Page 327 of The Running Grave

‘So he just took off?’

‘What d’you mean by “took off”?’

‘I mean, this was unexpected?’

‘Well,’ said Rufus, frowning slightly, ‘that’s hard to answer. My parents were in the middle of their divorce. I suppose you could argue my father was having what’s known as a mid-life crisis. He’d been passed over for promotion at work and was feeling unappreciated. He’s actually a very difficult personality. He’s never got on with colleagues, anywhere he worked. Argumentative. Obsessed with rank and titles. It’s rather pathetic.’

‘Really,’ said Robin. ‘And your mother took legal action against him, to make him leave?’

‘Not to make him leave,’ said Rufus. ‘He’d taken me and Rosie, to the farm.’

‘How old were you?’ asked Robin, her pulse speeding up further.

‘Fifteen. We’re twins. It was the school summer holidays. My father lied to us, said it was going to be a week’s holiday in the country. We didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so we agreed to go.

‘At the end of that week, he sent a letter to my mother full of church jargon saying the three of us had joined the UHC and wouldn’t be coming back. My mother got an emergency court order and threatened him with the police. We ended up sneaking out in the middle of the night, because my father had got himself into some ludicrous agreement with Wace and was scared of telling him it wouldn’t be happening.’

‘What kind of agreement?’

‘He wanted to sell the family home and give all the money to the church.’

‘I see,’ said Robin, who’d barely eaten any of her sandwich, she was making so many notes. ‘I’d imagine you and your sister were happy to leave?’

‘I was, but my sister was furious.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ said Rufus, with another sneer, ‘because she was smitten with Jonathan Wace. He was s’posed to be taking her up to the Birmingham centre the next day.’

‘She was being transferred?’ asked Robin. ‘After a week?’

‘No, no,’ said Rufus impatiently, as though Robin were a particularly slow pupil. ‘It was a pretext. Get her off on her own. She was quite pretty and well developed, for fifteen. Bit chubby, actually,’ he added, straightening up to display his abs. ‘Most of the girls in there were after Wace. One girl clawed Rosie’s face over him – but that got hushed up, because Wace liked to think everyone was living in harmony. Rosie’s still got a scar under her left eye.’

Far from sounding sorry, Rufus seemed rather pleased about this.

‘Would you happen to remember the date you left?’ asked Robin.

‘Twenty-eighth of July.’

‘How can you be so precise?’ asked Robin.

As she’d expected, Rufus didn’t seem offended, but further gratified at a chance to show his deductive powers.

‘Because it was the night before a child at the farm drowned. We read about it, in the papers.’

‘How exactly did you leave?’ asked Robin.

‘In my father’s car. He’d managed to get the keys back, pretending he wanted to check the battery hadn’t gone flat.’

‘Did you see anything unusual as you were leaving the farm?’

‘Like what?’

‘People awake when they shouldn’t have been? Or,’ said Robin, thinking of Jordan Reaney, ‘someone sleeping more deeply than perhaps they should have been?’

‘I can’t see how I’d have known that,’ said Rufus. ‘No, we saw nothing unusual.’

‘And did either you or your sister ever return to Chapman Farm?’