The running grave, p.97
The Running Grave, page 97
He paused to let her speak, but she said nothing, so he continued,
‘Would you like to hear some of the questions I’ve been pondering, about Daiyu’s drowning in the North Sea?’
‘Tell me what you like,’ said Abigail. She was striving to look unconcerned, but the hand holding her cigarette had begun to shake.
‘I started small,’ said Strike, ‘by wondering why she’d drowned exactly where your mother did, but the deeper into the investigation I got, the more unexplained things started cropping up. Who was buying Daiyu toys and sweets in her last few months at the farm? Why was she wearing a white dress rather than a tracksuit when last seen alive? Why did Carrie strip to her underwear, if they were only going in for a paddle? Why did Carrie run off to poke at something at the water’s edge, right before the police arrived? Who was the second adult, who was supposed to be in the dormitory the night Carrie helped Daiyu out of the window? Why did your father spirit Becca Pirbright away from the farm, after Daiyu vanished?’
Abigail, who’d already ground out her first cigarette under her heel, now took out a second. Having lit it, she blew smoke into Strike’s face. Far from resenting this, Strike took the opportunity to breathe in some nicotine.
‘Then I started thinking hard about Kevin Pirbright’s death. Who gouged some of the writing out of his bedroom wall, leaving only the word “pigs”, and who stole his laptop? Who was Kevin talking about, when he told an undercover detective he was going to meet a bully and “have things out” with them? What exactly did Kevin know – what had he pieced together – such that he deserved a bullet through the brain?
‘Now all of those things, separately, might have explanations. A junkie could’ve stolen his laptop. The kids in the dorm might’ve simply forgotten the second person in charge the last night Daiyu was seen there. But added together, there seemed to be a hell of a lot of unexplained occurrences.’
‘If you say so,’ said Abigail, but her hand was still shaking. ‘But—’
‘I haven’t finished. There was also the question of those phone calls. Who called Carrie Curtis Woods, before my partner and I visited her? Whom did she call back, after we’d left? Who phoned Jordan Reaney, from a call box in Norfolk to throw suspicion on the church, and put him in such a state of fear and alarm he tried to overdose? Who were those two people terrified of, and what had that person threatened them with, that made them both decide they’d rather die than face it? And who called the Delaunays, trying to make them scared Daiyu was still alive, to throw a red herring in my path, and make them even more obstructive?’
Abigail blew smoke towards the ceiling and said nothing.
‘I also wanted to know why there’s a circle of wooden posts in the woods at Chapman Farm that someone once tried to destroy, why there’s an axe hidden in a nearby tree, and why, close by the destroyed ring, somebody once tried to burn some rope.’
Abigail gave a little convulsive jerk at the word ‘rope’, but still said nothing.
‘Maybe you’ll find this more interesting with visual aids,’ said Strike.
Once again, he brought up the pictures of the Polaroids on the phone.
‘That’s not Joe Jackson,’ he said, pointing. ‘That’s Jordan Reaney. That,’ he said, pointing at the blonde, ‘is Carrie Curtis Woods, that’s Paul Draper, but that,’ he pointed at the chubby dark girl, ‘isn’t Rosie Fernsby. That’s you.’
The door behind Strike opened. A bearded man appeared, but Abigail shouted ‘Fuck off!’ and he withdrew precipitately.
‘Military-level discipline,’ said Strike approvingly. ‘Well, you learned from the best.’
Abigail’s irises were now two near-black discs.
‘Now,’ said Strike, ‘you had to identify the tall guy and the dark girl as Joe Jackson and Rosie, because Carrie had already pulled those names out of her arse when she was panicking. None of you realised any of those Polaroids were still hanging around, and none of you expected me to have them.
‘For a frankly embarrassing length of time, I kept asking myself who took those pictures. Not everyone in them looks happy, do they? It looked as though this had been done for punishment, or in service of some sadist’s kink. But finally, I saw what should’ve been obvious: there are never all four of you in one shot. You were all taking pictures of each other.
‘A little secret society of four. I don’t whether you enjoyed sticking two fingers up at the spirit bonding nonsense, or liked fucking for the fun of it, or were just passing on the lessons you’d learned from Mazu and your father, about the pleasures of compelling other people to participate in ritual humiliation and submission.’
‘You’re fucking cracked,’ said Abigail.
‘We’ll see,’ said Strike calmly, before holding up the picture of Draper being sodomised by Reaney. ‘The masks are a nice touch. Extra level of degradation, and also a bit of plausible deniability – you’ll have learned the value of that from your father. I note that you come out of this particular sex session pretty well. Fairly straightforward sex and a bit of vanity posing with your legs open. Nobody’s forcibly sodomising you.’
Abigail merely took another drag on her cigarette.
‘Having realised that you were taking pictures of each other, the obvious question is, why were the other three participating in what doesn’t seem to have been completely pleasurable for them? And the obvious answer is: you had all the power. You were Jonathan Wace’s daughter. Because I don’t buy the Cinderella crap you’ve been feeding me, Abigail. I’m sure Mazu disliked you – stepdaughter, stepmother, that’s hardly uncommon – but I think, as Papa J’s firstborn, you had a lot of leeway, a lot of freedom. You didn’t get to be that weight on the usual diet at Chapman Farm.’
‘That’s not me,’ said Abigail.
‘Oh, I’m not saying I can prove this girl’s you,’ said Strike. ‘But Rosie Fernsby’s very clear it’s not her. You tried to stop us talking to her, not because she was in these pictures, but because she wasn’t. And she remembers you clearly. She says you threw your weight around a lot – “porky” was how she described you, by strange coincidence. Naturally, she’d have been especially interested in you, because you were the daughter of the much older man she’d convinced herself she was in love with.
‘It was pretty stupid of you to tell me Mazu made people wear masks while crawling around on the ground. Obviously I understand where you got the idea, and that you were trying to add a nice flourish to your depiction of her as a sociopath, but nobody else has mentioned pig masks used in the context of punishment. It’s important not to use incriminating things in their wrong context, even in service of a cover story. Many a liar slips up that way. Signposts to things you might not want looked at.’
He paused again. Abigail remained silent.
‘So,’ said Strike, ‘there you are at Chapman Farm, throwing your weight around, with three vulnerable people at your beck and call: a juvenile criminal who’s hiding from the police, a boy who was mentally sub-par even before you helped kick the shit out of him, and a runaway girl who was never going to trouble Mensa.
‘As Papa J’s entitled firstborn, you were allowed out of the farm to buy things: chocolate, little toys, a Polaroid camera, pig masks – biscuits, if you fancied them. You could pick and choose, within the constraints of Mazu’s iron regime, which was probably more stringent when your father wasn’t around, what jobs you preferred. You might not have had the option to lie in bed all day eating biscuits, but you could decide whether – to take a random example – you wanted to share childcare duty overnight with Carrie, and who you wanted on early duty with you, in the morning.’
‘All of this,’ said Abigail, ‘is specker – specla—’
‘Speculation. You’ll have a lot of time on your hands in prison, serving life. You could do some Open Univ—’
‘Fuck you.’
‘You’re right, of course, this is all speculation,’ said Strike. ‘Until, that is, Jordan Reaney realises he’s up to his neck in the shit and starts talking. Until other people who remember you at Chapman Farm in the eighties and nineties come crawling out of the woodwork.
‘I think you and Daiyu were both spoiled and neglected at Chapman Farm, with a couple of important differences. Mazu genuinely detested you, and abused you during your father’s absences. You were grieving the loss of your mother. You were also obsessively envious of the attention your only remaining parent showed towards your bratty stepsister. You wanted to be Popsicle’s pet again and you didn’t like him cooing over Daiyu – or, more accurately, the money she was worth. You wanted retribution.’
Abigail continued to smoke in silence.
‘Of course,’ said Strike, ‘the problem you had inside Chapman Farm – as, indeed, you’ve had outside it – is that you couldn’t pick the people who were best for the job, you had to take what you could get, which meant your obedient pig-mask lackeys.
‘Daiyu had to be lulled into a false sense of security, and kept quiet while it was happening. Bribes of toys and sweets, secret games with the big kids: she didn’t want the treats or the attention to dry up, so she didn’t tell Mazu or your father what was going on. That was a kid who was starved of proper attention. Maybe she wondered why her big sister—’
‘She wasn’t my fuckin’ sister!’
‘—was suddenly being so nice to her,’ Strike continued, unperturbed, ‘but she didn’t question it. Well, she was seven years old. Why would she?
‘Reaney supposedly oversleeping the morning Daiyu disappeared smacked of collusion the moment I heard about it – collusion with Carrie, at the very least. You bought soporific cough medicine or similar, in sufficient quantities to drug the rest of the kids, on one of your trips outside the farm. You volunteered yourself and Carrie for dormitory duty, but you never showed up. You were waiting outside the window, for Carrie to pass Daiyu out to you.’
Abigail had begun to shake again. Her handsome head trembled. She tried to light a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one, but had to give up, resorting to the Zippo again.
‘The idea of the faked drowning is obviously to provide a cast iron alibi for the murderer – or murderers, plural. Did you or Reaney actually do the deed? You’d have needed two people, I expect, to stop her screaming and finish her off. Then, of course, you needed to dispose of the body.
‘Paul Draper got in trouble for letting the pigs out, but that wasn’t an accident, it was part of the plan. Some of those pigs were smuggled out into the woods and put into a pen constructed of posts and rope. My partner informs me pigs can be pretty vicious. I’d imagine it took all four of you to get them where you wanted them, or did Dopey have particular pig expertise you called into service?’
Abigail didn’t answer, but continued to smoke.
‘So you’d corralled the pigs in the woods… and someone, of course, had got hold of a hatchet.
‘What did Daiyu think was going to happen, once you’d led her off into the trees, in the dark? Midnight feast? Nice new game you had for her? Were you holding her hand? Was she excited?’
Abigail was now shaking uncontrollably. She moved the cigarette to her lips, but missed the first time. Her eyes were jet black.
‘When did she realise it wasn’t a game?’ said Strike. ‘When you pinned her arms to her sides so Reaney could throttle her? I don’t think the hatchet can have come into play until she was dead. You couldn’t risk screams. It’s very quiet at Chapman Farm at night.
‘Have you ever heard of Constance Kent?’ Strike asked her.
Abigail merely stared at him, trembling.
‘She was sixteen when she stabbed her three-year-old half-brother to death. Jealous of her father preferring him to her. It happened in the 1860s. She served twenty years, then got out, went to Australia and became a nurse. Is that what the firefighter stuff was about? Trying to atone? Because I don’t think you’re completely conscience-free, are you? Not if you’re still having nightmares about hacking Daiyu to pieces so the pigs could eat her more easily. You told me you “hate it when there’s kids involved”. I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet it brings back worse bloody memories than Pirates of the Caribbean.’
Abigail was white. Her eyes, like her father’s, had become as black and empty as boreholes.
‘I give you credit for the lie you told Patrick after he heard you screaming in your sleep, but once again, your lie gives something away. A whip, used on Jordan Reaney. You remembered that, and you associated it with Daiyu’s death. Was he whipped because he should have been supervising Draper? Or because he’d failed to find the lost pigs?’
Abigail now dropped her gaze to the table top, rather than look at Strike.
‘So: Daiyu’s dead, you’ve left Reaney to clean up the last of the mess, with instructions to set the pigs free once they’ve eaten the body parts, and to destroy the makeshift pen. You hurry off for early duty. You’d picked your companions for that morning carefully, hadn’t you? Two men who’d be exceptionally easy to manipulate. “Did you see that, Brian? Did you see it, Paul? Carrie was driving Daiyu! Did you see her wave at us?” Because, obviously,’ said Strike, ‘the thing in the passenger seat – which had to be wearing the white dress, because Daiyu had worn her tracksuit into the woods – couldn’t have waved, could it?’
Abigail said nothing, but continued to smoke, her fingers trembling.
‘It took me far longer than it should have done to realise what was in that van with Carrie,’ Strike went on. ‘Especially as Kevin Pirbright had written it on his bedroom wall. Straw. All those straw figures, made annually for the Manifestation of the Stolen Prophet. If Jonathan Wace’s daughter wants to have some fun crafting with straw in a barn, who’s going to stop her? Wouldn’t have taken nearly as long to construct a miniature version, would it?
‘Carrie’s careful to let herself be seen in Cromer, carrying the figure in the white dress down towards the water in the dark, because it’s important to establish that she and Daiyu actually went to the beach. I interviewed the Heatons, the couple Carrie met on the beach, after she came back out of the water. They bought the whole thing, they never suspected there was no child; they saw the shoes and the dress and believed Carrie – although Mrs Heaton had her doubts about whether Carrie was genuinely distressed. She mentioned a bit of nervous giggling.
‘I didn’t twig about the straw figure when Mr Heaton told me the van was covered in “muck and straw”. Didn’t even catch on when his wife told me Carrie had run off to poke at something – seaweed, she thought – when the police turned up. Of course, the sun would’ve been coming up by then. Bit weird, for a clump of wet straw to be lying on the beach. Carrie would have wanted to break that up and throw it back into the sea.
‘Ever since the Heatons told me she was a champion swimmer, though, I’ve wondered whether that was relevant to the plan. It was, of course. You’d need to be a powerful swimmer to get right out into deep water, deep enough to make sure you weren’t going to send all that straw straight back to the beach, keep your head above water while you untied it, and stay afloat while you broke it all apart. Genius plan, really, and a very accomplished bit of business from Carrie.’
Abigail continued to stare at the table, her cigarette-holding hand still shaking.
‘But there were a few slip-ups along the way,’ said Strike. ‘Bound to be, with a plan that complicated – which leads us right back to Becca Pirbright.
‘Why, when Becca’s sister told her she’d seen Daiyu climbing out of the window, did Becca come up with a cock and bull story about invisibility? Why, when Becca’s brother said he’d seen you trying to burn something in the woods – I presume Reaney didn’t do the job of destroying the pig pen thoroughly enough, and you wanted to finish the job, even if it was raining – did Becca insist he shouldn’t snitch? Why was Becca helping you cover everything up? What could have convinced an eleven-year-old to keep quiet, and keep others quiet, when she could have run straight to your father and Mazu with these odd stories, and gained their approval?’
Abigail now raised her eyes to look at Strike, and he thought she wanted to hear the answer, because she didn’t know it herself.
‘If ever anyone manages to de-programme Becca, which might be impossible by now, I think she’ll tell quite a strange story.
‘I don’t think Becca’s first impulse, on hearing what her brother and sister had witnessed, would have been to go to her own mother, or to the church Principals. I think she’d have gone straight to Carrie, who she seems to have worshipped as the only mother figure she’d ever really known. Becca’s sister told my partner that Becca would have done literally anything for Carrie.
‘I think Carrie panicked when she heard there were witnesses to Daiyu going out of the window and you burning rope in the woods. She’d gone along with the fake drowning because she was terrified of you, but I think she hoped, even while she was enacting the plan, that the thing wasn’t really going to come off. She might have hoped you’d set her up for a practical joke, or that you’d get cold feet when it came to actually killing your stepsister in the woods.
‘I think, when Becca kept going to Carrie with odd little bits of information she’d gleaned from her siblings, and maybe strange happenings and behaviours she’d picked up on herself, Carrie panicked. She knew this clever little girl must be shut down and persuaded that every anomaly, every inexplicable event, has an explanation – an explanation that must be kept secret, because she was worried that if you found out Becca knew a bit too much, she’d be the next child to get chopped to bits in the woods.
‘Now, what do we know about Carrie?’ said Strike. ‘Good swimmer, obviously. Runaway. Has been indoctrinated for the previous two years in all the mystic crap at Chapman Farm. Loves kids, and is loved back.
‘I think she cobbled together some story about Daiyu’s spiritual destiny to explain anything weird Becca and her siblings might have noticed. I think she fed Becca a line about Daiyu not being really dead, that the things she or her siblings had witnessed had mystic explanations. She encouraged Becca to come to her with anything else she’d heard or noticed, so Carrie could tie them in with her nonsense story about dematerialisation and resurrection, in which she’d played her own pre-ordained part, and I think she told Becca all of this was going to be their special secret, as the Blessed Divinity wanted.
