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After one astonished moment, Robin doubled back to enter the shop. Moving quietly in her trainers, she rounded the end of a row of shelves.
‘Emily?’
Emily jumped and stared at Robin as though she’d never seen her before.
‘Um… people are looking for you. Are you… what are you doing?’
The resentment bordering on occasional anger that Emily displayed at Chapman Farm had gone. She was chalk white and shaking.
‘It’s OK,’ said Robin, speaking as she might have spoken to somebody disorientated who’d just suffered a physical accident.
‘Is Taio angry?’ Emily whispered.
‘He’s worried,’ said Robin, not entirely untruthfully.
If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought Emily had taken some kind of stimulant. Her pupils were dilated and a muscle in her cheek was flickering.
‘I did that thing to him – you know – in the Retreat Room – that thing where you suck their—?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, very aware of children’s voices on the other side of the shelves.
‘—so he’d let me come to Norwich.’
‘Right,’ said Robin. Various courses of action were running through her mind. She could call Strike and see whether he’d pick Emily up, advise Emily to call a relative, if she had any outside the church, or tell Emily to turn herself in to the police, but all of these options would necessarily reveal Robin’s lack of allegiance to the UHC, and if Emily refused, Robin would have placed her own security in the hands of the woman now quivering uncontrollably in front of the shelves of Sylvanian Families.
‘Why did you want to come to Norwich so much?’ Robin asked quietly, certain of the answer, but wanting to hear Emily say it.
‘I was going to… but I can’t. I’ll only kill myself. That’s why they warn us. You can’t survive out here, once you reach step eight. I suppose I must be nearer pure spirit than I thought,’ said Emily, with an attempt at a laugh.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Robin, moving closer to Emily. ‘About step eight.’
‘I am master of my soul,’ said Emily, and Robin recognised the mantra of the Stolen Prophet. ‘Once your spirit’s really evolved, you can’t take rejoining the materialist world. It’ll kill you.’
Emily’s gaze shifted back to the shelves of Sylvanian Families: little model animals dressed as humans, packaged as parents and babies, with their houses and furniture ranged beside them.
‘Look,’ she said to Robin, pointing at the animals. ‘It’s all materialist possession. Tiny little flesh objects and their houses… all in boxes… I’ll have to go in the box, now,’ said Emily, with another laugh that turned into a sob.
‘What box?’
‘It’s for when you’ve been bad,’ whispered Emily. ‘Really bad…’
Robin’s mind was working rapidly.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We’ll tell them you needed the bathroom, but you came over faint, OK? You nearly passed out, and a woman came to help you and wouldn’t let you leave until you got your colour back. I’ll back you up – I’ll say when I came into the bathroom, the woman was threatening to get an ambulance. If we both tell the same story, you won’t be punished, OK? I’ll back you up,’ she repeated. ‘It’ll be all right.’
‘Why would you help me?’ asked Emily incredulously.
‘Because I want to.’
Emily held up her collecting box pathetically.
‘I didn’t get enough.’
‘I can help with that. I’ll bump you up a bit. Wait there.’
Robin had no qualms about leaving Emily, because she could tell the latter was too paralysed with fear to move. The girl at the cash register, who was chatting to a young man, handed over a pair of scissors from behind the desk almost absent-mindedly. Robin rejoined Emily and used the point of the scissors to prise open the collecting box.
‘I’ll have to keep something, because Vivienne saw money going in,’ said Robin, emptying out most of the cash inside and shoving it into Emily’s box instead. ‘There you go.’
