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‘Yeah,’ called Luke back from the hall, and Strike noticed that his voice had broken since he’d last seen the boy. ‘Three–one. They were pathetic.’
‘Fantastic! If you’re muddy, get straight in the shower,’ called Lucy. ‘Uncle Corm’s here,’ she added.
Luke made no response to this, but ran straight upstairs.
Strike’s brother-in-law now entered the kitchen, his tracksuit bottoms damp. Strike supposed he must coach or manage his son’s team. Greg was a quantity surveyor for whom Strike entertained feelings that had never quite reached the level of liking.
‘Everything all right?’ he said, looking from Strike to Lucy.
‘Just been talking about Ted,’ said Lucy, to explain her reddened eyes and heightened colour.
‘Oh. Well, I’ve been telling her, it’s only natural he’s getting a bit forgetful,’ Greg told Strike dismissively. ‘What’s he now, eighty-odd?’
‘Seventy-nine,’ said Lucy.
‘Well, that’s eighty-odd, isn’t it?’ said Greg, heading for the loaf of banana bread.
‘Come through to the living room,’ Lucy told Strike, picking up her tea. ‘We can talk it all over there.’
Greg, who evidently had no desire to talk about his uncle-in-law’s well-being, made no objection at being excluded from the conversation.
The living room, with its beige three-piece suite, was unchanged since the last time Strike had been in there, except that his nephews’ school photos had been updated. A large picture of Uncle Ted and Aunt Joan, dating from the eighties, stood in pride of place on a shelf. Strike well remembered the couple looking like that: Joan’s hair as big as Elnett could make it, stiff in the sea breezes, Ted, the largest and strongest member of the local lifeboat men. As Strike sat down on the sofa, he felt as though he should turn the picture to face the wall before dragging up memories of the Aylmerton Community, because his aunt and uncle had dedicated so much of their lives to trying to protect the niece and nephew whom Leda dumped on them, then removed, as unpredictably as she did everything.
Having shut the door carefully on the rest of her family, Lucy sat down in an armchair and placed her mug of tea on a side table.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.
‘Don’t apologise,’ said Strike. ‘Believe me, I know.’
‘Do you?’ she said, with an odd note in her voice.
‘It was a fucking terrible place,’ said Strike. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten.’
‘Are any of the people who were at the Aylmerton Community still there?’
‘Only one, as far as I know,’ said Strike. ‘She claims to have been a victim of the Crowthers. She’s married to the church’s leader.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Mazu,’ said Strike.
‘Oh God,’ said Lucy, and she covered her face with her hands again.
Horrible suspicions were now assailing Strike. He’d believed nothing more serious than feeling scared and sometimes hungry had happened to either of them at the Aylmerton Community; that they’d narrowly escaped what had later been all over the press. In his memory, he’d always been with Lucy, sticking close, trying to make sure she wasn’t invited anywhere by either of the Crowther brothers. From their adjoining mattresses on the floor, brother and sister had whispered at night about how much they hated the place, about how much they wished Leda would take them away. That was all that had happened, surely? That was what he’d believed, for years.
‘Luce?’ he said.
‘Don’t you remember her?’ said Lucy savagely, dropping her hands. ‘Don’t you remember that girl?’
‘No,’ said Strike truthfully.
His memory was usually excellent, but Aylmerton was a blur to him, more feeling than fact, an ominous black memory hole. Perhaps he’d deliberately tried to forget individuals: better by far to consign the whole lot to a faceless slough that need never be waded through, now it was all over.
‘You do. Very pale. Pointed nose. Black hair. Always wearing kind of tarty clothes.’
Something shifted in Strike’s memory. He saw a pair of very brief shorts, a thin halter-neck top and straggly, dark, slightly greasy hair. He’d been twelve: his hormones hadn’t yet reached the adolescent peak at which the slightest sign of unsupported breasts caused uncontainable, sometimes mortifyingly visible, excitement.
‘Yeah, that rings a bell,’ he said.
