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‘I don’t—’
‘Could be good publicity for ya,’ said Messenger, while a blonde in a mini-dress drifted across the screen behind him, looking vague. ‘It’d raise your profile. I in’t boasting or nuffing but I’d def’nitely get us an audience—’
‘Yeah, that wouldn’t work,’ said Strike firmly. ‘Goodbye.’
He hung up while Messenger was still talking.
‘Stupid tit,’ Strike muttered, getting to his feet again to tug Messenger’s picture off the UHC noticeboard, rip it in half and put it in the bin. He then scribbled ‘WHO’S JACOB?’ on a piece of paper and pinned it where Messenger’s photo had been.
Taking a few steps backwards, Strike contemplated yet again the various photos of the dead, untraced and unknown people connected to the church. Other than the note about Jacob, the only other recent change to the board was another piece of paper, which he’d pinned up after his trip to Cromer. It read ‘JOGGER ON BEACH?’ and it, too, was in the ‘still to be found/identified’ column.
Frowning, Strike looked from picture to picture, coming to rest on that of Jennifer Wace, with her big hair and her frosted lipstick, frozen forever in the 1980s. Since his trip to Cromer, Strike had tried to find out all he could about the ways in which somebody might induce a seizure in an epileptic and as far as he could see, the only plausible possibility would be withdrawing medication or, perhaps, substituting genuine medication with some ineffective substance. But supposing Wace had indeed tampered with his first wife’s pills, how could he have known a seizure would occur at that specific moment, while Jennifer was in the water? As a murder method it was ludicrously chancy, though admittedly no less risky than taking a child swimming, and hoping the sea would hide her body forever.
Stroking his unshaven chin, the detective wondered whether he wasn’t becoming fixated on what might turn out to be a dead end. Maybe he was joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists, who saw hidden plots and stratagems where other, saner folk said, like Shelley Heaton, ‘That’s a funny coincidence,’ and moved on with their lives? Was it arrogant, he asked himself, to think he’d manage to trace a connection where nobody else had succeeded in doing so? Possibly – but then, he’d been called arrogant before, most often by the woman who now lay freshly interred in Brompton Cemetery, and it had never yet deterred him from doing precisely what he’d set out to do.
68
Nine in the second place means:
The abyss is dangerous.
One should strive to attain small things only.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
A strange mood seemed to have infected Chapman Farm ever since members’ tracksuits had changed to white. There was a jitteriness in the air, a sense of strain. Robin noticed an increased tendency on the part of church members to be even more performatively considerate in their treatment of each other, as though some hidden entity were constantly watching and judging.
This generalised anxiety heightened Robin’s own. While she hadn’t precisely lied in her last letter to Strike, she hadn’t told the whole truth, either.
When she and Emily had returned to the abandoned stall in Norwich and told their story of Emily coming over faint in a bathroom, Taio had seemed to accept their account at face value. Relieved as he was to get Emily back, most of his ire was directed at Jiang for losing sight of her and putting her at the mercy of the bubble people, and he spent much of the journey back to Chapman Farm muttering what looked like insults and imprecations at the back of his brother’s head. Jiang didn’t respond, but remained hunched and silent over the steering wheel.
However, over the next couple of days Robin had detected a shift in Taio’s attitude. Doubtless the large amount of money Emily was supposed to have collected on her own, coupled with the very small amount left in the collecting box from the stall, had raised his suspicions. Several times, Robin caught Taio staring at her in no friendly manner, and she also noticed sidelong glances from others who’d been in Norwich. When Robin saw Amandeep hastily hushing Vivienne and Walter as she approached them in the courtyard, she knew she’d been the subject under discussion. Robin wondered whether Vivienne had told anyone about her answering to her real name and if so, how far the information had spread.
Robin knew she’d reached the absolute limit of allowable mistakes, and as she wasn’t prepared to have sex with either Taio or Jonathan Wace, she was now on borrowed time at Chapman Farm. Exactly how she was going to leave, she wasn’t yet sure. It would take a certain amount of courage to tell Taio and Mazu she wanted to go, and perhaps it would be easier to struggle over the barbed wire at the perimeter by night. However, her immediate concern, given that her time was now definitely running out, was to identify priorities and achieve them as quickly as possible.
Firstly, she wanted to capitalise on the secret understanding she’d brokered with Emily to get as much information out of her as possible. Secondly, she was determined to try and engineer a one-on-one conversation with Will Edensor, so as to be able to give Sir Colin up-to-date information on his son. Lastly, she thought she might try and find the hatchet hidden in a tree in the woods.
She knew that even this limited agenda would be tricky. Whether deliberately or not (and Robin suspected the former), ever since they’d returned to Norwich she and Emily had been given tasks that kept them as far apart as possible. She noticed that Emily was always flanked by the same people in the dining hall, as though an order had been given to keep her under watch at all times. Emily had twice made an attempt to sit beside Robin in the dining hall, before being blocked by one of the people who seemed to be constantly shadowing her. Robin and Emily’s eyes had also met several times in the dormitory and on one of these occasions, Emily had offered a fleeting smile before turning quickly away as Becca entered.
Catching Will Edensor alone was also difficult, because Robin’s contact with him had always been negligible, and since their joint stint on the vegetable patch she’d rarely been assigned a task with him. His status at Chapman Farm remained that of manual labourer, in spite of his clear intelligence and his trust fund, and such joint work as they did together was always supervised and therefore afforded no opportunities for conversation.
As for the hatchet supposedly hidden in the woods, she knew it would be unwise to use the torch to look for it by night, in case the beam was spotted by someone looking out of the dormitory windows. Unfortunately, searching the woods by daylight would be almost as difficult. Other than its use as an occasional adventure playground for children, the patch of uncultivated land was barely used, and barring Will and Lin, who’d been there illicitly, and the young man who’d searched it on the night Bo had gone missing, Robin had never seen an adult enter it. How she was to slip away from her tasks, or justify her presence in the woods if found there, she currently had no idea.
Since her excursion to Norwich, Robin seemed to have been given a new hybrid status: part manual worker, part high-level recruit. She wasn’t invited back into the city to fundraise, although she continued to study church doctrine with her group. Robin had a feeling her thousand pound donation had made her too valuable to relegate entirely to the status of a skivvy, but that she was on a kind of unspoken probation. Vivienne, who was always a good barometer of who was in favour and who wasn’t, was pointedly ignoring her.
Robin’s next letter to Strike was short and, as she was well aware, disappointingly short of information, but the morning after she’d deposited it in the plastic rock, a significant event happened at Chapman Farm: the return of Jonathan Wace.
Everyone turned out to watch Papa J’s silver Mercedes come up the drive with a convoy of lesser cars behind it, and before the procession had even drawn to a halt, all members began to cheer and applaud, Robin included. When Wace stepped out of the car, the crowd became almost hysterical.
He looked tanned, rested and as handsome as ever. His eyes grew wet again as he looked around at the cheering throng, pressing his hand over his heart and making one of his self-deprecating little bows. When he walked to Mazu, who was holding baby Yixin in her arms, he embraced her and delightedly examined the baby, as though it was his own – which, Robin suddenly realised, she might well be. The screams of the crowd became deafening, and Robin made sure to clap so enthusiastically her hands hurt.
From the car behind Wace’s, five young people emerged, all of them strangers, and Robin thought, mainly because of their perfect teeth, they were American. Two preppy young men and three noticeably beautiful young women, all dressed in white UHC tracksuits, stood beaming at the British church members, and Robin guessed that they’d been brought over to Chapman Farm from the San Francisco centre. She watched as Jonathan introduced them one by one to Mazu, who received them graciously.
That evening, there was another feast in the dining hall, which had once again been decorated with scarlet and gold paper lanterns. They were served real meat for the first time in weeks, and Wace gave a long, impassioned speech about the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, and lambasted the campaign speeches of presidential candidate Donald Trump. The American visitors, Robin noticed, nodded vehemently as Wace painted a vivid picture of the fascist terror that would be unleashed should Trump win the election.
Once Wace had described the horrors of the materialist world, he moved on to describe the UHC’s continuing success, and explain how the church alone could turn back the forces of evil now rallying across the planet. He praised the American visitors for their fundraising efforts and described the imminent creation of a new UHC centre in New York, then summoned various individuals onto the stage to praise them for their individual efforts. Evidently Mazu had been keeping Wace informed about happenings at Chapman Farm, because Amandeep was one of those called to the stage. He sobbed and shook his head as he approached Wace, who embraced him before announcing that Amandeep had now equalled the record for funds raised in a single day for the church. The five Americans who’d just arrived stood up to applaud and whoop, their fists pumping in the air.
When Wace’s speech ended, music broke out, just as it had at the end of the last feast, and people began to dance. Robin got up, too: she was determined to show willing whenever possible, and hoped to find a way, in the crush, to speak to either Will or Emily. However, this proved impossible. She found herself instead dancing opposite Kyle, who’d once been a high-level recruit, but whose inability or refusal to have sex with Vivienne had seen him relegated to one of the lowliest farm workers. Blank-faced, he moved jerkily in front of Robin, never meeting her gaze, and she wondered where he was imagining himself, until she noticed that his mouth was constantly, silently moving in a chant unrelated to the music.
