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The woman’s eyes darted to the opposite neighbour’s windows, and back to Strike. He was interested in the fact that she wasn’t asking them to repeat their names, as people often did, whether out of confusion, or to play for time. He had the feeling their appearance wasn’t entirely a surprise, that she’d been dreading something of this kind. Perhaps the UHC had a Facebook page, and she’d seen attacks on him and Robin there, or perhaps she’d been dreading this reckoning for years.
The seconds ticked past and Carrie remained frozen, and it was already too late to credibly deny that she didn’t know what they were talking about, or that she’d ever been Cherie Gittins.
‘All righ’,’ she said at last, her voice barely audible.
She turned and walked towards the front door. Strike and Robin followed.
The interior of the small house smelled of Pledge. The only thing out of place in the hall was a small, pink doll’s pushchair, which Carrie moved aside so that Strike and Robin could enter the combination sitting and dining room, which had pale blue wallpaper and a blue three-piece suite bearing stripy mauve cushions, all of which were balanced on their points.
Enlarged family photographs in pewter-coloured frames covered the wall behind the sofa. Carrie Curtis Woods’ two little girls, familiar to Strike from his perusal of her Facebook page, were pictured over and over again, sometimes with one or other of their parents. Both daughters were blonde, dimpled and always beaming. The younger child had several missing teeth.
‘Your daughters are lovely,’ said Robin, turning to smile at Carrie. ‘They’re not here?’
‘No,’ said Carrie, in a croak.
‘Play date?’ asked Robin, who was trying to quieten the woman’s nerves.
‘No. I jus’ took them over to their nana’s. They wan’ed to give her the presents they got her, in Spain. We’ve been on holiday.’
There was barely a trace of London in her voice now: she spoke with a Bristol drawl, the vowels elongated, consonants at the end of words cut off. She dropped into an armchair, setting her shopper onto the floor beside her feet.
‘You can siddown,’ she said weakly. Strike and Robin did so, on the sofa.
‘How long have you lived in Thornbury, Carrie?’ Robin asked.
‘Ten – ’leven years?’
‘What made you move here?’
‘I met my husband,’ she said. ‘Nate.’
‘Right,’ said Robin, smiling.
‘He wuz on a stag weekend. I wuz workin’ in the pub when they all come in.’
‘Ah.’
‘So I moved, ’cause he lived here.’
Further small talk revealed that Carrie had moved to Thornbury a mere two weeks after meeting Nathan in Manchester. She’d got herself a waitressing job in Thornbury, she and Nate had found themselves a rented flat, and married just ten months later.
The speed with which she’d relocated to be with a man she’d only just met and her chameleon-like transformation into what might have been a Thornbury native made Strike think Carrie was of a type he’d met before. Such people clung to more dominant personalities, training themselves like mistletoe on a tree, absorbing their opinions, their mannerisms and mirroring their style. Carrie, who’d once ringed her eyes in black liner before driving her knife-toting boyfriend to rob a pharmacy and stab an innocent bystander, was now telling Robin in her adopted accent that the local schools were very good and talked with something like reverence about her husband: what long hours he worked, and how he had no truck with people who didn’t, because he was like that, he’d always been a grafter. Her nerves seemed to dissipate slightly during the banal conversation. She seemed glad of the opportunity to set out the little stall of her life for the detectives’ consideration. Whatever she’d once been, she was blameless now.
‘So,’ said Strike, when a convenient pause presented itself, ‘we’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right. We’ve been hired to look into the Universal Humanitarian Church and we’re particularly interested in what happened to Daiyu Wace.’
Carrie gave a little twitch, as though some invisible entity had tugged her strings.
‘We hoped you might be able to fill in a few details about her,’ said Strike.
‘All righ’,’ said Carrie.
‘Is it all right if I take notes?’
‘Yeah,’ said Carrie, watching Strike draw out his pen.
‘You confirm you’re the woman who was living at Chapman Farm in 1995, under the name Cherie Gittins?’
Carrie nodded.
