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‘Are both your parents alive?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin.
‘What do they do?’
‘My dad’s a hedge fund manager. My mum’s got her own business.’
‘What kind of business?’
‘She provides external HR support to companies,’ said Robin.
Louise was working slowly, due to the stiffness of her hands. Her fingernails, Robin noticed, were all broken off. All around the table, the church members were talking to the newcomer to their right, and from what Robin could hear of the conversations, they were running very much along the lines of hers and Louise’s: quick-fire questions intended to elicit a lot of personal information. In very brief pauses in Louise’s questioning, she overheard Marion Huxley telling her neighbour that she was a widow, who’d run an undertakers with her husband.
‘You’re not married?’ Louise asked Robin.
‘No… I was going to be, but we called it off,’ said Robin.
‘Oh, that’s a pity,’ said Louise. ‘What made you interested in the UHC?’
‘It was actually a friend of mine,’ said Robin. ‘She wanted to go, but then she let me down and I ended up attending the temple on my own.’
‘That wasn’t a coincidence,’ said Louise, just as the blonde had said, on Robin’s first visit to the temple. ‘Most pure spirits were called like that, by what feels like chance. Do you know the fable of the blind turtle? The blind turtle who lives in the depths of the ocean and surfaces once every hundred years? The Buddha said, imagine there was a yoke floating on the ocean, and he asked what the chances that the old, blind turtle would surface at exactly the point that meant his neck would pass through the yoke. That’s how hard it is to find enlightenment for most people… you’re a good worker,’ Louise said again, as Robin completed her fourth stuffed turtle. ‘I think you’ll go pure spirit really fast.’
On Robin’s other side, Wan had begun to tell her neighbour the parable of the blind turtle, too. She wondered whether she dared ask Louise why her head was shaved, but decided it might be too personal a question to start with, so instead she said,
‘How long have you—?’
But Louise spoke across her, as though she hadn’t heard.
‘Did you have to take time off your job to come to Chapman Farm?’
‘No,’ said Robin, smiling. ‘I’m not actually working at the moment.’
25
The correct place of the woman is within;
the correct place of the man is without.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
The late afternoon sun pierced Strike’s retinas through the sides of his sunglasses as he walked along Sloane Avenue, ready to take over surveillance of Bigfoot. His thoughts were entirely with Robin as he wondered what was happening right now at Chapman Farm, how she was finding her new environment and whether she’d be able to find the plastic rock hidden just inside the perimeter fence.
As Strike approached his destination, Shah, who’d been watching the large hotel called the Chelsea Cloisters, walked away, which was usual procedure for a handover when facing a many-windowed building, from which people might be watching the street. However, a minute later, Strike received a call from the now out-of-sight subcontractor.
‘Hi, what’s up?’
‘He’s been in there an hour and a half,’ said Shah. ‘It’s chock-full of sex workers. Eastern European, mainly. I wanted a word about Littlejohn, though.’
‘Go on.’
‘Did he tell you he worked at Pattersons for a couple of months, before coming to us?’
‘No,’ said Strike, frowning. ‘He didn’t.’
‘A guy I used to know there, who’s now head of security at a City bank, told me yesterday Littlejohn was working for them. The guy resigned before Littlejohn left. He heard he was sacked. No details.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Strike.
