108
… one must move warily, like an old fox walking over ice… deliberation and caution are the prerequisites of success.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
When she arrived at 1 Great George Street the following day at half past twelve, Robin discovered that she’d been quite wrong in vaguely imagining the Institute of Civil Engineers would be based in a brutalist building where function had been prioritised over elegance. Rufus Fernsby’s place of work was a gigantic Edwardian building of considerable grandeur.
When she gave the name of the man she’d come to see, Robin was sent up a crimson-carpeted staircase which, coupled with the white walls, reminded her faintly of the farmhouse at Chapman Farm. She passed oil paintings of eminent engineers, and a stained-glass window with a coat of arms supported by a crane and a beaver bearing the motto Scientia et Ingenio, and finally reached a long open-plan room with rows of desks, where two men stood having what looked like a heated discussion while the other workers kept their heads down.
With one of those strange intuitions that admit of no explanation, Robin guessed immediately that the taller, angrier and odder looking of the two men was Rufus Fernsby. Perhaps he looked like the kind of man who’d slam down a phone on someone who mentioned his unsatisfactory father. His argument with the shorter man seemed to centre on whether somebody called Bannerman should, or shouldn’t, have forwarded an email.
‘Nobody’s claiming Grierson shouldn’t have been copied in,’ he was saying heatedly, ‘that’s not the point. What I’m raising here is a pattern of persistent—’
The shorter man, becoming aware of Robin, and possibly looking for a route of escape, said,
‘Can I help you?’
‘—failure to follow an established procedure, which increases the risk of miscommunications, because I might not have realised—’
‘I’m here to meet Rufus Fernsby.’
As she’d feared, the taller man broke off mid-sentence to say angrily,
‘I’m Fernsby.’
‘I’m Robin Ellacott. We spoke—’
‘What are you doing here? You should have waited in the atrium.’
‘The man on the desk sent me up.’
‘Right, well, that’s unhelpful,’ said Rufus.
Dark, lean and wearing a Lycra T-shirt with his work trousers, he had the weather-beaten, sinewy look common to dedicated runners and cyclists, and was sporting what Robin thought was the oddest of all facial hair variations: a chin curtain beard with no moustache.
‘Good luck,’ murmured the second man to Robin as he walked away.
‘I was going to meet you in the café,’ said Rufus irritably, as though Robin should have known this, and perhaps already ordered his food. He checked his watch. Robin suspected he’d have liked to find she’d arrived too early, but as she was exactly on time he said,
‘Come on then – no, wait!’ he added explosively, and Robin came to a halt, wondering what she’d done wrong now, but Rufus had merely realised he was still clutching papers in his hand. Having stalked off to put them back on his desk, he rejoined her, walking out of the room so fast she had to almost jog to keep up.
‘This is a very beautiful building,’ she said, hoping to ingratiate herself. Rufus appeared to consider the comment beneath his notice.
The café on the ground floor was infinitely more upmarket than any that had graced the offices where Robin had once worked as a temporary secretary; there were booths of black leather banquettes, sleek light fittings and expressionist prints on the walls. As they headed for the queue at the counter, and in what she feared would be another doomed attempt to conciliate herself, Robin said,
‘I’m starting to think I should have done engineering, if these are the perks.’
‘What d’you mean?’ said Rufus suspiciously.
‘It’s a nice café,’ said Robin.
‘Oh.’
Rufus looked around as though he’d never before considered whether it was pleasant or not.
‘Yes. I suppose so,’ he said grudgingly. She had the impression he’d rather have found fault with the place.
From the moment Rufus had agreed to meet her, Robin had known that her main objective, that of finding out whether Rosalind Fernsby was the naked girl in the pig mask, would have to be approached tactfully. She didn’t like to imagine how any of her own brothers would react, if shown such a photograph featuring Robin. Having now met Rufus, she was afraid there might be a truly volcanic explosion when she showed him the pictures on her phone. She therefore decided that her secondary objective – that of finding out whether Walter was the person Jiang had recognised as someone who’d come back after many years – would form her first line of questioning.
Having purchased sandwiches, they sat down at a corner table.
‘Well, thanks very much for meeting me, Rufus,’ Robin began.
‘I only called you back because I want to know what exactly’s going on,’ said Rufus severely. ‘I had a call from a policewoman – well, she said she was a policewoman – a week ago. She was asking for contact details for my sister.’
‘Did you give them to her?’
‘I haven’t got any. We don’t talk, haven’t for years. Nothing in common.’
He said it with a kind of pugnacious pride.
‘Then she told me two individuals called Robin Ellacott and Cormorant Strike might make contact with me, because they were trying to dig up dirt on my family. Naturally, I asked for further details, but she said she couldn’t give them, as it was an open investigation. She gave me a number to call if you contacted me. So, when you called – well, you know what happened,’ said Rufus unapologetically. ‘I phoned the number I’d been given and asked for PC Curtis. The man who answered laughed. He passed me to this woman. I was suspicious. I asked for her badge number and jurisdiction. There was a silence. Then she hung up.’
‘Pretty sharp of you to check,’ commented Robin.
‘Well, of course I checked,’ said Rufus, with a whiff of gratified vanity. ‘There’s more at stake for engineers than getting a bad review in some joke social sciences journal, if we don’t check.’
‘D’you mind if I take notes?’ she asked, reaching into her bag.
‘Why should I mind?’ he said irritably.
Robin, who knew from online records that Fernsby was married, offered up a silent vote of sympathy for his wife as she reached for her pen.
‘Did PC Curtis – so-called – give you a landline number, or mobile?’
‘Mobile.’
‘Have you still got it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Could I have it?’
‘I’ll need to think about that,’ he said, confirming Robin’s impression that this was a man who believed information was very definitely power. ‘I decided to call you back because you, at least, were telling the truth about who you are. I checked you out online,’ he added, ‘though you don’t look much like your pictures.’
His tone left Robin in no doubt that he thought she looked worse in person. Feeling sorrier for his wife by the minute, she said,
‘I’ve lost some weight recently. Well, my partner and I—’
‘This is Cormorant Strike?’
‘Cormoran Strike,’ said Robin, who didn’t see why Fernsby should corner the market in pedantry.
‘Not the bird?’
‘Not the bird,’ said Robin patiently. ‘We’re investigating the Universal Humanitarian Church.’
‘Why?’
‘We’ve been hired to do so.’
‘By a newspaper?’
‘No,’ said Robin.
‘I’m not sure I want to talk to you, unless I know who’s paying you.’
‘Our client has a relative inside the church,’ said Robin, deciding it was simpler, given Rufus’s clearly nit-picking nature, not to say that the relative had in fact left.
‘And how’s my father relevant to the situation?’
‘Are you’re aware he’s currently—?’
‘At Chapman Farm? Yes. He wrote me a stupid letter saying he’d gone back.’
‘What d’you mean by “gone back”?’ asked Robin, her pulse rate accelerating.
‘I mean he’s been there before, obviously.’
‘Really? When?’
‘In 1995, for ten days,’ said Rufus, with pernickety though useful precision, ‘and 2007, for… possibly a week.’
‘Why such short stays? My client’s interested in what makes people join, and what makes them leave, you see,’ she added mendaciously.
‘He left the first time because my mother took legal action against him. Second time, my sister Rosie was ill.’
Disguising her keen interest in these answers, Robin asked,
‘What made him want to join in ’95, do you know?’
‘That man who started it, Wace, gave a talk at the University of Sussex, where my father was working. He went along in a spirit of supposed academic enquiry,’ said Rufus, with a slight sneer, ‘and fell for it. He resigned his post, and decided he was going to devote himself to the spiritual life.’
‘So he just took off?’
‘What d’you mean by “took off”?’
‘I mean, this was unexpected?’
‘Well,’ said Rufus, frowning slightly, ‘that’s hard to answer. My parents were in the middle of their divorce. I suppose you could argue my father was having what’s known as a mid-life crisis. He’d been passed over for promotion at work and was feeling unappreciated. He’s actually a very difficult personality. He’s never got on with colleagues, anywhere he worked. Argumentative. Obsessed with rank and titles. It’s rather pathetic.’
‘Really,’ said Robin. ‘And your mother took legal action against him, to make him leave?’
‘Not to make him leave,’ said Rufus. ‘He’d taken me and Rosie, to the farm.’
‘How old were you?’ asked Robin, her pulse speeding up further.
‘Fifteen. We’re twins. It was the school summer holidays. My father lied to us, said it was going to be a week’s holiday in the country. We didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so we agreed to go.