‘Why did you want to come to Norwich so much?’ Robin asked quietly, certain of the answer, but wanting to hear Emily say it.
‘I was going to… but I can’t. I’ll only kill myself. That’s why they warn us. You can’t survive out here, once you reach step eight. I suppose I must be nearer pure spirit than I thought,’ said Emily, with an attempt at a laugh.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Robin, moving closer to Emily. ‘About step eight.’
‘I am master of my soul,’ said Emily, and Robin recognised the mantra of the Stolen Prophet. ‘Once your spirit’s really evolved, you can’t take rejoining the materialist world. It’ll kill you.’
Emily’s gaze shifted back to the shelves of Sylvanian Families: little model animals dressed as humans, packaged as parents and babies, with their houses and furniture ranged beside them.
‘Look,’ she said to Robin, pointing at the animals. ‘It’s all materialist possession. Tiny little flesh objects and their houses… all in boxes… I’ll have to go in the box, now,’ said Emily, with another laugh that turned into a sob.
‘What box?’
‘It’s for when you’ve been bad,’ whispered Emily. ‘Really bad…’
Robin’s mind was working rapidly.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We’ll tell them you needed the bathroom, but you came over faint, OK? You nearly passed out, and a woman came to help you and wouldn’t let you leave until you got your colour back. I’ll back you up – I’ll say when I came into the bathroom, the woman was threatening to get an ambulance. If we both tell the same story, you won’t be punished, OK? I’ll back you up,’ she repeated. ‘It’ll be all right.’
‘Why would you help me?’ asked Emily incredulously.
‘Because I want to.’
Emily held up her collecting box pathetically.
‘I didn’t get enough.’
‘I can help with that. I’ll bump you up a bit. Wait there.’
Robin had no qualms about leaving Emily, because she could tell the latter was too paralysed with fear to move. The girl at the cash register, who was chatting to a young man, handed over a pair of scissors from behind the desk almost absent-mindedly. Robin rejoined Emily and used the point of the scissors to prise open the collecting box.
‘I’ll have to keep something, because Vivienne saw money going in,’ said Robin, emptying out most of the cash inside and shoving it into Emily’s box instead. ‘There you go.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ Emily whispered, watching Robin stuff the last five pound note through the slot.
‘I told you, I want to. Stay there, I’ve got to give the scissors back.’
She found Emily standing exactly where she’d left her when she returned.
‘OK, shall we—?’
‘My brother killed himself and it was all our fault,’ said Emily jerkily. ‘Mine and Becca’s.’
‘You can’t be sure of that.’
‘I can. It was us, we did it to him. He shot himself. You can get guns really easily in the materialist world,’ said Emily with a nervous glance at the shoppers passing the toy shop window, as though she feared they might be armed.
‘It might’ve been an accident,’ said Robin.
‘No, it wasn’t, it definitely wasn’t. Becca made me sign a thing… she told me I’d suppressed what he did to us. She’s always done that,’ said Emily, her breathing rapid and shallow, ‘told me what happened, and what didn’t happen.’
Despite her genuine concern for Emily and the urgent need to get back to the group, this was an opening Robin couldn’t ignore.
‘What does Becca say didn’t happen?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ said Emily, shifting her gaze back on to the rows of happily paired animals smiling out of their neat cellophane-wrapped boxes. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing at a family of four pigs. ‘Pig demons… that’s a sign,’ she said, breathing rapidly.
‘A sign of what?’ said Robin.
‘That I need to shut up.’
‘Emily, they’re just toys,’ said Robin. ‘They aren’t supernatural, they’re not signs. You can tell me anything, I won’t give you away.’
‘The last person who said that to me was in Birmingham and he didn’t – he didn’t mean it – he—’
Emily began to cry. She shook her head as Robin laid a consoling hand on her arm.
‘Don’t, don’t – you’ll be in trouble, being nice to me – you shouldn’t be helping me, Becca will make sure you’re punished for it—’
‘I’m not scared of Becca,’ said Robin.
‘Well, you should be,’ said Emily, drawing deep breaths in an effort to control herself. ‘She’ll… do anything to protect the mission. Anything. I… I should know.’
‘How could you threaten the mission?’ asked Robin.
‘Because,’ said Emily, staring at a pair of small pandas in pink and blue nappies, ‘I know things… Becca says I was too young to remember…’ Then, in a rush of words, Emily said, ‘But I wasn’t really small, I was nine, and I know, because they moved me out of the kids’ dormitory after it happened.’
‘After what happened?’ said Robin.
‘After Daiyu became “invisible”,’ said Emily, her tone putting quotation marks around the word. ‘I knew Becca was lying, even then, only I went along with it, because,’ fresh tears gushed forth, ‘I loved… loved…’
‘You loved Becca?’
‘No… not… it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter… I shouldn’t be… talking about any of this… forget it, please…’
‘I will,’ lied Robin.
‘It’s just Becca,’ said Emily, struggling to regain control of herself again, wiping her face, ‘telling me I’m lying all the time… she’s not… since she went away… I feel like she’s not who she was before…’
‘When did she go away?’ asked Robin.
‘Ages ago… they sent her to Birmingham… they split up flesh objects… they must have thought we were too close… and when she came back… she wasn’t… she was really one of them, she wouldn’t hear a word against any of them, even Mazu… Sometimes,’ said Emily, ‘I want to scream the truth, but… that’s egomotivity…’
‘It isn’t egomotivity to tell the truth,’ said Robin.
‘You shouldn’t talk like that,’ said Emily, on a hiccup. ‘That’s how I got relocated.’
‘I joined the church to find truth,’ said Robin. ‘If it’s just another place where you can’t tell it, I don’t want to stay.’
‘“A single event, a thousand different recollections. Only the Blessed Divinity knows the truth,”’ said Emily, quoting from The Answer.
‘But there is truth,’ said Robin firmly. ‘It’s not all opinions or memories. There is truth.’
Emily looked at Robin with what seemed to be frightened fascination.
‘D’you believe in her?’
‘In who? Becca?’
‘No. In the Drowned Prophet.’
‘I… yes, I suppose so.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t,’ whispered Emily. ‘She wasn’t what they say she was.’
‘What d’you mean?’
Emily glanced through the window of the toy shop, then said,
‘She was always up to secret stuff at the farm. Forbidden things.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘Stuff in the barn and the woods. Becca saw it, too. She says I’m making it up, but she knows what happened. I know she remembers,’ said Emily desperately.
‘What did you see Daiyu doing in the barn and the woods?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ said Emily. ‘But I know she didn’t die. I know that.’
‘What?’ said Robin blankly.
‘She’s not dead. She’s out there, somewhere, grown up. She never drow—’
Emily gave a little gasp. Robin turned: a woman in a white top and trousers had come around the corner of the shelves, holding the hands of two boisterous little boys, and Robin knew Emily had momentarily mistaken the mother for another UHC member. The two little boys began clamouring for Thomas the Tank Engine models.
‘I want Percy. There’s Percy! I want Percy!’
‘You’ll really say I felt faint?’ Emily whispered to Robin. ‘In the bathroom, and all that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin, afraid to push Emily further right now, but hopeful that she’d now established a rapport that would survive, back at the farm. ‘Are you OK to go now?’
Emily nodded, still sniffing, and followed Robin out of the shop. They’d walked just a few steps along the arcade when Emily grabbed Robin by the arm.
‘Taio wants you to spirit bond with him, doesn’t he?’
Robin nodded.
‘Well, if you don’t want to,’ said Emily in a low voice, ‘you need to go with Papa J when he comes back. None of the other men are allowed to touch Papa J’s spirit wives. Becca’s a spirit wife, that’s why she never has to go in the Retreat Rooms with anyone else.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Robin.
‘Just go with Papa J,’ said Emily, ‘and you’ll be OK.’
‘Thanks, Emily,’ said Robin, who valued the helpful intention behind the words, if not the advice itself. ‘Come on, we’d better hurry.’
67
It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Strike took Robin’s next letter with him to reread while on overnight surveillance on the Franks on Monday evening, because he found much in there to interest him.
Wan, Robin wrote, had been moved on from Chapman Farm, though Robin didn’t know where she’d gone. She’d left her baby behind with Mazu, who’d named the little girl Yixin, and was now carrying her around and speaking as though she were the biological mother. Robin also described her trip into Norwich, but as she’d omitted to mention her accidental response to her own real name, Strike was unencumbered by fresh worries about Robin’s safety as he pondered Emily’s assertion that Daiyu hadn’t really drowned.
Even without supporting evidence, Emily’s opinion interested the detective, because it took him back to his musings on the esplanade in Cromer, when he’d mulled over the possibility that Daiyu had been carried down onto the beach, not to die, but to be handed to someone else. Sitting in his dark car, casting regular glances up at the windows of the Franks’ flat which, atypically at this hour, were lit up, he asked himself how likely it was that Daiyu had survived the trip to the beach, without reaching any conclusions.