AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘It’s very good of you to see us,’ said Sir Colin, when all had sat down. ‘Would you like anything to drink?’
When Strike and Robin declined, Sir Colin cleared his throat slightly, then said,
‘Well… I should probably start by saying I’m not sure you’re going to be able to help us. As I told you over the phone, we’ve already tried using private detectives, which didn’t go well. It might even have made things worse. However, you were highly recommended to me by the Chiswell family, who I know of old. Izzy assured me that if you didn’t think you’d be able to help, you’d tell me so at once – which I thought a high compliment.’
‘We certainly don’t take cases we consider hopeless,’ said Strike.
‘In that case,’ said Sir Colin, putting his fingers together, ‘I’ll outline the situation and you can give me your expert opinion. Yes, please, go ahead,’ he added, answering Strike’s unasked question as the detective reached for his notebook.
Even if he hadn’t known Sir Colin’s previous profession, Strike would’ve known he was a man well-practised in giving information in an organised, cogent fashion, so he merely readied his pen.
‘I think it’s best to start with Will,’ said the civil servant. ‘He’s our youngest child and he was – I don’t like to say an accident, but Sally was forty-four when she fell pregnant with him and didn’t realise for quite a while. But we were delighted, once we got over the shock.’
‘James and I weren’t,’ interjected Edward. ‘Nobody likes to think their forty-something parents are up to that when they’re not looking.’
Sir Colin smiled.
‘All right, well, let’s just say it was a shock all round,’ he resumed. ‘But we all doted on Will once he’d arrived. He was a lovely little boy. Will’s always been very clever, but by the time he was six or seven we were worried there was something slightly off. He had passionate enthusiasms – obsessions, you might almost say – and disliked upsets to his routine. Things other children took in their stride unsettled him. He didn’t like big groups. At children’s parties he’d be found upstairs quietly reading or playing on his own. We were a little bit anxious about him, so we took him to see a psychologist and he was diagnosed as being on the mild end of the autistic spectrum. We were told it was nothing dramatic, nothing serious. The psychologist also told us he’s got a very high IQ. That wasn’t really a surprise: his ability to process information and his recall were both extraordinary and his reading age was at least five years ahead of his actual one.
‘I’m telling you all this,’ Sir Colin went on, ‘because I believe Will’s particular combination of abilities and quirks explain, at least partially, how the UHC was able to recruit him. There’d been a previous incident which worried us a lot, and which should have been a warning.
‘When Will was fourteen he fell in with a couple of boys at school who told him they were radical socialists, waging a kind of general war on authority. Will was quite vulnerable to people who seemed to like him, because at that point he’d never had many very close friends. He bought into their philosophy of general disruption and started reading all sorts of socialist theory. Only when they convinced him to set fire to the chapel did we realise what was going on. He came within a hair’s breadth of being expelled, and only a late-stage admission from a schoolmate saved him. She knew these boys were perpetuating a tease on Will for the fun of seeing how far they could persuade him to go.
‘We sat him down after that, Sally and I,’ said Sir Colin, ‘and had a very long talk with him. It became clear to us that Will had difficulty telling when people might be duplicitous. He’s quite black and white and expects other people to be as straightforward as he is, which was an irresistible temptation to the boys who put him up to arson.
‘That incident aside, though, Will never got in trouble, and the older he got, the more easily he seemed to make friends. Characteristically, he went and bought books to research autism, and he could be very funny about it. By the time he came to his final year at school, Sally and I were confident he’d be fine at university. He’d already proven he could make good friends and his grades were outstanding.’
Sir Colin took a sip of coffee. Strike, who appreciated the way in which the civil servant was relating the information, posed no questions, but waited for him to continue.
‘Then,’ Sir Colin said, setting down his cup, ‘three months before Will was due to leave for Durham, Ed was involved in a very serious car crash.’
‘A lorry’s brakes failed,’ explained Ed. ‘It crashed right through some traffic lights and hit my car.’
‘God,’ said Robin. ‘Were you—?’
‘He was in a coma for five days,’ said Sir Colin, ‘and had to learn to walk again. As you can imagine, all Sally’s and my attention was on Ed. Sally was virtually living at the hospital.
‘I blame myself for what happened next,’ said Sir Colin. Both his sons made to protest, but Sir Colin said, ‘No, let me say it. Will went off to university, and I wasn’t checking in with him as often as I would have done. I should’ve asked more questions, shouldn’t have taken things at face value. He mentioned people he was having drinks with, told me he’d joined a couple of societies, his coursework didn’t seem a problem – but then he disappeared. Simply packed up and vanished.
‘His tutor alerted us and we were extremely worried. I went up to the university myself and spoke to some of his friends, who explained that he’d been to a UHC talk held at the university, where he got talking to some members who gave him some literature to read, and asked him to attend a service, which he did. The next thing that happened was that he reappeared in his college, stripped his room and took off. Nobody has seen him since.
‘We tracked him down via the temple in Rupert Court and found out he was at Chapman Farm, in Norfolk. That’s where the UHC originated and it’s still their largest indoctrination centre. Members aren’t permitted mobile phones, so the only way to contact Will was to write to him, which we did. Eventually, under threat of the police, we managed to force the church to let us meet Will at their Central Temple in Rupert Court.
‘That meeting went extremely badly. It was like talking to a stranger. Will was totally unlike himself. He met everything we said with what I now know to be standard UHC talking points and jargon, and he refused point-blank to leave the church or resume his studies. I lost my temper, which was a big mistake, because it played right into the church’s hands and enabled them to paint me as his enemy. I should’ve done what Sally was doing: simply pour out love and show we weren’t trying to control or mislead him, which of course is what the church Principals were saying about us.
‘If I’d let Sally handle things, we might have had a chance of getting him out, but I was angry – angry he was throwing away his university career, and angry he’d caused so much fuss and worry when we still didn’t know whether Ed was going to be wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life.’
‘What year was this?’ Strike asked.
‘2012,’ said Sir Colin.
‘So he’s been in there nearly four years?’
‘Correct.’
‘And you’ve only seen him once since he joined?’
‘Once face to face, and otherwise only in photographs taken by Patterson Inc. Ed’s seen him, though.’
