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‘So she’s still there?’ said Lucy, now breathing fast. ‘At the farm?’
‘Yeah. As I say, she married—’
‘If she was a victim,’ said Lucy, through clenched teeth, ‘she sure as hell spread it around.’
‘Why d’you say that?’ said Strike.
‘Because she – because she—’
Lucy was shaking. For a couple of seconds she said nothing, then a torrent of words exploded from her.
‘D’you know how glad I was, knowing I was having a boy, every single time they scanned me? Every single time. I didn’t want a girl. I knew I’d’ve been a lousy mother to a girl.’
‘You’d’ve been—’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Lucy fiercely. ‘I’d have barely let her out of my sight! I know it happens to boys too, I know it does, but the odds – the odds – it was only the girls at Aylmerton. Only the girls.’
Lucy continued to breathe very hard, intermittently dabbing her eyes with kitchen roll. Strike knew it was cowardice, because he could tell Lucy needed to tell him, but he didn’t want to ask any more questions, because he didn’t want to hear the answers.
‘She took me to him,’ said Lucy at last.
‘To who?’
‘Dr Coates,’ said Lucy. ‘I fell over. She must’ve been fifteen, sixteen. She had me by the hand. I didn’t want to go. “You should see the doctor.” She was half-dragging me.’
Another brief silence unrolled through the room, but Strike could feel Lucy’s rage battling with her habitual reserve and her determination to pretend that the life to which Leda had subjected them was as long dead as Leda herself.
‘Did he,’ said Strike slowly, ‘touch—’
‘He pushed four fingers inside me,’ said Lucy brutally. ‘I bled for two days.’
‘Oh fuck,’ said Strike, wiping his face with his hand. ‘Where was I?’
‘Playing football,’ said Lucy. ‘I was playing, as well. That’s how I fell. You probably thought she was helping me.’
‘Shit, Luce,’ said Strike. ‘I’m so—’
‘It’s not your fault, it’s my so-called mother’s fault,’ spat Lucy. ‘Where was she? Getting stoned somewhere? Screwing some long-haired weirdo in the woods? And that bitch Mazu shut me in with Coates, and she knew. She knew. And I saw her doing it to other little girls. Taking them to the Crowthers’ rooms. That’s what I talk about most in therapy, why I didn’t tell anyone, why I didn’t stop other little girls getting hurt—’
‘You’re in therapy?’ blurted out Strike.
‘Christ Almighty, of course I’m in therapy!’ said Lucy, in a furious whisper, as somebody, probably Greg, now full of banana cake, walked past the sitting room door and headed upstairs. ‘After that bloody childhood – aren’t you?’
‘No,’ said Strike.
‘No,’ repeated Lucy bitterly, ‘you don’t need it, of course, so self-sufficient, so un-messed-up—’
‘I’m not saying that,’ said Strike. ‘I’m not – bloody hell—’
‘Don’t,’ she snapped, arms wrapped around her torso again. ‘I don’t want – never mind, it doesn’t matter. Except it does matter,’ she said, tears trickling down her face again, ‘I can’t forgive myself for not speaking up. There were other little girls being led away by that Mazu bitch, and I never said anything, because I didn’t want to say what had happened to m—’
The sitting room door opened. Strike was astonished by the abrupt change in Lucy, as she wiped her face dry and straightened her back in an instant, so that when Jack entered, panting and wet-haired, she was smiling.
‘These are great,’ Jack told Strike, beaming, as he held up his bow.
‘Glad to hear it,’ said Strike.
‘Jack, go dry yourself off and then you can have some banana bread,’ said Lucy, for all the world as though she were perfectly happy, and for the very first time in their adult lives, it occurred to Strike that his sister’s determination to cling to stability and her notion of normality, her iron-clad refusal to dwell endlessly on the awful possibilities of human behaviour, was a form of extraordinary courage.
