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‘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.
