The sky was a flat grey, with one silvered patch where the sun was attempting to break through. As Strike walked along the high promenade, he pulled his vape pen out of his pocket. Even after losing so much weight over the last year, the end of his stump was sore and the muscles in his right thigh tight. At last he spotted a short stretch of cabins selling coffees, burgers and beach toys, beside which was a small car park.
This, then, was the place where, twenty years previously, Cherie Gittins had parked the old farm truck and carried Daiyu down to the sea.
A salty breeze stung Strike’s tired eyes as he leaned on the railings, and squinted down onto the beach. In spite of the unpropitious weather, there were still people walking over the patches of dun-coloured sand that were strewn with rounded flints, like those that adorned the town’s older walls. A number of roosting seagulls appeared between the sea-worn stones like larger rocks. Strike could see neither seaweed nor shells, nor were there any danger flags flying; the sea looked fairly placid, and its briny smell, coupled with the familiar sound of the rhythmic rush and retreat of the waves, intensified an underlying melancholy he was doing his hardest to keep at bay.
Focus.
Two drownings had happened here, seven years apart, to two individuals connected to Jonathan Wace. What had the sobbing Cherie said to Leonard Heaton? ‘I could have stopped it.’ Not ‘I could have stopped her,’ but ‘I could have stopped it.’ What was ‘it’? A plot, as Kevin Pirbright had written on his bedroom wall? And if so, whose?
It hadn’t escaped Strike’s notice that while three witnesses had seen Cherie and Daiyu driving away from Chapman Farm, and a further witness had seen Cherie carrying Daiyu down onto the beach, there were no witnesses at all for what had actually happened once they reached the sea. Neither the Heatons nor the jogger who’d passed them (who appeared in no press reports) had anything to say about that. For the critical stretch of time in which Daiyu had disappeared forever, the world had only the uncorroborated word of Cherie Gittins, and the myths that had been spun around the Drowned Prophet.
It had still been night when they reached the beach, Strike thought, looking down at the flint-strewn beach. Could Cherie have been meeting somebody secretly here, by arrangement? She’d been a very strong swimmer: had that been part of the plan? Had Cherie plunged into the black water, Daiyu perhaps clinging to her shoulders, so that Daiyu could be taken to a boat moored offshore, where somebody was waiting? Had that person spirited Daiyu away, perhaps killed her and buried her elsewhere, leaving Cherie to swim back to the shore and enact the tragedy of the accidental drowning? Or was it possible that Daiyu was still alive somewhere, living under a different name? After all, some abducted children weren’t killed, but kept captive, or raised by families unconnected to them by blood.
Or had Cherie perhaps carried Daiyu down to the beach because the child had been doped at some point during the journey? She must have been alive and alert on leaving Chapman Farm, given that she’d waved at the people who’d watched the van pass. Could Cherie have given Daiyu a drugged drink en route (‘There was a night when all the kids were given drinks that I now think must have been drugged,’ Kevin Pirbright had written), so that Daiyu drowned, not because she’d waded unwisely into the deeper water, but because she was barely conscious while Cherie held her down beneath the surface? In which case, had Cherie’s swimming prowess been required to drag the body out into deep water, in the hope that it would be forever lost, so that nobody could ever perform a post mortem?
Or did the truth lie between these two theories? A body dragged to a boat, where it could be tied to weights, and disposed of in a patch of water the coastguard wouldn’t think to search, because the tides should have taken Daiyu in an entirely different direction? Yet if a boat had been moored off the dark beach, it would have been exceptionally lucky to escape the notice of the coastguard: the time margins were too slim for anything but a large, powerful vessel to escape the area in time, in which case the Heatons would surely have heard the motor across the sea in the stillness of the dawn.
There was, of course, one other possibility: that this was a case of two genuine accidents, happening in the same place, seven years apart.
Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave…
Strike gazed out at the measureless mass of water, wondering whether what remained of Daiyu was somewhere out there, her bones long since picked clean, entangled in a broken fishing net, perhaps, her skull rolling gently on the sea bed as the waves tumbled far above. In which case, ‘I could have stopped it’ meant ‘I could have stopped her demanding to go to the sea’ or ‘I could have stopped doing everything she told me to do’.
Come off it.
All right, he argued with himself, where’s the evidence it wasn’t a coincidence?
The common denominator. Jonathan Wace.
That’s not evidence. That’s part of the coincidence.
After all, if Wace had planned his stepdaughter’s murder to get his hands on the quarter of a million pounds Daiyu was worth dead, why instruct Cherie to take her to precisely the same spot where his first wife had lost her life?
Because murderers tended to be creatures of habit? Because, having successfully murdered once, they stuck to the same modus operandi ever after? Might Wace have been planning a brazen double bluff to the police? ‘If I was going to drown her, why would I do it there?’ Could Wace have been hubristic enough to believe he could charm everyone into believing it was all a ghastly twist of fate?
Except that there was a problem with this theory, too: the death of the first Mrs Wace really had been an accident. George’s testimony corroborated Abigail’s: Wace hadn’t been in the water when his wife drowned, and had tried his utmost to save her. Unless… watching the waves break on the flints below, Strike wondered whether it was possible to induce an epileptic fit in somebody. He tugged his notebook out of his pocket and wrote a reminder to himself to look into this. He then looked back out to sea, postponing the moment when he’d have to walk again, and thinking about Cherie Gittins.
The girl who’d so foolishly driven her larcenous, knife-toting boyfriend to the pharmacy by daylight a few short years later, and who’d been loose-lipped enough to blurt out ‘I could have stopped it’ to Leonard Heaton outside the coroner’s court, was no mastermind. No, if Daiyu’s disappearance had been planned, Strike was certain Cherie had been a tool, rather than the architect of the plot.
His stomach rumbled loudly. He was tired, hungry and his leg was still aching. The last thing he felt like doing was driving back to London this evening. Turning reluctantly away from the sea, he retraced his steps, registering the presence of an enormous and fairly ugly redbrick hotel facing the pier as he turned back into Garden Street. The temptation of checking in was increased by the sight of the King’s Head pub, which had a paved beer garden, tucked up the High Street to his left. The rear entrance to the redbrick Hotel de Paris (why Paris?) lay directly opposite the beer garden, beckoning invitingly.
Fuck it.
He’d explain the overnight stay to the agency’s pernickety accountant by claiming to have been detained by his investigation. Inside the King’s Head, he glanced at a menu on the bar before ordering a pint of Doom Bar and a burger and chips, justifying the latter by the seven preceding days of good dietary behaviour.
The damp beer garden was deserted, which suited Strike, because he wanted to concentrate. Once settled at a table with his vape pen, he took out his mobile and got back to work. Having looked up lidos in the vicinity of Cherie’s childhood home, he found one in Herne Hill. Not forgetting that her youthful swimming career would have happened under her birth name of Carine Makepeace, Strike kept Googling, and at last, on page four of his search results, he found what he was looking for: an old photo of a swimming team comprising both boys and girls, posted to the Facebook page of a woman called Sarah-Jane Barnett.
There in the middle of the picture was a girl of eleven or twelve, in whose plump face Strike recognised the simpering smile of the teenager later known as Cherie Gittins. Beneath the picture, Sarah-Jane had written:
Happy memories of the old Brockwell Lido! Oh, to be that fit again, but it was easier when I was 12! L-R John Curtis (who we all fancied!!!), Tamzin Couch, Stuart Whitely, Carrie Makepeace, yours truly, Kellie Powers and Reece Summers.
Strike now pulled up the Facebook page of Carrie Curtis Woods, who still hadn’t accepted his follower request. However, he now knew that Cherie had once gone by Carrie too, and better even than that, he had a reason she might have chosen the pseudonym ‘Curtis’: in tribute to a childhood crush.
Having finished his burger, chips and pint, Strike returned to the car park to pick up a small rucksack containing toothbrush, toothpaste, clean underwear and a recharging lead for his phone, which he kept in the boot of his car for unforeseen overnight stays, then walked back to the Hotel de Paris.
He could have predicted the interior from the exterior: there was grandeur in the high archways, crystal chandeliers and sweeping staircase of the lobby, but a whiff of the youth hostel about the cork noticeboard on which a laminated history of the hotel had been printed. Incapable as ever of leaving a question unanswered, Strike cast an eye over this, and learned that the hotel had been established by a man whose family had fled France during the revolution.