AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Thanks, Emily,’ said Robin, who valued the helpful intention behind the words, if not the advice itself. ‘Come on, we’d better hurry.’
67
It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Strike took Robin’s next letter with him to reread while on overnight surveillance on the Franks on Monday evening, because he found much in there to interest him.
Wan, Robin wrote, had been moved on from Chapman Farm, though Robin didn’t know where she’d gone. She’d left her baby behind with Mazu, who’d named the little girl Yixin, and was now carrying her around and speaking as though she were the biological mother. Robin also described her trip into Norwich, but as she’d omitted to mention her accidental response to her own real name, Strike was unencumbered by fresh worries about Robin’s safety as he pondered Emily’s assertion that Daiyu hadn’t really drowned.
Even without supporting evidence, Emily’s opinion interested the detective, because it took him back to his musings on the esplanade in Cromer, when he’d mulled over the possibility that Daiyu had been carried down onto the beach, not to die, but to be handed to someone else. Sitting in his dark car, casting regular glances up at the windows of the Franks’ flat which, atypically at this hour, were lit up, he asked himself how likely it was that Daiyu had survived the trip to the beach, without reaching any conclusions.
The Waces had had a clear motive for Daiyu’s disappearance: to prevent the Graves family from obtaining DNA evidence and regaining control of that quarter of a million pounds in blue chip shares. Death hadn’t been necessary to achieve that objective: merely putting Daiyu beyond the Graves’ reach would have done it. But if Daiyu hadn’t died, where was she? Were there relatives of either Mazu or Jonathan he didn’t know about, who might have agreed to take the girl in?
Daiyu would be twenty-eight if she were still alive. Would she be content to remain silent, knowing that a cult had grown up around her supposedly drowned seven-year-old self?
In the penultimate line of her letter, Robin answered the question Strike had posed in his last: did she have any reason to believe her cover might have been blown at Chapman Farm, given that an unknown woman had approached Strike, apparently to disrupt his surveillance?
I don’t know whether that woman you mentioned has got anything to do with the church but I don’t think anyone here knows or suspects who I really am.
Movement at the door of the Franks’ block made Strike look up. The two brothers were walking, bow-legged, towards their dilapidated van, laden with heavy boxes and what looked like bags of groceries. As the younger Frank reached the vehicle he stumbled and several large bottles of mineral water tipped out of a box and rolled away. Strike, who by this time was filming them, watched as the older brother berated the younger, setting down his own box to help chase down the bottles. Strike zoomed in, and saw what looked like a coil of rope protruding from the older brother’s box.
Strike gave the van a head start, then followed them. After a short drive, they came to a halt outside a large lock-up facility in Croydon. Here, the detective watched as they unloaded the boxes and groceries and disappeared into the building.
It wasn’t, of course, a crime to buy rope or a van, or to hire a storage unit and put food and water in there, but Strike considered this activity highly ominous. Try as he might, he could think of no plausible explanation for these activities other than that the brothers were indeed planning the abduction and imprisonment of the actress whom they seemed determined to punish for being insufficiently accommodating of their demands for her attention. As far as he knew, the police hadn’t yet paid a call on the Franks to warn them off. He couldn’t help suspecting that the matter was being deprioritised because Mayo could afford a private detective agency to keep a watch on her stalkers.
He sat watching the entrance to the facility for twenty minutes, but the brothers didn’t emerge. After a while, knowing he’d hear the van starting up again, he did something he’d so far resisted doing, and Googled ‘Charlotte Campbell funeral’ on his phone.
Since the newspaper-reading public had learned of Charlotte’s death, further details of her suicide had leaked into the papers. Thus Strike knew that Charlotte had taken a cocktail of drink and anti-depressants before slitting her wrists and bleeding out in a bath. The cleaner had found the bathroom door locked at nine o’clock in the morning and, having pounded on it and shouted to no avail, called the police, who’d broken into the room. Much as he’d have preferred it not to, Strike’s imagination insisted on showing him a vivid picture of Charlotte submerged in her own blood, her black hair floating on the clotted surface.
He’d wondered where the family would choose as Charlotte’s final resting place. Her late father’s family had been Scottish, whereas her mother, Tara, had been born and lived in London. When Strike learned from The Times that Charlotte would be buried in Brompton Cemetery, one of the smartest in the capital, he knew Tara must have been given the casting vote. The choice of Brompton also ensured publicity, for which Tara had always had a weakness. Thus Strike was able to scan through photographs of the mourners on the Daily Mail website as he sat in the dark.
Many of the black-clad people who’d left Charlotte’s funeral earlier that day were familiar to him: Viscount Jago Ross, Charlotte’s ex-husband, looking as ever like a dissolute arctic fox; her floppy-haired stepbrother, Valentine Longcaster; Sacha Legard, her handsome half-brother, who was an actor; Madeline Courson-Miles, the jewellery designer Strike had previously dated; Izzy Chiswell, one of Charlotte’s old schoolfriends; Ciara Porter, a model with whom Strike had once had a one-night stand; and even Henry Worthington-Fields, the skinny red-headed man who’d worked at Charlotte’s favourite antiques shop. Unsurprisingly, Landon Dormer was conspicuous by his absence.
Strike hadn’t received an invitation to the funeral, not that this bothered him: as far as he was concerned, he’d said his farewells in the small Norfolk church overlooking Chapman Farm. In any case, given his personal history with some of the people who’d have been his fellow mourners, the funeral would undoubtedly have been one of the most uncomfortable occasions of his life.
The last photograph in the Mail article featured Tara. From what Strike could see through the thick black veil on her hat, her once-beautiful features had been severely distorted by what looked like overuse of cosmetic fillers. She was flanked on one side by her fourth husband and on the other by Charlotte’s only full sibling, Amelia, who was two years older than his ex-fiancée. This was the sister who’d called Strike’s office on the morning after Charlotte’s suicide had been announced to the press and who, on learning from Pat that Strike was unavailable, had simply hung up. Amelia had made no contact with Strike since, nor had he tried to contact her. If the rumour that Charlotte had left a suicide note was true, he was happy to remain in ignorance of what it said.
The noise of a slamming car door made him look up. The Frank brothers had emerged from the facility and were now attempting to make their cold van start. On the fourth attempt, it sputtered into life, and Strike tailed them back to their block of flats. The lights in their flat went out after twenty more minutes and Strike turned back to the news on his phone, to kill time until Shah arrived to take over from him at eight.
The Brexit referendum might be over, but the subject continued to dominate the headlines. Strike scrolled down past these articles without opening them, vaping, until, with misgivings, he saw another familiar face: that of Bijou Watkins.
The picture, which had been taken as she left her flat, showed Bijou wearing a tight peacock blue dress that emphasised her figure. Her dark hair was freshly styled, she was expertly made up as usual and carried a glossy briefcase in her hand. Beside Bijou’s picture was another, of a stout, bare-faced and frizzy-haired woman in an unflattering evening dress of pink satin, who was named as Lady Matilda Honbold in the caption. Above the two photos was the headline: Andrew ‘Honey Badger’ Honbold to Divorce.
Strike skim-read the article below, and in paragraph four found what he’d feared: his own name.
A committed Catholic, high-profile donor to the Conservative party and patron of both The Campaign for Ethical Journalism and Catholic Aid to Africa, Honbold’s alleged infidelity was first reported in Private Eye. The magazine alleged that Honbold’s unnamed mistress had also enjoyed a dalliance with well-known private detective Cormoran Strike, stories that were denied by Honbold, Watkins and Strike, with Honbold threatening legal action against the magazine.
‘Shit,’ muttered Strike.
He’d thought the rumour of his involvement with Bijou had been successfully quashed. The last thing he needed was a signpost in The Times telling Patterson and Littlejohn exactly where to mine for dirt.
Promptly at eight o’clock, Shah arrived to take over surveillance on the Franks.
‘Morning,’ he said, getting into the passenger seat of the BMW. Before Strike could tell him what had happened overnight, Shah held out his own phone and said,
