They had a medieval kind of kit in the bathroom, with a leather strap thing for Wan to bite on and rusty forceps. Wan wasn’t supposed to make any noise. It was my night for coming to the plastic rock but I couldn’t leave the dormitory because all the women were awake.
Wan was in labour for thirty-six hours. It was absolutely awful and the closest I’ve come to wanting to reveal who I really am and telling them I’m going to the police. I don’t know what’s normal for a birth but she seemed to lose a huge amount of blood. I was present when the baby was actually born because one of the birthing team couldn’t cope any more and I volunteered to take her place. The baby was breech and I was convinced she was going to be born dead. She looked blue at first, but Sita revived her. After all that, Wan wouldn’t look at the baby. All she said was, ‘Give it to Mazu.’ I haven’t seen the baby since. Wan’s still in bed in the women’s dormitory. Sita says she’s going to be OK and I hope to God that’s true but she looks terrible.
2. Sita
The women who stayed up two nights with Wan were allowed to catch up on sleep today. I managed to get talking to Sita in the dormitory once we’d all woken up and I sat beside her at din
‘Shit,’ Robin muttered, shaking the ballpoint. As she’d feared, it seemed to be running out of ink.
Then Robin froze. In the absence of the scratching of pen on paper, she’d heard something else: footsteps and a female voice quietly and relentlessly chanting.
‘Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu… Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhav—’
The chanting stopped. Robin extinguished the pencil torch she was holding in her mouth and flung herself flat among the nettles again, but too late: she knew the chanter had seen the light.
‘Who’s there? Who’s there? I c-c-can see you!’
Robin slowly sat up, shoving the torch, pen and paper behind her as she did so.
‘Lin,’ said Robin. ‘Hi.’
The girl was alone this time. A car swished past, and as the beam of its headlights slid over Lin Robin saw that her pale face was streaked with tears and her hands full of plants she’d tugged up by the roots. For what felt like a long time, though was really a few seconds, the two stared at each other.
‘Wh-wh-why are you here?’
‘I needed some fresh air,’ said Robin, cringing inwardly at the inadequacy of the lie, ‘and then – then I felt a bit dizzy, so I sat down. It’s been an intense few days, hasn’t it? With Wan and – and everything.’
By the faint moonlight, Robin saw the young girl glance up at the trees, in the direction of the closest security camera.
‘What m-m-made you come here, though?’
‘I got a bit lost,’ Robin lied, ‘but then I saw the light from the road and came here so I could get my bearings. What are you up to?’
‘D-d-don’t t-t-tell anyone you saw me,’ said Lin. Her large eyes shone weirdly in the shadowed face. ‘If you t-t-tell anyone, I’ll say you were out of b-b-b-b-b—’
‘I won’t tell—’
‘—bed and that I saw you and f-f-f-ollowed—’
‘—I promise,’ said Robin urgently. ‘I won’t tell.’
Lin turned and hurried away into the trees, still clutching her uprooted plants. Robin listened until Lin’s footsteps died away completely, leaving a silence broken only by the usual nocturnal rustlings of the woods.
Waves of panic broke over Robin as she sat very still, contemplating the possible repercussions of this unexpected meeting. She turned her head to look at the wall behind her.
Shah was in the vicinity. Perhaps it would be better to climb onto the road now and wait for him to come back and check the rock? If Lin talked, if Lin told the church leaders she’d found Robin at the blind spot of the perimeter with a torch she definitely shouldn’t possess…
For several minutes, Robin sat very still, thinking, barely conscious of the cold earth beneath her and the breeze lifting the hair from her nettle-stung neck. Then, reaching a decision, she groped around to find her unfinished letter, pen and torch, re-read what she’d communicated so far, then continued writing.
She looks as though she’s over 70 and has been here since the earliest days of the church. She came here at Wace’s invitation to teach yoga and told me she soon realised Papa J was ‘a very great swami’, so she stayed.
I got her talking about Becca quite easily, because Sita doesn’t like her (hardly anyone does). When I mentioned Becca knowing the Drowned Prophet, she told me Becca was really jealous of Daiyu when they were kids. She said all the little girls loved Cherie, and Becca was really envious of Daiyu getting special attention from her.
Robin stopped writing again, wondering whether to tell Strike about her encounter with Lin. She could imagine what he’d say: get out now, you’re compromised, you can’t trust a brainwashed teenager. However, after a further minute’s deliberation, she signed the letter without mentioning Lin, took up a fresh piece of paper and turned instead to the task of explaining to Murphy why she still wasn’t ready to leave Chapman Farm.
61
Nine in the third place.
All day long the superior man is creatively active.
At nightfall his mind is still beset with cares.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Strike’s primary emotion on receiving Robin’s most recent dispatch from Chapman Farm was relief that the twenty-four-hour delay hadn’t been due to injury or illness, although he found much food for thought in its contents, and re-read it several times at his desk, his notebook open beside him.
While he didn’t doubt that the Manifestation of the Stolen Prophet had been disconcerting for those present, Strike still agreed with Abigail Glover: Mazu Wace had built on the lowly magic tricks Gerald Crowther had taught her, to the point that she was now able to perform large-scale illusions, using lighting, sound and misdirection.
Robin’s account of Wan’s labour, on the other hand, genuinely troubled him. He’d been concentrating so hard on deaths at Chapman Farm, with particular focus on proper record-keeping, that he’d overlooked possible wrong-doing with regard to births. Now he wondered what would have happened if the mother or baby had died, why Mazu, a woman with no medical background, had to see the baby the moment it was born, and why the baby hadn’t been seen since.
The passages relating to Becca Pirbright also interested Strike, especially her accusation that her sister had passed information to Kevin for his book. Having re-read these paragraphs, he got up from his desk to re-examine the picture of Kevin Pirbright’s room pinned to the board on the wall. Once again his gaze travelled over the writing that was legible on the walls, which included the name Becca.
An internet search enabled him to find pictures of the adult Becca onstage at UHC seminars. He remembered Robin describing her as being like a motivational speaker, and certainly this beaming, shiny-haired woman in her logo-embossed sweatshirt had a whiff of the corporate about her. He was particularly interested in the fact that Becca had been jealous of the attention Daiyu received from Cherie Gittins. Strike scribbled a few more notes for himself, relating to the questions he intended to ask the Heatons, who’d met the hysterical Cherie on Cromer beach after Daiyu’s drowning.
The next week was busy, though unproductive in terms of advancing any of the cases on the agency’s books. In addition to his various other general and personal preoccupations, Strike’s mind kept flitting back to the dark woman at the Connaught, who claimed to have recognised him. It had been the very first time a stranger had done so, and it had worried him to the extent that he’d done something he’d never done before, and Googled himself. As he’d hoped and expected, there were very few pictures of him available online: the one used most often by the press had been taken back when he was still a military policeman and far younger and fitter. The rest showed him sporting the full beard that grew conveniently quickly when he needed it, and which he’d always worn when having to give evidence in court. He still found it strange that the woman had recognised him, clean-shaven and wearing glasses, and he couldn’t escape the suspicion that she’d been trying to draw attention to him, thereby sabotaging his surveillance.
Having discounted the possibility that she was a journalist – the direct approach in the middle of the restaurant merely to confirm his identity, would be bizarre behaviour – he was left with three possible explanations.
First: he’d managed to acquire a stalker. He thought this highly unlikely. While he had plenty of supporting evidence to prove he was attractive to certain kinds of women, and his investigative career had taught him that even apparently successful and wealthy people could be harbouring strange impulses, Strike found it very hard to imagine a woman that good looking and well dressed would be following him around for kicks.
Second: she was something to do with the Universal Humanitarian Church. His chat with Fergus Robertson had made it clear to what extremes the church was prepared to go to protect its interests. Was it possible she was one of the church’s wealthier and more influential members? If that was the explanation, the UHC evidently knew the agency was investigating them, which had serious implications not only for the case, but for Robin’s safety. Indeed, it might imply that Robin had been identified at Chapman Farm.
The last, and, in his opinion, most likely possibility was that the woman was a second Patterson operative. In this case, her loud, public approach might have been done purely to draw attention to him and scupper his job. It was this possibility that made Strike text a description of the woman to Barclay, Shah and Midge, telling them to be on the lo