‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin, afraid to push Emily further right now, but hopeful that she’d now established a rapport that would survive, back at the farm. ‘Are you OK to go now?’
Emily nodded, still sniffing, and followed Robin out of the shop. They’d walked just a few steps along the arcade when Emily grabbed Robin by the arm.
‘Taio wants you to spirit bond with him, doesn’t he?’
Robin nodded.
‘Well, if you don’t want to,’ said Emily in a low voice, ‘you need to go with Papa J when he comes back. None of the other men are allowed to touch Papa J’s spirit wives. Becca’s a spirit wife, that’s why she never has to go in the Retreat Rooms with anyone else.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Robin.
‘Just go with Papa J,’ said Emily, ‘and you’ll be OK.’
‘Thanks, Emily,’ said Robin, who valued the helpful intention behind the words, if not the advice itself. ‘Come on, we’d better hurry.’
Strike took Robin’s next letter with him to reread while on overnight surveillance on the Franks on Monday evening, because he found much in there to interest him.
Wan, Robin wrote, had been moved on from Chapman Farm, though Robin didn’t know where she’d gone. She’d left her baby behind with Mazu, who’d named the little girl Yixin, and was now carrying her around and speaking as though she were the biological mother. Robin also described her trip into Norwich, but as she’d omitted to mention her accidental response to her own real name, Strike was unencumbered by fresh worries about Robin’s safety as he pondered Emily’s assertion that Daiyu hadn’t really drowned.
Even without supporting evidence, Emily’s opinion interested the detective, because it took him back to his musings on the esplanade in Cromer, when he’d mulled over the possibility that Daiyu had been carried down onto the beach, not to die, but to be handed to someone else. Sitting in his dark car, casting regular glances up at the windows of the Franks’ flat which, atypically at this hour, were lit up, he asked himself how likely it was that Daiyu had survived the trip to the beach, without reaching any conclusions.
The Waces had had a clear motive for Daiyu’s disappearance: to prevent the Graves family from obtaining DNA evidence and regaining control of that quarter of a million pounds in blue chip shares. Death hadn’t been necessary to achieve that objective: merely putting Daiyu beyond the Graves’ reach would have done it. But if Daiyu hadn’t died, where was she? Were there relatives of either Mazu or Jonathan he didn’t know about, who might have agreed to take the girl in?
Daiyu would be twenty-eight if she were still alive. Would she be content to remain silent, knowing that a cult had grown up around her supposedly drowned seven-year-old self?
In the penultimate line of her letter, Robin answered the question Strike had posed in his last: did she have any reason to believe her cover might have been blown at Chapman Farm, given that an unknown woman had approached Strike, apparently to disrupt his surveillance?
I don’t know whether that woman you mentioned has got anything to do with the church but I don’t think anyone here knows or suspects who I really am.
Movement at the door of the Franks’ block made Strike look up. The two brothers were walking, bow-legged, towards their dilapidated van, laden with heavy boxes and what looked like bags of groceries. As the younger Frank reached the vehicle he stumbled and several large bottles of mineral water tipped out of a box and rolled away. Strike, who by this time was filming them, watched as the older brother berated the younger, setting down his own box to help chase down the bottles. Strike zoomed in, and saw what looked like a coil of rope protruding from the older brother’s box.
Strike gave the van a head start, then followed them. After a short drive, they came to a halt outside a large lock-up facility in Croydon. Here, the detective watched as they unloaded the boxes and groceries and disappeared into the building.
It wasn’t, of course, a crime to buy rope or a van, or to hire a storage unit and put food and water in there, but Strike considered this activity highly ominous. Try as he might, he could think of no plausible explanation for these activities other than that the brothers were indeed planning the abduction and imprisonment of the actress whom they seemed determined to punish for being insufficiently accommodating of their demands for her attention. As far as he knew, the police hadn’t yet paid a call on the Franks to warn them off. He couldn’t help suspecting that the matter was being deprioritised because Mayo could afford a private detective agency to keep a watch on her stalkers.
