‘Yeah,’ said Saxon, with another little upwards jerk of the chin, ‘’cause men need to know wha’ she’s like. I come out the bog an’ she’s waitin’ for me. She’d ’ad a few, she drinks like a fuckin’ fish, an’ she’s tellin’ me to stop followin’ ’er round, an’ I says, “You fink you’re your fuckin’ farver dontcha? Tellin’ everyone where they’re allowed to fuckin’ go,” an’ she says, “You wanna bring my farver into this, I could ’ave you taken out, I’ll tell ’im you go walkin’ round slaggin’ off the church, you don’ know ’oo you’re messin’ wiv,” an’ I told ’er she was talkin’ bollocks an’ she started fuckin’ jabbin’ me on the shoulder,’ Saxon unconsciously raised his hand to touch the spot where Abigail had presumably hit him, ‘an’ she says, “They got guns—”’
‘She said the church has got guns?’
‘Yeah, an’ she says, “They jus’ killed a guy for talkin’ shit about ’em, so you need to stop fuckin’ pissin’ me off”, an’ I says, “’ow’s the fire service gonna like it when I go to the police abou’ you freatenin’ me?” I got a
‘Did she say she’d
‘Yeah, so she’s seen the fuckin’ murder weapon, an’ she’s never reported—’
‘She can’t have seen the gun that killed Kevin Pirbright. He was killed by a model that didn’t exist then.’
Temporarily stymied, Saxon said,
‘She still freatened to ’ave me fuckin’ shot!’
‘Well, if you think that was a credible threat, by all means go to the police. Sounds to me like a woman trying to scare off a guy who can’t take no for an answer, but maybe they’ll see it differently.’
Strike thought he knew what was going on behind Saxon’s tiny hazel eyes. Occasionally, when people in the grip of obsessive resentment were pouring out their ire and grievances, something in them, some small trace of self-awareness, heard themselves as others might, and was surprised to find they didn’t sound quite as blameless, or even as rational, as they’d imagined themselves to be.
‘Maybe I will go the fuckin’ police,’ said Saxon, heaving himself to his feet.
‘Good luck with that,’ said Strike, also getting up. ‘In the meantime, I might ring Abigail and recommend she finds a lodger who doesn’t tell his mate every time she screams in her sleep.’
Perhaps because Strike was six inches taller than him, Saxon contented himself with snarling,
‘If that’s your fuckin’ attitude—’
‘Thanks for coming in,’ said Strike, moving to open the door onto the outer office.
Saxon strode out past Pat and slammed the glass door behind him.
‘I never trust men with those piggy little eyes,’ croaked the office manager.
‘You’d be right not to trust him,’ said Strike, ‘but not because of his piggy little eyes.’
‘What did ’e want?’
‘Revenge,’ said Strike succinctly.
He returned to the inner office, sat back down at the partners’ desk and read the sparse notes he’d made while Saxon was talking.
With reluctance, but knowing it was the only sure way to get fast results, he picked up his mobile and pressed Ryan Murphy’s number.
Several things had happened lately at Chapman Farm to leave anxiety squirming in Robin’s guts like a parasite.
It had been one thing to tell Strike in the safety of the office that she wasn’t worried about being coerced into unprotected sex with male church members, quite another to sit through a two-hour lecture about spirit bonding in the farmhouse basement and watch all the women around her earnestly nodding as they were told ‘flesh is unimportant, spirit is all-important’ (Robin knew, now, where Penny Brown had got that line).
‘What we stand against,’ Taio said from the stage, ‘is materialist possession. No human being owns another or should create any kind of framework to control or limit them. This is inevitable in carnal relationships – what we call CRs – which are based upon the possession instinct. CRs are inherently materialist. They venerate physical appearance and they inevitably stunt the natures of those in them, yet the bubble world exalts them, especially when they come draped in materialist trappings of property, weddings and the so-called nuclear family.
