two Yorkie bars and letters from Strike, Murphy and Shah. She read the three men’s letters by the light of the pencil torch. Ryan’s was essentially a thinly veiled request to know when she’d be leaving Chapman Farm. Strike’s told her he’d soon be interviewing the Heatons, who’d met Cherie Gittins on the beach in the immediate aftermath of Daiyu’s drowning.

Shah’s note read:

I checked the rock last night and I’m still in the vicinity. Strike says if there’s nothing by midnight tomorrow he’s driving up and he’ll come in the front on Sunday.

‘For God’s sake, Strike,’ muttered Robin, pulling the top off the biro with her teeth. One day’s delay didn’t seem to justify such extreme measures. Hungry as she was, she had far more to write than usual, so she postponed eating the chocolate, instead taking out the paper and pen, putting the torch between her teeth and setting to work.

Hi Cormoran,

I’m sorry this is late, it was unavoidable, I’ll explain why below. A LOT has happened this week, so I hope this pen doesn’t run out.

1. Row between the Pirbright sisters

I overheard Emily accusing Becca of lying about Daiyu’s drowning. Emily seems really unhappy and I think if I can get friendly with her she might talk. Becca also accused Emily of collaborating with Kevin on his book, because of the writing on Kevin Pirbright’s walls – Becca’s seen the photo of his room.

NB: Apparently nobody’s told Emily Kevin was murdered. She thinks he committed suicide. Not sure whether Becca knows the truth.

2. Stolen Prophet’s Manifestation

This happened Weds night. Mazu led the service, telling us all about Alexander Graves and how he went to live at Chapman Farm because of his abusive family. A huge straw man, bigger than life size, was standing in the middle on a raised platform in a spotlight and

Robin now stopped writing. She hadn’t had time to fully process what had happened in the temple and with her fingers numb with cold she doubted she could convey to Strike just how frightening the Manifestation had been: the pitch darkness pierced by two spotlights, one trained on Mazu, in her blood red robes, the mother-of-pearl fish gleaming on its cord around her neck, the other on that towering straw figure. Mazu had commanded the straw figure to give proof that the Stolen Prophet lived on in the spirit world, and a hoarse shout had issued from the figure, echoing around the temple walls: ‘Let me stay in the temple! Don’t let them take me, don’t let them hurt me again!’

Robin resumed her letter.

when Mazu told it to, the figure spoke and lifted its arms. I saw it when they were building it: it was just a wire frame covered in straw, so how they made it move I don’t know. Mazu said the Prophet died to show members how vulnerable pure spirits are when they’re exposed to materialist wickedness again. Then a noose came snaking down from the ceiling

Robin saw it all again as she wrote: the thick rope snaking down out of the darkness, the noose falling around the figure’s neck, then tightening.

and the rope lifted the figure up into the air and it started thrashing around and screaming and trying to chant, then went limp.

Maybe this doesn’t sound as scary as it did when I was watching it, but it was terrif—

Robin second-guessed herself; she didn’t want Strike to think she was cracking up. Crossing out the word, she wrote instead,

very creepy.

1. Wan

Right after we’d got back to the women’s dormitory after the Manifestation, Wan went into labour. They’ve clearly got an established procedure for when women give birth because a group of the women, including Louise Pirbright and Sita (more on her below) snapped into action to help her. Becca ran out of the dormitory to tell Mazu, and then kept coming back every hour or so to see what was happening and to report back to the farmhouse.

They had a medieval kind of kit in the bathroom, with a leather strap thing for Wan to bite on and rusty forceps. Wan wasn’t supposed to make any noise. It was my night for coming to the plastic rock but I couldn’t leave the dormitory because all the women were awake.

Wan was in labour for thirty-six hours. It was absolutely awful and the closest I’ve come to wanting to reveal who I really am and telling them I’m going to the police. I don’t know what’s normal for a birth but she seemed to lose a huge amount of blood. I was present when the baby was actually born because one of the birthing team couldn’t cope any more and I volunteered to take her place. The baby was breech and I was convinced she was going to be born dead. She looked blue at first, but Sita revived her. After all that, Wan wouldn’t look at the baby. All she said was, ‘Give it to Mazu.’ I haven’t seen the baby since. Wan’s still in bed in the women’s dormitory. Sita says she’s going to be OK and I hope to God that’s true but she looks terrible.

2. Sita

The women who stayed up two nights with Wan were allowed to catch up on sleep today. I managed to get talking to Sita in the dormitory once we’d all woken up and I sat beside her at din

‘Shit,’ Robin muttered, shaking the ballpoint. As she’d feared, it seemed to be running out of ink.

Then Robin froze. In the absence of the scratching of pen on paper, she’d heard something else: footsteps and a female voice quietly and relentlessly chanting.

‘Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu… Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhav—’

The chanting stopped. Robin extinguished the pencil torch she was holding in her mouth and flung herself flat among the nettles again, but too late: she knew the chanter had seen the light.

‘Who’s there? Who’s there? I c-c-can see you!’

Robin slowly sat up, shoving the torch, pen and paper behind her as she did so.

‘Lin,’ said Robin. ‘Hi.’

The girl was alone this time. A car swished past, and as the beam of its headlights slid over Lin Robin saw that her pale face was streaked with tears and her hands full of plants she’d tugged up by the roots. For what felt like a long time, though was really a few seconds, the two stared at each other.

‘Wh-wh-why are you here?’

‘I needed some fresh air,’ said Robin, cringing inwardly at the inadequacy of the lie, ‘and then – then I felt a bit dizzy, so I sat down. It’s been an intense few days, hasn’t it? With Wan and – and everything.’

By the faint moonlight, Robin saw the young girl glance up at the trees, in the direction of the closest security camera.

‘What m-m-made you come here, though?’

‘I got a bit lost,’ Robin lied, ‘but then I saw the light from the road and came here so I could get my bearings. What are you up to?’

‘D-d-don’t t-t-tell anyone you saw me,’ said Lin. Her large eyes shone weirdly in the shadowed face. ‘If you t-t-tell anyone, I’ll say you were out of b-b-b-b-b—’

‘I won’t tell—’

‘—bed and that I saw you and f-f-f-ollowed—’

‘—I promise,’ said Robin urgently. ‘I won’t tell.’

Lin turned and hurried away into the trees, still clutching her uprooted plants. Robin listened until Lin’s footsteps died away completely, leaving a silence broken only by the usual nocturnal rustlings of the woods.

Waves of panic broke over Robin as she sat very still, contemplating the possible repercussions of this unexpected meeting. She turned her head to look at the wall behind her.

Shah was in the vicinity. Perhaps it would be better to climb onto the road now and wait for him to come back and check the rock? If Lin talked, if Lin told the church leaders she’d found Robin at the blind spot of the perimeter with a torch she definitely shouldn’t possess…

For several minutes, Robin sat very still, thinking, barely conscious of the cold earth beneath her and the breeze lifting the hair from her nettle-stung neck. Then, reaching a decision, she groped around to find her unfinished letter, pen and torch, re-read what she’d communicated so far, then continued writing.

She looks as though she’s over 70 and has been here since the earliest days of the church. She came here at Wace’s invitation to teach yoga and told me she soon realised Papa J was ‘a very great swami’, so she stayed.

I got her talking about Becca quite easily, because Sita doesn’t like her (hardly anyone does). When I mentioned Becca knowing the Drowned Prophet, she told me Becca was really jealous of Daiyu when they were kids. She said all the little girls loved Cherie, and Becca was really envious of Daiyu getting special attention from her.

Robin stopped writing again, wondering whether to tell Strike about her encounter with Lin. She could imagine what he’d say: get out now, you’re compromised, you can’t trust a brainwashed teenager. However, after a further minute’s deliberation, she signed the letter without mentioning Lin, took up a fresh piece of paper and turned instead to the task of explaining to Murphy why she still wasn’t ready to leave Chapman Farm.

61

Nine in the third place.

All day long the superior man is creatively active.

At nightfall his mind is still beset with cares.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Strike’s primary emotion on receiving Robin’s most recent dispatch from Chapman Farm was relief that the twenty-four-hour delay hadn’t been due to injury or illness, although he found much food for thought in its contents, and re-read it several times at his desk, his notebook open beside him.

While he didn’t doubt that the Manifestation of the Stolen Prophet had been disconcerting for those present, Strike still agreed with Abigail Glover: Mazu Wace had built on the lowly magic tricks Gerald Crowther had taught her, to the point that she was now able to perform large-scale illusions, using lighting, sound and misdirection.

Robin’s account of Wan’s labour, on the other hand, genuinely troubled him. He’d been concentrating so hard on deaths at Chapman Farm, with particular focus on proper record-keeping, that he’d overlooked possible wrong-doing with regard to births. Now he wondered what would have happened if the mother or baby had died, why Mazu, a woman with no medical background, had to see the baby the moment it was born, and why the baby hadn’t been seen since.

The passages relating to Becca Pirbright also interested Strike, especially her accusation that her sister had passed information to Kevin for his book. Having re-read these paragraphs, he got up from his desk to re-examine the picture of Kevin Pirbright’s room pinned to the board on the wall. Once again his gaze travelled over the writing that was legible on the walls, which included the name Becca.

An internet search enabled him to find pictures of the adult Becca onstage at UHC seminars. He remembered Robin describing her as being like a motivational speaker, and certainly this beaming, shiny-haired woman in her logo-embossed sweatshirt had a whiff of the corporate about her. He was particularly interested in the fact that Becca had been jealous of the attention Daiyu received from Cherie Gittins. Strike scribbled a few more notes for himself, relating to the questions he intended to ask the Heatons, who’d met the hysterical Cherie on Cromer beach after Daiyu’s drowning.

The next week was busy, though unproductive in terms of advancing any of the cases on the agency’s books. In addition to his various other general and personal preoccupations, Strike’s mind kept flitting back to the dark woman at the Connaught, who claimed to have recognised him. It had been the very first time a stranger had done so, and it had worried him to the extent that he’d done something he’d never done before, and Googled himself. As he’d hoped and expected, there were very few pictures of him available online: the one used most often by the press had been taken back when he was still a military policeman and far younger and fitter. The rest showed him sporting the full beard that grew conveniently quickly when he needed it, and which he’d always worn when having to give evidence in court. He still found it strange that the woman had recognised him, clean-shaven and wearing glasses, and he couldn’t escape the suspicion that she’d been trying to draw attention to him, thereby sabotaging his surveillance.

Having discounted the possibility that she was a journalist – the direct approach in the middle of the restaurant merely to confirm his identity, would be bizarre behaviour – he was left with three possible explanations.

First: he’d managed to acquire a stalker. He thought this highly unlikely. While he had plenty of supporting evidence to prove he was attractive to certain kinds of women, and his investigative career had taught him that even apparently successful and wealthy people could be harbouring strange impulses, Strike found it very hard to imagine a woman that good looking and well dressed would be following him around for kicks.

Second: she was something to do with the Universal Humanitarian Church. His chat with Fergus Robertson had made it clear to what extremes the church was prepared to go to protect its interests. Was it possible she was one of the church’s wealthier and more influential members? If that was the explanation, the UHC evidently knew the agency was investigating them, which had serious implications not only for the case, but for Robin’s safety. Indeed, it might imply that Robin had been identified at Chapman Farm.

The last, and, in his opinion, most likely possibility was that the woman was a second Patterson operative. In this case, her loud, public approach might have been done purely to draw attention to him and scupper his job. It was this possibility that made Strike text a description of the woman to Barclay, Shah and Midge, telling them to be on the lookout for her.

The evening before his trip to Cromer, Strike worked late in the otherwise empty office, dealing with tedious paperwork while eating a packaged quinoa salad. It was the day of the Brexit referendum, but Strike hadn’t had time to vote: the Franks had decided to split up that day and he’d been pinned down, watching for the younger brother in Bexleyheath.

A combination of tedium and hunger made him particularly irritated by the sound of the office phone ringing at nearly eleven at night. Certain it was Charlotte, he let it go to voicemail. The phone rang again twenty minutes later, and at one minute to midnight rang for a third time.

Finally closing the various folders on the desk, he added his signature to a couple of documents and got up to file everything away.

Before leaving the office for his attic flat he paused at Pat’s desk again and pressed a button on her phone. He didn’t want anyone else to listen to Charlotte’s tirades: once had been enough.

‘Bluey, pick up. Seriously, Bluey, please, please pick up. I’m desp—’

Strike pressed delete, then played the next message. She sounded angry as well as pleading now.

‘I need to talk to you. If you’ve got any humanity at a—’

He pressed delete, then play.

Now a malevolent whisper filled the room, and he could visualise Charlotte’s expression, because he’d seen her like that at her most destructive, when there was no limit to her appetite to wound.

‘You’ll wish you’d picked up, you know. You will. And so will precious fucking Robin, when she hears what you really are. I know where she lives, you realise that? I’ll be doing her a fav—’

Strike slammed his hand onto the phone, deleting the message.

He knew why Charlotte was taking things this far: she’d at long last admitted to herself that Strike wasn’t ever coming back. For nearly six years she’d believed the craving she couldn’t eradicate in herself lived on in him, too, and that her beauty, her vulnerability and their long, shared history would reunite them, no matter all that had gone before, no matter how determined he was not to return. Charlotte’s flashes of insight and extraordinary ability to sniff out weak spots had always had something of the witch about them. She’d correctly intuited that he must be in love with his business partner, and this certainty was driving her to new heights of vindictiveness.

He’d have liked to comfort himself with the belief that Charlotte’s threats were empty, but he couldn’t: he knew her far too well. Possible scenarios ran through his head, each more damaging than the last: Charlotte turning up outside Robin’s house, Charlotte tracking down Murphy, Charlotte making good on her threat, and speaking to the press.

He’d had a little malicious fun in the pub with Murphy, refusing to disclose what he might have heard from Wardle to Murphy’s discredit. Now he looked back on what he felt might have been a dangerous bit of self-indulgence. Ryan Murphy would have no sense of loyalty to Strike, should Charlotte decide to spin him a line about what Strike was ‘really like’, or to pass on to Robin the vitriol Charlotte might choose to unleash in the press.

After what might have been one minute or ten, Strike became aware that he was still standing beside Pat’s desk, every muscle in his arms and neck tense. The office looked strange, almost alien, in the overhead lights, with the darkness closing in against the windows. As he headed to the door with both partners’ names engraved upon it, the only cold comfort he could draw from the situation was that Charlotte couldn’t ambush Robin, as long as she was at Chapman Farm.

62

Nine in the second place…

To bear with fools in kindliness brings good fortune.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Strike learned in the car on the way to the Heatons’ house in Cromer that Britain had voted to leave the EU. He switched off the radio after an hour of listening to commentators speculating on what this would mean for the country and listened instead to Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones.

He might have chosen to pick up Robin’s latest letter on the way back from Cromer, but he’d allotted the job to Midge. Having done it once already, he’d learned the hard way how difficult it was for a man with half his leg missing to get over the wall and barbed wire without injuring himself or falling into the nettle patch on the other side. However, he deliberately chose to drive past the entrance to Lion’s Mouth and Chapman Farm, even though, under normal circumstances, it was the last place he’d have ventured near. Inevitably, more unpleasant memories assailed him, as he passed the electric gates, and saw on the horizon that curious tower that resembled a giant chess piece; he remembered being convinced, at the age of eleven, that it had something to do with the Crowther brothers, that it was a watchtower of some description, and even though he’d never known exactly what was going on in the cabins and tents, out of sight, his inner antenna for evil had imagined children locked up in there. The fact that Robin was momentarily so close, but unreachable, did nothing whatsoever to improve his spirits, and he drove away from Chapman Farm with his mood even lower than it had been over breakfast, when his thoughts had been dominated by Charlotte’s threats of the previous night.

Cornishman that he was, proximity to the ocean generally cheered him up, but on entering Cromer he saw many old walls and buildings covered in rounded flints, which reminded him unpleasantly of the farmhouse into which Leda had periodically disappeared to discuss philosophy and politics, leaving her children unsupervised and unprotected.

He parked the BMW in a car park in the middle of town and got out beneath an overcast sky. The Heatons lived in Garden Street, which lay within walking distance, and narrowed into a pedestrian alley as it approached the seafront, the ocean framed between old houses as a small square of teal beneath a cloudy grey sky. Their house lay on the left side of the street: a solid-looking terraced residence with a dark green front door that opened directly onto the pavement. Strike imagined it would be a noisy place to live, with pedestrians tramping up and down from the beach to the shops and the Wellington pub.

When he rapped on the door using a knocker shaped like a horseshoe, a dog started yapping furiously from the interior. The door was opened by a woman in her early sixties, whose platinum hair was cut short and whose skin was the colour and texture of old leather. The dog, which was tiny, fluffy and white, was clutched to her sizeable bosom. For a split second, Strike thought he must have come to the wrong house, because gales of laughter issued from behind her, audible even over the still-yapping dog.

‘Got friends over,’ she said, beaming. ‘They wanted to meet you. Averyone’s excited.’

You have to be kidding me.

‘I take it you’re—?’

‘Shelley Heaton,’ she said, extending a hand, on which a heavy gold charm bracelet tinkled. ‘Come on in. Len’s through there with the rest of ’em. Do you shet up, Dilly.’

The dog’s yapping subsided. Shelley led Strike down a dark hallway and left into a comfortable but not over-large sitting room, which seemed to be full of people. Hazy shadows of holiday-makers drifted to and fro behind the net curtains: as Strike had expected, the noise from the street was constant.

‘Thass Len,’ said Shelley, pointing at a large, ruddy-faced man with the most obvious comb-over Strike had seen in years. Leonard Heaton’s right leg, which was encased in a surgical boot, was resting on a squat pouffe. The table beside him was crammed with framed photographs, many of them featuring the dog in Shelley’s arms.

‘Hare he is,’ said Len Heaton loudly, offering a sweaty paw embellished with a large signet ring. ‘Cameron Strike, I presume?’

‘That’s me,’ said Strike, shaking hands.

‘I’ll juss make the tea,’ said Shelley, looking hungrily at Strike. ‘Don’t go starting without me!’

She set down the small dog and left with a jangle of jewellery. The dog trotted after her.

‘This is our friends George and Gillian Cox,’ said Leonard Heaton, pointing at the sofa, where three plump people, also in their sixties, were tightly wedged, ‘and thass Suzy, Shell’s sister.’

Suzy’s eager eyes looked like raisins in her doughy face. George, whose paunch rested almost on his knees, was entirely bald and wheezing slightly, even though he was stationary. Gillian, who had curly grey hair and wore silver spectacles, said proudly,

‘I’m the one you spoke to, on the phone.’

‘Do you set down,’ Heaton told Strike comfortably, pointing at the armchair with its back to the window, facing his own. ‘Happy about the referendum?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Strike, who judged from Len Heaton’s expression that this was the correct answer.

During the few minutes Heaton’s wife moved in and out of the kitchen carrying tea, cups, plates and lemon drizzle cake, regularly crying ‘Wait fur me, I wanna hear it all!’, Strike had ample time to realise that the three blondes who’d cornered him at his godson’s christening had been mere amateurs in nosiness. The sofa-dwellers bombarded him with questions, not only about all his most newsworthy cases, but also about his parentage, his missing half leg and even – here, his determined good nature nearly failed – his relationship with Charlotte Campbell.

‘That was a long time ago,’ he said as firmly as was compatible with politeness, before turning to Leonard Heaton. ‘So you’re just back from Spain?’

‘Ah, thass right,’ said Leonard, whose forehead was peeling. ‘Got ourselves a little place in Fuengirola ahter I sowd my business. We’re normally there November through to April, but—’

‘He broke his bloody leg,’ said Shelley, finally sitting down on a chair beside her husband, perching the tiny white dog on her knee and looking greedily at Strike.

‘Liss of the “bloody”, you,’ said Leonard, smirking. He had the air of a joker used to commanding the room, but he didn’t seem to resent Strike’s temporary hogging of centre stage, perhaps because he and his wife were enjoying playing the role of impresarios who’d brought this impressive exhibit for their friends’ amusement.

‘Tell him what you was up to whan you broke it,’ Shelley instructed her husband.

‘Thass neither hare nor there,’ said a smirking Leonard, clearly wanting to be prompted.

‘Go on, Leonard, tell him,’ said Gillian, giggling.

‘I’ll tell’m, then,’ said Shelley. ‘Minigolf.’

‘Really?’ said Strike, smiling politely.

‘Bloody minigolf!’ said Shelley. ‘I said to him, “How the hell d’you manage to break a leg doing minigolf?”’

‘Tripped,’ said Leonard.

‘Pissed,’ said Shelley, and the audience on the sofa chortled more loudly.

‘Do you shet up, woman,’ said Leonard, archly innocent. ‘Tripped. Could’ve happened to anyone.’

‘Funny how it olluz happens to you,’ said Shelley.

‘They’re olluz like this!’ the giggling Gillian told Strike, inviting him to enjoy the Heatons’ madcap humour. ‘They never stop!’

‘We stayed out in Fuengirola till he could walk better,’ said Shelley. ‘He didn’t fancy the plane and tryina manage the steps down the esplanade at home. We had to miss out on a couple of summer bookings, but thass the price you pay for marrying a man who breaks his leg tryina git a golf ball into a clown’s mouth.’

The trio on the sofa roared with laughter, darting eager looks at Strike to see whether he was suitably entertained, and Strike continued to smile as sincerely as he could manage while drawing out his notebook and pen, at which a silence tingling with excitement fell over the room. Far from dampening anyone’s spirits, the prospect of raking back over the accidental death of a child seemed to be having a stimulating effect on all present.

‘Well, it’s very good of you to agree to see me,’ Strike told the Heatons. ‘As I said, I’m really just after an eyewitness account of what happened that day on the beach. It’s a long time ago now, I know, but—’

‘Well, we were up right arly,’ said Shelley eagerly.

‘Ah, crack of dawn,’ said Leonard.

‘Before dawn,’ Shelley corrected him. ‘Still dark.’

‘We were s’pposed to be driving up to Leicester—’

‘Fur me auntie’s funeral,’ interjected Shelley.

‘You can’t leave a Maltese,’ said Leonard. ‘They do howl the place down if you leave ’em, so we needed t’ampty har before we got in the car. You’re not s’posed to take dogs down on the beach in th’oliday season—’

‘But Betty was like Dilly, she wus only tiny, and we always pick up,’ said Shelley comfortably. After a split second’s confusion, Strike realised she was referring to dog shit.

‘So we took har along the beach, just out there,’ said Leonard, pointing left. ‘And the gal come a-runnin’ out of the dark, screaming.’

‘Give me a hell of a tann,’ said Shelley.

‘We thowt she’d had a sex attack or something,’ said Leonard, not without a certain relish.

‘Can you remember what she said?’

‘“Hilp me, hilp me, she’s gone under” sorta thing,’ said Leonard.

‘“I thenk she’s drowned”,’ said Shelley.

‘We thowt she meant a dog. Who goes swimming, five a.m. in the North Sea? She wus in her undies. Soaking wet,’ said Leonard with a smirk and a waggle of his eyebrows. Shelley cuffed her husband with the back of her ringed hand.

‘Behave yoursalf,’ said Shelley, smirking at Strike, while the sofa-sitters snorted with renewed laughter.

‘She wasn’t in a swimsuit?’

‘Undies,’ repeated Leonard, smirking. ‘Freezing cold.’

Shelley cuffed him again while the sofa-sitters laughed.

‘I thowt at fust she’d stripped off to go in ahter the dog,’ said Shelley. ‘Navver dreamed she’d been swimming.’

‘And she said, “Help me, she’s gone under”?’ asked Strike.

‘Ah, something like that,’ said Leonard. ‘Than she says, “We wus over hare” and goes running off to—’

‘No, she navver,’ said Shelley. ‘She asked us to git the coastguard fust.’

‘No, she navver,’ said Leonard. ‘She showed us the stuff fust.’

‘No, she navver,’ said Shelley, ‘she said, “Git the coastguard, git the coastguard.”’

‘’Ow come I seen the stuff, then?’

‘You seen the stuff ahter you come back, you dozy foal,’ said Shelley, to further chuckles from the sofa.

‘What stuff was this?’ Strike asked.

‘Towels and clothes – the little gal’s driss and shoes,’ said Shelley. ‘She took me over to tham, and whan I seen the shoes, I realised it was a kid. Orful,’ she said, but her tone was matter-of-fact. Strike could tell that the drowning had receded into the distant past for the Heatons. Such shock as it might have caused them two decades ago had long since subsided.

‘I come along with yarsalves,’ said Leonard stubbornly. ‘I warn’t gonna call up the coastguard fur a dog. I wus there, I seen the shoes—’

‘All right, Leonard, you wus with us, ha’it your own way,’ said Shelley, rolling her eyes.

‘So then I go to phone the coastguard,’ said Leonard, satisfied.

‘And you stayed with Cherie, Mrs Heaton?’

‘Ah, and I said to har, “The hell was you doing in the water, this hour of the morning?”’

‘And what did she say?’ asked Strike.

‘Said the little gal wanted a paddle.’

‘I said to Shelley ahter,’ interjected Leonard, ‘“thass what the word “no”’s for. We see kids like that hare avery summer, spoiled as hell. We navver had any ourselves—’

‘How’m I supposed to manage kids? I’ve got my hands full with you, breaking your bloody legs playing minigolf,’ said Shelley, drawing more giggles from the sofa. ‘I should tell you no more often.’

‘You tell me no plenny, thass why we ha’n’t got kids,’ said Leonard, which provoked shrieks of laughter from George, Gillian and Suzy and another cuff from his smirking wife.

‘Did Cherie tell you what had happened in the sea?’ Strike asked Shelley patiently.

‘Ah, she said the little gal went too deep and went under, said she tried to reach har and couldn’t, so she swum back to shore. Than she seen us and come a-running.’

‘And how did Cherie seem to you? Upset?’

‘More scared’n upset, I thowt,’ said Shelley.

‘Shell din’t like har,’ said Leonard.

‘He liked har, ’cause he was gitting an arly morning eyeful,’ said Shelley, while the chorus on the sofa chuckled. ‘She said to me, “I nearly drowned mysalf, the current’s right strong.” Looking fur sympathy for harsalf, and thar’s a kid dead.’

‘You’ve olluz been hard on—’

‘I weren’t the one with the hard on, Len,’ said Shelley.

The trio on the sofa shrieked with scandalised laughter, and both Heatons threw a triumphant glance at Strike, as if to say they doubted he’d ever been entertained like this during an investigation. The detective’s jaw was starting to ache with all the fake smiling he was having to do.

‘An’ she giggled and all,’ Shelley told Strike, over the others’ laughter. ‘I said to har, put your clothes back on, no point standing there like that. “Oh yeah,” she said, an’ she giggled.’

‘Narves,’ said Leonard. ‘Shock.’

‘You warn’t there whan that happened,’ said Shelley. ‘You wus phoning.’

‘You didn’t think she was genuinely upset Daiyu had drowned, Mrs Heaton?’ Strike asked.

‘Well, she wus crying a bit, but if it’d been me—’

‘You took agin har,’ Leonard told Shelley.

‘She bent down to Betty and fussed har,’ said Shelley. ‘Whass she doing playing with a dog whan there’s a little gal drowning?’

‘Shock,’ said Leonard staunchly.

‘How long were you away, Mr Heaton?’ asked Strike.

‘Twenny minutes? Haaf hour?’

‘And how quickly did the coastguard get out?’

‘They wus out there not long ahter I got back to the beach,’ said Leonard. ‘We seen the boat going out, seen the lights, and the police wus on the beach not long ahter that.’

‘She was bloody scared whan the police got there,’ said Shelley.

‘Natural,’ said Leonard.

‘She run awff,’ said Shelley.

‘She navver,’ scoffed Leonard.

‘She did,’ said Shelley. ‘“Whass that over there?” She went tanking off to see something along the beach. Pebbles or weed or something. Sun wus just coming up by then. It wus an excuse,’ said Shelley. ‘She wanted to look busy whan they arrived, poking around in the weed.’

‘Thass not running awff,’ said Leonard.

‘Lump of seaweed, a seven-year-old gal? She wus playing up fur the police. “Look at me trying averything t’find har.” No, I din’t like har,’ Shelley told Strike unnecessarily. ‘Irresponsible, warn’t she? It wus har fault.’

‘What happened when the police arrived, can you remember?’ asked Strike.

‘They asked how she and the little gal got there, ’cause she warn’t local,’ said Shelley.

‘She took us up to the scrappy owd truck with dirt and straw all over it, in the car park,’ said Leonard. ‘Said they wus from that farm, that church place full of weirdos, up Aylmerton way.’

‘You already knew about the Universal Humanitarian Church, did you?’ asked Strike.

‘Friends of aars in Felbrigg, they’d towd us about the place,’ said Shelley.

‘Weirdos,’ repeated Leonard. ‘So we’re standing in the car park and the police wants us all to go t’station, to make statements. I says, “We’ve got a funeral to git to.” The gal was crying. Then owd Muriel come out the café, to see whass going on.’

‘This is Muriel Carter, who saw Cherie take Daiyu down to the beach?’

‘Know your stuff, don’tchew?’ said Shelley, as impressed by Strike’s thoroughness as Jordan Reaney had been disconcerted. ‘Ah, thass her. Used to own a café down by that bit of beach.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘We’d navver spoken to har before all this happened,’ said Shelley, ‘but we knew her ahter that. She told the police she’d seen Cherie carrying the little gal out the truck and off down the beach. She thowt it was stupid, that time in the morning, seeing Cherie with towels and that.’

‘Muriel was in her café very early,’ commented Strike. ‘This must have all been – what, five in the morning?’

‘Coffee machine wus on the blink,’ said Leonard. ‘She’n har husband wus in there tryina fix it before opening time.’

‘Ah, right,’ said Strike, making a note.

‘Muriel said the kid wus sleepy,’ said Shelley. ‘I said to Leonard ahter, “So she warn’t pestering har for a paddle, then, thass just an excuse.” I thenk it wus Cherie who wanted to go swimming, not the little gal.’

‘Do you give it a rest, woman,’ said Leonard before saying to Strike, ‘Th’only reason Muriel thowt the kid wus sleepy wus ’cause Cherie was carrying har. Kids like being carried, that don’t mean nothen.’

‘Wut about wut come out at the inquest?’ Shelley asked Leonard sharply. ‘About har swimming? Tell’m.’ But before Leonard could do so, Shelley said,

‘Cherie wus a champion swimmer. She said it at the inquest, in the dock.’

‘Champion,’ said Leonard, with an eye roll, ‘she warn’t a champion, she wus juss good at it whan she wus a kid.’

‘She wus on a team,’ said Shelley, still speaking to Strike. ‘She’d won medals.’

‘So?’ said Leonard. ‘Thass not a bloody crime.’

‘If I wus a bloody champion swimmer I’d’ve stayed out thar to halp the little gal, not gawn back to the beach,’ said Shelley firmly, to a murmur of agreement from the sofa.

‘Don’t matter how many medals you’ve got, a rip tide’s a rip tide,’ said Leonard, now looking disgruntled.

‘This is interesting,’ said Strike, and Shelley looked excited. ‘How did the subject of Cherie’s swimming come up at the inquest, can you remember?’

‘Ah, I can,’ said Shelley, ‘because she wus tryin’ to make out it wusn’t irresponsible, takin’ the little gal into the sea, because she wus a strong swimmer harself. I said to Len after, “Medals make you see in the dark, do they?” “Medals make it ollright to take a little gal who can’t swim into the North Sea, do they?”’

‘So it was established at the inquest that Daiyu couldn’t swim, was it?’

‘Ah,’ said Leonard. ‘Har mother said she’d navver larned.’

‘I didn’t take to that mother,’ said Shelley. ‘Looked like a witch.’

‘Wearin’ robes, Shell, warn’t she?’ piped up Suzy from the sofa.

‘Long black robes,’ said Shelley, nodding. ‘You’d thenk, ef you were going to court, you’d put on proper clothes. Juss respectful.’

‘Iss their religion,’ said Leonard, forgetting that he’d just described the church members as weirdos. ‘You carn’t stop people following thar religion.’

‘Ef you ask me, Cherie wus the one who wanted the swim,’ Shelley told Strike, disregarding her husband’s interjection. ‘The kid was sleepy, she warn’t asking to go. It was Cherie’s idea.’

‘You don’t know that,’ said Leonard.

‘Navver said I knew it,’ said Shelley loftily. ‘Suspected.’

‘Can you remember any details Cherie gave about her swimming career?’ asked Strike. ‘The name of a club? Where she trained? I’m trying to trace Cherie and if I could find old teammates, or a coach—’

‘Hang on,’ said Leonard, perking up.

‘What?’ said Shelley.

‘I might be able to ’elp thar.’

‘’Ow?’ said Shelley sceptically.

‘’Cause after court, I spoke to har. She wus crying outside. One of the little gal’s family had just been talking to har – havin’ a go, probably. He walked off quick enough when I gone over to har,’ said Leonard, with a slight swelling of the chest. ‘I felt sorry fur har, an’ I towd her, “I know you done averything you could, love.” You warn’t thar, you wus in the bog,’ said Leonard, forestalling Shelley. ‘She said to me, crying, like, “But I could’ve stopped it”, and—’

‘Hang on,’ said Strike. ‘She said, “But I could’ve stopped it”?’

‘Ah,’ said Leonard.

‘Those exact words? “I could’ve stopped it”, not “I could have saved her”?’

Leonard hesitated, absent-mindedly smoothing down the few strands of greying hair doing such a poor job of disguising his baldness.

‘Ah, it wus “I could’ve stopped it”,’ he said.

‘You can’t remember th’exact words, not after all this time,’ said Shelley scornfully.

‘Do you shet up, woman,’ said Leonard, for the second time, no longer smiling. ‘I can, an’ I’ll tell you why, because I said back to her: “Nothing on earth’ll stop a rip tide.” Thass wut I said. An’ then she said, “I’ll navvar go swimming again” or sumthing, an’ I said, “Thass juss silly, after all tham medals,” an’ she kinda laughed—’

‘Laughed!’ said Shelley indignantly. ‘Laughed, an’ there’s a kid dead!’

‘—an’ she started telling me a bit about what she’d won, an’ then you come outta the bog,’ Leonard told Shelley, ‘an’ said we needed to get back to Betty, so off we went. But I know whar she practised wus open air, ’cause—’

‘’Cause you started picturing har in har undies again, probably,’ said Shelley, eyes on her audience, but nobody sniggered: they were all now interested in Leonard’s story.

‘—cause she said she trained at a lido. I remember that. You’ve olluz been hard on that gal,’ he said, looking sideways at his wife. ‘She warn’t as bad as you make out.’

‘It wus her fault,’ said Shelley implacably, with a supporting murmur from the two women on the sofa. ‘Bloody stupid thing to do, take a kid who can’t swim to the beach, that time in the morning. I spoke to the little gal’s aunt in the bathroom,’ she added, possibly to even up the score between herself and Leonard, who’d just excited so much interest from Strike, ‘an’ she agreed the blame wus what it belonged an’ she thanked me an’ Leonard fur whut we’d done, gettin’ the coastguard an’ oll that, an’ she said it wus a relief it wus oll over. Posh woman,’ Shelley added judiciously, ‘but very nice.’

‘Nearly there, just a few more questions,’ said Strike, casting an eye over his notes to check he hadn’t missed anything. ‘Did either of you see anyone else on the beach, before the police got there?’

‘No, there warn’t—’ began Shelley, but Leonard spoke over her.

‘There wus. There wus tha’ jogger.’

‘Oh, yeah, there wus him,’ said Shelley grudgingly. ‘But he warn’t nothing to do with it.’

‘When did you see him?’ asked Strike.

‘He run past us,’ said Leonard. ‘Not long after we got on the beach.’

‘Running towards the place where you met Cherie, or away from it?’ asked Strike.

‘Away,’ said Leonard.

‘Can you remember what he looked like?’

‘Big guy, I thenk,’ said Leonard, ‘but it wus dark.’

‘And he was on his own? Jogging, not carrying anything?’

‘No, he warn’t carrying nothing,’ said Leonard.

‘Given the timings, would he have passed Cherie and Daiyu when they were still on the beach, do you think? Or after they entered the water?’

The Heatons looked at each other.

‘Ahter,’ said Leonard. ‘Can’t’ve been more’n five minutes after we seen him, she come out the sea, screaming.’

Strike made a note, then asked,

‘Did you see or hear any boats in the area – before the coastguard went out, I mean?’

Both Heatons shook their heads.

‘And the van was empty when you got there?’

‘Ah, empty and locked up,’ said Leonard.

‘And how long did the coastguard look for the body, d’you know?’

‘Ah, they give it a good few days,’ said Leonard.

‘They said at the inquest she must’ve got dragged down and got stuck somewhar,’ said Shelley. ‘’S’orful, really,’ she said, fondling her tiny dog’s ears. ‘Whan you thenk about it… poor little gal.’

‘One last thing,’ said Strike, ‘would you happen to remember another drowning off the beach, back in 1988? A woman had a seizure in the water, not far from the shore.’

‘’Ang on a mo,’ piped up the wheezy George from the sofa. ‘’Eighty-eight? I remember that. I was thar!’

His companions all looked round at him, surprised.

‘Ah,’ said George excitedly, ‘if iss the one I’m thenking of, she wus with a little gal, too!’

‘That sounds right,’ said Strike. ‘The drowned woman was there with her husband and daughter. Did you see what happened?’

‘I seen a bloke with long har a-running into the sea and then him an’ another bloke dragging her up along the beach. The little gal wus crying and screaming. Tarrible business. The firs’ man gev har mouth to mouth until the ambulance came, but I hard after it was no good, she died. It wus in the paper. Epileptic. Tarrible business.’

‘Wut’s that got to do with our little gal?’ asked a curious Shelley.

‘The man whose wife died of the seizure in the water was Daiyu’s stepfather,’ said Strike.

‘No!’ said Shelley and Suzy together.

‘Yes,’ said Strike, closing his notebook.

‘Thass a funny coincidence,’ said the wide-eyed Shelley.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ said Strike. ‘Well, I think that’s everything. You’ve been very helpful, thank you. I wonder whether you could give me directions to the bit of beach where you met Cherie?’

‘Straight down th’end of our road, turn left,’ said Leonard, pointing. ‘You can’t miss it, the old café and car park’s still thar.’

‘And where—?’ began Strike, turning to George, but the latter anticipated the question.

‘Same place,’ he said, and the three women gasped. ‘Exact same place.’

63

The heart thinks constantly. This cannot be changed, but the movements of the heart—that is, a man’s thoughts—should restrict themselves to the immediate situation. All thinking that goes beyond this only makes the heart sore.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

It took Strike a further twenty minutes to extricate himself from the Heatons and their friends, but he did so as tactfully and pleasantly as he could manage, in case he needed to speak to them again. Once outside, he relaxed his facial muscles with relief, walked to the end of Garden Street and onto the esplanade.

The sky was a flat grey, with one silvered patch where the sun was attempting to break through. As Strike walked along the high promenade, he pulled his vape pen out of his pocket. Even after losing so much weight over the last year, the end of his stump was sore and the muscles in his right thigh tight. At last he spotted a short stretch of cabins selling coffees, burgers and beach toys, beside which was a small car park.

This, then, was the place where, twenty years previously, Cherie Gittins had parked the old farm truck and carried Daiyu down to the sea.

A salty breeze stung Strike’s tired eyes as he leaned on the railings, and squinted down onto the beach. In spite of the unpropitious weather, there were still people walking over the patches of dun-coloured sand that were strewn with rounded flints, like those that adorned the town’s older walls. A number of roosting seagulls appeared between the sea-worn stones like larger rocks. Strike could see neither seaweed nor shells, nor were there any danger flags flying; the sea looked fairly placid, and its briny smell, coupled with the familiar sound of the rhythmic rush and retreat of the waves, intensified an underlying melancholy he was doing his hardest to keep at bay.

Focus.

Two drownings had happened here, seven years apart, to two individuals connected to Jonathan Wace. What had the sobbing Cherie said to Leonard Heaton? ‘I could have stopped it.’ Not ‘I could have stopped her,’ but ‘I could have stopped it.’ What was ‘it’? A plot, as Kevin Pirbright had written on his bedroom wall? And if so, whose?

It hadn’t escaped Strike’s notice that while three witnesses had seen Cherie and Daiyu driving away from Chapman Farm, and a further witness had seen Cherie carrying Daiyu down onto the beach, there were no witnesses at all for what had actually happened once they reached the sea. Neither the Heatons nor the jogger who’d passed them (who appeared in no press reports) had anything to say about that. For the critical stretch of time in which Daiyu had disappeared forever, the world had only the uncorroborated word of Cherie Gittins, and the myths that had been spun around the Drowned Prophet.

It had still been night when they reached the beach, Strike thought, looking down at the flint-strewn beach. Could Cherie have been meeting somebody secretly here, by arrangement? She’d been a very strong swimmer: had that been part of the plan? Had Cherie plunged into the black water, Daiyu perhaps clinging to her shoulders, so that Daiyu could be taken to a boat moored offshore, where somebody was waiting? Had that person spirited Daiyu away, perhaps killed her and buried her elsewhere, leaving Cherie to swim back to the shore and enact the tragedy of the accidental drowning? Or was it possible that Daiyu was still alive somewhere, living under a different name? After all, some abducted children weren’t killed, but kept captive, or raised by families unconnected to them by blood.

Or had Cherie perhaps carried Daiyu down to the beach because the child had been doped at some point during the journey? She must have been alive and alert on leaving Chapman Farm, given that she’d waved at the people who’d watched the van pass. Could Cherie have given Daiyu a drugged drink en route (‘There was a night when all the kids were given drinks that I now think must have been drugged,’ Kevin Pirbright had written), so that Daiyu drowned, not because she’d waded unwisely into the deeper water, but because she was barely conscious while Cherie held her down beneath the surface? In which case, had Cherie’s swimming prowess been required to drag the body out into deep water, in the hope that it would be forever lost, so that nobody could ever perform a post mortem?

Or did the truth lie between these two theories? A body dragged to a boat, where it could be tied to weights, and disposed of in a patch of water the coastguard wouldn’t think to search, because the tides should have taken Daiyu in an entirely different direction? Yet if a boat had been moored off the dark beach, it would have been exceptionally lucky to escape the notice of the coastguard: the time margins were too slim for anything but a large, powerful vessel to escape the area in time, in which case the Heatons would surely have heard the motor across the sea in the stillness of the dawn.

There was, of course, one other possibility: that this was a case of two genuine accidents, happening in the same place, seven years apart.

Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave…

Strike gazed out at the measureless mass of water, wondering whether what remained of Daiyu was somewhere out there, her bones long since picked clean, entangled in a broken fishing net, perhaps, her skull rolling gently on the sea bed as the waves tumbled far above. In which case, ‘I could have stopped it’ meant ‘I could have stopped her demanding to go to the sea’ or ‘I could have stopped doing everything she told me to do’.

Come off it.

All right, he argued with himself, where’s the evidence it wasn’t a coincidence?

The common denominator. Jonathan Wace.

That’s not evidence. That’s part of the coincidence.

After all, if Wace had planned his stepdaughter’s murder to get his hands on the quarter of a million pounds Daiyu was worth dead, why instruct Cherie to take her to precisely the same spot where his first wife had lost her life?

Because murderers tended to be creatures of habit? Because, having successfully murdered once, they stuck to the same modus operandi ever after? Might Wace have been planning a brazen double bluff to the police? ‘If I was going to drown her, why would I do it there?’ Could Wace have been hubristic enough to believe he could charm everyone into believing it was all a ghastly twist of fate?

Except that there was a problem with this theory, too: the death of the first Mrs Wace really had been an accident. George’s testimony corroborated Abigail’s: Wace hadn’t been in the water when his wife drowned, and had tried his utmost to save her. Unless… watching the waves break on the flints below, Strike wondered whether it was possible to induce an epileptic fit in somebody. He tugged his notebook out of his pocket and wrote a reminder to himself to look into this. He then looked back out to sea, postponing the moment when he’d have to walk again, and thinking about Cherie Gittins.

The girl who’d so foolishly driven her larcenous, knife-toting boyfriend to the pharmacy by daylight a few short years later, and who’d been loose-lipped enough to blurt out ‘I could have stopped it’ to Leonard Heaton outside the coroner’s court, was no mastermind. No, if Daiyu’s disappearance had been planned, Strike was certain Cherie had been a tool, rather than the architect of the plot.

His stomach rumbled loudly. He was tired, hungry and his leg was still aching. The last thing he felt like doing was driving back to London this evening. Turning reluctantly away from the sea, he retraced his steps, registering the presence of an enormous and fairly ugly redbrick hotel facing the pier as he turned back into Garden Street. The temptation of checking in was increased by the sight of the King’s Head pub, which had a paved beer garden, tucked up the High Street to his left. The rear entrance to the redbrick Hotel de Paris (why Paris?) lay directly opposite the beer garden, beckoning invitingly.

Fuck it.

He’d explain the overnight stay to the agency’s pernickety accountant by claiming to have been detained by his investigation. Inside the King’s Head, he glanced at a menu on the bar before ordering a pint of Doom Bar and a burger and chips, justifying the latter by the seven preceding days of good dietary behaviour.

The damp beer garden was deserted, which suited Strike, because he wanted to concentrate. Once settled at a table with his vape pen, he took out his mobile and got back to work. Having looked up lidos in the vicinity of Cherie’s childhood home, he found one in Herne Hill. Not forgetting that her youthful swimming career would have happened under her birth name of Carine Makepeace, Strike kept Googling, and at last, on page four of his search results, he found what he was looking for: an old photo of a swimming team comprising both boys and girls, posted to the Facebook page of a woman called Sarah-Jane Barnett.

There in the middle of the picture was a girl of eleven or twelve, in whose plump face Strike recognised the simpering smile of the teenager later known as Cherie Gittins. Beneath the picture, Sarah-Jane had written:

Happy memories of the old Brockwell Lido! Oh, to be that fit again, but it was easier when I was 12! L-R John Curtis (who we all fancied!!!), Tamzin Couch, Stuart Whitely, Carrie Makepeace, yours truly, Kellie Powers and Reece Summers.

Strike now pulled up the Facebook page of Carrie Curtis Woods, who still hadn’t accepted his follower request. However, he now knew that Cherie had once gone by Carrie too, and better even than that, he had a reason she might have chosen the pseudonym ‘Curtis’: in tribute to a childhood crush.

Having finished his burger, chips and pint, Strike returned to the car park to pick up a small rucksack containing toothbrush, toothpaste, clean underwear and a recharging lead for his phone, which he kept in the boot of his car for unforeseen overnight stays, then walked back to the Hotel de Paris.

He could have predicted the interior from the exterior: there was grandeur in the high archways, crystal chandeliers and sweeping staircase of the lobby, but a whiff of the youth hostel about the cork noticeboard on which a laminated history of the hotel had been printed. Incapable as ever of leaving a question unanswered, Strike cast an eye over this, and learned that the hotel had been established by a man whose family had fled France during the revolution.

As he’d hoped, he was able to secure a single room, and as he supposed was inevitable in the summer season, it didn’t have a sea view, but looked out over the rooftops of Cromer. Consciously looking for the good, he noted that the room was clean and the bed seemed comfortable, but now that he was shut inside it, surrounded by the same soft yellow and red colour scheme as the lobby, he felt claustrophobic, which he knew to be entirely irrational. Between his childhood and the army, he’d slept in cars, tents pitched on hard ground, squats, that bloody awful barn at Chapman Farm and a multi-storey car park in Angola: he had no reason to complain of a perfectly adequate hotel room.

But as he hung up his jacket and glanced around to determine how many balancing aids were available between the bed and the ensuite bathroom, which he’d need to navigate one-legged next morning, the depression he’d been fighting off all day sagged down upon him. Letting himself drop down onto the bed, he passed a hand over his face, unable to distract himself any longer from the twin causes of his low mood: Charlotte and Robin.

Strike despised self-pity. He’d witnessed serious poverty, trauma and hardship, both in the military and during his detective career, and he believed in counting your blessings. Nevertheless, Charlotte’s midnight threats were gnawing at him. If she followed through on them, the consequences wouldn’t be pretty. He’d had enough press interest to know how severe a threat it posed to his business, and he was already dealing with an attempt at sabotage from Patterson. He’d hoped never to have to decamp from his office again, or to lose clients who needed an anonymous sleuth, not an unwilling celebrity, least of all one tarred with the suspicion of violence against a woman.

He took out his phone again and Googled his name and Charlotte’s.

There were a few hits, mostly old newspaper articles in which their relationship had been mentioned in passing, including the recent one about her assault on Landon Dormer. So she hadn’t talked, yet. Doubtless he’d know about it immediately if she did: helpful friends would text him their outrage, as people always did on reading bad news, thinking this would help.

He yawned, plugged the mobile in to charge and, even though it was still early, went to shower before turning in. He’d hoped the hot water would improve his mood, but as he soaped himself, he found his thoughts drifting towards Robin, which brought no consolation. He’d been with her on his last two visits to seaside towns, both taken in the course of other cases: he’d eaten chips with her in Skegness, and stayed overnight in neighbouring rooms in Whitstable.

He remembered particularly the hotel dinner they’d shared that evening, shortly after he’d just broken up with his last girlfriend, and before Robin had gone on her first date with Ryan Murphy. Robin, he remembered, had been wearing a blue shirt. They’d drunk Rioja and laughed together, and waiting upstairs had been those two bedrooms, side by side on the top floor. Everything, he thought, had been propitious: wine, sea view, both of them single, nobody else around to interrupt, and what had he done? Nothing. Even telling her that his relationship – short, unsatisfactory and undertaken purely to distract himself from inconvenient desire for his partner – was over might have precipitated a conversation that would have drawn out Robin’s own feelings, but instead he’d maintained his habitual reserve, determined not to mess up their friendship and business partnership, but afraid, too, of rejection. His one, admittedly aborted, drunken move to kiss Robin, outside the Ritz Hotel on her thirtieth, had been met with such a look of horror that it remained branded on his memory.

Naked, he returned to the bedroom to take off his prosthesis. As it parted unwillingly with the gel pad at the end of his stump, he listened to the seagulls wheeling overhead in the sunset and wished to God he’d said something that night in Whitstable, because if he had, he might not currently be feeling so bloody miserable, and resting all his hopes on Ryan Murphy succumbing to one more alcoholic drink.

64

Nine in the third place…

Darkening of the light during the hunt in the south…

One must not expect perseverance too soon.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Strike woke next morning to a moment of confusion as to where he was. He’d been dreaming that he was sitting beside Robin in her old Land Rover and exchanging anecdotes about drowning, which in the dream both had experienced several times.

Bleary eyed, he reached across to his mobile to silence the alarm and immediately saw that seven texts had come in over the last half an hour: from Pat, Lucy, Prudence, Shanker, Ilsa, Dave Polworth and journalist Fergus Robertson. With a lurch of dread, he opened Pat’s message.

Her sister’s just called. I said you weren’t here. Hope you’re all right.

Strike opened Lucy’s next.

Stick, I’m so sorry, I’ve just seen. It’s awful. I don’t know what else to say. Hope you’re ok xxx

Now with a real sense of foreboding, Strike hitched himself up in bed and opened the text from Fergus Robertson.

I’ve got the news desk asking if you’ve got a comment. Might be wise to give them something, get everyone off your back. Don’t know if you’re aware, but there’s a rumour she left a note.

His heart now beating uncomfortably fast, Strike opened his phone browser and typed in Charlotte’s name.

Death of an It-Girl: Charlotte Campbell Found Dead

Former Wild Child Charlotte Campbell Found Dead by Cleaner

Charlotte Campbell Dead in Wake of Assault Charge

He stared at the headlines, unable to take in what he was seeing. Then he pressed the link to the last story.

Charlotte Campbell, model and socialite, has died by suicide at the age of 41, her family’s lawyer confirmed on Friday evening. In a statement issued to The Times, Campbell’s mother and sister said,

‘Our beloved Charlotte took her own life on Thursday night. Charlotte was under considerable stress following a baseless accusation of assault and subsequent harassment by the press. We request privacy at this very difficult time, particularly for Charlotte’s adored young children.’

‘We’ve lost the funniest, cleverest, most original woman any of us knew,’ said Campbell’s half-brother, actor Sacha Legard, in a separate statement. ‘I’m just one of the heartbroken people who loved her, struggling to comprehend the fact that we’ll never hear her laugh again. Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.’

The younger daughter of broadcaster Sir Anthony Campbell and model Tara Clairmont, Campbell married Jago Ross, Viscount of Croy, in 2011. The couple had twins before divorcing last year. Prior to her marriage she was the long-term girlfriend of private detective Cormoran Strike, eldest son of rock star Jonny Rokeby. More recently Campbell dated Landon Dormer, American billionaire scion of the Dormer hotel empire, but the relationship ended ten days ago with Campbell’s arrest for assault. Friends of Dormer assert that he required stitches to his face after an altercation at Dormer’s Fitzrovia apartment.

Campbell, who first made news when she ran away from Cheltenham Ladies’ College aged 14, gained a degree in Classics at Oxford before becoming a regular fixture on the London social scene. Described as ‘mercurial and mesmerising’ by Vogue, she worked intermittently as a model and fashion writer, and spent several spells in rehab during the 90s and 00s. In 2014 she was admitted to the controversial Symonds House, a private psychiatric and addiction clinic, from which she was hospitalised after what was later described as an accidental overdose.

Campbell’s body is believed to have been discovered by a cleaner yesterday morning at her Mayfair flat.

Blood thudded in Strike’s ears. He scrolled slowly back up the article.

Two pictures accompanied the piece: the first showed Charlotte in academic gown alongside her parents on her graduation day at Oxford in the nineties. Strike remembered seeing the picture in the press while stationed in Germany with the military police. Unbeknownst to Sir Anthony and his wife, Tara, both of whom had loathed Strike, he and Charlotte had already resumed their affair at long distance.

The second picture showed Charlotte smiling into the camera, wearing a heavy, emerald-studded choker. This was a publicity still for a jewellery collection, and the irrelevant thought flashed through his numb brain that the designer, whom he’d briefly dated, would surely be glad it had been used.

‘Fuck,’ he muttered, pushing himself up on his pillows. ‘Fuck.’

Shock was battling a heavy sense of absolute inevitability. The final hand had been played and Charlotte had been wiped out, with nothing more to bet and nowhere to find credit. She must have done it right after calling him. Had one of the voicemail messages he’d deleted made her intentions explicit? After threatening to go to Robin and tell her what Strike really was, had Charlotte broken down and pleaded with him to contact her once more? Had she threatened (as she’d done so many times before) to kill herself if he didn’t give her what she wanted?

Mechanically, Strike opened the other texts he’d been sent. He could have predicted all of them except Dave Polworth’s. Dave had always loathed Charlotte, and had often told Strike he was a fool to keep taking her back.

Bit of a fucker this, Diddy.

These were the exact words Polworth had spoken on first visiting Strike in Selly Oak Military Hospital, following Strike’s loss of half a leg.

Strike set down his phone without answering any of the texts, swung his one and a half legs out of the bed and hopped off towards the bathroom, using the wall and the door jamb to balance. Amidst the many emotions now assailing him was a terrible echo of the day he’d found out his mother had died. Grief stricken though he’d been, the burden of worry and dread he’d carried with him like a dead weight throughout Leda’s second marriage to a violent, volatile, drug-using younger man had become redundant: he’d never again need to fear hearing terrible news, because the news had come. A similar, shameful trace of relief was twisted in among his conflicting emotions now: the worst had happened, so he need never again fear the worst.

Having emptied his bladder and cleaned his teeth, he dressed and put on his prosthesis, entirely forgetting breakfast. He checked out of the hotel, so distracted that he couldn’t have said with any certainty what sex the receptionist was.

Could he have stopped it happening? Yes, probably, but at what cost? Ongoing contact, escalating demands and pleas to reunite with a woman who lived half addicted to her own pain. He’d long since abandoned the hope of any possibility of real change in Charlotte, because of her adamantine resistance to any succour but drink, drugs and Cormoran Strike.

He drove out of rainswept Cromer thinking about Charlotte’s messy, fractured family, which was littered with step-parents and half-siblings and riven with feuds and addiction. Our beloved Charlotte…

Strike was passing Chapman Farm. He glanced left, and spotted that odd tower on the horizon again. On a whim, he took the next left turn. He was going to find out what that tower actually was.

Why on earth this, now? said Charlotte’s angry voice in his head. What does it matter?

It matters to me, Strike replied silently.

His one unfailing refuge and distraction in times of trouble, ever since he could remember, had been to detangle and unravel, to try and impose order on the chaotic world, to resolve mysteries, to scratch his persistent itch for truth. Finding out what that tower really was had nothing to do with Charlotte, yet had everything to do with Charlotte. He wasn’t a little boy any more, vaguely threatened by the watching tower, even though there were far more things to worry about closer at hand, with his mother out of sight in the woods and predators all around him. Nor was he the nineteen-year-old who’d fallen in love with Oxford’s most beautiful student, too dazzled and disarmed that she seemed to love him back to see her clearly. If he did nothing else today, he’d demystify the tower that had lurked in his memory as a symbol of one of the worst times of his life.

It took him only a few minutes to reach the hilltop in the BMW, and there it was: a church, as he should have known it would be: a very old Norfolk church, faced with flint rubble like so many of the buildings he’d passed in Cromer.

He got out of the car. A sign at the entrance to the small graveyard told him this was St John the Baptist Church. Driven by impulses he didn’t fully understand he passed through the gate, and found himself trying the door of the church. He’d expected it to be locked, but it opened.

The interior was small, white-walled, and empty. Strike’s footsteps echoed as he walked up the aisle, eyes fixed on a plain gold cross on the altar. Then he sat down on one of the hard wooden pews.

He didn’t believe in God, but some of the people he’d loved and admired did. His Aunt Joan had had an unshowy faith, and her belief in certain forms and structures had provided a jarring contrast to his mother’s disdain for boundaries and every form of small-town respectability. Joan had made Strike and Lucy go to Sunday school during their spells in St Mawes, and these sessions had bored and oppressed him as a child, yet the memory of those lessons was strangely pleasing as he sat on the hard pew: how much sweeter had the dash to the beach been, afterwards? How much more satisfying the games of imagination he and Lucy had played, once released from the tiresome activities they were forced to do while Ted and Joan were taking communion? Perhaps, he thought vaguely, a bit of boredom was no bad thing for kids.

Footsteps behind Strike made him look round.

‘Good morning,’ said the newcomer, a man in late middle age with a long, pale face and mild eyes, like a sheep. His trousers were fastened with bicycle clips, which Strike hadn’t seen for years.

‘Morning,’ said the detective.

‘Everything ollright?’

Strike wondered whether the man was the rector. He wore no dog collar, but then, of course, it wasn’t Sunday. How can you think about that now, why do you care about his dog collar, why this mania for working things out?

‘Someone I know’s just died.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ said the man, with such obvious sincerity that Strike said, as though to console the stranger,

‘She’d been unwell for a long time.’

‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘Still.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike.

‘I’ll leave you,’ said the other, his voice now hushed, and he proceeded down the aisle and out of sight, into what Strike assumed was the vestry, probably removing himself so that Strike could pray in peace. He did in fact close his eyes, though not to speak to God. He knew what Charlotte would have said to him now, if she were here.

I’m out of your hair now, Bluey. You should be glad.

I didn’t want you dead, he answered, inside his head.

But you knew you were the only one who could save me. I warned you, Bluey.

You can’t hold onto someone by threatening to top yourself if they leave. It isn’t right. You had kids. You should have stayed alive for them.

Ah, OK. He could visualise her cold smile. Well, if that’s how you want to frame this. I’m dead. I can’t argue.

Don’t play that game with me. His anger was rising as though she were really here in this silent church. I gave you everything I had to give. I put up with shit I’ll never put up with again.

Robin’s a saint, is she? How boring, said Charlotte, now smirking at him. You used to like a challenge.

She’s not a saint any more than I am, but she’s a good person.

And now, to his anger, he felt tears coming.

I want a good person for a change, Charlotte. I’m sick of filth and mess and scenes. I want something different.

Would Robin kill herself over you?

Of course she wouldn’t. She’s got more bloody sense.

Everything we had, everything we shared, and you want someone sensible? The Cormoran I knew would have laughed at the idea of wanting someone sensible. Don’t you remember? ‘Suns rise and set, but for us there’s one brief day then one perpetual night. So kiss me a thousand times…’

I was a messed-up fucking kid when I quoted that at you. That’s not who I am any more. But I’d still rather you’d lived, and been happy.

I was never happy, said the Charlotte who was sometimes brutally honest, when nothing else had worked, and another vicious scene had left both of them exhausted. Amused, sometimes. Never happy.

Yeah, I know.

And he echoed the kindly man in the bicycle clips.

Still.

He opened his damp eyes again to stare at the cross on the altar. He might not believe, but the cross meant something to him, nonetheless. It stood for Ted and Joan, for order and stability, but also for the unknowable and unresolvable, for the human craving for meaning in chaos, and for the hope of something beyond the world of pain and endless striving. Some mysteries were eternal and unresolvable by man, and there was relief in accepting that, in admitting it. Death, love, the endless complexity of human beings: only a fool would claim to fully understand any of them.

And as he sat in this humble old church, with the round tower that lost its sinister aspect when seen up close, he looked back on the teenager who’d left Leda and her dangerous naivety only to fall for Charlotte, and her equally dangerous sophistication, and knew definitively, for the first time, that he was no longer the person who’d craved either of them. He forgave the teenager who’d pursued a destructive force because he thought he could tame it, and thereby right the universe, and make all comprehensible and safe. He wasn’t so different from Lucy, after all. They’d both set out to refashion their worlds, they’d just done it in very different ways. If he was lucky, he had half his life to live again, and it was time to give up things far more harmful than smoking and chips, time to admit to himself he should seek something new, as opposed to what was damaging but familiar.

The kindly sheep-faced man had reappeared. As he made his way back down the aisle, he paused uncertainly beside Strike.

‘I hope you’ve found what you needed.’

‘I have,’ said Strike. ‘Thank you.’