‘At the end of that week, he sent a letter to my mother full of church jargon saying the three of us had joined the UHC and wouldn’t be coming back. My mother got an emergency court order and threatened him with the police. We ended up sneaking out in the middle of the night, because my father had got himself into some ludicrous agreement with Wace and was scared of telling him it wouldn’t be happening.’
‘What kind of agreement?’
‘He wanted to sell the family home and give all the money to the church.’
‘I see,’ said Robin, who’d barely eaten any of her sandwich, she was making so many notes. ‘I’d imagine you and your sister were happy to leave?’
‘I was, but my sister was furious.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ said Rufus, with another sneer, ‘because she was smitten with Jonathan Wace. He was s’posed to be taking her up to the Birmingham centre the next day.’
‘She was being transferred?’ asked Robin. ‘After a week?’
‘No, no,’ said Rufus impatiently, as though Robin were a particularly slow pupil. ‘It was a pretext. Get her off on her own. She was quite pretty and well developed, for fifteen. Bit chubby, actually,’ he added, straightening up to display his abs. ‘Most of the girls in there were after Wace. One girl clawed Rosie’s face over him – but that got hushed up, because Wace liked to think everyone was living in harmony. Rosie’s still got a scar under her left eye.’
Far from sounding sorry, Rufus seemed rather pleased about this.
‘Would you happen to remember the date you left?’ asked Robin.
‘Twenty-eighth of July.’
‘How can you be so precise?’ asked Robin.
As she’d expected, Rufus didn’t seem offended, but further gratified at a chance to show his deductive powers.
‘Because it was the night before a child at the farm drowned. We read about it, in the papers.’
‘How exactly did you leave?’ asked Robin.
‘In my father’s car. He’d managed to get the keys back, pretending he wanted to check the battery hadn’t gone flat.’
‘Did you see anything unusual as you were leaving the farm?’
‘Like what?’
‘People awake when they shouldn’t have been? Or,’ said Robin, thinking of Jordan Reaney, ‘someone sleeping more deeply than perhaps they should have been?’
‘I can’t see how I’d have known that,’ said Rufus. ‘No, we saw nothing unusual.’
‘And did either you or your sister ever return to Chapman Farm?’
‘I certainly didn’t. As far as I’m aware, Rosie didn’t, either.’
‘You said your father returned to Chapman Farm in 2007?’
‘Correct,’ said Rufus, now speaking as though Robin was at last showing some intellectual promise in remembering this fact from a couple of minutes previously. ‘He’d moved university, but he was bickering with his colleagues again and feeling hard done by, so he resigned again and went back into the UHC.’
Robin, who was doing some rapid mental calculation, deduced that Jiang would have been in his mid-teens on Walter’s second appearance at Chapman Farm and therefore, surely, old enough to remember him.
‘Why did he leave so quickly that time?’
‘Rosie got meningitis.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Robin.
‘She survived,’ said Rufus, ‘but my mother had to track him down all over again, to let him know.’
‘This is all very helpful,’ said Robin.
‘I don’t see why,’ said Rufus. ‘Surely plenty of people have joined and left that place by now? I dare say our story’s quite common.’
Deciding not to argue the point, Robin said,
‘Would you have any idea where Rosie is now? Even a town? Is she going under a married name?’
‘She’s never married,’ said Rufus, ‘but she goes by Bhakta Dasa now.’
‘She – what, sorry?’
‘Converted to Hinduism. She’s probably in India,’ said Rufus, sneering again. ‘She’s like my father: silly crazes. Bikram yoga. Incense.’
‘Would your mother know where she is?’ said Robin.
‘Possibly,’ said Rufus, ‘but she’s currently in Canada, visiting her sister.’
‘Ah,’ said Robin. This explained why Mrs Fernsby never picked up her phone.
‘Well,’ said Rufus, looking at his watch, ‘that’s really all I can tell you, and as I’ve got a lot of work on—’
‘Just one last question, if you don’t mind,’ said Robin, her heart beginning to race again as she took her mobile out of her bag. ‘Can you remember anyone at the farm having a Polaroid camera?’
‘No. You weren’t supposed to take anything like that in there. Luckily, I left my Nintendo in my father’s car,’ Rufus said, with a satisfied smirk. ‘Rosie tried to take hers in with her and it was confiscated. Probably still there.’
‘This might seem an odd question,’ said Robin, ‘but was Rosie ever punished at the farm?’
‘Punished? Not that I’m aware of,’ said Rufus.
‘And she definitely seemed distressed at leaving? Not glad to go?’
‘Yes, I’ve told you that.’
‘And – this is an even weirder question, I know – did she ever mention wearing a pig mask?’
‘A pig mask?’ repeated Rufus Fernsby, frowning. ‘No.’
‘I want to show you a picture,’ said Robin, thinking, even as she said it, how untrue the statement was. ‘It’s – distressing, especially for a relative, but I wondered whether you could tell me if the dark girl in this picture is Rosie.’
She brought up one of the pig mask pictures, in which the dark-haired girl sat alone, naked, with her legs wide open, and passed it across the table.
Fernsby’s reaction was instantaneous.
‘How—? You – this is disgusting!’ he said, so loudly heads in the now crowded café turned. ‘That is definitely not my sister!’
‘Mr Fernsby, I—’
‘I’ll be contacting lawyers about you!’ he thundered, scrambling to his feet. ‘Lawyers!’
109
… there are annoying arguments like those of a married couple. Naturally this is not a favourable state of things…
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘And then he stormed out,’ concluded Robin forty minutes later. She was now sitting beside Strike in his parked BMW, from which he was observing the office of the man they’d nicknamed Hampstead.
‘Hmm,’ said Strike, who was holding one of the takeaway coffees Robin had bought en route. ‘So did he go apeshit because it is his sister, or because he was afraid we’re going to claim it is?’
‘From his reaction, it could have been either, but if it wasn’t Rosie—’
‘Why did somebody posing as a policewoman try and warn him off speaking to us?’
‘Well, exactly,’ said Robin.
She’d called Strike immediately after leaving the Institute of Civil Engineers, and he’d asked her to meet him in Dorset Street, a short Tube journey away. Strike had been sitting in his parked car all morning, watching the entrance of Hampstead’s office: an exercise he’d guessed would be fruitless, as Hampstead’s only suspicious activity had so far been conducted by night.
Strike sipped his coffee, then said,
‘I don’t like this.’
‘Sorry, I got what you—’
‘Not the coffee. I mean these mysterious phone calls to everyone we interview. I don’t like that Corsa following us, or the bloke watching the office last night, or that guy stalking you on the Tube.’
‘I told you, he wasn’t stalking me. I’m just jumpy.’
‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t being jumpy when an armed intruder tried to smash their way through our office door with a gun, although Kevin Pirbright might well have been when he realised he was about to get shot through the head.’
Strike now pulled his mobile out of his pocket and handed it to Robin. Looking down, she saw the same flattering picture of Jonathan Wace that was on the enormous poster on the side of a building near her flat. It was captioned:
Interested in the Universal Humanitarian Church? Join us at
7pm Friday 12th August
SUPERSERVICE 2016
PAPA J AT OLYMPIA
‘Doubt there’ll be anyone at Olympia tonight who’s more interested in the Universal Humanitarian Church than I am,’ said Strike.
‘You can’t go!’
Though instantly ashamed of her own panic, and worried that Strike would think her foolish, the very idea of entering a space where Papa J was in charge brought back memories Robin been trying to suppress every day since she’d left Chapman Farm, but which resurfaced almost nightly in her dreams.
Strike understood Robin’s disproportionate reaction better than she realised. For a long time after half his leg had been ripped off in that exploding car in Afghanistan, certain experiences, certain noises, even certain faces, had evoked a primal response over which it had taken him years to gain mastery. A particular brand of rough humour, shared with those who understood, had got him through some of his bleakest moments, which was why he said,
‘Typical materialist reaction. Personally, I think I’ll go pure spirit very fast.’
‘You can’t,’ said Robin, trying to sound reasonable, and not as though she was trying to dispel a vivid recollection of Jonathan Wace advancing on her in that peacock blue room, calling her Artemis. ‘You’ll be recognised!’
‘Bloody well hope so. That’s the whole point.’
‘What?’
‘They know we’re investigating them, we know they know, they know we know they know. It’s time to stop playing this dumb game and actually look Wace in the eye.’
‘Strike, if you tell him any of the things people told me at Chapman Farm, those people will be in deep, deep trouble!’
‘You mean Emily?’
‘And Lin, who’s still inside, really, and Shawna, and even Jiang, not that I like him much. You’re messing—’
‘With forces I don’t understand?’
‘This isn’t funny!’
‘I don’t think it’s remotely funny,’ said Strike, unsmiling. ‘As I’ve just said, I don’t like the way this is going, nor have I forgotten that at the current tally, we’ve got one definite murder, one suspected murder, two coerced suicides and two missing kids – but whatever else Wace is, he’s not stupid. He can fuck around with Wikipedia pages all he likes, but it’d be a massive strategic error to shoot me through the head at Olympia. If they realise I’m there, I’ll lay you odds Wace’ll want to talk to me. He’ll want to know what we know.’