Becca had left the temple lights on their lowest setting, doubtless to make it easier for her to navigate when she returned. The place was deserted. The gigantic cinema screen facing Robin was black, which gave it a faintly forbidding look. The Disneyesque hand-holding figures that ran around the walls had blended into the shadows, but the ceiling figures were dimly visible: the Wounded Prophet in orange, with the blood on his forehead; the Healer Prophet in his blue robes, with his beard and serpent-wrapped staff; the Golden Prophet in yellow, scattering jewels as she flew; the Stolen Prophet in scarlet, with his noose around his neck; and lastly the Drowned Prophet, all in bridal white, with the stylised waves rising behind her.
Robin walked up the scarlet-carpeted aisle to stand beneath the image of Daiyu, with its malevolent black eyes. It was while she was still looking up at the figure that Robin heard something she hadn’t expected, and which made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up: the screaming of a baby, somewhere inside the temple.
She turned swiftly, trying to locate the source of the sound, then headed towards the stage. To the right of it was a door so well camouflaged in the gold temple wall that Robin hadn’t noticed it during the services she’d attended, distracted, no doubt, by the images of Gods, and of the church’s charitable work, shown onscreen. Robin felt for the flush pull handle and tugged.
The door opened. There was a staircase beyond, leading upstairs to what Robin knew were sleeping quarters. The baby’s cries grew louder. Robin began to climb.
129
The fate of fire depends on wood; as long as there is wood below, the fire burns above.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘So,’ said Strike, pausing in his note-taking to read back what Abigail had just told him, ‘in the two or three weeks you spent at the Birmingham centre, you definitely don’t remember any eleven-year-olds being transferred from Chapman Farm?’
‘No,’ said Abigail.
‘That tallies with my information,’ said Strike, ‘because my operative in Birmingham made enquiries about Becca Pirbright. They know who she is, because she’s a big shot in the church now, but they said she’d never lived there as a child.’
‘What’s it matter wevver she ever lived in Birmingham?’ said Abigail, perplexed.
‘Because that’s where her brother and sister believed she’d gone, after Daiyu disappeared. Becca returned to the farm three years later, and she was changed.’
‘Well, she would be, after free years,’ said Abigail, still looking puzzled.
‘But you can’t remember the Pirbright kids?’
‘No, they must’ve been a lot younger than me.’
‘Becca was five years younger.’
‘Then we’d’ve missed each uvver in the dorms.’
‘Dark,’ Strike prompted her. ‘Reasonably attractive. Shiny hair.’
Abigail shrugged and shook her head.
‘Their mother was called Louise.’
‘Oh,’ said Abigail slowly. ‘Yeah… I remember Louise. Really good-looking woman. Mazu ’ad it in for ’er the moment she arrived at the farm.’
‘Did she?’
‘Oh yeah. It was all bruvverly love an’ not bein’ possessive an’ shit, but Mazu fuckin’ ’ated all the women my farver was shagging.’
‘Was he calling them spirit wives in those days?’
‘Not to me,’ said Abigail restlessly. ‘Listen, can you get to the point? Only I’ve gotta meet Darryl an’ ’e’s pissed off at me at the moment ’cause ’e finks I’m not givin’ ’im enough attention.’
‘You don’t seem the type to be bothered by complaints like that.’
‘’E’s very good in the sack, if you must know,’ said Abigail coolly. ‘Is that it, then, on Becca and Birmingham?’
‘Not entirely. I’d have asked Cherie to clarify the next couple of points, but unfortunately I can’t, because she hanged herself hours after I interviewed her.’
‘She… wha’?’
Abigail had stopped chewing.
‘Hanged herself,’ repeated Strike. ‘It’s been a bit of a feature of this case, to tell you the truth. After I went to interview Jordan Reaney, he tried to kill himself, too. I’d shown both of them –’
He slid his hand into his coat pocket, extracted his mobile and brought up the pictures of the Polaroids.
‘– these. You can swipe right to see all of them. There are six.’
Abigail took the phone and looked through the pictures, her expression blank.
‘Are those the kinds of pig masks you were made to wear as punishments, by Mazu?’ asked Strike.
‘Yeah,’ said Abigail quietly. ‘That’s them.’
‘Were you ever forced to do anything like this?’
‘Christ, no.’
She pushed the phone back across the table, but Strike said,
‘Would you be able to identify the people in the pictures?’
Abigail drew the phone back towards her and examined them once again, though with obvious reluctance.
‘The tall one looks like Joe,’ she said, after staring for a while at the picture in which Paul Draper was being sodomised.
‘Did he have a tattoo?’
‘Dunno. I was never in the Retreat Rooms wiv ’im.’
She glanced up at Strike.
‘S’pose your partner found out about the Retreat Rooms, did she?’
‘Yes,’ said Strike. ‘D’you think this happened in one of them?’
‘No,’ said Abigail, dropping her gaze to the phone again. ‘The place looks too big. Looks more like a barn. There was never no one takin’ photographs or nuffing in the Retreat Rooms, no group stuff, nuffing like this. It was s’posed to be “spiritual”, what you did in there,’ she said, her mouth twisting. ‘Jus’ one man an’ one woman. An’ that,’ she said, pointing at the picture of the small man being sodomised, ‘was right out. My farver an’ Mazu didn’ like gays. They both ’ad a fing about it.’
‘Can you identify any of the others? The smaller man?’
‘Looks like Dopey Draper, poor sod,’ said Abigail quietly. ‘The girls, I dunno… s’pose that could be Cherie. She was blonde. An’ the dark one, yeah, that could be Rosie whatever-’er-name-was. You didn’t get many chubby girls at Chapman Farm.’
‘Can you remember anyone having a Polaroid camera?’ asked Strike, as Abigail pushed the phone back across the table to him.
‘No, it weren’t allowed. No phones or cameras, nuffin’ like that.’
‘The original Polaroids were found hidden in an old biscuit tin. Long shot, I know, but can you remember anybody at the farm having chocolate biscuits?’
‘’Ow d’you expec’ me to remember chocolate biscuits, all this time after?’
‘It’d be quite unusual to see biscuits at the farm, wouldn’t it? With sugar being banned?’
‘Yeah, but… well, I s’pose someone in the farm’ouse could’ve ’ad ’em, ’idden…’
‘Going back to where your father was, when Daiyu disappeared: there was a man seen on the beach by witnesses, shortly before Cherie emerged from the sea: a jogger. He never came forward when the story of the drowning hit the press. It was dark, so the only description I’ve managed to get is that he was large. Did your father like jogging?’