Four adults were supervising the toddlers, to make sure they didn’t stray too close to the river at the foot of the garden: James and Will Edensor, James’ wife Kate and Lin Doherty. Inside the kitchen, watching the group on the lawn, sat Sir Colin Edensor, Strike, Robin, Pat and her husband Dennis.
‘I can never,’ said Sir Colin, for the third time, ‘thank you enough. Any of you,’ he added, including the Chaunceys in his glance around the table.
‘Nice to see them getting on,’ said Pat in her baritone, watching the re-christened Qing chasing bubbles.
‘What happened when James and Will met for the first time?’ asked Robin, who didn’t want to seem too nosy, but was very interested in the answer.
‘Well, James shouted a lot,’ said Sir Colin, smiling. ‘Told Will what he thought of him, in about fifteen different ways. Funnily enough, I think Will actually welcomed it.’
Robin wasn’t surprised. Will Edensor had wanted to atone for his sins, and with immunity from prosecution guaranteed, and the Drowned Prophet proven to be a mirage, where else was he to get the punishment he craved, but from his older brother?
‘He agreed with every word James said. He cried about his mother, said he knew nothing could ever make right what he’d done, said James was justified in hating him, that he understood if James never wanted to have anything to do with him again. That rather took the wind out of James’s sails,’ said Sir Colin.
‘And they’re going to live here with you?’ asked Strike.
‘Yes, at least until we can sort out proper accommodation for Lin and little Sally. With the press milling around and so on, I think it’s best they’re here.’
‘She’ll need support,’ croaked Pat. ‘She’s never been in charge of the kid all by herself. Never run her own house. Sixteen, it’s a lot of responsibility. If you found her something round my way, I could keep an eye on ’em. My daughter and granddaughters would muck in. She needs other mothers round her, teach her the ropes. Get together and moan about the kids. That’s what she needs.’
‘You’ve done so much already, Mrs Chauncey,’ said Sir Colin.
‘I was her age, near enough, when I had my first,’ said Pat unemotionally. ‘I know what it takes. Anyway,’ she took a drag on her e-cigarette, ‘I like ’em. You brought Will up very well. Good manners.’
‘Yeah, he’s a nice lad,’ said Dennis. ‘We all did stupid things when we were young, didn’t we?’
Sir Colin now took his eyes off the group on the lawn to turn to Robin.
‘I see they’ve found more bodies at Chapman Farm.’
‘I think they’re going to be finding them for weeks to come,’ said Robin.
‘And none of the deaths were registered?’
‘None except the prophets’.’
‘You don’t want coroners involved, if you’ve been refusing people medical help,’ said Strike. ‘Our police contact says they’ve got three skeletons of babies, presumably stillbirths, out of the field so far. There’ll probably be more. They’ve been on that land since the eighties.’
‘I doubt they’ll be able to identify all the remains,’ said Robin. ‘They were recruiting runaways and the homeless as well as wealthy people. It’s going to be a big job tracing all the babies who were sold, as well.’
‘It beggars belief that they got away with it for so long,’ said Sir Colin.
‘“Live and let live”, isn’t it?’ said Strike. ‘If nobody wants to speak out, and with the charity work there as a smokescreen, plus all the useful celebrity idiots…’
The previous fortnight had seen a multitude of front pages devoted to the UHC in both broadsheets and tabloids. Fergus Robertson was busy morning and night, sharing inside details nobody else knew. It was he who’d ambushed an outraged Giles Harmon outside his house in Bloomsbury, he who’d first broken the news of the alleged child trafficking and he who’d doorstepped the MP who was a church Principal, who’d been suspended by his party pending investigations into substantial undeclared donations he’d received from the UHC. The packaging multimillionaire, too foolish to have hidden behind his lawyers, had made several injudicious and unintentionally incriminating comments to the press jostling outside his offices. Mazu, Taio, Jiang and Joe Jackson were in custody. Dr Andy Zhou’s arrest had caused a flurry of statements from wealthy women who’d been cupped and hypnotised, massaged and detoxified, all of whom refused to believe the handsome doctor could have done anything wrong. A carefully phrased statement had also been issued by Noli Seymour’s agent, expressing shock and horror at the findings at Chapman Farm, of which Noli had naturally had no suspicion.
Jonathan Wace had been arrested while trying to drive over the border into Mexico. He was smiling in the gentle, self-deprecating way Robin knew so well in the photograph that showed him handcuffed and being led away. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
The temple at Chapman Farm had been thoroughly searched by police, and the means by which illusions had been conducted had been leaked to journalists, along with photographs of whips and the box. The various bodily fluids that lingered in the mattresses and bedding of the Retreat Rooms were being tested and the Chapman Farm woods were cordoned off. The axe and soil Midge had stolen had been handed to the police, and Wardle had called Strike with the news that the thigh bone of a young child had been dug up close to the rotting wooden posts. Evidently the pigs hadn’t managed to consume all of Daiyu Wace before Jordan Reaney had to get back to bed, and Abigail Wace reach the yard in time to watch the truck bearing the straw figure pass, in the dark.
Meanwhile ex-church members were coming forward in increasing numbers. Guilt and shame had kept them silent, sometimes for decades, but reassured by the possibility of immunity from prosecution for their own coerced actions, which ranged from administering beatings and helping bury bodies illegally to failing to secure medical assistance for a fourteen-year-old who’d died in childbirth, they were now ready to find catharsis in testifying against the Waces.
But there were still those who saw no evil in anything that had been done. Danny Brockles, the ex-addict who’d travelled the country with Jonathan Wace to extol the merits of the church, had been interviewed. All evidence of wrongdoing, he said, sobbing, had been planted by the agents of the Adversary. The public needed to understand that satanic forces were behind this attempt to destroy Papa J and the church (but the public seemed to understand no such thing, judging by the angry and indignant comments posted online beneath every article on the UHC). And Becca Pirbright, who remained at liberty, had twice appeared on television, composed and personable, calm and charming, disdainful of what she termed lurid, scaremongering and sensational reporting, denying all personal wrongdoing and describing Jonathan and Mazu Wace as two of the best human beings she’d ever known in her life.
Robin, watching Becca at home, found herself again thinking of the church as a virus. She was certain many, if not most, members would be cured by this eruption of revelations, by the evidence that they’d been thoroughly hoodwinked, that Papa J was no hero, but a conman, a rapist and an accessory to murder. Yet so many lives had been destroyed… Robin had heard that Louise Pirbright had tried to hang herself in the hospital to which she’d been taken upon release. Robin could quite see why Louise preferred death than to have to live with the knowledge that her foolish decision to follow Jonathan Wace into his cult twenty-four years previously had led to the death of two of her sons, and total estrangement from both of her daughters. Emily, who’d been found unconscious in the box when police entered the farm, had been sent to the same hospital as Louise, but when offered a meeting with her mother by well-intentioned medics, had informed them she never wanted to see Louise again.