‘“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.
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.
