‘You like tattoos,’ said Strike.
‘Wha’?’
‘Tattoos. You’ve got a lot of them.’
‘So?’
‘Anything on your upper right arm?’ said Strike.
‘Why?’
‘Could I have a look?’
‘No, you fuckin’ can’t,’ snarled Reaney.
‘I’ll ask that again,’ said Strike quietly, leaning forwards, ‘this time reminding you what’s likely to happen to you once this interview’s over, when I inform my friend you weren’t cooperative.’
Reaney slowly pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. There was no skull on the bicep, but a large, jet black devil with red eyes.
‘Is that covering anything up?’
‘No,’ said Reaney, tugging his sleeve back down.
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure.’
‘I’m asking,’ said Strike, now reaching into an inner pocket of his jacket, withdrawing a couple of the Polaroids Robin had found in the barn at Chapman Farm, ‘because I thought you might once have had a skull where that devil is.’
He laid the two photos down on the table, facing Reaney. One showed the tall, skinny man with the skull tattoo penetrating the chubby, dark-haired girl, the other the same man sodomising the smaller man whose short, wispy hair might have been Paul Draper’s.
Reaney’s forehead had started shining in the harsh overhead light.
‘That ain’t me.’
‘You sure?’ said Strike. ‘Because I thought this might explain the pig nightmares better than the smell of pig shit.’
Sweaty and pale, Reaney shoved the photos away from him so violently that one of them fell onto the floor. Strike retrieved it and replaced both in his pocket.
‘This spirit you saw,’ he said, ‘what did it look like?’
Reaney didn’t answer.
‘Were you aware Daiyu re-materialises regularly now at Chapman Farm?’ Strike asked. ‘They call her the Drowned—’
Without warning, Reaney got to his feet. Had his plastic chair and the table not been fastened to the floor, Strike was prepared to bet the prisoner would have kicked them over.
‘Oi!’ said a nearby warder, but Reaney was walking fast towards the door into the main prison. A couple more warders caught up with him, and escorted him through the door out of the hall. Prisoners and visitors had turned to watch Reaney storm out, but swiftly turned back to their own conversations, afraid of wasting precious minutes.
Strike met the eyes of the large prisoner one table along, which were asking a silent question. Strike made a small, negative gesture. Further beatings wouldn’t make Jordan Reaney any more cooperative, Strike was sure of that. He’d met terrified men before, men who feared something worse than physical pain. The question was, what exactly was putting Jordan Reaney into such a state of alarm that he was prepared to face the worst kind of prison justice rather than divulge it?
To Robin’s relief, Strike’s next letter offered a solution to the problem of giving money to the UHC.
In consequence, Robin asked permission to visit Mazu in the farmhouse the following morning.
‘I want to make a donation to the church,’ she explained to the hard-faced woman who’d been supervising her stint in the kitchens.
‘All right. Go now, before lunch,’ said the woman, with the first smile Robin had received from her. Glad to escape the fug of boiling noodles and turmeric, Robin pulled off her apron and left.
The June day was overcast, but as Robin crossed the deserted courtyard the sun slid out from behind a cloud and turned Daiyu’s fountain-dappled pool into a basin of diamonds. Thankfully, Emily was no longer standing on her crate. She’d remained there for a full forty-eight hours, ignored and unmentioned by all who passed, as though she’d always stood there and always would. Robin had pitied Emily doubly by the time urine stains had appeared on the inside of her tracksuit bottoms and track marks of tears had striped her muddy face, but she’d imitated all other church members and acted as though the woman was invisible.
The other absence currently improving life at Chapman Farm was that of Taio Wace, who was visiting the Glasgow centre. The removal of the ever-present fear that he’d try and take her into a Retreat Room again was such a relief that Robin even felt less tired than usual, although her regime of manual labour continued.
She knelt at Daiyu’s pool, made the usual tribute, then approached the carved double doors of the farmhouse. As she reached them, Sita, a brown-skinned, elderly woman with a long rope of steel-grey hair opened it from the inside, carrying a bulging plastic sack. As they passed each other, Robin smelled a foul odour of faeces.
