The Running Grave, page 91
Strike, who’d soon devoured three burgers and two bags of fries, now started on an apple pie. Like Robin, he felt no desire whatsoever for sleep. The immediate past seemed to compress and extend in his mind: at one moment, the shooting felt as though it had happened a week previously, the next, as though he’d only just felt the heat of the bullet searing his cheek and watched the windscreen shatter.
‘What are you looking at?’ he asked Robin, noticing her slightly glass-eyed stare at the board on the wall behind him.
She seemed to withdraw her attention from a long way away.
‘I didn’t tell you what the third Divine Secret is, did I? The “Living Sacrifice”?’
‘No,’ said Strike.
‘The UHC are child trafficking.’
Strike’s jaws stopped moving.
‘What?’
‘Superfluous babies, mostly boys, are taken to the Birmingham centre where they’re warehoused until they’re sold. It’s an illegal adoption service: babies for cash. Most of them go to America. Your friend Joe Jackson is in charge, apparently. From what Flora said, hundreds of babies must have passed out of the UHC by now.’
‘Holy—’
‘I should’ve realised there was something up, given how much unprotected sex they’re having at Chapman Farm, because there are relatively few kids there, and nearly all of them looked as though they’d been fathered by Jonathan or Taio. Wace keeps his own bloodline and, of course, enough non-related girls to keep providing the church with future generations.’
Momentarily lost for words, Strike swallowed his apple pie and reached for the beer he’d got out of the office fridge.
‘Will knew, because of Lin,’ Robin said. ‘When she got pregnant she was terrified Qing would be sent to Birmingham. Neither of them could understand why she was allowed to stay, so I have to assume Lin doesn’t realise Wace is her father… Strike, I’m really worried about Lin.’
‘Me too,’ said Strike, ‘but Midge couldn’t tail that bloody van through the night, and definitely not with her girlfriend coming along for the jolly.’
‘That’s not fair,’ said Robin. ‘You used to – I mean, obviously, I wasn’t your girlfriend, but you let me do stuff in the early days when, technically, I was your temp. Tasha’s worried about Lin too.’
‘Investigation isn’t a bloody team sport. So is it an open secret, this baby trade?’
‘I don’t know. Flora only found out when she was pregnant. One of the other women told her her baby was going to be sold for lots of cash for the glorious mission, but the baby died at birth. Flora was punished for that,’ said Robin.
‘Shit,’ said Strike.
Whether or not Robin had intended her information to have that effect, Strike now felt guilty that he’d judged Flora Brewster so harshly.
‘Robin, this is fucking massive, and you did it.’
‘Except,’ said Robin, who didn’t sound particularly pleased, ‘it’s still hearsay, isn’t it? Flora, Will and Lin have never been to the Birmingham centre. We haven’t got a shred of concrete proof of the trafficking.’
‘Emily Pirbright was relocated from Birmingham, right?’
‘Yes, but given that she hasn’t been allowed to leave Chapman Farm since I escaped, we might be waiting a long time for her testimony.’
‘Abigail Glover was sent to Birmingham after Daiyu died, as well, but she never said a word about a glut of babies being kept there.’
‘If Abigail wasn’t ever pregnant, she probably thought all the kids belonged to people living at the Birmingham centre. Women seem to find out about it only once they’re expecting… we’ve got to get police in there,’ said Robin, ‘and not when the church is expecting it.’
‘Agreed,’ said Strike, now taking out his notebook. ‘Fuck it, we’ve got the contacts, it’s time to stop being so bloody polite. I say we try and get them all together, Wardle, Layborn, Ekwensi – Murphy,’ he added, after a slight hesitation – needs must, he supposed – ‘and lay it all on the line, preferably with Will and Flora present. D’you think they’d talk?’
‘I’m ninety per cent certain Flora would, after tonight. Will… I think he’s still determined only to speak to the police once Lin’s out.’
‘Maybe bullets sailing a foot over his head will have sharpened his ideas up,’ said Strike. ‘I’ll make those calls tomorrow… later today, I mean.’
Strike ate a solitary cold chip lingering at the bottom of a greasy bag. Robin was again looking at the board on the wall. Her eyes travelled from the photo of rabbity-faced Daiyu to Flora Brewster’s drawing of the girl without eyes; from the mugshot of twenty-something Carrie Curtis Woods to Jennifer Wace, with her eighties perm; from the pig-mask Polaroids to Paul Draper’s timid moon face, and lastly to the note to himself Strike had written, which read, JOGGER ON THE BEACH?
‘Strike,’ said Robin, ‘what the hell’s going on?’
121
Six in the third place means:
Whoever hunts deer without the forester
Only loses his way in the forest.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘Enough to bring down the UHC, if we’re lucky,’ said Strike.
‘No, I mean the things that have been happening since I got out. Why are they simultaneously so slick, so hard to catch in the act, but also so incompetent?’
‘Go on,’ said Strike, because she was articulating something he himself had been wondering about.
‘That couple in the red Corsa: were they genuinely tailing us? If so, they were lousy at it, whereas the Ford Focus – I know I messed up, not spotting them sooner—’
‘No, whoever was driving that car was very good, and they also came bloody close to killing one or both of us.’
‘Right, and whoever tried to break in here with the gun looked pretty efficient, and whoever murdered Kevin Pirbright has got clean away with it—’
‘Whereas our green-eyed friend couldn’t have been more obvious unless he’d held up a placard saying, “I am watching you”.’
‘And then you’ve got Reaney and Carrie, scared into suicide without even being face to face with the person… don’t you feel as though we’ve got two different sets of people after us, one of them kind of a clown show, and the other lot really dangerous?’
‘Personally,’ said Strike, ‘I think we’ve got someone after us who can’t be picky about their underlings. They have to go with what they’ve got at any given time.’
‘But that doesn’t fit Jonathan Wace. He’s got thousands of people who’re absolutely devoted to him at his disposal, and whatever else you might say about him, he’s got a real talent for putting people where they’re most useful. He’s never had a high-level defector.’
‘There’s that,’ said Strike, ‘and also the fact he’d have the ability to keep us under twenty-four-hour surveillance without ever repeating a face, whereas whoever’s behind this seems to be watching us and following us at what seem fairly random times. I get the sense that they’re only doing it when they can.
‘You know,’ said Strike, reaching for his beer, ‘Wace absolutely denied he was following or watching us when I met him at Olympia. He would, of course, but I s’pose there’s an outside chance he was telling the truth.’
‘What if,’ said Robin, thinking the thing out as she spoke, ‘someone in the church is scared we’ve found out something Wace never knew about? Something he’d be really angry about?’
Both of them now looked up at the noticeboard.
‘Going by who they’re trying to stop us talking to, it’s those Polaroids,’ said Strike, ‘because I doubt it’s escaped your notice that the bullets only started hitting us once it looked as though we were heading for Cedar Terrace and, I strongly suspect, Rosie Fernsby. They didn’t give a damn about Will, or they’d have tried to stop us earlier. It’s possible they’re banking on the fact he won’t talk while they’ve still got Lin, in case she’s the one who pays for it… in point of fact, she’s something of a trump card for the church, isn’t she? It’s in their best interests to keep her alive…
‘No,’ said Strike, reaching for his notebook and pen again, ‘I still think Rosie Fernsby’s the one in real danger. Someone’s got to go to Cedar Terrace and warn her, if she’s there.’
He made a note to this effect and set his pen down again.
Robin shivered. It was now approaching four in the morning, and while her brain was far too overwrought for sleep, her body felt differently. She was too busy staring at the picture of Daiyu on the noticeboard to register Strike taking off his jacket until he passed it to her.
‘Oh… are you sure?’
‘I’ve got about five stone of extra padding, compared to you.’
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ muttered Robin. ‘Thank you.’
She pulled the jacket on: it was comfortingly warm.
‘How did Wace react when you mentioned the pig-mask Polaroids?’
‘Incredulity, disbelief… exactly what you’d expect.’
Both sat in thought for a while, still gazing up at the board.
‘Strike, I don’t see why anyone would risk shooting us, purely because of those pictures,’ said Robin, breaking a lengthy silence. ‘They’re horrible, and they’d definitely get tabloid coverage, but honestly, compared with what the church could be facing if we can get Will and Flora and maybe others to testify, those pictures would surely pale into – not insignificance, but they’d be just one more sordid detail. Plus, there’s nothing in the pictures to show they were taken at Chapman Farm. It’s deniable.’
‘Not if Rosie Fernsby testifies, it isn’t.’
‘She hasn’t spoken up in twenty-one years. Her face is hidden in the pictures. If she wants to deny it’s her, we’ll never be able to prove it.’
‘So why’s someone so keen to stop us talking to her?’
‘I don’t know, except… I know you don’t like the theory, but she was there, the night before Daiyu died. What if she witnessed something, or heard something, as she was sneaking out of the women’s dormitory to join her father and brother?’
‘How far away from the kids’ dormitory is the women’s?’
‘A fair distance,’ admitted Robin, ‘but what if Daiyu came into the women’s dorm, after leaving the children’s one? Or maybe Rosie looked out of her dormitory window and saw Daiyu heading for the woods, or a Retreat Room?’
‘Then somebody else must have been with Daiyu, to know Rosie had spotted them.’
Another silence followed. Then Robin said,
‘Daiyu was getting food and toys from somewhere…’
‘Yeah, and you know what that smacks of? Grooming.’
‘But Carrie said it wasn’t her.’
‘Do we believe her?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Robin.
Another long pause followed, each of them lost in thought.
‘It would make a damn sight more sense,’ said Strike at last, ‘if the last glimpse anyone ever had of Daiyu was her going out of that window. If you were going to drown a child in the early hours, why help them out of the window first? What if Daiyu didn’t come back?… Or was that the point? Daiyu hides – or is hidden – somewhere after climbing out of the window… and another child gets taken to the beach in her place?’
‘Are you serious?’ said Robin. ‘You’re saying a different child drowned?’
‘What do we know about the journey to the beach?’ said Strike. ‘It’s dark, self-evidently – it must’ve been around this time of night,’ said Strike, glancing out of the window at the navy blue sky. ‘We know there was a kid in the van, because he or she waved as they passed the people on early duty – which, when you think about it, is suspicious in itself. You’d think Daiyu would’ve ducked down until they were safely off the premises if she didn’t have permission for the trip. I also find it fishy that Daiyu was dressed in a distinctive white dress unlike any other at the farm. Then, after they left the farm, the only witness was an elderly woman who saw them from a distance and didn’t know Daiyu from Adam anyway. She wouldn’t have known which kid it was.’
‘But the body,’ said Robin. ‘How could Carrie be sure it wouldn’t wash back up? DNA would prove it wasn’t Daiyu.’
‘They might not bother taking DNA if Daiyu’s loving mother was prepared to identify the corpse as her daughter,’ said Strike.
‘So Mazu’s in on the switch? And nobody notices there’s an extra child missing from Chapman Farm?’
‘You’re the one who’s found out the church separates kids from parents and shifts them around the different centres. What if a kid was drafted in from Glasgow or Birmingham to be Daiyu’s stand-in? All the Waces would need to do is tell everyone the child’s gone back to where they came from. If it was a child whose birth was never registered, who’s going to go looking?’
Robin, who was remembering the shaven-headed, closed-down children in the Chapman Farm classroom, and how easily they’d shown affection to a total stranger, now felt a nasty sinking sensation.
After another silence, Strike said,
‘Colonel Graves thinks the witnesses who saw the van passing were set up, so the Waces could punish them and maintain the fiction that they didn’t know about the trip to the beach. If it was a set-up, it was bloody sadistic. Brian Kennett: getting steadily sicker, no use to the church any more. Draper: low IQ and possibly brain-damaged. Abigail: the heartbroken stepmother can’t bear to look at the stepdaughter who let her child drive off to a watery grave and insists on getting rid of her.’
‘You think Wace would deliberately set up his elder daughter to be shut up naked in the pigsty?’
‘Wace was supposed to be absent that morning, remember,’ said Strike.
‘So you think Mazu planned it all behind Wace’s back?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘But where did Daiyu go, if the drowning was faked? We haven’t found any other family.’
‘Yeah, we have. Wace’s parents, in South Africa.’
‘But that means a passport, and if Wace wasn’t privy to the hoax…’
Strike frowned, then said with a sigh,
‘OK, objection sustained.’
‘I’ve got another objection,’ said Robin tentatively. ‘I know you’re going to say this is based on emotion, not facts, but I don’t believe Carrie was capable of drowning a child. I just don’t, Strike.’
‘Then explain “It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t pretend. It was real. She wasn’t coming back.”’
‘I can’t, except that I’m certain Carrie believed Daiyu was dead.’
‘Then—’
‘Dead… but not in the sea. Or not with her, in the sea…
‘You know,’ said Robin, after another long pause, ‘there might be an alternative explanation for the chocolate and the toys. Not grooming… blackmail. Daiyu saw something when she was sneaking around. Somebody was trying to keep her sweet… and that might tie back in with those Polaroids. Maybe she saw the naked people in masks, but unlike Kevin, knew they were real people… I need a pee,’ said Robin, getting to her feet, Strike’s jacket still wrapped around her.
Robin’s reflection was ghostly in the tarnished mirror of the landing bathroom. Having washed her hands, she returned to the office to find Strike now at Pat’s desk, poring over his attempt at a transcript of Kevin Pirbright’s interview with Farah Navabi.
‘I ran you off a copy,’ said Strike, putting the still-warm pages into Robin’s hand.
‘Want a coffee?’ asked Robin, dropping the pages onto the sofa to attend to in a few minutes.
‘Yeah, go on… and she drowned, or they said she drowned,’ he read off the paper in front of him. ‘So Kevin had his doubts about Daiyu’s death, too.’
‘He was only six when it happened,’ objected Robin, switching on the kettle.
‘He might not have had doubts then, but he grew up with people who might’ve let slip more than they let on at the time, and started wondering about it later… and he says, I remember funny things happening, things I keep thinking about, stuff I keep remembering, and then, there were four of them – or that’s what Navabi thought he said. It’s not clear on the tape.’
‘Four people in pig masks?’ suggested Robin.
‘Possibly, although we might be getting a bit too hung up on those pictures… What else could it be? “More of them”, “score of them”, “sixty-four of them”… Christ knows…
‘Then we’ve got it was more than just Cherie – he was slurring a lot, but that’s what it sounded like… then something about drinks… then, but Bec made Em, visible and then bullshit.’
‘But Becca made Emily lie about Daiyu being invisible?’ suggested Robin, over the sound of the bubbling kettle.
‘Got to be, because then Navabi says, Becca made Em lie, did you say? And Kevin says, she was allowed out, she could get things and smuggle it in.’
Robin finished making the two coffees, set Strike’s beside him and sat down on the sofa.
‘Cheers,’ said Strike, still reading the transcript. ‘Then we’ve got let her away with stuff – didn’t care about her, really – she had chocolate once and I stole some – and bully, though.’
Robin had just found the part of the transcript Strike was reading.
‘Well, let her away with stuff sounds like Daiyu… and didn’t care about her, really might well apply to Daiyu, too…’
‘Who didn’t care about Daiyu?’ objected Strike. ‘Abigail told me she was the princess of the place.’
‘But was she, though?’ said Robin. ‘You know, I saw a virtual shrine to Daiyu in Mazu’s office and for a few seconds, I felt genuinely sorry for her. What could be worse than waking and finding out your child’s disappeared, and then hearing she’s drowned? But the picture other people paint isn’t of a devoted mother. Mazu was happy to palm Daiyu off onto other people – well, certainly onto Carrie. Don’t you think,’ said Robin, warming to her subject, ‘it’s odd behaviour, the way Mazu’s let this cult grow up around Daiyu? The drowning’s mentioned constantly. Is that consistent with genuine grief?’
‘Could be a deranged kind of grief.’
