Will Edensor is the original subject of the book’s main case.  The letters at the beginning of the book between Will and his parents, Sir Colin and Lady Edensor, tell us that he has dropped out of University and joined the Universal Humanitarian Church.  As Lady Edensor’s health deteriorates, they plead with Will to let them see him but receive no reply and Lady Edensor sadly dies without seeing her son again (Prologue).

When he hires the agency, Sir Colin tells Strike and Robin that Will was a very clever child, but he had some issues.  He was diagnosed as being on the mild end of the autistic spectrum, which Sir Colin says made him vulnerable to manipulation.  Whilst at university he attended a service of the Universal Humanitarian Church, dropped out, and was eventually found by his parents to be at Chapman Farm (Ch 4).

When Robin first spots Will in Soho collecting for the Church, she thinks that he looks ill and defeated.  He is very thin and has shadows under his eyes (Ch 13). When she sees him again on her arrival at Chapman Farm she notes that he is very tall and that his orange tracksuit hangs off him (Ch 24).

Robin has few opportunities to see Will in her early days at Chapman Farm, but notices him comforting a small child who is crying (Ch 31). Later, when Robin makes her first trip to the rock at the perimeter of Chapman Farm, she overhears Will and Lin Doherty talking. Robin believes that Lin has had a child and that Will may be the father (Ch 36).

Robin meets Will again when she is sent to work in the vegetable patch. Will quotes parts of Jonathan Wace’s book The Answer, and Robin reflects on the fact that Will presents a different image when he is amongst the farmhands, where he seems self-assured and dogmatic, to the one he presents when around the Church Elders when he looks hangdog and defeated. Robin starts to understand why Will’s brother James finds him infuriating (Ch 50).