The house where the fastidious Joan had once presided was dusty, although Strike was pleased to see the fridge was well stocked with food. Strike understood that Ted’s neighbours had been rallying around, making sure he had enough to eat and checking in with him regularly. This increased Strike’s guilt about not doing more to support Ted, whose conversation was rambling and repetitive.
The visit to the GP the following morning did nothing to allay Strike’s concerns.
‘He asked Ted what date it is and he didn’t know,’ Strike told Lucy by phone after lunch. Strike had left Ted with a mug of tea in the living room, then slipped out into the back garden on the pretext of vaping and was now pacing the small patch of lawn.
‘Well, that’s not too serious, is it?’ said Lucy.
‘Then he told Ted an address and made him say it back, which Ted did fine, and he told Ted he was going to ask him to repeat the address a few minutes later, but Ted couldn’t.’
‘Oh no,’ said Lucy.
‘He asked if Ted could remember a recent news story and Ted said “Brexit”, no problem. Then he told him to fill in the numbers on a picture of a clock. Ted did that OK, but then he had to mark in the hands to make it say ten to eleven, and Ted was lost. Couldn’t do it.’
‘Oh shit,’ Lucy whispered, disconsolate. ‘So what’s the diagnosis?’
‘Dementia,’ said Strike.
‘Was Ted upset?’
‘Hard to say. I’ve got the impression he knows something’s up. He told me yesterday he’s forgetting things a lot and it’s worrying him.’
‘Stick, what are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Strike. ‘I wouldn’t give good odds on him remembering to turn the cooker off at night. He left the hot tap running an hour ago, just walked away and forgot it. It might be time for sheltered housing.’
‘He won’t want that.’
‘I know,’ said Strike, who now paused in his pacing to contemplate the strip of sea just visible from Ted’s back garden. Joan’s ashes had been strewn there from Ted’s old sailing boat and some irrational part of him sought guidance from the distant, glittering ocean. ‘But I’m worried about him living alone if he goes downhill much further. The stairs are steep and he’s not too steady on his feet.’
The call ended with no definite plan for Ted’s future in place. Strike returned to the house to find his uncle fast asleep in an armchair, so removed himself quietly to the kitchen to look at emails on the laptop he’d brought down from London.
A message from Midge sat at the top of his inbox. She’d attached a scanned copy of the letter Robin had put in the plastic rock the previous evening.
The first paragraph dealt with the disgruntled Emily Pirbright’s return to the farm and Robin’s so far unrealised hope of getting information out of her. The second paragraph described the basement session in which the new recruits had to write to their families, and concluded,
… so can one of you please write a letter from Theresa, acknowledging the letter saying I’ve joined the church? Make her sound worried, they’ll expect that.
Other news: someone in the farmhouse might be ill, possibly called Jacob. Saw Dr Zhou hurrying in there looking worried. No further details as yet, will try and find out more.
This afternoon we had our first Revelation. We all sat in a circle in the temple. The last time we did that, it was to talk about how much we’d suffered in the outside world. This was very different. The people who were called on had to take a chair in the middle and confess things they were ashamed of. When they did, they got abused and shouted at. They all ended up in tears. I didn’t get called, so I’ll probably get it next time. Mazu led the Revelation session and was definitely enjoying herself.
Nothing new on Will Edensor. I see him from a distance sometimes but no conversation. Lin still around. There was talk of her going to Birmingham, can’t remember if I said.
Think that’s everything. I’m so tired. Hope all well with you x
Strike read the letter through twice, taking particular note of the ‘I’m so tired’ at the end. He had to admire Robin’s resourcefulness in thinking up a way of obfuscating her relatives’ whereabouts at short notice, but like her, felt he should have foreseen the necessity for a safe address for mail. Strike also wondered whether there’d been a letter for Murphy this week, but could think of no way of asking without arousing the suspicions of Pat and the other subcontractors. Instead, he texted Midge to ask her to write the letter from Theresa, as he feared his own handwriting looked too obviously masculine.
As Ted’s snores were still emanating from the sitting room, Strike opened his next email, which was from Dev Shah.
Having spent hours the previous day searching online records for Cherie Gittins under her birth name of Carine Makepeace, Strike had at last succeeded in finding her birth certificate and death certificates for both her father, who’d died when she was five, and the cousin in Dulwich with whom she’d stayed after fleeing Chapman Farm. However, Cherie’s mother, Maureen Agnes Makepeace, née Gittins, was still alive and living in Penge, so Strike had asked Shah to pay her a visit.
Visited Ivychurch Close this morning, Shah had written. Maureen Makepeace and her flat are both falling apart. She looks & talks like a heavy drinker, v aggressive. Neighbour called out to me as I was approaching the front door. He hoped I was from the council, because there’ve been arguments over bins, noise, etc. Maureen says she’s had no contact with her daughter since the latter ran away, aged 15.
Inured as he was to leads petering out in this way, Strike was nevertheless disappointed.
He made himself a mug of tea, resisted a chocolate biscuit, and sat back down in front of his laptop while Ted’s snores continued to rumble through the open door.
The difficulty he was having tracing Carine/Cherie was making Strike commensurately more interested in her. He now began Googling combinations and variations of the two names he knew for certain the girl had used. Only when he returned to the British Library’s newspaper archive did he finally get a hit on the name ‘Cherry Makepeace’ in a copy of the Manchester Evening News dated 1999.
‘Gotcha,’ he muttered, as two mugshots appeared onscreen, one showing a young man with long hair and extremely bad teeth, the other, a tousle-haired blonde who, beneath the heavy eyeliner, was clearly recognisable as Cherie Gittins of Chapman Farm.
The news story described a robbery and stabbing committed by Isaac Mills, which was the name of the young man with the bad teeth. He’d stolen morphine, temazepam, diazepam and cash from a pharmacy before knifing a customer who’d tried to intervene. The victim had survived, but Mills had still been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
The report concluded:
Cherry Makepeace, 21, also known as Cherry Curtis, drove Mills to the pharmacy on the day of the robbery and waited for him outside. Makepeace claimed she was unaware of Mills’ intention to rob the pharmacy and didn’t know he possessed a knife. She was convicted of aiding and abetting a criminal and received a six-month sentence, suspended for three years.
Strike jotted down the names Carine/Cherie/Cherry along with the surnames Gittins/Makepeace/Curtis. Where the last of these had come from, he had no idea; perhaps she’d simply pulled it out of thin air. The regular name changes suggested someone keen not to be found, but Strike tended to believe that Colonel Graves’ assessment of Cherie as ‘feather-brained’ and ‘easily influenced’ had been correct, given her dumbstruck look in the Manchester Evening News photo.
He now navigated to the Pinterest page of Torment Town, with its eerie drawings of Daiyu Wace and grotesque parodies of the UHC logo. Torment Town hadn’t responded to the message Strike had sent them, over which he’d taken more trouble than the few words might have suggested.
Amazing pictures. Do you draw from imagination?
A particularly loud snore from the sitting room made Strike turn off his laptop, feeling guilty. He’d soon need to make his way back to Falmouth for the overnight train. It was time to wake Ted so they could have a last chat before leaving him, once more, to his loneliness.
41
One is courageous and wishes to accomplish one’s task, no matter what happens.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
The account of Revelation that Robin had sent Strike had been brief and to the point, partly because she’d had neither time nor energy to go into details while exhausted, crouching among nettles in the dark and pausing regularly to listen out for footsteps, but it had shaken her more than she’d liked to admit in her letter. Mazu had encouraged those in the circle to use the filthiest and most abusive words they could find when berating those confessing, and Robin thought she was unlikely ever to forget the sight of Kyle doubled over in his chair, sobbing, while others screamed ‘pervert’ and ‘faggot’ in response to his admission that he continued to feel shame about being gay.
When Kyle’s time in the hot seat had concluded, Mazu had told him calmly he’d be more resilient for having undergone Revelation, that he’d faced ‘externalisation of his inner shame’, and congratulated the group for doing what she knew had been difficult for them, too. Yet the facial expressions of those shouting abuse at Kyle were still seared on Robin’s memory: they’d been given permission to be as vile as they liked, irrespective of their true feelings about Kyle or homosexuality, and she was disturbed by the gusto with which they’d participated, even knowing that their own turn in the middle of the circle would come.
Robin was rapidly learning that at Chapman Farm, practices that in the outside world would be considered abusive or coercive were excused, justified and disguised by a huge amount of jargon. The use of slurs and offensive language during Revelation was justified as part of PRT, or Primal Response Therapy. Whenever a question was posed about contradictions or inconsistencies in church doctrine, the answer was almost always that they would be explained by an HLT (Higher-Level Truth), which would be revealed when they had progressed further along the path to pure spirit. A person putting their own needs above those of the group was deemed to be in the grip of EM (egomotivity), one who continued to prize worldly goods or status was a BP, or bubble person, and leaving the church was ‘going DV’, meaning, becoming a Deviate. Terms such as false self, flesh object and materialist possession were now employed casually among the new members, who’d begun to reframe all past and present experience in the church’s language. There was also much talk of the Adversary, who was not only Satan, but also all temporal power structures, which were populated by the Adversary’s agents.