Page 12 of The Running Grave

No blame, no praise.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Robin spent the six-minute walk from the Golden Lion to Green Park station doing the thing she’d resolutely schooled herself over the past eight months not to do: thinking about Cormoran Strike in any context other than work and friendship.

The long-delayed realisation that she was in love with her work partner had burst in upon Robin Ellacott the previous year upon finding out that he was having an affair he’d carefully concealed from her. At that point, Robin had decided that the only thing to do was to fall out of love, and it was in that spirit, a few weeks later, that she’d agreed to a first date with Ryan Murphy.

Since then, she’d done her utmost to keep an inner door firmly closed on whatever she might feel for Strike, hoping love would wither and die for lack of attention. In practice, this meant turning her thoughts firmly away from him when alone, and refusing, ever, to make comparisons between him and Murphy, as Ilsa had tried to do on the day of the christening. When, in spite of her best efforts, certain unwelcome memories intruded – the way Strike had hugged her on her wedding day, or the dangerous, drunken moment outside the Ritz bar on her thirtieth birthday, when he’d moved to kiss her – she reminded herself that her detective partner was a man perfectly happy with a single life punctuated by affairs with (usually gorgeous) women. He was forty-one years old, had never married, voluntarily lived alone in a spartan attic over the office, and had a deeply entrenched tendency to erect barriers to intimacy. While some of this reserve had relaxed where Robin was concerned, she hadn’t forgotten how quickly it had returned after that night at the Ritz. In short, Robin had now concluded that whatever she might once have wanted, Strike hadn’t ever wanted it at all.

It was therefore a pleasure and a relief to be with Murphy, who so clearly wanted to be with her. Aside from the fact that the CID man was handsome and intelligent, they had investigative work in common, which made a very welcome contrast to the well-paid accountant she’d divorced, who’d never understood Robin’s preference for what Matthew had considered an eccentric, insecure career. Robin was also enjoying having a sex life again: a sex life, moreover, that was considerably more satisfactory than that she’d had with her ex-husband.

Yet there remained something between her and Ryan that she found hard to identify. Guardedness perhaps expressed it best, and it sprung, she was sure, from the fact that each had a fractured marriage in their past. Both knew just how badly people in the most intimate relationships could hurt each other, and treated each other carefully in consequence. Wiser than she’d been during her years with Matthew, Robin made sure she didn’t talk too much about Strike when with Ryan, didn’t mention Strike’s war record, or tell any anecdotes that cast him in too amusing or attractive a light. She and Murphy had now shared plenty of details of their respective histories, but Robin was aware that she, like Ryan, was offering an edited version. Perhaps that was inevitable, once you reached your thirties. It had been so very easy to open her heart to Matthew, whom she’d met at school: though she’d believed at the time she was telling all her secrets, she looked back and realised how little, at the time, she’d had to tell. It had taken Robin six months to talk to Ryan about the brutal rape that had ended her university career, and she’d omitted mention of the fact that a major factor in the failure of her marriage had been Matthew’s persistent jealousy and suspicion of Strike. For his part, Ryan never talked much about his drinking years, and had given her what she suspected was a sanitised account of the way he and his ex-wife had split up. She assumed these things would be discussed eventually, if the relationship continued. In the meantime, a private life without jealous rows and grinding resentment made a very nice change.

All this being so, brooding on the emotional subtext of Strike’s conversation could do nobody any good, and made Robin feel disloyal to Murphy. Strike probably felt safe to say things like ‘you always look great’ and ‘I’ve told my sister all about you’ because she was now in a steady relationship with another man. As she descended into the station, she told herself firmly that Strike was her best friend, nothing more, and forced her thoughts back onto the job in Bexleyheath.

7

This hexagram indicates a situation in which the principle of darkness, after having been eliminated, furtively and unexpectedly obtrudes again from within and below.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Strike had meant to return to the office once he’d finished his pint, but the Golden Lion was so pleasant, it occurred to him that he could just as easily read the documents provided by Colin Edensor there, where there was also beer. He therefore bought himself a second pint and took the first opportunity to leave his barstool for a vacated leather bench at a lower table, where he flipped open the folder. At the top of the pile of paper inside was a lengthy email to Sir Colin from the late Kevin Pirbright.

Dear Colin,

Apologies in advance if this is long, but you asked about my family’s involvement with the Universal Humanitarian Church and how I came to leave etc, so here it is.

My mother joined the UHC when I was 3 and my sisters were 6 and 8. It’s important to say that my mother – I was raised to call her Louise, because the UHC forbids naming blood relationships – isn’t stupid. She grew up poor and never got the chance to go to university or anything, but she’s bright. She married my dad really young but he left the family when I was 1. I remember Louise being very pretty when she was younger.

I don’t know when she first heard Jonathan Wace speak, but I know she fell in love with him. Loads of the women in the UHC are crazy about him. Anyway, she packed up our council house and took us off to Chapman Farm. (I’ve had to piece all this together from stuff my sisters told me later, because I’ve got no memory of our life before the UHC.)

After that, we had nowhere to go other than UHC accommodation. This is really common. People sink everything into the church, as proof of their commitment to their new lives. Some members even sell their houses and give all the money to the church.

Chapman Farm is where the UHC was founded. The five prophets are buried there and because it’s in deep countryside as opposed to a city, it tends to be where members are sent for re-indoctrination if they need it. There are other centres and my older sister Becca spent three years at the one in Birmingham (she’s quite high up in the church now), and Emily was allowed to go out collecting money, but Louise and I never left the farm.

The UHC teaches that normal family relationships or monogamous sexual relationships are a form of materialist possession. If you’re a good person, you’re spirit-bonded to everyone inside the church and you love them all just the same. Louise tried to stick to that once we were inside, but the three of us always knew she was our real mother. Most of the kids’ education consisted of reading UHC tracts and memorising them, but Louise taught me, Becca and Emily things like our times tables on the sly, while we were cleaning out the chickens.

When I was very young, I literally thought Jonathan Wace was my father. We all called him ‘Papa J’ and I knew about family relationships because they appeared in the Bible and other holy books we studied. It was only gradually I realised I wasn’t actually related to Papa J. It was really confusing for a small kid but you just went with it, because everyone else did.

Mazu Wace, Papa J’s wife, grew up at Chapman Farm. She was there in the Aylmerton Community days—

Strike stopped reading, staring at the last four words.

The Aylmerton Community days.

The Aylmerton Community.

Aylmerton Community.

The rundown barns, the children running riot, the Crowther brothers striding across the yard, the strange round tower standing alone on the horizon like a giant chess piece: he saw it all again. His stoned mother trying to make daisy chains for little girls; nights in ramshackle dormitories with no locks on the door; a constant sense that everything was out of control, and a childish instinct that something was wrong, and that an undefinable danger lurked close by, just out of sight.

Until this moment, Strike had had no idea that Chapman Farm was the same place: it had been called Forgeman Farm when he’d lived there, with a motley collection of families who were working the land, housed in a cluster of rundown buildings, their activities directed by the Crowther brothers. Even though there’d been no hint of religion at the Aylmerton commune, Strike’s disdain for cults sprang directly from the six months at Forgeman Farm, which had constituted the unhappiest period of his unstable and fragmented childhood. The commune had been dominated by the powerful personality of the elder Crowther brother, a rangy, round-shouldered, greasy-haired man with long black sideburns and a handlebar moustache. Strike could still visualise his mother’s rapt face as Malcolm Crowther lectured the group by firelight, outlining his radical beliefs and personal philosophies. He remembered, too, his own ineradicable dislike of the man, which had amounted to a visceral revulsion.

By the time the police raided the farm, Leda had already moved her family on. Six months was the longest Leda could ever bear to remain in one place. Reading about the police action in the papers once back in London, she’d refused to believe that the community wasn’t being persecuted for their pacifism, the soft drugs and their back-to-the earth philosophy. For a long time she’d insisted the Crowthers couldn’t possibly have done the things for which they were eventually charged, not least because her own children told her they’d escaped unscathed. Only after reading accounts of the trial had Leda reluctantly come to accept that this had been more luck than judgement; that her pastoral fantasy had indeed been a hotbed of paedophilia. Characteristically, she’d shrugged off the whole episode as an anomaly, then continued the restless existence that meant her son and daughter, when not dumped on their aunt and uncle in Cornwall, moved constantly between different kinds of insecure housing and volatile situations of her choosing.

Strike drank a third of his fresh pint before focusing his attention once more on the page in front of him.

Mazu Wace, Papa J’s wife, grew up at Chapman Farm. She was there in the Aylmerton Community days and it’s like her private kingdom. I don’t think she’s ever visited the Birmingham or Glasgow centres and she only goes up to the London Temple occasionally. I was always terrified of Mama Mazu, as church members are supposed to call her. She looks like a witch, very white face, black hair, long pointed nose and weird eyes. She always wore robes instead of the tracksuits the rest of us had to wear. I used to have nightmares about Mazu when I was little, where she was peering in at me through keyholes or watching me from skylights.