The Running Grave полностью

Downstairs in the silent sitting room, Strike was again poring over the photograph of Kevin Pirbright’s room that Wardle had given him, and which he’d brought with him to show Robin. For several minutes, he’d been squinting at it, trying to make out a few things that puzzled him. Finally he glanced around and spotted exactly what he required: an antique magnifying glass lying decoratively on top of a pile of art books.

Ten minutes later, Robin reappeared in the sitting room and emitted a surprised laugh.

‘What?’ said Strike, looking up.

‘Sherlock Holmes, I presume?’

‘Don’t mock it until you’ve tried it,’ said Strike, holding out both photo and magnifying glass. ‘This is Kevin Pirbright’s room, as the police found it. Wardle got it for me.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin. She sat back down on the sofa beside Strike and took both picture and magnifying glass from him.

‘Have a shufti at what he’s written on the walls,’ said Strike. ‘See whether you can read any of it. That picture’s all we’ve got, unfortunately, because I called the landlord this afternoon. Once the police had finished with it, he repainted the room.’

Robin moved the magnifying glass to and fro, trying to make out the scrawled words. She was concentrating so hard, the sound of the front door banging open made her jump.

‘Hi, new uncle,’ said a dark teenaged boy, poking his head into the room. He seemed disconcerted to find Robin there, as well.

‘Hi, Gerry,’ said Strike. ‘This is my detective partner, Robin.’

‘Oh,’ said the boy, looking vaguely embarrassed. ‘Cool. Hi.’

He disappeared again.

Robin resumed her close examination of the photo. After a minute’s intense concentration, she began to read aloud.

‘“Five prophets”… what’s that over the mirror? Is it “retribution”?’

‘I think so,’ said Strike, shifting closer to her on the sofa, so their thighs were almost touching.

Many of the scrawls on Pirbright’s walls were illegible, or too small to read from the photograph, but here and there, a word stood out.

‘“Becca”,’ read Robin. ‘“Sin”… “stra” something… straw? “I think that’s “plot”, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike.

‘“The night before”… the night before… I can’t read the rest…’

‘Nor can I. What d’you make of that?’

Strike was pointing at something on the wall over the unmade bed. As both leaned in to look closer, Strike’s hair brushed Robin’s and she felt another small electric shock in the pit of her stomach.

‘It looks,’ she said, ‘as though someone’s tried to scrub something off… or… have they chipped away the plaster?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Strike. ‘Looks to me like someone’s literally gouged some of the writing off the wall, but they didn’t take it all. Wardle told me Pirbright’s neighbour came banging on the door after hearing his music stop. Possibly that persuaded the killer to leave via the window, before they’d had time to remove the whole thing.’

‘And they left that,’ said Robin, looking at the last remnant of what seemed to have been a sentence or phrase.

Written in capitals and circled many times was a single, easily legible word: PIGS.

Six in the second place means:

Contemplation through the crack of the door.

Furthering for the perseverance of a woman.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Largely because of Prudence’s warnings, Strike spent the next two evenings reading Combatting Cult Mind Control in his attic flat. As a result, he insisted on Robin spending longer than usual on creating her undercover persona before making her first appearance at the Rupert Court Temple. While he had total confidence in Robin’s ability to think on her feet, some of what he’d read, and particularly Prudence’s warning that the church sought out weak places in members’ psyches the better to manipulate them, had left him feeling uneasy.

‘There shouldn’t be any points of resemblance between your own life and Rowena’s,’ he told her, Rowena Ellis being the pseudonym Robin had chosen (it was always easier, especially when exhausted or caught off guard, to have a pseudonym that was vaguely familiar). ‘Don’t go drawing on your real past. Stick with pure fiction.’

‘I know,’ said Robin patiently, ‘don’t worry, I’ve thought about that already.’

‘And don’t change your accent too much. That’s the kind of thing that slips when you’re knackered.’

‘Strike, I know,’ she said, half-irritated, half-amused. ‘But if I don’t get in there soon, this haircut’s going to have grown out and I’ll have to get it redone.’