‘S’pose you were right: prison’s boring,’ Robin told Strike, when she called him from outside Hampstead’s office to tell him the good news.
‘Be interesting to know whether he’s got any idea what it’s about,’ said Strike, who was walking away from Chinatown as he spoke.
‘Anyone watching the office today?’
‘No,’ said Strike, ‘but I’ve just followed a friend of yours to the Rupert Court Temple. Saw her from across the street when I was buying vape juice: Becca.’
‘What, out with a collecting tin?’ said Robin. ‘I thought she was too important for that.’
‘No tin. She was just walking along staring at the ground. She unlocked the temple doors and went inside and didn’t come out while I was watching, which was for about half an hour. I had to leave, I’ve got Colin Edensor arriving in twenty minutes; he wants an update on Will. Anyway, very good news on Mills. This Saturday, did you say?’
‘Yes. I’ve never visited a prison before.’
‘I wouldn’t worry. The dress code’s fairly relaxed,’ said Strike, and Robin laughed.
Having seen his 1999 mugshot, Robin hadn’t supposed Isaac Mills would look more attractive or healthy seventeen years later, but she certainly wasn’t expecting the man who shuffled towards her in the Wandsworth visitors’ centre a few days later.
He was, without exception, the most pathetic example of humanity Robin had ever laid eyes on. Though she knew him to be forty-three, he might have been seventy. The small amount of hair he still possessed was dull and grey, and while his skin was bronzed, his hollow face seemed to have collapsed inwards. Most of his teeth were missing, and the few that remained were blackened stumps, while his discoloured fingernails scooped upwards, as if peeling away from his hands. Robin had the macabre thought that she was looking at a man whose proper setting was a coffin, an impression reinforced by the gust of rotten breath that reached her as he sat down.
In the first two minutes of their meeting, Mills told Robin that he never received visits and that he was waiting for a liver transplant. After this, the conversation stalled. When Robin mentioned Carrie – or Cherry, as she’d been when Mills knew her – he informed her that Cherry had been a ‘stupid tart’, then folded his arms and contemplated her with a sneer on his face, his demeanour posing the silent question, What’s in this for me?
Appeals to conscience – ‘Daiyu was only seven when she disappeared. You’ve got children, haven’t you?’ – or to a sense of justice – ‘Kevin’s killer’s still walking around, free, and you could help us catch them’ – elicited nothing at all from the prisoner, though his sunken eyes, with their yellow whites and pinprick pupils, remained fixed on the healthy young woman who sat breathing in his odour of decay.
Uneasily conscious of the time slipping past, Robin tried an appeal to self-interest.
‘If you were to help our investigation, I’m sure it would be taken into account when you come up for parole.’
Mills’ only reaction was a low, unpleasant chuckle. He was serving twelve years for manslaughter; they both knew he was unlikely to live long enough to meet a parole board.
‘We’ve got a journalist who’s very interested in this story,’ she said, resorting in desperation to the tactic Strike had used on the police. ‘Finding out what really happened could help us bring down the church, which—’
‘It’s a cult,’ said Isaac Mills unexpectedly, a further gust of halitosis engulfing Robin. ‘Not a fucking church.’
‘I agree. That’s what’s got the journalist interested. Cherry talked to you about the UHC, then, did she?’
Mills’ only response was a loud sniff.
‘Did Cherry ever mention Daiyu, at all?’
Mills glanced at the large clock over the double doors through which he’d emerged.
Robin was forced to the conclusion that she had indeed been invited to Wandsworth to while away an hour of Mills’ tedious, miserable life. He showed no inclination to get up and leave, presumably because he was enjoying the pathetic pleasure of denying her what she’d come for.
For nearly a minute, Robin contemplated him in silence, thinking. She doubted any hospital would ever be brave enough to put Isaac Mills to the top of a waiting list for a liver, because the newspaper-reading public would doubtless feel such a gift should go to a patient who wasn’t an addict or a serial burglar and hadn’t been convicted of several stabbings, one of them fatal. At last, she said,
‘You understand that if you were to help this investigation, it would be publicised. You’d have helped put an end to something huge, and criminal. The fact that you’re ill would be publicised, too. Some of the people trapped inside the cult have wealthy families, people of influence. Let’s be honest – you haven’t got a prayer of a new liver unless something changes.’
He glanced at her, his sneer more pronounced.
‘You’re not gonna get that cult,’ he said, ‘whatever I tell you.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Robin. ‘Just because Cherry didn’t drown Daiyu, doesn’t mean she didn’t do something nearly as bad. None of it could have happened without her collusion.’
By the tiniest tremor at the corner of Mills’ mouth, she could tell he was listening more closely.
‘What you don’t appreciate,’ said Robin, forcing herself to lean forwards, even though it meant getting closer to the source of Mills’ disgusting breath, ‘is that the cult centres around Daiyu’s death. They’ve turned her into a prophet who vanished in the sea, only to come back to life again. They’re pretending she materialises in their temple. Proof that she never really drowned means their religion’s founded on a lie. And if you’re the one who provides that proof, a lot of people, some of them very rich, are going to be deeply invested in you being well enough to testify. You might be their last hope of seeing their family members again.’
She had his full attention now. Mills sat in silence for a few more seconds before saying,
‘She never done it.’
‘Done what?’
‘Killed Dayoo, or whatever her name was.’
‘So what really happened?’ said Robin, taking the top off her pen.
This time, Isaac Mills answered.
125
The way opens; the hindrance has been cleared away.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Forty minutes later, Robin emerged from Wandsworth Prison in a state of elation. Pulling her mobile out of her bag, she noticed with frustration that it was almost out of power: either it hadn’t charged properly at Murphy’s the previous evening or, which she thought more likely given its age, she needed a new phone. Waiting until she was out of the vicinity of the stream of families now exiting the building, she called Strike.
‘You were right,’ said Robin. ‘Carrie confessed nearly all of it to Mills, mostly whenever she got drunk. He says she’d always deny it when she sobered up, but basically, he’s confirmed everything, except—’
‘Who planned it.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Because she was still scared enough of them to kill herself twenty-one years later.’
‘But Mills is very clear it was all a put-up job. Carrie faked the drowning, Daiyu was never on the beach. I know it’s not enough, hearsay from a dead woman—’