Stroking his unshaven chin, the detective wondered whether he wasn’t becoming fixated on what might turn out to be a dead end. Maybe he was joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists, who saw hidden plots and stratagems where other, saner folk said, like Shelley Heaton, ‘That’s a funny coincidence,’ and moved on with their lives? Was it arrogant, he asked himself, to think he’d manage to trace a connection where nobody else had succeeded in doing so? Possibly – but then, he’d been called arrogant before, most often by the woman who now lay freshly interred in Brompton Cemetery, and it had never yet deterred him from doing precisely what he’d set out to do.
68
Nine in the second place means:
The abyss is dangerous.
One should strive to attain small things only.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
A strange mood seemed to have infected Chapman Farm ever since members’ tracksuits had changed to white. There was a jitteriness in the air, a sense of strain. Robin noticed an increased tendency on the part of church members to be even more performatively considerate in their treatment of each other, as though some hidden entity were constantly watching and judging.
This generalised anxiety heightened Robin’s own. While she hadn’t precisely lied in her last letter to Strike, she hadn’t told the whole truth, either.
When she and Emily had returned to the abandoned stall in Norwich and told their story of Emily coming over faint in a bathroom, Taio had seemed to accept their account at face value. Relieved as he was to get Emily back, most of his ire was directed at Jiang for losing sight of her and putting her at the mercy of the bubble people, and he spent much of the journey back to Chapman Farm muttering what looked like insults and imprecations at the back of his brother’s head. Jiang didn’t respond, but remained hunched and silent over the steering wheel.
However, over the next couple of days Robin had detected a shift in Taio’s attitude. Doubtless the large amount of money Emily was supposed to have collected on her own, coupled with the very small amount left in the collecting box from the stall, had raised his suspicions. Several times, Robin caught Taio staring at her in no friendly manner, and she also noticed sidelong glances from others who’d been in Norwich. When Robin saw Amandeep hastily hushing Vivienne and Walter as she approached them in the courtyard, she knew she’d been the subject under discussion. Robin wondered whether Vivienne had told anyone about her answering to her real name and if so, how far the information had spread.
Robin knew she’d reached the absolute limit of allowable mistakes, and as she wasn’t prepared to have sex with either Taio or Jonathan Wace, she was now on borrowed time at Chapman Farm. Exactly how she was going to leave, she wasn’t yet sure. It would take a certain amount of courage to tell Taio and Mazu she wanted to go, and perhaps it would be easier to struggle over the barbed wire at the perimeter by night. However, her immediate concern, given that her time was now definitely running out, was to identify priorities and achieve them as quickly as possible.
Firstly, she wanted to capitalise on the secret understanding she’d brokered with Emily to get as much information out of her as possible. Secondly, she was determined to try and engineer a one-on-one conversation with Will Edensor, so as to be able to give Sir Colin up-to-date information on his son. Lastly, she thought she might try and find the hatchet hidden in a tree in the woods.
She knew that even this limited agenda would be tricky. Whether deliberately or not (and Robin suspected the former), ever since they’d returned to Norwich she and Emily had been given tasks that kept them as far apart as possible. She noticed that Emily was always flanked by the same people in the dining hall, as though an order had been given to keep her under watch at all times. Emily had twice made an attempt to sit beside Robin in the dining hall, before being blocked by one of the people who seemed to be constantly shadowing her. Robin and Emily’s eyes had also met several times in the dormitory and on one of these occasions, Emily had offered a fleeting smile before turning quickly away as Becca entered.
Catching Will Edensor alone was also difficult, because Robin’s contact with him had always been negligible, and since their joint stint on the vegetable patch she’d rarely been assigned a task with him. His status at Chapman Farm remained that of manual labourer, in spite of his clear intelligence and his trust fund, and such joint work as they did together was always supervised and therefore afforded no opportunities for conversation.
As for the hatchet supposedly hidden in the woods, she knew it would be unwise to use the torch to look for it by night, in case the beam was spotted by someone looking out of the dormitory windows. Unfortunately, searching the woods by daylight would be almost as difficult. Other than its use as an occasional adventure playground for children, the patch of uncultivated land was barely used, and barring Will and Lin, who’d been there illicitly, and the young man who’d searched it on the night Bo had gone missing, Robin had never seen an adult enter it. How she was to slip away from her tasks, or justify her presence in the woods if found there, she currently had no idea.
Since her excursion to Norwich, Robin seemed to have been given a new hybrid status: part manual worker, part high-level recruit. She wasn’t invited back into the city to fundraise, although she continued to study church doctrine with her group. Robin had a feeling her thousand pound donation had made her too valuable to relegate entirely to the status of a skivvy, but that she was on a kind of unspoken probation. Vivienne, who was always a good barometer of who was in favour and who wasn’t, was pointedly ignoring her.
Robin’s next letter to Strike was short and, as she was well aware, disappointingly short of information, but the morning after she’d deposited it in the plastic rock, a significant event happened at Chapman Farm: the return of Jonathan Wace.
Everyone turned out to watch Papa J’s silver Mercedes come up the drive with a convoy of lesser cars behind it, and before the procession had even drawn to a halt, all members began to cheer and applaud, Robin included. When Wace stepped out of the car, the crowd became almost hysterical.
He looked tanned, rested and as handsome as ever. His eyes grew wet again as he looked around at the cheering throng, pressing his hand over his heart and making one of his self-deprecating little bows. When he walked to Mazu, who was holding baby Yixin in her arms, he embraced her and delightedly examined the baby, as though it was his own – which, Robin suddenly realised, she might well be. The screams of the crowd became deafening, and Robin made sure to clap so enthusiastically her hands hurt.
From the car behind Wace’s, five young people emerged, all of them strangers, and Robin thought, mainly because of their perfect teeth, they were American. Two preppy young men and three noticeably beautiful young women, all dressed in white UHC tracksuits, stood beaming at the British church members, and Robin guessed that they’d been brought over to Chapman Farm from the San Francisco centre. She watched as Jonathan introduced them one by one to Mazu, who received them graciously.