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‘Are you threatening me?’ she whispered over the damp tissue.
‘It’s a warning,’ said Strike. ‘Delete the texts you sent me and take my number off your phone.’
‘Or?’
‘Or there’ll be consequences,’ he repeated. ‘I’m a private detective. I find out things about people, things they think they’ve hidden very effectively. Unless there’s nothing in your past you’d mind seeing printed in the Sun, I’d think long and hard about using me to try and leverage a proposal out of Honbold.’
She was no longer crying. Her expression had hardened, but he thought she’d gone slightly paler beneath her foundation. Finally she took out her mobile, deleted his contact details, the texts they’d exchanged and the photos she’d sent him. Strike then did the same on his own phone, downed his whisky in one and stood up again.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘blanket denials all round and this should blow over.’
He left the Ship feeling no qualms whatsoever about the tactics he’d just employed, but consumed with fury at her and himself. Time would tell whether he was going to find the Mail at his own door, but as he walked back towards Holborn Tube station, he vowed to himself that this would be the last time, ever, he risked his own privacy or career for a pointless affair undertaken to distract him from thoughts of Robin Ellacott.
45
But every relationship between individuals bears within it the danger that wrong turns may be taken…
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Robin had had to carry around the Polaroids she’d found for a week before placing them in the plastic rock on Thursday night. She didn’t dare hide them anywhere in the dormitory, but the awareness of them close to her skin was an ever-present source of anxiety in case one slipped out from under her tracksuit top. Her fourth trip into the woods and back again was mercifully uneventful, and she returned safely to her bed undetected, deeply relieved to have got rid of the photographs.
The following evening, after a day of lectures and chanting, Robin returned to the dormitory with the other women to find scarlet tracksuits lying on their beds, instead of orange.
‘Why the colour change?’ said widowed Marion Huxley blankly. Marion, whose ginger hair had now grown out to reveal an inch of silver, often asked rather basic questions, or spoke when others might have remained silent.
‘’Aven’t you finished reading The Answer yet?’ snapped spiky-haired Vivienne. ‘We must’ve entered the Season of the Stolen Prophet. Red’s his colour.’
‘Very good, Vivienne,’ called Becca Pirbright, smiling from a few beds away, and Vivienne visibly preened herself.
But there was something else on Robin’s bed beside her folded scarlet tracksuit: a box of hair colour remover with a slip of paper lying on top of it, with what she recognised as a quotation from The Answer printed on it.
The False Self craves that which is artificial and unnatural.
The True Self craves that which is genuine and natural.
Robin glanced across the dormitory and saw green-haired Penny Brown also examining a box of hair colour remover. Their eyes met; Robin smiled and pointed towards the bathroom and Penny, smiling back, nodded.
To Robin’s surprise, Louise was standing at the sink, carefully shaving her head in the mirror. Their eyes met briefly. Louise dropped her gaze first. Having towelled off her now completely bald pate, she left the bathroom without speaking.
‘People were telling me,’ whispered Penny, ‘that she’s been shaved for, like, a year.’
‘Wow,’ said Robin. ‘D’you know why?’
Penny shook her head.
Tired as she was, and resentful that she had to give up valuable sleeping time to removing her blue hair dye, Robin was nevertheless glad for the opportunity to talk freely to another church member, especially one whose daily routine differed so markedly from her own.
‘How’re you doing? I’ve barely seen you since we were in Fire Group together.’
‘Great,’ said Penny. ‘Really great.’
Her round face was slimmer than it had been on arrival at the farm and there were shadows beneath her eyes. Side by side at the bathroom mirror, Robin and Penny opened the boxes and began to apply the product to their hair.
‘If this is the start of the Season of the Stolen Prophet,’ said Penny, ‘we’ll be seeing a proper Manifestation soon.’
She sounded both excited and frightened.
‘It was incredible, seeing the Drowned Prophet appear, wasn’t it?’ said Robin.
