‘That’s not me,’ said Abigail.
‘Oh, I’m not saying I can prove this girl’s you,’ said Strike. ‘But Rosie Fernsby’s very clear it’s not her. You tried to stop us talking to her, not because she was in these pictures, but because she wasn’t. And she remembers you clearly. She says you threw your weight around a lot – “porky” was how she described you, by strange coincidence. Naturally, she’d have been especially interested in you, because you were the daughter of the much older man she’d convinced herself she was in love with.
‘It was pretty stupid of you to tell me Mazu made people wear masks while crawling around on the ground. Obviously I understand where you got the idea, and that you were trying to add a nice flourish to your depiction of her as a sociopath, but nobody else has mentioned pig masks used in the context of punishment. It’s important not to use incriminating things in their wrong context, even in service of a cover story. Many a liar slips up that way. Signposts to things you might not want looked at.’
He paused again. Abigail remained silent.
‘So,’ said Strike, ‘there you are at Chapman Farm, throwing your weight around, with three vulnerable people at your beck and calclass="underline" a juvenile criminal who’s hiding from the police, a boy who was mentally sub-par even before you helped kick the shit out of him, and a runaway girl who was never going to trouble Mensa.
‘As Papa J’s entitled firstborn, you were allowed out of the farm to buy things: chocolate, little toys, a Polaroid camera, pig masks – biscuits, if you fancied them. You could pick and choose, within the constraints of Mazu’s iron regime, which was probably more stringent when your father wasn’t around, what jobs you preferred. You might not have had the option to lie in bed all day eating biscuits, but you could decide whether – to take a random example – you wanted to share childcare duty overnight with Carrie, and who you wanted on early duty with you, in the morning.’
‘All of this,’ said Abigail, ‘is specker – specla—’
‘Speculation. You’ll have a lot of time on your hands in prison, serving life. You could do some Open Univ—’
‘Fuck you.’
‘You’re right, of course, this is all speculation,’ said Strike. ‘Until, that is, Jordan Reaney realises he’s up to his neck in the shit and starts talking. Until other people who remember you at Chapman Farm in the eighties and nineties come crawling out of the woodwork.
‘I think you and Daiyu were both spoiled and neglected at Chapman Farm, with a couple of important differences. Mazu genuinely detested you, and abused you during your father’s absences. You were grieving the loss of your mother. You were also obsessively envious of the attention your only remaining parent showed towards your bratty stepsister. You wanted to be Popsicle’s pet again and you didn’t like him cooing over Daiyu – or, more accurately, the money she was worth. You wanted retribution.’
Abigail continued to smoke in silence.
‘Of course,’ said Strike, ‘the problem you had inside Chapman Farm – as, indeed, you’ve had outside it – is that you couldn’t pick the people who were best for the job, you had to take what you could get, which meant your obedient pig-mask lackeys.
‘Daiyu had to be lulled into a false sense of security, and kept quiet while it was happening. Bribes of toys and sweets, secret games with the big kids: she didn’t want the treats or the attention to dry up, so she didn’t tell Mazu or your father what was going on. That was a kid who was starved of proper attention. Maybe she wondered why her big sister—’
‘She wasn’t my fuckin’ sister!’
‘—was suddenly being so nice to her,’ Strike continued, unperturbed, ‘but she didn’t question it. Well, she was seven years old. Why would she?
‘Reaney supposedly oversleeping the morning Daiyu disappeared smacked of collusion the moment I heard about it – collusion with Carrie, at the very least. You bought soporific cough medicine or similar, in sufficient quantities to drug the rest of the kids, on one of your trips outside the farm. You volunteered yourself and Carrie for dormitory duty, but you never showed up. You were waiting outside the window, for Carrie to pass Daiyu out to you.’
Abigail had begun to shake again. Her handsome head trembled. She tried to light a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one, but had to give up, resorting to the Zippo again.
‘The idea of the faked drowning is obviously to provide a cast iron alibi for the murderer – or murderers, plural. Did you or Reaney actually do the deed? You’d have needed two people, I expect, to stop her screaming and finish her off. Then, of course, you needed to dispose of the body.
‘Paul Draper got in trouble for letting the pigs out, but that wasn’t an accident, it was part of the plan. Some of those pigs were smuggled out into the woods and put into a pen constructed of posts and rope. My partner informs me pigs can be pretty vicious. I’d imagine it took all four of you to get them where you wanted them, or did Dopey have particular pig expertise you called into service?’
Abigail didn’t answer, but continued to smoke.
‘So you’d corralled the pigs in the woods… and someone, of course, had got hold of a hatchet.
‘What did Daiyu think was going to happen, once you’d led her off into the trees, in the dark? Midnight feast? Nice new game you had for her? Were you holding her hand? Was she excited?’
Abigail was now shaking uncontrollably. She moved the cigarette to her lips, but missed the first time. Her eyes were jet black.
‘When did she realise it wasn’t a game?’ said Strike. ‘When you pinned her arms to her sides so Reaney could throttle her? I don’t think the hatchet can have come into play until she was dead. You couldn’t risk screams. It’s very quiet at Chapman Farm at night.
‘Have you ever heard of Constance Kent?’ Strike asked her.
Abigail merely stared at him, trembling.
‘She was sixteen when she stabbed her three-year-old half-brother to death. Jealous of her father preferring him to her. It happened in the 1860s. She served twenty years, then got out, went to Australia and became a nurse. Is that what the firefighter stuff was about? Trying to atone? Because I don’t think you’re completely conscience-free, are you? Not if you’re still having nightmares about hacking Daiyu to pieces so the pigs could eat her more easily. You told me you “hate it when there’s kids involved”. I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet it brings back worse bloody memories than Pirates of the Caribbean.’
Abigail was white. Her eyes, like her father’s, had become as black and empty as boreholes.
‘I give you credit for the lie you told Patrick after he heard you screaming in your sleep, but once again, your lie gives something away. A whip, used on Jordan Reaney. You remembered that, and you associated it with Daiyu’s death. Was he whipped because he should have been supervising Draper? Or because he’d failed to find the lost pigs?’
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?’