Page 130 of The Running Grave

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.

The intensity of indoctrination crept up even further during Robin’s third week at the farm. New members were regularly bombarded with dreadful images and statistics about the outside world, sometimes for hours at a time. Even though Robin knew this was being done to create a sense of urgency with regard to the war the UHC was supposedly waging on the Adversary, and to bind recruits more closely to the church as the world’s only hope, she doubted anyone of normal empathy could fail to feel distressed and anxious after being forced to look at hundreds upon hundreds of images of starving and wounded children, or learning the statistics on people trafficking and world poverty, or hearing how the rainforest would be entirely destroyed within another two decades. It was difficult not to agree that the planet was on the brink of collapse, that humanity had taken terrible wrong turns and that it would face an awful reckoning unless it changed its ways. The anxiety induced by this constant bombardment of dreadful news was such that Robin welcomed the times recruits were led to the temple to chant on the hard floor, where she experienced the blessed relief of not thinking, of losing herself in the collective voice of the group. Once or twice, she found herself muttering Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu even when nobody around her was chanting.

Her only real bulwark against the onslaught of indoctrination was to remind herself, constantly, what she was at the farm to do. Unfortunately, her third week inside the church yielded very little in the way of useful information. Emily Pirbright and Will Edensor remained impossible to engage in conversation due to the unacknowledged system of segregation in place at the farm. In spite of Will’s wealth and Emily’s almost lifelong membership of the church, both were currently acting as farmhands and domestic servants, whereas Robin continued to spend most of her time in the temple or the lecture room. Nevertheless, she tried to keep a covert eye on both of them, and her observation led her to a couple of deductions.

The first was that Will Edensor was trying, as far as he dared, to maintain personal contact with the white-haired toddler Robin had previously seen him comforting. She was now almost certain that Qing was the daughter he’d had with Lin Pirbright, a conclusion reinforced when she spotted Lin cuddling the child in the shadow of some bushes near the farmhouse. Will and Lin were both in clear breach of the church’s teaching on materialist possession, and risking severe penalties if their ongoing quest to maintain a parental relationship with their daughter was made known to Mazu, Taio and Becca, who were currently reigning supreme at Chapman Farm in the absence of Jonathan Wace.

Still more intriguingly, Robin had noticed definite signs of tension and possibly dislike between the Pirbright sisters. She hadn’t forgotten that Becca and Emily had accused their dead brother of sexually abusing them, yet she’d seen no signs of solidarity between the pair. On the contrary, whenever they found themselves in close proximity, they made no eye contact and generally removed themselves from each other’s vicinity as quickly as possible. Given that church members usually made a point of greeting each other as they passed in the yard, and an elaborate courtesy was observed when it came to opening doors for each other, or ceding to each other when it came to vacant spaces in the dining hall, this behaviour definitely couldn’t be attributed to fear of succumbing to materialist possession. Robin wondered whether Becca was afraid of being tarnished by the faint aura of disgrace which hung over the shaven-headed Emily, or whether there was another, more personal, source of animosity. The sisters seemed united in one thing only: disdain for the woman who’d brought them into the world. Not once did Robin see any sign of warmth towards or even acknowledgement of Louise from either of her daughters.

Robin was still keeping track of the days with the tiny pebbles she picked up daily. The approach of her third Thursday at the farm brought the now familiar mixture of excitement and nerves, because while she craved communication from the outside world, the nocturnal journey to the plastic rock remained nerve-wracking.

When the lights went out, she dressed beneath the covers again, waited for the other women to fall silent, and for the usual snorers to prove they’d fallen asleep, then got quietly out of bed.

The night was cold and windy, a stiff breeze blowing across the dark field as Robin crossed it, and she entered the woods to the sound of trees creaking and rustling around her. To her relief, she found the plastic rock more easily than she’d done previously.

When Robin opened the rock she saw a letter from Strike, a note in Ryan’s handwriting, and, to her delight, a small bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. Easing herself behind a tree, she ripped the wrapping off the chocolate and devoured it in a few bites, so hungry she couldn’t slow down to savour it. She then turned on the torch and opened Ryan’s letter.

Dear Robin,

It was great to hear from you, I was getting worried. The farm sounds bizarre, although being a country girl you’re probably not hating it as much as I would.