‘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.
‘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.
‘He was a doctor, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s right,’ said Strike. ‘Did you used to see much of him?’
‘I didn’t, but Maeve did. She kept getting nervous rashes. He used to treat her.’
Strike made a note of this, his face expressionless.
‘D’you remember Jonathan Wace’s daughter?’ asked Robin.
‘Well, no,’ said Niamh, looking confused. ‘She was dead.’
‘Sorry, not Daiyu – I mean his elder daughter, Abigail.’
‘Oh, did he have another one?’ said Niamh, surprised. ‘No, I never met her.’
‘OK,’ said Strike, having made a final note, ‘that’s been helpful, thank you. We’re trying to establish a timeline, find out who was there, and when.’
‘I’m sorry I don’t remember more,’ said Niamh.
Cups of tea finished, they all rose from the table, Robin disengaging her foot carefully from Basil.
‘If,’ said Niamh tentatively, ‘you find out anything about Mum, will you let me know?’
‘Of course,’ said Strike.
‘Thank you. Since having Charlie, I think about Mum such a lot… Oisin and Maeve say they don’t care, but I think it would mean a lot to them, too, if we could find out what happened to her…’
Strike, Robin noticed, looked unusually severe as the three of them headed down the hall, even allowing for the natural surliness of his resting expression. At the front door, Robin thanked Niamh for her time and the biscuits. Basil stood panting beside them, tail wagging, evidently convinced he might yet wheedle fun and treats out of the strangers.
Strike now turned to his partner.
‘You go on. I’d like a private word with Niamh.’
Though surprised, Robin asked no questions, but left. When the sound of her footsteps had disappeared, Strike turned back to Niamh.
‘I’m sorry to ask this,’ he said quietly, looking down at her, ‘but has your younger sister ever talked to you about what Harold Coates did, to cure her rashes?’
‘I think he gave her some cream, that’s all,’ said Niamh, looking nonplussed.
‘She’s never talked about anything else that happened, when he was treating her?’
‘No,’ said Niamh, fear now dawning in her face.
‘How old’s your sister now – twenty-one?’
‘Yes,’ said Niamh.
‘Harold Coates was a paedophile,’ said Strike, and Niamh gasped and clapped her hands to her face. ‘I think you should ask her what happened. She’s probably in need of more help than anti-depressants, and it might be a relief to have someone else know.’
‘Oh my God,’ whispered Niamh through her fingers.
‘I’m sorry,’ repeated Strike. ‘It won’t be much consolation, I know, but Maeve was far from the only one.’
22
Nine at the top means:
Look to your conduct and weigh the favourable signs.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘Fancy some lunch while we debrief?’ said Strike, once he was back in the car. ‘Niamh recommended a good place just round the corner,’ he lied. In fact, he’d found the Merlin’s Cave restaurant online, the previous day.
Robin hesitated. Having taken the day off, Murphy would be expecting her back as soon as possible, to spend their last few hours together. Yet their slightly tense phone conversation of the previous evening, in which Murphy had just refrained from becoming openly annoyed, had irked her. Her boyfriend, who supposedly wanted her as well prepared as possible before going undercover, had resented her speaking to a last witness before she went in, and his behaviour was all too reminiscent of her marriage.
‘Yes, OK,’ said Robin. ‘I can’t hang around too long, though, I – er – told Ryan I’d be back.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Strike, happy to have gained lunch. Hopefully, the service would be slow.
Merlin’s Cave, which stood on the village green, was a country pub with a timbered and red brick façade. Strike and Robin were shown to a table for two in a pleasant restaurant area, with glass windows overlooking a rear garden.
‘If I drive back,’ said Strike, as they sat down, ‘you can drink. Last chance for alcohol before Chapman Farm.’
‘I’m not bothered, I can have a drink later,’ said Robin.
‘Murphy’s OK with you drinking in front of him, is he?’