The Running Grave, page 88
‘You never told me that.’
‘I had no idea you were so interested in Strike’s love life. I’ll keep you briefed in future.’
Murphy laughed.
‘I’m sorry, Robin,’ he said, reaching for her hand. ‘I am, seriously. Shit… I didn’t mean to… Lizzie went off with a supposed “friend”, in the end.’
‘I know that, but what you’re failing to factor in here is, I’m not Lizzie.’
‘I know. I’m sorry, seriously. How long’s Strike been with this lawyer?’
‘I don’t know – months. I don’t keep notes,’ said Robin.
The rest of the evening passed amicably enough. Tired, still annoyed but wanting to keep the peace, Robin told herself she’d worry later about what might happen if Nick, Ilsa, or Strike himself revealed that his affair with Bijou was over.
116
Nine at the beginning means:
Hidden dragon.
Do not act.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Robin spent a good deal of the next three days asking herself unanswerable questions about the state of her own feelings, and in speculation about the likely future trajectory of Murphy’s newly revealed jealousy. Would this relationship go the same way as her marriage, through increasing levels of suspicion to a destructive explosion, or was she projecting old resentments onto Murphy, much as he’d done to her?
Though she’d accepted the truce, and did her best to act as though all was forgiven and forgotten, Robin remained annoyed that, yet again, she’d been forced to justify and dissemble on matters relating to Cormoran Strike. Those fatal four words, ‘I love you, too’, had brought about a shift in Murphy. It would be going too far to call his new attitude possessiveness, but there was a certain assurance that had been lacking before.
In her more honest moments, Robin asked herself why she hadn’t called him when worried a gunman might be lurking out of sight round the corner. The only answers she could come up with were confused, and some opened doors onto further questions she didn’t want to answer. At the admissible end of the scale was her fear that Murphy would have overreacted. She hadn’t wanted to hand her boyfriend a justification for dictating what risks she took, because she’d had quite enough of that already, from her mother. Yet, whispered her conscience, she’d let Strike tell her to be more careful, hadn’t she? She’d also done as he’d suggested, with regard to taxis and taking on no jobs on her own. What was the difference?
The answer (so Robin told herself) was that she and Strike were in business together, which gave him certain rights – but here, her self-analysis stopped, because it might be argued that Murphy, too, had rights; it was simply that she found them less admissible. Such musings came dangerously close to forcing her to confront something she was determinedly avoiding. Ruminations on Strike’s true feelings, as she knew from past experience, led only to confusion and pain.
Strike, meanwhile, had personal worries of his own. On Saturday afternoon, Lucy called him with the news that Ted, who was still staying at her house, had had a ‘funny turn’. Guilt-stricken that he hadn’t so much as visited Ted in the last couple of weeks, Strike abandoned surveillance of the husband they’d nicknamed Hampstead to drive straight to Lucy’s house in Bromley, where he’d found Ted even more disorientated than usual. Lucy had already made a doctor’s appointment for their uncle, and had promised to get back to Strike with news as soon as she had it.
He spent most of Monday on surveillance of Toy Boy, handing over to Barclay in the late afternoon, then heading back to the office at four o’clock. Robin had been there all day, trying to sublimate in work the anxiety she felt about moving Will out of the safe haven of Pat’s house to visit Prudence that evening.
‘I still think Will and Flora could have FaceTimed,’ Robin said to Strike, when he joined her at the partners’ desk, coffee in hand.
‘Yeah, well, Prudence is a therapist, isn’t she? Wants the in-person touch.’
He glanced at Robin, who looked both tired and tense. Assuming this was due to her continuing fear of the church, he said,
‘They’d be stupider than I think they are to try and tail us after what I said to Wace on Friday, but if we spot anyone, we’ll pull over and confront them.’
Strike chose not to mention that if, as he half-suspected, Wace was playing mind games rather than genuinely attempting covert surveillance, the church leader might equally decide to ramp up harassment in retribution for their face-to-face chat at Olympia.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ Robin said. ‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain, but I think Isaac Mills might be dead. Look: I found it an hour ago.’
She passed the printout of a small news item in the Telegraph dated January 2011 across the desk. It described an incident in which Isaac Mills, 38, had died in a head-on collision with a van which, unlike Mills, had been driving on the correct side of the road.
‘Right age,’ said Robin, ‘and wrong side of the road sounds like he was drunk or stoned.’
‘Shit,’ said Strike.
‘I’ll keep looking,’ said Robin, taking back the clipping, ‘because there are other Isaac Millses out there, but I’ve got a horrible feeling that was our man. Did you talk to Dev about taking Rosie Fernsby out for dinner, by the way?’
‘Did, yeah, he’s going to make a profile on Mingle Guru tonight. I had another thought about Rosie, actually. If that profile is hers, and she really has been travelling around India for the last few years, it makes sense that she hasn’t got a permanent base here. I wondered whether she might be housesitting while her mother’s in Canada.’
‘Nobody’s answered the landline in all the time I’ve tried. It just goes straight to voicemail.’
‘Even so, it wouldn’t be far out of our way, going through Richmond on the way back from Strawberry Hill. We could just knock on the door in Cedar Terrace and see what happens.’
Strike’s mobile rang. Expecting Lucy, he instead saw Midge’s number.
‘Everything all right?’
‘No,’ said Midge.
With a sense of foreboding, Strike switched the mobile to speakerphone and laid it down on the desk between him and Robin.
‘It’s not Tash’s fault,’ said Midge defensively, ‘OK? She hasn’t been able to get back to the annexe for the last couple of nights, so she seized a chance when she was coming back from a massage an hour ago.’
‘She was spotted?’ said Strike sharply.
‘Yeah,’ said Midge. ‘Some bloke who works there saw her tapping on the window.’
Strike’s and Robin’s eyes met. The latter, who feared Strike was about to explode, made a grimace intended to prevent any unhelpful outburst.
‘Obviously, Tash walked straight off,’ said Midge, ‘but the bad thing is—’
‘That’s not the bad thing?’ said Strike ominously.
‘Look, she’s done us a favour, Strike, and at least she’s found out Lin’s there!’
‘Midge, what else happened?’ said Robin, before Strike could retort.
‘Well, she had the note in the pocket of her robe, the one to show Lin, saying Will and Qing are out, and… and now she can’t find it. She thinks she might’ve taken the wrong robe when she left the massage room. Or, maybe, she’s dropped it.’
‘OK,’ said Robin, gesturing to Strike to withhold the stream of recriminations she knew he was bursting to deliver, ‘Midge, if she can pretend she’s lost a ring or something—’
‘She’s already gone back to the massage room to look, but she called me first because, obviously—’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Obviously.’
‘Let us know what happens,’ said Robin. ‘Call us.’
‘Will do,’ said Midge. She rang off.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ said Strike, seething. ‘What did I tell Tasha? Take no risks, be ultra-cautious, then she goes to that fucking window by daylight—’
‘I know,’ said Robin, ‘I know.’
‘We should never have put an amateur in there!’
‘It was the only way,’ said Robin. ‘We had to use someone they’d never realise had a connection to us. Now we’ve just got to hope she gets that note back.’
Strike got to his feet and began to pace.
‘If they’ve found that note, Zhou’s probably scrambling to pull another Jacob – hide Lin and come up with an alternative blonde, fast. Fuck – this isn’t good… I’m going to call Wardle.’
Strike did so. Robin listened as her partner laid out the problem to his best police contact. As she could have predicted, Wardle needed quite a lot of explanation and repetition before he fully grasped what Strike was telling him.
‘If Wardle finds it hard to believe, I can just imagine how regular officers are going to react,’ said Strike bitterly, having hung up. ‘I don’t think they’ll see it as a top priority, rescuing a girl who’s living at a luxury spa. What’s the time?’
‘Time to go,’ said Robin, shutting down her computer.
‘Are we giving Pat a lift home?’
‘No, she’s meeting her granddaughter. Dennis is going to look after Qing while Will’s with us.’
So Strike and Robin walked together towards the garage where Strike kept his BMW. It was a warm evening; a pleasant change from the intermittent drizzle of the last few days. They’d just reached the garage when Strike’s mobile rang again: Lucy.
‘Hi, what did the GP say?’ he asked.
‘He thinks Ted’s had a mini-stroke.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said Strike, unlocking the car with his free hand.
‘They want to scan him. The earliest they can do is Friday.’
‘Right,’ said Strike, getting into the passenger’s seat while Robin took the wheel. ‘Well, if you like, I’ll go with him. You’re picking up all the slack here.’
‘Thanks, Stick,’ said Lucy. ‘I appreciate that.’
‘Thank Christ he was with you when it happened. Imagine if he’d been alone in St Mawes.’
‘I know,’ said Lucy.
‘I’ll take him for the scan, and afterwards we’ll talk plans, OK?’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy, sounding defeated. ‘OK. How are things with you?’
‘Busy,’ said Strike. ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘Everything all right?’ asked Robin, waiting until Strike had hung up until turning on the ignition.
‘No,’ said Strike, and as they set off up the road, he explained about Ted’s stroke, and his Alzheimer’s, and the burden Lucy was currently bearing, and the guilt he felt about not pulling his weight. In consequence, neither Strike nor Robin noticed the blue Ford Focus that pulled away from the kerb a hundred yards beyond the garage, as Robin accelerated.
The Ford’s speed was often adjusted, which varied the distance between it and the BMW, so that it was sometimes one, and sometimes as many as three cars behind them. Both detectives’ minds were so preoccupied with their separate, joint, general and specific anxieties that both failed to notice they were, again, being followed.
117
K’an represents the heart, the soul locked up within the body, the principle of light enclosed in the dark – that is, reason.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
It was only as Robin approached Prudence’s house that she registered, in some dim region of her mind, that she’d spotted a blue Ford Focus in her rear-view mirror at another point in the journey. She rounded the corner of Prudence’s street, and the blue car drove innocently past. Preoccupied with the imminent meeting between Will and Flora, Robin immediately forgot it again.
‘You’ll like Prudence,’ she said reassuringly to Will, who’d barely spoken during the journey. ‘She’s really nice.’
Will looked up at the large Edwardian house, shoulders hunched and arms folded, an expression of intense misgiving on his face.
‘Hi,’ said Prudence, when she opened the front door, looking understatedly elegant as ever in cream trousers and a matching sweater. ‘Oh.’
Her face had fallen on seeing Strike.
‘Problem?’ he asked, wondering whether she’d expected him to call and apologise after their last, heated phone call. As he considered himself entirely blameless in the matter of identifying Flora, the idea hadn’t occurred to him.
‘I assumed it would just be Robin,’ said Prudence, standing back to let them all in. ‘Flora isn’t expecting another man.’
‘Ah,’ said Strike. ‘Right. I could wait in the car?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Prudence, with a slight awkwardness. ‘You can go in the sitting room.’
‘Thanks,’ said Strike. He caught Robin’s eye, then headed wordlessly through the door to the right. Prudence opened a door on the left.
Like the sitting room, Prudence’s consulting room was tastefully decorated in neutral colours. A few decorative objects, including jade snuff bottles and a Chinese puzzle ball, were arranged on wall shelves. There was a sofa upholstered in cream, a flourishing palm tree in the corner and an antique rug on the floor.
A pale and very heavy woman of around thirty was sitting in a low, black, steel-framed chair. Every item she wore was dark and baggy. Robin noticed the thin white self-harm scars on her neck, and the way she was clutching both cuffs of her long-sleeved top, so as to hold them down over her hands. Her curly hair was arranged to cover as much of her face as possible, though a pair of large, beautiful brown eyes were just visible.
‘Have a seat, Will,’ said Prudence. ‘Anywhere you like.’
After a moment’s indecision, he chose a chair. Robin sat down on the sofa.
‘So: Flora, Will, Will, Flora,’ said Prudence, smiling as she sat down too.
‘Hi,’ said Flora.
‘Hi,’ muttered Will.
When neither of them showed any further inclination for interacting with each other, Prudence said,
‘Flora was in the UHC for five years, Will, and I think you were in for—’
‘Four, yeah.’
Will’s eyes were darting around the room, lingering on some of the objects.
‘How long have you been out?’ he shot suddenly at Flora.
‘Um… eleven years,’ said Flora, peering at Will through her fringe.
Will got up so suddenly, Flora gasped. Pointing at her, Will snarled at Robin,
‘It’s a trap. She’s still working for them.’
‘I’m not!’ exclaimed Flora indignantly.
‘She’s in on it, as well!’ Will said, now pointing at Prudence. ‘This place –’ He looked from the Chinese puzzle ball to the antique rug, ‘it’s just like Zhou’s office!’
‘Will,’ said Robin, getting to her feet, too, ‘why on earth would I have gone undercover at Chapman Farm to get you out, only to lead you straight back to them?’
‘They fooled you! Or, it’s all been a test. You’re an agent of the church too!’
‘You found the plastic rock,’ said Robin calmly. ‘You saw the torch and the traces of my notes. If I were a church agent, why would I have been writing to outsiders? And how would I have known you’d find the rock at all?’
‘I want to go back to Pat’s,’ said Will desperately. ‘I want to go back.’
He was almost at the door when Robin said,
‘Will, your mother’s dead. You know that, don’t you?’
Will turned back, glaring at her, his thin chest rising and falling rapidly. Robin felt she had no choice but to resort to dirty tactics, but it wrung her heart, nonetheless.
‘You looked it up online, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’
Will nodded.
‘You know how much I risked at Chapman Farm, by telling you that. You heard them talking about me after I left, and you found out my real name, and tracked me down to exactly where I should have been, at our office. I’m not lying to you. Flora was a church member, but she got out. Please, just sit down and talk to her for a bit. I’ll drive you back to Pat’s afterwards.’
After almost a full minute of deliberation, Will returned reluctantly to his chair.
‘I know how you feel, Will,’ said Flora unexpectedly, in a timid voice. ‘I do, honestly.’
‘Why are you still alive?’ said Will brutally.
‘I wonder myself, sometimes,’ said Flora with a shaky little laugh.
Robin was starting to fear this meeting was going to do both parties more harm than good. She looked at Prudence for help, and the latter said,
‘Are you wondering why the Drowned Prophet hasn’t come for Flora, Will?’
‘Yes, obviously,’ said Will, refusing to look at Prudence, whose offences of possessing snuff bottles and antique rugs were apparently too severe for him to overlook.
‘The Drowned Prophet kind of did come for me. I’m not supposed to drink on my meds,’ said Flora, with a guilty glance at Prudence, ‘and I’m try not to, but if I do, I start feeling like the prophet’s watching me again, and I can hear her telling me I’m not fit to live. But nowadays I know the voice isn’t real.’
‘How?’ demanded Will.
‘Because she hates all the things I hate about myself,’ said Flora, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘I know it’s me doing it, not her.’
‘How did you get out?’
‘I wasn’t very well.’
‘I don’t believe you. ‘They wouldn’t have let you go just for that. They’d have treated you.’
‘They did treat me, kind of. They made me chant in the temple, and gave me some herbs, and Papa J –’ A look of disgust flickered across Flora’s half-concealed face ‘– but none of it worked. I was seeing things and hearing voices. In the end, they contacted my dad and he came and picked me up.’
‘You’re lying. They wouldn’t do that. They’d never contact a flesh object.’
‘They didn’t know what else to do with me, I don’t think,’ said Flora. ‘My dad was really angry. He said it was all my own fault for running away and causing a load of trouble and not answering letters. Once we got home, he was really pissed off with me chanting and doing the joyful meditation. He thought it was me trying to stay in the religion… he didn’t understand that I couldn’t stop… I could see the Drowned Prophet standing behind doors and sometimes I’d see her reflection in the bathroom mirror, right behind me, and I’d turn around but she’d be gone. I didn’t tell Dad or my stepmum, because the Drowned Prophet told me not to – I mean, I thought she told me not to…’
‘I had no idea you were so interested in Strike’s love life. I’ll keep you briefed in future.’
Murphy laughed.
‘I’m sorry, Robin,’ he said, reaching for her hand. ‘I am, seriously. Shit… I didn’t mean to… Lizzie went off with a supposed “friend”, in the end.’
‘I know that, but what you’re failing to factor in here is, I’m not Lizzie.’
‘I know. I’m sorry, seriously. How long’s Strike been with this lawyer?’
‘I don’t know – months. I don’t keep notes,’ said Robin.
The rest of the evening passed amicably enough. Tired, still annoyed but wanting to keep the peace, Robin told herself she’d worry later about what might happen if Nick, Ilsa, or Strike himself revealed that his affair with Bijou was over.
116
Nine at the beginning means:
Hidden dragon.
Do not act.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Robin spent a good deal of the next three days asking herself unanswerable questions about the state of her own feelings, and in speculation about the likely future trajectory of Murphy’s newly revealed jealousy. Would this relationship go the same way as her marriage, through increasing levels of suspicion to a destructive explosion, or was she projecting old resentments onto Murphy, much as he’d done to her?
Though she’d accepted the truce, and did her best to act as though all was forgiven and forgotten, Robin remained annoyed that, yet again, she’d been forced to justify and dissemble on matters relating to Cormoran Strike. Those fatal four words, ‘I love you, too’, had brought about a shift in Murphy. It would be going too far to call his new attitude possessiveness, but there was a certain assurance that had been lacking before.
In her more honest moments, Robin asked herself why she hadn’t called him when worried a gunman might be lurking out of sight round the corner. The only answers she could come up with were confused, and some opened doors onto further questions she didn’t want to answer. At the admissible end of the scale was her fear that Murphy would have overreacted. She hadn’t wanted to hand her boyfriend a justification for dictating what risks she took, because she’d had quite enough of that already, from her mother. Yet, whispered her conscience, she’d let Strike tell her to be more careful, hadn’t she? She’d also done as he’d suggested, with regard to taxis and taking on no jobs on her own. What was the difference?
The answer (so Robin told herself) was that she and Strike were in business together, which gave him certain rights – but here, her self-analysis stopped, because it might be argued that Murphy, too, had rights; it was simply that she found them less admissible. Such musings came dangerously close to forcing her to confront something she was determinedly avoiding. Ruminations on Strike’s true feelings, as she knew from past experience, led only to confusion and pain.
Strike, meanwhile, had personal worries of his own. On Saturday afternoon, Lucy called him with the news that Ted, who was still staying at her house, had had a ‘funny turn’. Guilt-stricken that he hadn’t so much as visited Ted in the last couple of weeks, Strike abandoned surveillance of the husband they’d nicknamed Hampstead to drive straight to Lucy’s house in Bromley, where he’d found Ted even more disorientated than usual. Lucy had already made a doctor’s appointment for their uncle, and had promised to get back to Strike with news as soon as she had it.
He spent most of Monday on surveillance of Toy Boy, handing over to Barclay in the late afternoon, then heading back to the office at four o’clock. Robin had been there all day, trying to sublimate in work the anxiety she felt about moving Will out of the safe haven of Pat’s house to visit Prudence that evening.
‘I still think Will and Flora could have FaceTimed,’ Robin said to Strike, when he joined her at the partners’ desk, coffee in hand.
‘Yeah, well, Prudence is a therapist, isn’t she? Wants the in-person touch.’
He glanced at Robin, who looked both tired and tense. Assuming this was due to her continuing fear of the church, he said,
‘They’d be stupider than I think they are to try and tail us after what I said to Wace on Friday, but if we spot anyone, we’ll pull over and confront them.’
Strike chose not to mention that if, as he half-suspected, Wace was playing mind games rather than genuinely attempting covert surveillance, the church leader might equally decide to ramp up harassment in retribution for their face-to-face chat at Olympia.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ Robin said. ‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain, but I think Isaac Mills might be dead. Look: I found it an hour ago.’
She passed the printout of a small news item in the Telegraph dated January 2011 across the desk. It described an incident in which Isaac Mills, 38, had died in a head-on collision with a van which, unlike Mills, had been driving on the correct side of the road.
‘Right age,’ said Robin, ‘and wrong side of the road sounds like he was drunk or stoned.’
‘Shit,’ said Strike.
‘I’ll keep looking,’ said Robin, taking back the clipping, ‘because there are other Isaac Millses out there, but I’ve got a horrible feeling that was our man. Did you talk to Dev about taking Rosie Fernsby out for dinner, by the way?’
‘Did, yeah, he’s going to make a profile on Mingle Guru tonight. I had another thought about Rosie, actually. If that profile is hers, and she really has been travelling around India for the last few years, it makes sense that she hasn’t got a permanent base here. I wondered whether she might be housesitting while her mother’s in Canada.’
‘Nobody’s answered the landline in all the time I’ve tried. It just goes straight to voicemail.’
‘Even so, it wouldn’t be far out of our way, going through Richmond on the way back from Strawberry Hill. We could just knock on the door in Cedar Terrace and see what happens.’
Strike’s mobile rang. Expecting Lucy, he instead saw Midge’s number.
‘Everything all right?’
‘No,’ said Midge.
With a sense of foreboding, Strike switched the mobile to speakerphone and laid it down on the desk between him and Robin.
‘It’s not Tash’s fault,’ said Midge defensively, ‘OK? She hasn’t been able to get back to the annexe for the last couple of nights, so she seized a chance when she was coming back from a massage an hour ago.’
‘She was spotted?’ said Strike sharply.
‘Yeah,’ said Midge. ‘Some bloke who works there saw her tapping on the window.’
Strike’s and Robin’s eyes met. The latter, who feared Strike was about to explode, made a grimace intended to prevent any unhelpful outburst.
‘Obviously, Tash walked straight off,’ said Midge, ‘but the bad thing is—’
‘That’s not the bad thing?’ said Strike ominously.
‘Look, she’s done us a favour, Strike, and at least she’s found out Lin’s there!’
‘Midge, what else happened?’ said Robin, before Strike could retort.
‘Well, she had the note in the pocket of her robe, the one to show Lin, saying Will and Qing are out, and… and now she can’t find it. She thinks she might’ve taken the wrong robe when she left the massage room. Or, maybe, she’s dropped it.’
‘OK,’ said Robin, gesturing to Strike to withhold the stream of recriminations she knew he was bursting to deliver, ‘Midge, if she can pretend she’s lost a ring or something—’
‘She’s already gone back to the massage room to look, but she called me first because, obviously—’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Obviously.’
‘Let us know what happens,’ said Robin. ‘Call us.’
‘Will do,’ said Midge. She rang off.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ said Strike, seething. ‘What did I tell Tasha? Take no risks, be ultra-cautious, then she goes to that fucking window by daylight—’
‘I know,’ said Robin, ‘I know.’
‘We should never have put an amateur in there!’
‘It was the only way,’ said Robin. ‘We had to use someone they’d never realise had a connection to us. Now we’ve just got to hope she gets that note back.’
Strike got to his feet and began to pace.
‘If they’ve found that note, Zhou’s probably scrambling to pull another Jacob – hide Lin and come up with an alternative blonde, fast. Fuck – this isn’t good… I’m going to call Wardle.’
Strike did so. Robin listened as her partner laid out the problem to his best police contact. As she could have predicted, Wardle needed quite a lot of explanation and repetition before he fully grasped what Strike was telling him.
‘If Wardle finds it hard to believe, I can just imagine how regular officers are going to react,’ said Strike bitterly, having hung up. ‘I don’t think they’ll see it as a top priority, rescuing a girl who’s living at a luxury spa. What’s the time?’
‘Time to go,’ said Robin, shutting down her computer.
‘Are we giving Pat a lift home?’
‘No, she’s meeting her granddaughter. Dennis is going to look after Qing while Will’s with us.’
So Strike and Robin walked together towards the garage where Strike kept his BMW. It was a warm evening; a pleasant change from the intermittent drizzle of the last few days. They’d just reached the garage when Strike’s mobile rang again: Lucy.
‘Hi, what did the GP say?’ he asked.
‘He thinks Ted’s had a mini-stroke.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said Strike, unlocking the car with his free hand.
‘They want to scan him. The earliest they can do is Friday.’
‘Right,’ said Strike, getting into the passenger’s seat while Robin took the wheel. ‘Well, if you like, I’ll go with him. You’re picking up all the slack here.’
‘Thanks, Stick,’ said Lucy. ‘I appreciate that.’
‘Thank Christ he was with you when it happened. Imagine if he’d been alone in St Mawes.’
‘I know,’ said Lucy.
‘I’ll take him for the scan, and afterwards we’ll talk plans, OK?’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy, sounding defeated. ‘OK. How are things with you?’
‘Busy,’ said Strike. ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘Everything all right?’ asked Robin, waiting until Strike had hung up until turning on the ignition.
‘No,’ said Strike, and as they set off up the road, he explained about Ted’s stroke, and his Alzheimer’s, and the burden Lucy was currently bearing, and the guilt he felt about not pulling his weight. In consequence, neither Strike nor Robin noticed the blue Ford Focus that pulled away from the kerb a hundred yards beyond the garage, as Robin accelerated.
The Ford’s speed was often adjusted, which varied the distance between it and the BMW, so that it was sometimes one, and sometimes as many as three cars behind them. Both detectives’ minds were so preoccupied with their separate, joint, general and specific anxieties that both failed to notice they were, again, being followed.
117
K’an represents the heart, the soul locked up within the body, the principle of light enclosed in the dark – that is, reason.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
It was only as Robin approached Prudence’s house that she registered, in some dim region of her mind, that she’d spotted a blue Ford Focus in her rear-view mirror at another point in the journey. She rounded the corner of Prudence’s street, and the blue car drove innocently past. Preoccupied with the imminent meeting between Will and Flora, Robin immediately forgot it again.
‘You’ll like Prudence,’ she said reassuringly to Will, who’d barely spoken during the journey. ‘She’s really nice.’
Will looked up at the large Edwardian house, shoulders hunched and arms folded, an expression of intense misgiving on his face.
‘Hi,’ said Prudence, when she opened the front door, looking understatedly elegant as ever in cream trousers and a matching sweater. ‘Oh.’
Her face had fallen on seeing Strike.
‘Problem?’ he asked, wondering whether she’d expected him to call and apologise after their last, heated phone call. As he considered himself entirely blameless in the matter of identifying Flora, the idea hadn’t occurred to him.
‘I assumed it would just be Robin,’ said Prudence, standing back to let them all in. ‘Flora isn’t expecting another man.’
‘Ah,’ said Strike. ‘Right. I could wait in the car?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Prudence, with a slight awkwardness. ‘You can go in the sitting room.’
‘Thanks,’ said Strike. He caught Robin’s eye, then headed wordlessly through the door to the right. Prudence opened a door on the left.
Like the sitting room, Prudence’s consulting room was tastefully decorated in neutral colours. A few decorative objects, including jade snuff bottles and a Chinese puzzle ball, were arranged on wall shelves. There was a sofa upholstered in cream, a flourishing palm tree in the corner and an antique rug on the floor.
A pale and very heavy woman of around thirty was sitting in a low, black, steel-framed chair. Every item she wore was dark and baggy. Robin noticed the thin white self-harm scars on her neck, and the way she was clutching both cuffs of her long-sleeved top, so as to hold them down over her hands. Her curly hair was arranged to cover as much of her face as possible, though a pair of large, beautiful brown eyes were just visible.
‘Have a seat, Will,’ said Prudence. ‘Anywhere you like.’
After a moment’s indecision, he chose a chair. Robin sat down on the sofa.
‘So: Flora, Will, Will, Flora,’ said Prudence, smiling as she sat down too.
‘Hi,’ said Flora.
‘Hi,’ muttered Will.
When neither of them showed any further inclination for interacting with each other, Prudence said,
‘Flora was in the UHC for five years, Will, and I think you were in for—’
‘Four, yeah.’
Will’s eyes were darting around the room, lingering on some of the objects.
‘How long have you been out?’ he shot suddenly at Flora.
‘Um… eleven years,’ said Flora, peering at Will through her fringe.
Will got up so suddenly, Flora gasped. Pointing at her, Will snarled at Robin,
‘It’s a trap. She’s still working for them.’
‘I’m not!’ exclaimed Flora indignantly.
‘She’s in on it, as well!’ Will said, now pointing at Prudence. ‘This place –’ He looked from the Chinese puzzle ball to the antique rug, ‘it’s just like Zhou’s office!’
‘Will,’ said Robin, getting to her feet, too, ‘why on earth would I have gone undercover at Chapman Farm to get you out, only to lead you straight back to them?’
‘They fooled you! Or, it’s all been a test. You’re an agent of the church too!’
‘You found the plastic rock,’ said Robin calmly. ‘You saw the torch and the traces of my notes. If I were a church agent, why would I have been writing to outsiders? And how would I have known you’d find the rock at all?’
‘I want to go back to Pat’s,’ said Will desperately. ‘I want to go back.’
He was almost at the door when Robin said,
‘Will, your mother’s dead. You know that, don’t you?’
Will turned back, glaring at her, his thin chest rising and falling rapidly. Robin felt she had no choice but to resort to dirty tactics, but it wrung her heart, nonetheless.
‘You looked it up online, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’
Will nodded.
‘You know how much I risked at Chapman Farm, by telling you that. You heard them talking about me after I left, and you found out my real name, and tracked me down to exactly where I should have been, at our office. I’m not lying to you. Flora was a church member, but she got out. Please, just sit down and talk to her for a bit. I’ll drive you back to Pat’s afterwards.’
After almost a full minute of deliberation, Will returned reluctantly to his chair.
‘I know how you feel, Will,’ said Flora unexpectedly, in a timid voice. ‘I do, honestly.’
‘Why are you still alive?’ said Will brutally.
‘I wonder myself, sometimes,’ said Flora with a shaky little laugh.
Robin was starting to fear this meeting was going to do both parties more harm than good. She looked at Prudence for help, and the latter said,
‘Are you wondering why the Drowned Prophet hasn’t come for Flora, Will?’
‘Yes, obviously,’ said Will, refusing to look at Prudence, whose offences of possessing snuff bottles and antique rugs were apparently too severe for him to overlook.
‘The Drowned Prophet kind of did come for me. I’m not supposed to drink on my meds,’ said Flora, with a guilty glance at Prudence, ‘and I’m try not to, but if I do, I start feeling like the prophet’s watching me again, and I can hear her telling me I’m not fit to live. But nowadays I know the voice isn’t real.’
‘How?’ demanded Will.
‘Because she hates all the things I hate about myself,’ said Flora, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘I know it’s me doing it, not her.’
‘How did you get out?’
‘I wasn’t very well.’
‘I don’t believe you. ‘They wouldn’t have let you go just for that. They’d have treated you.’
‘They did treat me, kind of. They made me chant in the temple, and gave me some herbs, and Papa J –’ A look of disgust flickered across Flora’s half-concealed face ‘– but none of it worked. I was seeing things and hearing voices. In the end, they contacted my dad and he came and picked me up.’
‘You’re lying. They wouldn’t do that. They’d never contact a flesh object.’
‘They didn’t know what else to do with me, I don’t think,’ said Flora. ‘My dad was really angry. He said it was all my own fault for running away and causing a load of trouble and not answering letters. Once we got home, he was really pissed off with me chanting and doing the joyful meditation. He thought it was me trying to stay in the religion… he didn’t understand that I couldn’t stop… I could see the Drowned Prophet standing behind doors and sometimes I’d see her reflection in the bathroom mirror, right behind me, and I’d turn around but she’d be gone. I didn’t tell Dad or my stepmum, because the Drowned Prophet told me not to – I mean, I thought she told me not to…’
