The woman’s eyes darted to the opposite neighbour’s windows, and back to Strike. He was interested in the fact that she wasn’t asking them to repeat their names, as people often did, whether out of confusion, or to play for time. He had the feeling their appearance wasn’t entirely a surprise, that she’d been dreading something of this kind. Perhaps the UHC had a Facebook page, and she’d seen attacks on him and Robin there, or perhaps she’d been dreading this reckoning for years.
The seconds ticked past and Carrie remained frozen, and it was already too late to credibly deny that she didn’t know what they were talking about, or that she’d ever been Cherie Gittins.
‘All righ’,’ she said at last, her voice barely audible.
She turned and walked towards the front door. Strike and Robin followed.
The interior of the small house smelled of Pledge. The only thing out of place in the hall was a small, pink doll’s pushchair, which Carrie moved aside so that Strike and Robin could enter the combination sitting and dining room, which had pale blue wallpaper and a blue three-piece suite bearing stripy mauve cushions, all of which were balanced on their points.
Enlarged family photographs in pewter-coloured frames covered the wall behind the sofa. Carrie Curtis Woods’ two little girls, familiar to Strike from his perusal of her Facebook page, were pictured over and over again, sometimes with one or other of their parents. Both daughters were blonde, dimpled and always beaming. The younger child had several missing teeth.
‘Your daughters are lovely,’ said Robin, turning to smile at Carrie. ‘They’re not here?’
‘No,’ said Carrie, in a croak.
‘Play date?’ asked Robin, who was trying to quieten the woman’s nerves.
‘No. I jus’ took them over to their nana’s. They wan’ed to give her the presents they got her, in Spain. We’ve been on holiday.’
There was barely a trace of London in her voice now: she spoke with a Bristol drawl, the vowels elongated, consonants at the end of words cut off. She dropped into an armchair, setting her shopper onto the floor beside her feet.
‘You can siddown,’ she said weakly. Strike and Robin did so, on the sofa.
‘How long have you lived in Thornbury, Carrie?’ Robin asked.
‘Ten – ’leven years?’
‘What made you move here?’
‘I met my husband,’ she said. ‘Nate.’
‘Right,’ said Robin, smiling.
‘He wuz on a stag weekend. I wuz workin’ in the pub when they all come in.’
‘Ah.’
‘So I moved, ’cause he lived here.’
Further small talk revealed that Carrie had moved to Thornbury a mere two weeks after meeting Nathan in Manchester. She’d got herself a waitressing job in Thornbury, she and Nate had found themselves a rented flat, and married just ten months later.
The speed with which she’d relocated to be with a man she’d only just met and her chameleon-like transformation into what might have been a Thornbury native made Strike think Carrie was of a type he’d met before. Such people clung to more dominant personalities, training themselves like mistletoe on a tree, absorbing their opinions, their mannerisms and mirroring their style. Carrie, who’d once ringed her eyes in black liner before driving her knife-toting boyfriend to rob a pharmacy and stab an innocent bystander, was now telling Robin in her adopted accent that the local schools were very good and talked with something like reverence about her husband: what long hours he worked, and how he had no truck with people who didn’t, because he was like that, he’d always been a grafter. Her nerves seemed to dissipate slightly during the banal conversation. She seemed glad of the opportunity to set out the little stall of her life for the detectives’ consideration. Whatever she’d once been, she was blameless now.
‘So,’ said Strike, when a convenient pause presented itself, ‘we’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right. We’ve been hired to look into the Universal Humanitarian Church and we’re particularly interested in what happened to Daiyu Wace.’
Carrie gave a little twitch, as though some invisible entity had tugged her strings.
‘We hoped you might be able to fill in a few details about her,’ said Strike.
‘All righ’,’ said Carrie.
‘Is it all right if I take notes?’
‘Yeah,’ said Carrie, watching Strike draw out his pen.
‘You confirm you’re the woman who was living at Chapman Farm in 1995, under the name Cherie Gittins?’
Carrie nodded.
‘When did you first join the church?’ asked Robin.
‘Ninety… three,’ she said. ‘I think. Yeah, ninety-three.’
‘What made you join?’
‘I wen’ along to a meetin’. In London.’
‘What attracted you to the UHC?’ asked Strike.
‘Nothin’,’ said Carrie baldly. ‘The buildin’ wuz warm, tha’s all. I’d run off… run away from home. I wuz sleepin’ in a hostel… I didn’t get on with my mum. She drank. She had a new boyfriend and… yeah.’
‘How soon after that meeting did you go to Chapman Farm?’ asked Strike.
‘I wen’ right after the meetin’ finished… they had a minibus outside.’
Her hands were clutching each other, the knuckles white. There was a henna tattoo drawn onto the back of one of them, doubtless done in Spain. Perhaps, Robin thought, her small daughters had also had flowers and curlicues drawn onto their hands.
‘What did you think of Chapman Farm, when you got there?’ asked Strike.
There was a long pause.
‘Well, it wuz… weird, wuzn’ it?’
‘Weird?’
‘Yeah… I liked some of it though. I liked bein’ with the kids.’
‘They liked you, too,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve heard some very nice things about you from a woman called Emily. She’d have been around seven or eight when you knew her. D’you remember her? Emily Pirbright?’
‘Emily?’ said Carrie distractedly. ‘Um – maybe. I’m not sure.’
‘She had a sister, Becca.’
‘Oh… yeah,’ said Carrie. ‘Have you – where’s Becca, now?’
‘Still in the church,’ said Robin. ‘Both sisters are. Emily told me she really loved you – that both of them did. She said all the kids felt that way about you.’
Carrie’s mouth made a tragi-comic downwards arc and she began to cry, noisily.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ said Robin hastily, as Carrie bent down to the shopper at her feet and extracted a packet of tissues from its interior. She mopped her eyes and blew her nose, saying through her sobs,
‘Sorry, sorry…’
‘No problem,’ said Strike. ‘We understand this must be difficult.’
‘Can I get you anything, Carrie?’ said Robin. ‘A glass of water?’
‘Y–y–yes please,’ wept Carrie.
Robin left the room for the kitchen, which lay off the dining area. Strike let Carrie cry without offering words of comfort. He judged her distress to be genuine, but it would set a bad precedent to make her think tears were the way to soften up her interviewers.
Robin, who was filling a glass with tap water in the small but spotless kitchen, noticed Carrie’s daughters’ paintings on the fridge door, all of which were signed either Poppy or Daisy. One was captioned Me and Mummy and showed two blonde figures hand in hand, both wearing princess dresses and crowns.
‘Thank you,’ whispered Carrie when Robin returned to the sitting room and handed her the glass. She took a sip, then looked up at Strike again.
‘OK to continue?’ he asked formally. Carrie nodded, her eyes now reddened and swollen, the mascara washed away onto her cheeks, leaving them grey. Strike thought she looked like a piglet, but Robin was reminded of the teenaged girls keeping vigil before the Manifestation of the Drowned Prophet.
‘So you met Daiyu for the first time at the farm?’ asked Strike.
Carrie nodded.
‘What did you think of her?’
‘Thought she wuz lovely,’ said Carrie.
‘Really? Because a few people have told us she was spoiled.’
‘Well… maybe a bit. She wuz still sweet.’
‘We’ve heard you spent a lot of time with her.’
‘Yeah,’ said Carrie, after another brief pause, ‘I s’pose I did.’
‘Emily told me,’ said Robin, ‘that Daiyu used to boast you and she were going to go away and set up house together. Is that true?’
‘No!’ said Carrie, sounding shocked.
‘Daiyu made that up, did she?’ said Strike.
‘If – if she said it, yeah.’
‘Why d’you think she’d claim she was going to leave to live with you?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Maybe to make the other children jealous?’ suggested Robin.
‘Maybe,’ agreed Carrie, ‘yeah.’
‘How did you like the Waces?’ asked Strike.
‘I… thought the same as everyone else.’
‘What d’you mean by that?’
‘Well, they wuz… they could be strict,’ said Carrie, ‘but it wuz for a good cause, I s’pose.’
‘You thought that, did you?’ said Strike. ‘That the church’s cause was good?’
‘It did good things. Some good things.’
‘Did you have any particular friends at Chapman Farm?’
‘No,’ said Carrie. ‘You weren’ supposed to have special friends.’
She was holding her water tightly. Its surface was shivering.
‘All right, let’s talk about the morning you took Daiyu to Cromer,’ said Strike. ‘How did that come about?’
Carrie cleared her throat.
‘She jus’ wan’ed to go with me to the beach.’
‘Had you ever taken any other children to the beach?’
‘No.’
‘But you said yes to Daiyu?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘Well – ’cause she wan’ed to go, and – she kept goin’ on about it – so I agreed.’
‘Weren’t you worried about what her parents would say?’ asked Robin.
‘A bit,’ said Carrie, ‘but I thought we’d get back before they wuz awake.’
‘Walk us through what happened,’ said Strike. ‘How did you wake yourself up so early? There aren’t clocks at Chapman Farm, are there?’
Cherie looked unhappy that he knew this, and he was reminded of Jordan Reaney’s clear displeasure that Strike had so much information.