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As he set off up the road, Strike’s mobile buzzed again, now with a text from Barclay.
Still no invite
Strike sent two words back.
Keep trying
124
The inferior man is not ashamed of unkindness and does not shrink from injustice. If no advantage beckons he makes no effort.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
The second week of September passed without progress on the UHC case, and no word as to whether the church’s accusation of child abuse against Robin was likely to result in her arrest, which meant she continued to suffer regular stabs of dread every time she thought about it. In slightly better news, both Will and Flora had been invited to give formal statements to the police, and, far more quickly than she’d expected, Robin received word that she’d been put on Isaac Mills’ visitors’ list.
‘S’pose you were right: prison’s boring,’ Robin told Strike, when she called him from outside Hampstead’s office to tell him the good news.
‘Be interesting to know whether he’s got any idea what it’s about,’ said Strike, who was walking away from Chinatown as he spoke.
‘Anyone watching the office today?’
‘No,’ said Strike, ‘but I’ve just followed a friend of yours to the Rupert Court Temple. Saw her from across the street when I was buying vape juice: Becca.’
‘What, out with a collecting tin?’ said Robin. ‘I thought she was too important for that.’
‘No tin. She was just walking along staring at the ground. She unlocked the temple doors and went inside and didn’t come out while I was watching, which was for about half an hour. I had to leave, I’ve got Colin Edensor arriving in twenty minutes; he wants an update on Will. Anyway, very good news on Mills. This Saturday, did you say?’
‘Yes. I’ve never visited a prison before.’
‘I wouldn’t worry. The dress code’s fairly relaxed,’ said Strike, and Robin laughed.
Having seen his 1999 mugshot, Robin hadn’t supposed Isaac Mills would look more attractive or healthy seventeen years later, but she certainly wasn’t expecting the man who shuffled towards her in the Wandsworth visitors’ centre a few days later.
He was, without exception, the most pathetic example of humanity Robin had ever laid eyes on. Though she knew him to be forty-three, he might have been seventy. The small amount of hair he still possessed was dull and grey, and while his skin was bronzed, his hollow face seemed to have collapsed inwards. Most of his teeth were missing, and the few that remained were blackened stumps, while his discoloured fingernails scooped upwards, as if peeling away from his hands. Robin had the macabre thought that she was looking at a man whose proper setting was a coffin, an impression reinforced by the gust of rotten breath that reached her as he sat down.
In the first two minutes of their meeting, Mills told Robin that he never received visits and that he was waiting for a liver transplant. After this, the conversation stalled. When Robin mentioned Carrie – or Cherry, as she’d been when Mills knew her – he informed her that Cherry had been a ‘stupid tart’, then folded his arms and contemplated her with a sneer on his face, his demeanour posing the silent question, What’s in this for me?
Appeals to conscience – ‘Daiyu was only seven when she disappeared. You’ve got children, haven’t you?’ – or to a sense of justice – ‘Kevin’s killer’s still walking around, free, and you could help us catch them’ – elicited nothing at all from the prisoner, though his sunken eyes, with their yellow whites and pinprick pupils, remained fixed on the healthy young woman who sat breathing in his odour of decay.
Uneasily conscious of the time slipping past, Robin tried an appeal to self-interest.
‘If you were to help our investigation, I’m sure it would be taken into account when you come up for parole.’
Mills’ only reaction was a low, unpleasant chuckle. He was serving twelve years for manslaughter; they both knew he was unlikely to live long enough to meet a parole board.
‘We’ve got a journalist who’s very interested in this story,’ she said, resorting in desperation to the tactic Strike had used on the police. ‘Finding out what really happened could help us bring down the church, which—’
‘It’s a cult,’ said Isaac Mills unexpectedly, a further gust of halitosis engulfing Robin. ‘Not a fucking church.’
‘I agree. That’s what’s got the journalist interested. Cherry talked to you about the UHC, then, did she?’
Mills’ only response was a loud sniff.
‘Did Cherry ever mention Daiyu, at all?’
Mills glanced at the large clock over the double doors through which he’d emerged.
Robin was forced to the conclusion that she had indeed been invited to Wandsworth to while away an hour of Mills’ tedious, miserable life. He showed no inclination to get up and leave, presumably because he was enjoying the pathetic pleasure of denying her what she’d come for.
