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‘Oh my God!’ said Robin, who’d just gulped down some brandy.
‘Yeah. But the good news is, he’d rather work for us, and he assures me he’s very trustworthy and loyal.’
Robin laughed harder, though she didn’t seem able to stop her eyes streaming. Strike, who was deliberately talking about life outside Chapman Farm rather than interrogating her on what had happened inside it, laughed too, but he’d silently registered everything Robin had so far told him about her last few days: they locked me in a box. It was that or have sex with him. And the Manifestation was…
‘And Midge has been fucked off at me because I thought she and Tasha Mayo might be getting overfamiliar.’
‘Strike!’
‘Don’t bother, Pat’s already told me off. She knew another lesbian once, so it’s very much her area of expertise.’
There might be an edge of hysteria to Robin’s laughter, but Strike, who knew the value of humour in the wake of horror, and the necessity of emphasising that Robin had rejoined the outside world, continued to fill her in on what had been happening with the agency while she’d been away, until the woman from the hotel knocked on the door again, this time carrying soup and sandwiches.
Robin drank a few mouthfuls of soup as though she hadn’t seen food for days, but after a couple of minutes she laid down her spoon and pushed the bowl onto the bedside table.
‘Is it all right if I just…?’
Drawing her legs up onto the bed, she fell sideways onto the pillow and was instantly asleep.
Strike got carefully off the bed so as not to wake her and moved to an armchair, no longer grinning. He was worried: Robin seemed far more fragile than any of her letters had suggested and through the ripped portion of her tracksuit trousers he could see raw skin on her right knee, which looked as though she’d been walking on it. He supposed he should have anticipated the dramatic weight loss and the profound exhaustion, but the hysteria, the unbridled fear, the strange reaction to the view of the hot tub, the ominous fragments of information, all added up to something more serious than he’d expected. What the fuck was ‘the box’ she’d been locked in? And why did she say the only alternative to getting punched in the face had been coerced sex with their client’s son? He knew his partner to be physically brave; indeed, there’d been more than one occasion on which he’d have called her recklessly so. Had he not had confidence in her, he’d never have let her go undercover at Chapman Farm, but now he felt he should have put one of the men in there instead, should have overruled Robin’s request to do the job.
The sound of a car made Strike get to his feet and peer through the curtains.
‘Robin,’ he said quietly, moving back to the bed, ‘the police are here.’
She remained asleep, so he tentatively shook her shoulder, at which she woke with a start and looked wildly at him, as though he was a stranger.
‘Police,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘right… OK…’
She struggled back into a sitting position. Strike went to open the door.
89
Six in the fourth place means:
Grace or simplicity?
A white horse comes as if on wings.
He is not a robber,
He will woo at the right time.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
The two Norfolk officers were both male: one older, balding and stolid, the other young, skinny and watchful, and they spent a full eighty minutes taking Robin’s statement. Strike couldn’t blame them for wanting as full an account as possible of what Robin was alleging, given that pursuing an investigation would mean securing a warrant to gain entry to a compound owned by a wealthy, highly litigious organisation. Nevertheless, and even though he himself would have acted similarly under the circumstances, he was irritated by the slow, methodical questioning and the painstaking clarification of every minute detail.
‘Yes, on the top floor,’ said Robin, for the third time. ‘End of the corridor.’
‘And what’s Jacob’s surname?’
‘It should be either Wace or Birpright… Pirbright, sorry,’ said Robin, who was struggling to remain alert. ‘I don’t know which – but those are his parents’ surnames.’
Strike could see the men’s eyes travelling from her ripped tracksuit with its UHC logo to the bruising on her face. Doubtless her story seemed very strange to them: she’d admitted being punched in the jaw, but said she didn’t want to press charges, had brushed off enquiries about the injury to her knee, kept insisting that she simply wanted them to rescue the child who was dying in an upstairs room, behind double doors carved with dragons. They’d cast suspicious looks in Strike’s direction: was the large man watching the interview in silence responsible for the bruising? Robin’s explanation that she was a private detective from the Strike and Ellacott agency in London had been treated, if not with overt suspicion, then with a certain reserve: the impression given was that this would all need verifying, and that what might be accepted without question in the capital would by no means be taken at face value in Norfolk.
At last, the officers appeared to feel there was no more to be gleaned tonight, and took their leave. Having seen them out into the car park, Strike returned to the room to find Robin eating the sandwich she’d temporarily abandoned.
