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‘She… I always thought of her as, like, a really big spider. You don’t want to know what it might do to you, you just know you don’t want to be near it. That’s how I felt about Mazu.’
‘We’ve heard,’ said Strike, ‘that there were beatings and whippings.’
‘They kept the children away from anything like that,’ said Niamh, ‘but sometimes you’d see grown-ups with bruises or cuts. You learned never to ask about it.’
‘And we know one boy was tied to a tree in the dark overnight,’ said Robin.
‘Yes, that – that was quite a common punishment, for children, I think,’ said Niamh. ‘Kids weren’t supposed to talk about what had happened to them if they were taken away to be disciplined, but of course people whispered about it, in the dorms. I never got a bad punishment, personally,’ Niamh added. ‘I toed the line and I made sure Oisin and Maeve did, too. No, it wasn’t so much what actually happened to you, as what you were afraid might happen. There was always this feeling of lurking danger.
‘Mazu and Papa J could both do supernatural – I mean, obviously, they weren’t supernatural things, I know that now, but I believed it at the time. I thought they both had powers. Both of them could make objects move, just by pointing at them. I saw him levitate, as well. All the adults believed it was real, or they acted as if they did, so, of course, we did, too. But the worst thing for the children was the Drowned Prophet. You know about her?’
‘We know a bit,’ said Robin.
‘Mazu used to tell us stories about her. She was supposed to have been this perfect little girl who never did anything wrong and was marked for this important destiny. We were taught that she’d drowned on purpose, to prove that spirit is stronger than flesh, but that she came back to Chapman Farm in the white dress she drowned in, and appeared in the woods where she used to play – and we saw her,’ said Niamh quietly. ‘A couple of times at night I saw her, standing in the trees, staring towards our dormitory.’
Niamh shuddered.
‘I know it must have been a trick, but I had nightmares about it for years afterwards. I’d see her outside my bedroom window in Whitby, soaking wet in her white dress, with long black hair like Mazu’s, staring in at me, because we’d all been bad and left Chapman Farm. All the kids at Chapman Farm were petrified of the Drowned Prophet. “She’s listening. She’ll know if you’re lying. She’ll come and find you, in the dark.” That was enough to scare us all into good behaviour.’
‘I’m sure it was,’ said Robin.
Strike now reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded list.
‘Could I go through some names with you, and see whether you remember any of these people?’ he asked Niamh, who nodded. However, she showed no sign of recognition of the first half-dozen names Strike read out.
‘Sorry, it’s so long ago, and unless they were in our dormitory…’
The first name Niamh recognised was that of Kevin Pirbright, and Robin could tell from her reaction that she didn’t know he was dead.
‘Kevin Pirbright, yes! I remember him and his sister, Emily. They were nice. And they had an older sister, Becca, who came back not long after we’d arrived.’
‘What d’you mean, “came back”?’ asked Strike, his pen at the ready.
‘She’d been at the Birmingham centre for three years. She’d been kind of fast-tracked by Papa J, as a future church leader. She was really bossy. A big favourite of Papa J’s and Mazu’s. I didn’t like her much.’
Strike kept reading out names, but Niamh kept shaking her head until Strike said ‘Flora Brewster’.
‘Oh, yes, I think I remember her. She was a teenager, right? I helped her make her first corn dolly – they make them a lot, at Chapman Farm, to sell in Norwich.’
Strike continued working his way down the list of names.
‘Paul Draper? He’d have been older than you. A teenager, as well.’
‘No, can’t remember a Paul.’
‘Jordan Reaney? Also a teenager.’
‘No, sorry.’
‘Cherie Gittins?’
‘No. I mean, they might have been there, but I can’t remember them if they were.’
‘Margaret Cathcart-Bryce?’
‘Oh God, yes, I remember her,’ said Niamh at once. ‘She was really strange and stretched-looking, she’d had so much work done on her face. She was one of the rich women who used to visit the farm all the time. There was another one who liked grooming the horses, and some of the others took “yoga” with Papa J, but Margaret was the richest of the lot.’
Strike kept reading out names, but the only one Niamh recognised was that of Harold Coates.
