AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Not entirely. I’d have asked Cherie to clarify the next couple of points, but unfortunately I can’t, because she hanged herself hours after I interviewed her.’
‘She… wha’?’
Abigail had stopped chewing.
‘Hanged herself,’ repeated Strike. ‘It’s been a bit of a feature of this case, to tell you the truth. After I went to interview Jordan Reaney, he tried to kill himself, too. I’d shown both of them –’
He slid his hand into his coat pocket, extracted his mobile and brought up the pictures of the Polaroids.
‘– these. You can swipe right to see all of them. There are six.’
Abigail took the phone and looked through the pictures, her expression blank.
‘Are those the kinds of pig masks you were made to wear as punishments, by Mazu?’ asked Strike.
‘Yeah,’ said Abigail quietly. ‘That’s them.’
‘Were you ever forced to do anything like this?’
‘Christ, no.’
She pushed the phone back across the table, but Strike said,
‘Would you be able to identify the people in the pictures?’
Abigail drew the phone back towards her and examined them once again, though with obvious reluctance.
‘The tall one looks like Joe,’ she said, after staring for a while at the picture in which Paul Draper was being sodomised.
‘Did he have a tattoo?’
‘Dunno. I was never in the Retreat Rooms wiv ’im.’
She glanced up at Strike.
‘S’pose your partner found out about the Retreat Rooms, did she?’
‘Yes,’ said Strike. ‘D’you think this happened in one of them?’
‘No,’ said Abigail, dropping her gaze to the phone again. ‘The place looks too big. Looks more like a barn. There was never no one takin’ photographs or nuffing in the Retreat Rooms, no group stuff, nuffing like this. It was s’posed to be “spiritual”, what you did in there,’ she said, her mouth twisting. ‘Jus’ one man an’ one woman. An’ that,’ she said, pointing at the picture of the small man being sodomised, ‘was right out. My farver an’ Mazu didn’ like gays. They both ’ad a fing about it.’
‘Can you identify any of the others? The smaller man?’
‘Looks like Dopey Draper, poor sod,’ said Abigail quietly. ‘The girls, I dunno… s’pose that could be Cherie. She was blonde. An’ the dark one, yeah, that could be Rosie whatever-’er-name-was. You didn’t get many chubby girls at Chapman Farm.’
‘Can you remember anyone having a Polaroid camera?’ asked Strike, as Abigail pushed the phone back across the table to him.
‘No, it weren’t allowed. No phones or cameras, nuffin’ like that.’
‘The original Polaroids were found hidden in an old biscuit tin. Long shot, I know, but can you remember anybody at the farm having chocolate biscuits?’
‘’Ow d’you expec’ me to remember chocolate biscuits, all this time after?’
‘It’d be quite unusual to see biscuits at the farm, wouldn’t it? With sugar being banned?’
‘Yeah, but… well, I s’pose someone in the farm’ouse could’ve ’ad ’em, ’idden…’
‘Going back to where your father was, when Daiyu disappeared: there was a man seen on the beach by witnesses, shortly before Cherie emerged from the sea: a jogger. He never came forward when the story of the drowning hit the press. It was dark, so the only description I’ve managed to get is that he was large. Did your father like jogging?’
