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‘Doesn’t matter. We’re just trying to tie names to faces at the moment.’
‘They’re upstairs,’ said Niamh. ‘Shall I—?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ said Strike.
Niamh left the kitchen. Strike helped himself to a biscuit.
‘Bloody nice,’ he said, through a mouthful of chocolate chips.
‘Don’t give him any,’ said Robin, as Basil the dog placed his front paws on Strike’s leg. ‘Chocolate’s really bad for dogs.’
‘She says you can’t have any,’ Strike told the fox terrier, cramming the rest of the biscuit into his mouth. ‘It’s not my decision.’
They heard Niamh’s returning footsteps, and she reappeared.
‘That’s Mum,’ she said, passing a faded Polaroid to Strike.
He guessed it had been taken in the early nineties. Fair-haired Deirdre Doherty looked up at him, wearing a pair of square-framed glasses.
‘Thanks,’ said Strike, making a note. ‘Would you be all right with me taking a picture of this? I won’t take the original.’
Niamh nodded and Strike took a photograph on his mobile.
‘So you were at Chapman Farm for three years?’ Strike asked Niamh.
‘That’s right – not that I knew it until we got out, because there are no clocks or calendars in there.’
‘Really?’ said Robin, thinking of her Thursday night appointments with the plastic rock.
‘No, and they never celebrated birthdays or anything. I can remember walking through the woods and thinking, “Today could be my birthday. I don’t know.” But the people running the place must have known our dates of birth, because certain things happened when you reached different ages.’
‘What kind of things?’ asked Strike.
‘Well, up to the age of nine, you slept in a mixed dormitory. Then you went into a single-sex dormitory, and you had to start keeping a journal for the church elders to read. Obviously, you didn’t say what you were really thinking. I soon found out if I wrote one thing I’d learned and one thing I’d enjoyed, I’d be OK. “Today I learned more about what the false self is,”’ she said, adopting a flat voice, ‘“and ways of fighting my false self. I understand that the false self is the bad part of me that wants bad things. It is very important to defeat the false self. I enjoyed dinner tonight. We had chicken and rice and there were songs.”’
Beneath the table, Basil had finally settled down, his woolly head resting on Robin’s foot.
‘Then, when you turned thirteen, you moved into the adult dorms,’ Niamh continued, ‘and you started attending Manifestations and training to go pure spirit. The children who’d been raised in the church told me pure spirits get special powers. I remember fantasising at night that I’d go pure spirit really fast, and blast apart the walls of the dormitories and grab Mum, Oisin and Maeve and fly away with them… I don’t know whether I thought that was really possible… after you’d been in there a while, you did start to believe mad things.
‘But I can’t tell you how you go pure spirit,’ said Niamh, with a wry smile, ‘because I was only eleven when we left.’
‘So what was the routine, for younger kids?’ asked Strike.
‘Rote learning of church dogma, lots of colouring in, and sometimes going to the temple to chant,’ said Niamh. ‘It was incredibly boring and we were very heavily supervised. No proper teaching. Very occasionally we were allowed to go and play in the woods.
‘I remember this one day – ’ Niamh’s tone lightened a little, ‘– in the woods, Oisin and I found a hatchet. There was this big old tree with a hollow in it. If you climbed up high enough into its branches, you could see down into the hollow. One day Oisin got a long branch and started poking around inside the trunk, and he saw something at the bottom.
‘It was about that big,’ Niamh held her hands a foot apart, ‘and the blade was sort of rusty-looking. It’ll have been used for chopping wood, but Oisin was convinced it had blood on it. We couldn’t get it out, though. We couldn’t reach.
‘We didn’t tell anyone. You learned never to tell anyone anything, even if it was innocent, but we made up this whole story in secret about how Mazu had taken a naughty child into the woods and killed them there. We half-believed it, I think. We were all terrified of Mazu.’
‘You were?’ said Robin.
‘God, yes,’ said Niamh. ‘She was… like nobody I’ve ever met, before or since.’
‘In what way?’ asked Strike.
Niamh gave an unexpected shudder, then a half-ashamed laugh.
