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.
‘I think she cobbled together some story about Daiyu’s spiritual destiny to explain anything weird Becca and her siblings might have noticed. I think she fed Becca a line about Daiyu not being really dead, that the things she or her siblings had witnessed had mystic explanations. She encouraged Becca to come to her with anything else she’d heard or noticed, so Carrie could tie them in with her nonsense story about dematerialisation and resurrection, in which she’d played her own pre-ordained part, and I think she told Becca all of this was going to be their special secret, as the Blessed Divinity wanted.
‘And Becca bought all of it. She kept silent when Carrie told her to, she shut her siblings down, she gave them pseudo-mystical explanations, or told them off for being grasses. Which means, ironically, that the myth of the Drowned Prophet began, not with your father or Mazu, but out of a teenager’s imagination, in service of covering up a murder and silencing a kid who was a danger to all of you.
‘And after the inquest was over, Carrie did a flit, changed her name and tried to forget what she’d colluded in and tried to cover up. I suspect it was at that point that the heartbroken Becca went to your father and told him the whole story. If I had to guess,’ said Strike, watching Abigail closely for her reaction, ‘your father took you aside at some point, probably after he’d talked to Becca.’
Abigail’s lips twitched, but she remained silent.
‘Your father must’ve known you should’ve been in the dormitory that night, and he definitely knew you were on early duty that day and saw the truck pass. He might’ve asked what you were burning in the woods. He’ll have already noted the strange coincidence of Daiyu dying exactly where his first wife did, as though someone was trying to rub his face in it, or even cast suspicion on him. Because he should’ve been on his way to Birmingham with a fifteen-year-old girl when Daiyu “drowned”, shouldn’t he? Whether the police brought him in for questioning about taking an underage girl he’d only known a week on a road trip, or about infanticide, it wouldn’t look very good for a church leader, would it?
‘No, I think your father suspected or guessed that you were behind Daiyu’s disappearance, but being who he is – an amoral narcissist – all he really cared about was hushing it up. He’d just been handed the story of Daiyu ascending to heaven through the divine vessel of Carrie Gittins and he definitely didn’t want his daughter banged up on suspicion of murder – very bad for business. Much better to accept the supernatural explanation, to comfort his distraught wife with this mystic bullshit. Bereaved people will clutch at that kind of stuff, or there wouldn’t be any bloody mediums. So your father strings Becca along; he says, yes, he knew all along Carrie wasn’t a bad person, that she was merely helping Daiyu fulfil her destiny, and how clever of Becca, for seeing the truth.
‘Then he, too, does a bit of expert grooming. Perhaps he told Becca that it had been foreseen that she would come to him as a divine messenger. Maybe he told her the spirit of the prophet lived on in her. He flattered her and groomed her exactly as you groomed Daiyu – but without the ending of the pigs and the axe, in the woods at night.
‘You were shunted off to Birmingham to keep you out of sight and out of trouble, and Becca was secreted somewhere safe, somewhere you couldn’t get at her, where your father indoctrinated her so thoroughly into obedience and chastity and unquestioning loyalty that she’s become a very useful tool for the church. I think she’s been kept in a state of virginity for no other reason than that Wace doesn’t want her getting too close to anyone but him, and also because she’s the one woman he doesn’t want Mazu getting jealous of – because Becca’s the keeper of the biggest secrets. Becca’s the one who could testify that the supernatural explanation for Daiyu’s disappearance came from Carrie, not your father, and she could also tell a story of how expertly Wace fed her vanity, to keep her from ever talking. From what Robin found out at Chapman Farm, Becca might well have moments of lucidity, but it doesn’t seem to overly trouble her. I don’t think there’s a more committed believer in the UHC than Becca Pirbright.’
Strike now sat back in his chair, watching Abigail, who now looked back at him with a strange, calculating expression on her pale face.
‘Are you about to say that’s all speculation, too?’ asked Strike.