She looks as though she’s over 70 and has been here since the earliest days of the church. She came here at Wace’s invitation to teach yoga and told me she soon realised Papa J was ‘a very great swami’, so she stayed.
I got her talking about Becca quite easily, because Sita doesn’t like her (hardly anyone does). When I mentioned Becca knowing the Drowned Prophet, she told me Becca was really jealous of Daiyu when they were kids. She said all the little girls loved Cherie, and Becca was really envious of Daiyu getting special attention from her.
Robin stopped writing again, wondering whether to tell Strike about her encounter with Lin. She could imagine what he’d say: get out now, you’re compromised, you can’t trust a brainwashed teenager. However, after a further minute’s deliberation, she signed the letter without mentioning Lin, took up a fresh piece of paper and turned instead to the task of explaining to Murphy why she still wasn’t ready to leave Chapman Farm.
Strike’s primary emotion on receiving Robin’s most recent dispatch from Chapman Farm was relief that the twenty-four-hour delay hadn’t been due to injury or illness, although he found much food for thought in its contents, and re-read it several times at his desk, his notebook open beside him.
While he didn’t doubt that the Manifestation of the Stolen Prophet had been disconcerting for those present, Strike still agreed with Abigail Glover: Mazu Wace had built on the lowly magic tricks Gerald Crowther had taught her, to the point that she was now able to perform large-scale illusions, using lighting, sound and misdirection.
Robin’s account of Wan’s labour, on the other hand, genuinely troubled him. He’d been concentrating so hard on deaths at Chapman Farm, with particular focus on proper record-keeping, that he’d overlooked possible wrong-doing with regard to births. Now he wondered what would have happened if the mother or baby had died, why Mazu, a woman with no medical background, had to see the baby the moment it was born, and why the baby hadn’t been seen since.
The passages relating to Becca Pirbright also interested Strike, especially her accusation that her sister had passed information to Kevin for his book. Having re-read these paragraphs, he got up from his desk to re-examine the picture of Kevin Pirbright’s room pinned to the board on the wall. Once again his gaze travelled over the writing that was legible on the walls, which included the name Becca.
An internet search enabled him to find pictures of the adult Becca onstage at UHC seminars. He remembered Robin describing her as being like a motivational speaker, and certainly this beaming, shiny-haired woman in her logo-embossed sweatshirt had a whiff of the corporate about her. He was particularly interested in the fact that Becca had been jealous of the attention Daiyu received from Cherie Gittins. Strike scribbled a few more notes for himself, relating to the questions he intended to ask the Heatons, who’d met the hysterical Cherie on Cromer beach after Daiyu’s drowning.
The next week was busy, though unproductive in terms of advancing any of the cases on the agency’s books. In addition to his various other general and personal preoccupations, Strike’s mind kept flitting back to the dark woman at the Connaught, who claimed to have recognised him. It had been the very first time a stranger had done so, and it had worried him to the extent that he’d done something he’d never done before, and Googled himself. As he’d hoped and expected, there were very few pictures of him available online: the one used most often by the press had been taken back when he was still a military policeman and far younger and fitter. The rest showed him sporting the full beard that grew conveniently quickly when he needed it, and which he’d always worn when having to give evidence in court. He still found it strange that the woman had recognised him, clean-shaven and wearing glasses, and he couldn’t escape the suspicion that she’d been trying to draw attention to him, thereby sabotaging his surveillance.
Having discounted the possibility that she was a journalist – the direct approach in the middle of the restaurant merely to confirm his identity, would be bizarre behaviour – he was left with three possible explanations.
