‘Oh my God, look!’
The cry came from the other side of the dormitory: a group of women had hurried to the window. Some were gasping, others clapping hands to their mouths.
‘What is it?’ said Marion Huxley, rushing to look. ‘Is it her?’
‘Yes – yes – look!’
Robin climbed up onto her bed, so she could see over their heads.
A small, luminous figure was standing motionless in the middle of the field Robin had so often crossed by night, wearing a limp white dress. She shone brightly for a few more seconds, then vanished.
The women at the window turned away, talking in frightened, awestruck whispers. Some looked scared, others enthralled. Marion Huxley headed back across the dormitory smiling, and on reaching her bed, threw Robin a look of malicious triumph.
PART SIX
K’an/The Abysmal
Forward and backward, abyss on abyss.
In danger like this, pause at first and wait,
Otherwise you will fall into a pit in the abyss.
Do not act in this way.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
78
In the life of man… acting on the spur of every caprice is wrong and if continued leads to humiliation.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Had Strike known what had happened to his detective partner over the previous twenty-four hours, he’d have been driving full speed towards Norfolk. However, as he remained in ignorance of developments at Chapman Farm, he rose on Wednesday morning buoyed by the idea that he’d be picking Robin up the following evening, having informed his subcontractors he wanted to do this job himself.
His bathroom scales showed an unwelcome regain of five pounds, doubtless due to the recent reappearance of burgers, chips and bacon rolls in his diet. Strike therefore breakfasted on porridge made with water, resolving to be strict again. While eating, he checked Pinterest on his phone, to see whether Torment Town had yet answered his question about Deirdre Doherty. To his dismay, he found the entire page deleted. The many grotesque drawings, including the eyeless Daiyu and the fair-haired woman floating in the five-sided pool, were gone, leaving Strike none the wiser as to who’d drawn them, but with the strong suspicion that his question had triggered the deletion, which suggested the blonde in the pool had, indeed, represented Deirdre.
At the precise moment he’d muttered ‘Fuck’, the mobile in his hand rang and he saw, with foreboding, Lucy’s number.
‘What’s happened?’ he said. Lucy wouldn’t call at half past six in the morning for no good reason.
‘Stick, I’m sorry it’s so early,’ said Lucy, whose voice was thick with tears, ‘but I’ve just had Ted’s neighbour on the phone. They noticed his front door was wide open, they went over there and he’s gone, he’s not there.’
An icy fog seemed to descend on Strike.
‘They’ve called the police,’ said Lucy, ‘and I don’t know what to do, whether to go down there—’
‘Stay put for now. If they haven’t found him in a couple of hours, we’ll both go down.’
‘Can you get away?’
‘Of course,’ said Strike.
‘I feel so guilty,’ said Lucy, breaking into sobs. ‘We knew he was bad…’
‘If – when they find him,’ said Strike, ‘we’ll talk about what we’re going to do next. We’ll make a plan.’
He, too, felt inordinately guilty at the thought of his confused uncle setting off at dawn for some destination unknown. Remembering Ted’s old sailing boat, the Jowanet, and the sea into which Joan’s ashes had disappeared, Strike hoped to God he was being fanciful in thinking that was where the old man had gone.
His first appointment of the day wasn’t calculated to take his mind off his personal troubles and he resented having to do it at all. After several days of procrastination, Bijou’s lover, Andrew Honbold QC, had sent Strike a curt email inviting him to his flat to discuss ‘the matter under advisement’. Strike had agreed to this meeting because he wanted to shut down forever the complications in which his ill-considered liaison with Bijou had involved him, but he was in no very conciliatory mood as he approached Honbold’s duplex shortly before nine o’clock, his mind still on his uncle in Cornwall.
After ringing the bell of the barrister’s presumably recently rented residence, which lay a mere two minutes’ walk from Lavington Court Chambers, Strike had time to estimate that the place was probably costing Honbold upwards of ten thousand pounds a month. Bijou had had many lucrative reasons to be careless with her birth control.
The door was opened by a tall, supercilious-looking man with bloodhound-like jowls, a broken-veined complexion, a substantial paunch and pure white hair which had receded to show an age-spotted pate. Honbold led Strike into an open-plan living area decorated in expensive but bland taste which didn’t suit its occupant, whose Hogarthian appearance cried out for a backdrop of velvet drapes and polished mahogany.
‘So,’ said Honbold loudly, when the two men had sat down opposite each other, with the glass coffee table between them, ‘you have information for me.’
‘I do, yeah,’ said Strike, perfectly happy to dispense with the niceties. Taking out his phone, he laid it on the table with the photograph of Farah Navabi in Denmark Street displayed. ‘Recognise her?’
Honbold retrieved his gold-rimmed reading glasses from his shirt pocket, then picked up the phone and held it at various distances from his eyes, as though the picture might transform into a different woman if he found the right number of inches from which to view it.
‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘although she certainly wasn’t dressed like that when I met her. Her name’s Aisha Khan and she works for Tate and Brannigan, the reputation management people. Jeremy Tate phoned me to ask if I’d see her.’
‘Did you call him back?’
‘Did I what?’ boomed Honbold, throwing his voice as though trying to reach the back of a courtroom.
‘Did you call Tate and Brannigan back, to check it was genuinely Jeremy Tate who’d rung you?’
‘No,’ said Honbold, ‘but I looked her up. I don’t usually see people ad hoc like that, without the client. She was on their website. She’d just joined them.’
‘Was there a picture of her on the website?’
‘No,’ said Honbold, now looking uneasy.
‘Her real name,’ said Strike, ‘is Farah Navabi. She’s an undercover detective working for Patterson Inc.’
There was a second’s silence.
‘Bitch!’ Honbold exploded. ‘Working for some tabloid, is she? Or is it my bloody wife?’
‘Could be either,’ said Strike, ‘but Patterson had someone planted at my agency for the last few months. The aim could’ve been getting me in the dock for bugging you. Was Navabi alone in your office at any point?’
‘Yes,’ groaned Honbold, running a hand through his thinning hair. ‘I showed her in, but I needed a pee. She had a few minutes in there, alone. Shit,’ he exploded again. ‘She was bloody convincing!’
‘Acting’s clearly her strong suit, because she’s not much cop at undercover surveillance.’
‘Mitchell fucking Patterson… how he got off, after all the fucking phone hacking he did – I’ll have him banged up for this if it’s the last bloody thing I—’