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‘… weekend?’
‘Great,’ said Strike, hoping she’d just agreed to meet him. ‘Where would you—?’
‘Not at my flat, my lodger’s bloody nosy. I’ll meet you at seven on Sunday in the Forester on Seaford Road.’
26
The Joyous is the lake… it is a sorceress; it is mouth and tongue.
It means smashing and breaking apart…
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Robin had no idea how long she’d stuffed toy turtles, but at a guess, it was a couple of hours. During that time her fake identity had been so thoroughly tested that she could only be glad she’d devoted so many hours to bringing Rowena to life. When Louise asked, Robin was able to give the names of both her imaginary parents’ imaginary cats.
She might have worried that Louise’s meticulous questioning of her indicated suspicion of her bona fides, except for the fact that all the new recruits, as far as she could hear, were being subjected to similar interrogations. It was as though the established members had been given a rota of questions to ask, and Robin had a feeling that the most important parts of what she’d told Louise would have been memorised, and passed in due course to somebody else.
The room in which Fire Group was making the toys became progressively stuffier as they worked, and the relentless questioning had left so little time to think, that Robin was relieved when Becca came to the door, smiling and letting in a cool breeze.
‘Thank you for your service,’ she told the group, pressing her hands together as though in prayer, and bowing. ‘Now, please follow me!’
Everyone trooped after Becca, back past the chicken coop, inside which Wood Group was ushering the hens back into their shed. Seeing the low-hanging sun, Robin realised she must have spent longer with the toy turtles than she’d imagined. There were no longer people in orange dotted over the fields, nor could she see the two Shire horses.
Becca now led them to what Robin guessed was the oldest part of the farm. Ahead lay an old stone sty, and beyond it, a muddy acre of field, where pigs were roaming. Robin could see a couple of teenagers in bee-keeping hats and gloves, tending to the hives. Tethered at a wall nearby stood the two massive horses, still wearing harnesses, their bodies steaming in the cooling air.
‘As I explained to some of you on the minibus,’ said Becca, ‘this is still a working farm. One of our central tenets is to live in harmony with nature, and commit to ethical food production and sustainability. I’m going to hand you over to Jiang now, who’ll instruct you.’
Jiang, the minibus driver, now moved forwards.
‘OK, you – you – you – you,’ muttered Jiang, pointing at four people at random, ‘you find wellingtons in the shed, you get the buckets of swill, you get the pigs back in the sty.’
Robin noticed as he spoke that Jiang had several missing teeth. Like Louise, his skin was coarse and chapped, giving him the appearance of being outside in all weathers. As he began to give instructions, his tic recurred; as his right eye began its uncontrollable winking again, he clapped his hand over it and pretended to be rubbing it.
‘You four,’ said Jiang, pointing at Robin and three others, ‘you get the harness off the horses, then you rub them down and brush their feathers. The rest will clean the harness when it comes off.’
Jiang gave the grooming group brushes and combs and left them to their job, disappearing into the stable, while behind them, those trying to entice the pigs into the sty called and cajoled, shaking their buckets of food.
‘Did he say feathers?’ asked green-haired Penny, puzzled.
‘He means the hair over their hooves,’ Robin explained.
A yell from the field made them all look round: widowed Marion Huxley had slipped in the mud and fallen. The pigs had charged those holding the buckets: country-born Robin, whose uncle was a farmer, could have told them they should have put the food in the trough and opened the gate between sty and field, rather than trying to lead the pigs in, Pied Piper style.
There was pleasure in doing a physical task, and not being bombarded with questions. The harness they removed from the horses was very heavy; Robin and Penny struggled to take it into the stable where some of their group sat waiting to clean it. The Shire horses stood over eighteen hands each, and took a lot of grooming; Robin had to stand on a crate to reach their broad backs and their ears. She was becoming increasingly hungry. She’d wrongly assumed they’d be given something to eat upon arrival.
By the time the inept pig-wranglers had succeeded in persuading their temporary charges back into their sty and both the horses and their harness had been cleaned to Jiang’s satisfaction, the red sun was sinking slowly over the fields. Becca now returned. Robin hoped she was about to announce dinner; she felt hollow with hunger.
‘Thank you for your service,’ said the smiling Becca, putting her hands together and bowing as before. ‘Now follow me to temple, please!’
Becca led them back past the dining hall, the laundry and the library, then into the central courtyard, where the Drowned Prophet’s fountain was glinting red and orange in the sunset. Fire Group followed Becca up the marble steps and through doors that now stood open.
The interior of the temple was every bit as impressive as the outside. Its inner walls were of muted gold, with many scarlet creatures – phoenixes, dragons, horses, roosters and tigers – cavorting together as unlikely playmates. The floor was of shining black marble and the benches, which were cushioned in red and appeared to be of black lacquer, were arranged around a central, raised pentagon-shaped stage.
Robin’s eyes travelled naturally upwards, towards the high ceiling. Halfway up the high walls, the space narrowed, because a balcony ran all the way around the temple, behind which were regularly spaced, shadowy arched recesses, which reminded Robin of boxes at a theatre. The five painted prophets in their respective robes of orange, scarlet, blue, yellow and white stared down at worshippers from the ceiling.
A woman in long, amber-beaded orange robes was standing on the raised stage, waiting for them. Her eyes were shadowed by the long curtains of black hair that fell to below her waist; only the long, pointed nose was clearly visible. Only as Robin drew nearer did she see that one of the woman’s very dark, narrow eyes was set noticeably higher than the other, giving her a strange lopsided stare, and for reasons Robin couldn’t have explained, a tremor passed through her, such as she might have experienced on glimpsing something pale and slimy watching her from the depths of a rockpool.
‘N ho,’ she said, in a deep voice. ‘Welcome.’
