Abigail took another drag on her cigarette, frowning.
‘I’m lost.’
‘I think Kevin Pirbright worked out the truth behind Daiyu’s disappearance before he died, and that’s why he was shot.’
Abigail lowered her cigarette.
‘’E knew?’
‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘’E never said nuffing to me about Daiyu.’
‘He didn’t mention it being an odd coincidence, Daiyu dying exactly where your mother did?’
‘Oh,’ said Abigail. ‘Yeah. ’E did say somefing abou’ that.’
‘Possibly Kevin only put it all together after he’d approached you,’ said Strike.
‘So ’oo called these Delaunay people?’
‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I suspect it was the same person who called Jordan Reaney to find out what he might have let slip to me, and who called Carrie Curtis Woods, and tipped her into suicide.’
Strike’s mobile buzzed, not once, but twice, in quick succession.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Been waiting for this.’
The first text was from Barclay, but he ignored it in favour of Midge’s.
Robin safe. Got Becca and Mazoo shut in temple.
Immensely relieved, Strike opened Barclay’s message, which comprised two words.
Got everything.
Strike sent two texts of his own back, returned his mobile to his pocket, then looked again at Abigail.
‘I said there were four possibilities, to explain Becca’s strange status in the church.’
‘Listen,’ said Abigail impatiently, ‘I’m sorry, but I told Darryl I was gonna be late, not that I was never gonna turn up.’
‘Is Darryl the tall, good-looking black guy with green eyes? Because I know he wasn’t the fat guy driving the red Corsa. That was your lodger, Patrick.’
The pupils of Abigail’s dark blue eyes enlarged suddenly, so that they became as opaque as Strike had seen her father’s.
‘I had to keep you talking,’ said Strike, ‘because there were things that needed doing while you were well out of the way.’
He paused to let her speak, but she said nothing, so he continued,
‘Would you like to hear some of the questions I’ve been pondering, about Daiyu’s drowning in the North Sea?’
‘Tell me what you like,’ said Abigail. She was striving to look unconcerned, but the hand holding her cigarette had begun to shake.
‘I started small,’ said Strike, ‘by wondering why she’d drowned exactly where your mother did, but the deeper into the investigation I got, the more unexplained things started cropping up. Who was buying Daiyu toys and sweets in her last few months at the farm? Why was she wearing a white dress rather than a tracksuit when last seen alive? Why did Carrie strip to her underwear, if they were only going in for a paddle? Why did Carrie run off to poke at something at the water’s edge, right before the police arrived? Who was the second adult, who was supposed to be in the dormitory the night Carrie helped Daiyu out of the window? Why did your father spirit Becca Pirbright away from the farm, after Daiyu vanished?’
Abigail, who’d already ground out her first cigarette under her heel, now took out a second. Having lit it, she blew smoke into Strike’s face. Far from resenting this, Strike took the opportunity to breathe in some nicotine.
‘Then I started thinking hard about Kevin Pirbright’s death. Who gouged some of the writing out of his bedroom wall, leaving only the word “pigs”, and who stole his laptop? Who was Kevin talking about, when he told an undercover detective he was going to meet a bully and “have things out” with them? What exactly did Kevin know – what had he pieced together – such that he deserved a bullet through the brain?
‘Now all of those things, separately, might have explanations. A junkie could’ve stolen his laptop. The kids in the dorm might’ve simply forgotten the second person in charge the last night Daiyu was seen there. But added together, there seemed to be a hell of a lot of unexplained occurrences.’
‘If you say so,’ said Abigail, but her hand was still shaking. ‘But—’
‘I haven’t finished. There was also the question of those phone calls. Who called Carrie Curtis Woods, before my partner and I visited her? Whom did she call back, after we’d left? Who phoned Jordan Reaney, from a call box in Norfolk to throw suspicion on the church, and put him in such a state of fear and alarm he tried to overdose? Who were those two people terrified of, and what had that person threatened them with, that made them both decide they’d rather die than face it? And who called the Delaunays, trying to make them scared Daiyu was still alive, to throw a red herring in my path, and make them even more obstructive?’
Abigail blew smoke towards the ceiling and said nothing.
‘I also wanted to know why there’s a circle of wooden posts in the woods at Chapman Farm that someone once tried to destroy, why there’s an axe hidden in a nearby tree, and why, close by the destroyed ring, somebody once tried to burn some rope.’
Abigail gave a little convulsive jerk at the word ‘rope’, but still said nothing.
‘Maybe you’ll find this more interesting with visual aids,’ said Strike.
Once again, he brought up the pictures of the Polaroids on the phone.
‘That’s not Joe Jackson,’ he said, pointing. ‘That’s Jordan Reaney. That,’ he said, pointing at the blonde, ‘is Carrie Curtis Woods, that’s Paul Draper, but that,’ he pointed at the chubby dark girl, ‘isn’t Rosie Fernsby. That’s you.’
The door behind Strike opened. A bearded man appeared, but Abigail shouted ‘Fuck off!’ and he withdrew precipitately.
‘Military-level discipline,’ said Strike approvingly. ‘Well, you learned from the best.’
Abigail’s irises were now two near-black discs.
‘Now,’ said Strike, ‘you had to identify the tall guy and the dark girl as Joe Jackson and Rosie, because Carrie had already pulled those names out of her arse when she was panicking. None of you realised any of those Polaroids were still hanging around, and none of you expected me to have them.
‘For a frankly embarrassing length of time, I kept asking myself who took those pictures. Not everyone in them looks happy, do they? It looked as though this had been done for punishment, or in service of some sadist’s kink. But finally, I saw what should’ve been obvious: there are never all four of you in one shot. You were all taking pictures of each other.
‘A little secret society of four. I don’t whether you enjoyed sticking two fingers up at the spirit bonding nonsense, or liked fucking for the fun of it, or were just passing on the lessons you’d learned from Mazu and your father, about the pleasures of compelling other people to participate in ritual humiliation and submission.’
‘You’re fucking cracked,’ said Abigail.
‘We’ll see,’ said Strike calmly, before holding up the picture of Draper being sodomised by Reaney. ‘The masks are a nice touch. Extra level of degradation, and also a bit of plausible deniability – you’ll have learned the value of that from your father. I note that you come out of this particular sex session pretty well. Fairly straightforward sex and a bit of vanity posing with your legs open. Nobody’s forcibly sodomising you.’
Abigail merely took another drag on her cigarette.
‘Having realised that you were taking pictures of each other, the obvious question is, why were the other three participating in what doesn’t seem to have been completely pleasurable for them? And the obvious answer is: you had all the power. You were Jonathan Wace’s daughter. Because I don’t buy the Cinderella crap you’ve been feeding me, Abigail. I’m sure Mazu disliked you – stepdaughter, stepmother, that’s hardly uncommon – but I think, as Papa J’s firstborn, you had a lot of leeway, a lot of freedom. You didn’t get to be that weight on the usual diet at Chapman Farm.’