‘Who’s the artwork by?’ Robin asked, pointing at the blobby creations on the fridge, and trying to put Niamh more at ease.
‘Oh, my little boy, Charlie,’ said Niamh. ‘He’s two. He’s with his dad this morning. Nigel thought it would be easier for me to talk to you without Charlie here.’
‘I take it that’s Nigel?’ asked Robin, smiling as she pointed at the beach picture.
‘Yes,’ said Niamh. She seemed to feel something needed explaining. ‘I met him at my first job. He was actually my boss.’
‘How lovely,’ said Robin, trying not to feel judgemental. Given Nigel’s hair loss, the couple looked more like father and daughter in the picture.
‘So,’ said Strike, ‘as I said on the phone, we’re after background on the Universal Humanitarian Church. Is it OK if I take notes?’
‘Yes, fine,’ said Niamh nervously.
‘Could we start with what year you and your family went to Chapman Farm?’ asked Strike, clicking out the nib of his pen.
‘1999,’ said Niamh.
‘And you were eight, right?’
‘Yes, and my brother Oisin was six and my sister Maeve was four.’
‘What made your parents join, do you know?’ asked Strike.
‘It was Dad, not Mum,’ said Niamh. ‘He was always a bit, um… it’s hard to describe. When we were little he was politically quite far left, but he’s about as far right as you can go these days. I actually haven’t spoken to him for three years… he just got worse and worse. Weird ranting phone calls, temper tantrums. Nigel thinks I’m better off without contact with him.’
‘Was your family religious?’ asked Strike.
‘Not before the UHC. No, I just remember Dad coming home one evening, incredibly excited, because he’d been to a meeting and got talking to Papa J, who converted him on the spot. It was like Dad had found the meaning of life. He was going on and on about a social revolution. He’d brought home a copy of Papa J’s book, The Answer. Mum just… went along with it,’ said Niamh sadly. ‘Maybe she thought everything would be better inside the church, I don’t know.
‘She told us it’d be fun. We cried about leaving home, and all our friends, she told us not to do it in front of Dad, because he’d be upset. Anything for an easy life, that was Mum… we hated it, though, from the moment we got there. No clothes of our own. No toys. I can remember Maeve sobbing for the cuddly bunny she used to take to bed every night. We’d taken it to the farm, but everything was locked up, the moment we arrived, including Maeve’s bunny.’
Niamh took a sip of tea, then said,
‘I don’t want to be hard on Mum. From what I can remember, she had a tough time with Dad’s mood swings and how erratic he was. She wasn’t very strong, either. She’d had some kind of heart condition since childhood. I remember her as very passive.’
‘Are you still in contact with her?’ asked Robin.
Niamh shook her head. Her eyes had become damp.
‘I haven’t seen her since we left her behind at Chapman Farm, in 2002. She stayed behind, with our younger sister. That’s actually part of the reason I said I’d see you,’ said Niamh. ‘I’d just like to know… if you happened to find out what happened to her… I wrote to the church a few years ago, trying to find out where she was, and I got a letter back saying she left in 2003. I don’t know whether it’s true. Maybe she couldn’t find us after we got out, because Dad took us to Whitby, where we’d never lived before, and he changed our surname. Maybe she didn’t want to find us, I don’t know, or possibly Dad told her to stay away. I think he might have heard from her, though, or from the UHC, after we left, because he got a few letters that made him really angry. Maybe they were forwarded from our old address. Anyway, he’d tear them up really small so we couldn’t read them. We were forbidden from ever mentioning Mum, after we left Chapman Farm.’
‘What made your father take you away, do you know?’ asked Strike.
‘I only know what he was saying as he dragged us out of there. It was night-time. We had to climb out over fences. We all wanted Mum to come with us – we were begging Dad to let us fetch her, and Maeve was calling for her, and Dad hit her. He told us Mum was a slut,’ said Niamh miserably, ‘which was just mad, because in the church, the women are supposed to… I mean, they’re shared, between all the men. But Dad must’ve thought Mum wasn’t joining in with all that, which just – it beggars belief, it really does, but it’s so typical of him. He thought he could join the church and just have the bits he liked, and leave the rest, which was idiotic: the church is completely anti-marriage. Everyone’s supposed to sleep around. From what I heard him telling our uncle afterwards, he didn’t believe Lin was his… I really hate saying all this, because from what I remember of Mum, she was quite – you know – prim. I don’t think she’d have wanted to sleep with people other than Dad. The whole thing’s so… so bizarre,’ said Niamh bleakly. ‘You can’t explain, to people who don’t understand about the UHC. I usually tell people my mum died when I was eleven. It’s just easier.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Robin, who really couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘Oh, I’m all right,’ said Niamh, who no longer looked young, but far older than her years. ‘Compared to Oisin and Maeve, I’ve done fine. They’ve never got over the UHC. Maeve’s always at the doctor’s, constantly signed off sick from work, on tons of different medication. She binge eats, she’s got really big and she’s never had a stable relationship. And Oisin drinks far too much. He’s had kids with two different girls already, and he’s only twenty-three. He works really menial jobs, just to get drinking money. I’ve tried to help, to look after both of them a bit, because I’m the only one who made it through the whole thing kind of intact, and I’ve always felt guilty about that. Both of them are angry at me. “It’s all right for you, you married a rich old man.” But I coped better, right from the moment we got out. I could remember our pre-church life, so the change wasn’t such a shock. I caught up at school quicker than the other two and I’d had Mum around longer… but to this day, I can’t stand David Bowie. The UHC used to play “Heroes” all the time, to get people revved up. It doesn’t even have to be that song. Just the sound of his voice… when Bowie died, and they were playing his music non-stop on the radio, I hated it…’
‘Would you happen to have any photographs of your mother?’ Strike asked.
‘Yes, but they’re very old.’
‘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.