Page 388 of The Running Grave

‘“Live and let live”, isn’t it?’ said Strike. ‘If nobody wants to speak out, and with the charity work there as a smokescreen, plus all the useful celebrity idiots…’

The previous fortnight had seen a multitude of front pages devoted to the UHC in both broadsheets and tabloids. Fergus Robertson was busy morning and night, sharing inside details nobody else knew. It was he who’d ambushed an outraged Giles Harmon outside his house in Bloomsbury, he who’d first broken the news of the alleged child trafficking and he who’d doorstepped the MP who was a church Principal, who’d been suspended by his party pending investigations into substantial undeclared donations he’d received from the UHC. The packaging multimillionaire, too foolish to have hidden behind his lawyers, had made several injudicious and unintentionally incriminating comments to the press jostling outside his offices. Mazu, Taio, Jiang and Joe Jackson were in custody. Dr Andy Zhou’s arrest had caused a flurry of statements from wealthy women who’d been cupped and hypnotised, massaged and detoxified, all of whom refused to believe the handsome doctor could have done anything wrong. A carefully phrased statement had also been issued by Noli Seymour’s agent, expressing shock and horror at the findings at Chapman Farm, of which Noli had naturally had no suspicion.

Jonathan Wace had been arrested while trying to drive over the border into Mexico. He was smiling in the gentle, self-deprecating way Robin knew so well in the photograph that showed him handcuffed and being led away. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

The temple at Chapman Farm had been thoroughly searched by police, and the means by which illusions had been conducted had been leaked to journalists, along with photographs of whips and the box. The various bodily fluids that lingered in the mattresses and bedding of the Retreat Rooms were being tested and the Chapman Farm woods were cordoned off. The axe and soil Midge had stolen had been handed to the police, and Wardle had called Strike with the news that the thigh bone of a young child had been dug up close to the rotting wooden posts. Evidently the pigs hadn’t managed to consume all of Daiyu Wace before Jordan Reaney had to get back to bed, and Abigail Wace reach the yard in time to watch the truck bearing the straw figure pass, in the dark.

Meanwhile ex-church members were coming forward in increasing numbers. Guilt and shame had kept them silent, sometimes for decades, but reassured by the possibility of immunity from prosecution for their own coerced actions, which ranged from administering beatings and helping bury bodies illegally to failing to secure medical assistance for a fourteen-year-old who’d died in childbirth, they were now ready to find catharsis in testifying against the Waces.

But there were still those who saw no evil in anything that had been done. Danny Brockles, the ex-addict who’d travelled the country with Jonathan Wace to extol the merits of the church, had been interviewed. All evidence of wrongdoing, he said, sobbing, had been planted by the agents of the Adversary. The public needed to understand that satanic forces were behind this attempt to destroy Papa J and the church (but the public seemed to understand no such thing, judging by the angry and indignant comments posted online beneath every article on the UHC). And Becca Pirbright, who remained at liberty, had twice appeared on television, composed and personable, calm and charming, disdainful of what she termed lurid, scaremongering and sensational reporting, denying all personal wrongdoing and describing Jonathan and Mazu Wace as two of the best human beings she’d ever known in her life.

Robin, watching Becca at home, found herself again thinking of the church as a virus. She was certain many, if not most, members would be cured by this eruption of revelations, by the evidence that they’d been thoroughly hoodwinked, that Papa J was no hero, but a conman, a rapist and an accessory to murder. Yet so many lives had been destroyed… Robin had heard that Louise Pirbright had tried to hang herself in the hospital to which she’d been taken upon release. Robin could quite see why Louise preferred death than to have to live with the knowledge that her foolish decision to follow Jonathan Wace into his cult twenty-four years previously had led to the death of two of her sons, and total estrangement from both of her daughters. Emily, who’d been found unconscious in the box when police entered the farm, had been sent to the same hospital as Louise, but when offered a meeting with her mother by well-intentioned medics, had informed them she never wanted to see Louise again.

Murphy was inclined to be triumphalist about the church’s demise, but Robin found it hard to celebrate. Murphy and Strike kept telling her that the child abuse accusations against her would be dropped any day now, but she’d had no word to that effect. Even worse than her personal fear of prosecution was her dread of the church reforming and rebuilding. When she said as much to Murphy, he’d told her she was too pessimistic, but watching Becca smiling on television, clearly unshaken in her belief in the Lotus Way, Robin could only hope that the world would watch more closely and ask more questions, when the next five-sided temple appeared on a piece of vacant land.

‘And what about the Waces?’ Sir Colin asked Strike, while the children on the lawn continued to chase bubbles.

‘Confidentially,’ said Strike, ‘Mazu hasn’t spoken a word since her arrest. Literally not a word. One of our police contacts told us she won’t even talk to her own lawyer.’

‘Shock, do you think?’ said Sir Colin.

‘Power play,’ said Robin. ‘She’ll continue to act as though she’s the divine mother of the Drowned Prophet until her dying breath.’

‘But surely she knows, now…?’

‘I think,’ said Robin, ‘if she ever allowed herself to accept that Daiyu was murdered, and her husband knew all along, and made sure to get her killer out of the way to safety, it would drive her out of her mind.’

‘And has Abigail confessed?’ Sir Colin asked Strike.

‘No,’ said Strike. ‘She’s like her father: brazen it out as long as you can, but her boyfriends are turning on her. Now they’ve realised they might be accused of being accessories to attempted murder, they can’t wait to get off the sinking ship. Confidentially, one of her fireman colleagues saw her pocketing the gun and ammo when she found it in a burned-out drug den. He says he assumed she was going to hand them over to the police. ’Course, he’d have to say that – he’s married, and he doesn’t want it to come out that she was sleeping with him, as well.

‘Reaney’s currently denying he knows anything about axes and pigs, but a guy who was in the men’s dormitory that night remembers Reaney sneaking back inside, in the early hours. Reaney was in his underwear: he’d obviously had to get rid of his bloody tracksuit somewhere. Then he accused everyone of nicking it, when he woke up.

‘I think Abigail will be found guilty of Kevin’s murder, and for trying to kill Robin and me, and I think she and Reaney are both going to be done for Daiyu’s murder.’

‘Abigail must be seriously disturbed,’ said the compassionate Sir Colin. ‘She must have had a dreadful childhood.’

‘A lot of people have dreadful childhoods and don’t take to strangling small children,’ said the implacable Strike, to nods of agreement from Dennis and Pat.

Strike was thinking of Lucy as he spoke. He’d spent the previous day with his sister, accompanying her to view two prospective nursing homes for their uncle. Afterwards they’d had a coffee together in a café, and Strike had told his sister about Mazu attempting to kill Robin in the Rupert Court Temple.

‘That evil bitch,’ said the horrified Lucy.

‘Yeah, but we got her, Luce,’ said Strike, ‘and the baby’s back with her mother.’

Strike had half-expected more tears, but to his surprise, Lucy beamed at him.

‘I know I nag you, Stick,’ she said. ‘I know I do, but as long as you’re happy, I don’t care if you’re not – you know. Married with kids, and all that. You do wonderful things. You help people. You’ve helped me, taking this case, putting that woman behind bars. And what you said about Leda… you’ve really helped me, Stick.’

Touched, Strike reached out to squeeze her hand.

‘I s’pose you’re just not cut out for the whole settling down with one woman thing, and that’s OK,’ said Lucy, now smiling a little tearfully. ‘I promise I’ll never go on about it again.’

135

… if one is intent on retaining his clarity of mind, good fortune will come from this grief. For here we are dealing not with a passing mood, as in the nine in the third place, but with a real change of heart.

The I Ching or Book of Changes