Page 167 of The Running Grave

Still puzzled by her reaction, he turned back to the board, eyes now on the pictures in the right-hand column, which featured four people who’d lived at Chapman Farm and met unnatural deaths.

At the top was an old news clipping about the death of Paul Draper, which Strike had found a couple of days earlier. Headlined ‘Couple Sentenced for Killing of “Modern Slave”’, the article detailed how Draper had been sleeping rough when a couple offered him a bed for the night. Both of his putative rescuers had previous convictions for violence, and had set Draper to doing building work for them, forcing him to sleep in their shed. Draper’s death six months later had occurred during a beating. His starved and partially burned body had been discovered on a nearby building site. The detective had had no success in tracing any living relative of Draper, whose picture showed a timid-looking, moon-faced youth of nineteen with short, wispy hair.

Strike’s gaze now moved to the Polaroids Robin had sent from Chapman Farm, showing the naked foursome in pig masks. The hair of the male being sodomised by the tattooed man might possibly be Draper’s, although given the age of the Polaroids, it was impossible to be certain.

Beneath Draper’s picture was the only photo of Kevin Pirbright Strike had been able to find, again taken from the news report of his murder. It showed a pale, apologetic-looking young man whose skin was pitted with acne scars. Beside the picture of Kevin was that of the murder scene. For the umpteenth time, Strike stared at that bit of gouged-out wall, and the single word ‘pigs’ that remained.

The last two pictures on the board were the oldest: those of Jonathan Wace’s first wife, Jennifer, and of Daiyu.

Jennifer Wace’s teased and permed hairstyle reminded Strike of the girls he’d known during his school days in the mid-eighties, but she’d been a very attractive woman. Nothing Strike had found out so far contradicted her daughter’s belief that her drowning had been a complete accident.

Lastly, he turned his attention to the picture of Daiyu. Rabbity-faced, with her overbite and her missing tooth, she beamed out of the blurry newsprint picture at the detective: dead at seven years old, on the same beach as Jennifer Wace.

He turned from the board and reached for his phone again. He’d already made multiple fruitless attempts to contact the Heatons, who’d witnessed Cherie running screaming up the beach after Daiyu’s drowning. Nevertheless, more in hope than expectation, he called their number again.

To his amazement, the phone was answered after three rings.

‘Hello?’ said a female voice.

‘Hi,’ said Strike, ‘is this Mrs Heaton?’

‘No, iss me, Gillian,’ said the woman, who had a strong Norfolk accent. ‘Who’s this?’

‘I’m trying to contact Mr and Mrs Heaton,’ said Strike. ‘Have they sold their house?’

‘No,’ said Gillian, ‘I’m jus’ here waterin’ the plants. They’re still in Spain. Who’s this?’ she asked again.

‘My name’s Cormoran Strike. I’m a private detective, and I was wondering whether I could speak—’

‘Strike?’ said the woman on the end of the line. ‘You’re not him who got that strangler?’

‘That’s me. I was hoping to speak to Mr and Mrs Heaton about the drowning of a little girl in 1995. They were witnesses at the inquest.’

‘Blimey, yeah,’ said Gillian. ‘I remember that. We’re old friends.’

‘Are they likely to be back in the country soon? I’d rather speak to them in person, but if they can’t—’

‘Well, Leonard broke his leg, see,’ said Gillian, ‘so they stopped out in Fuengirola a bit longer. They’ve got a place out there. He’s getting better, though. Shelley reckons they’ll be back in a couple of weeks.’

‘Would you mind asking if they’d be prepared to speak to me when they get home? I’m happy to come to Cromer,’ added Strike, who wanted to take a look at the place Jennifer and Daiyu had died.

‘Oh,’ said Gillian, who sounded quite excited. ‘Right. I’m sure they’d be happy to help.’

Strike gave the woman his number, thanked her, hung up, then turned to face the board on the wall once more.

There was only one other item pinned to it: a few lines of a poem, which had been printed in a local Norfolk newspaper as part of a grieving widower’s tribute to his dead wife.

Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave

Beside her as she struck

Wildly towards the shore, but the blackcapped wave

Crossed her and swung her back…

The imagery was powerful, but it wasn’t Wace’s. Strike had had a feeling upon reading the lines that he’d heard something like them before, and sure enough, he’d traced them to poet George Barker’s ‘On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast’. Wace had taken the opening lines of Barker’s poem and switched the pronouns, for Barker’s friend had been male.

It was a shameless piece of plagiarism and Strike was surprised that nobody at the newspaper had spotted it. He was interested not only in the brazenness of the theft, but in the egoism of the widower who’d wanted to figure as a man of poetic gifts in the immediate wake of his wife’s drowning, not to mention the choice of a poem that described the way in which Jennifer must have died, rather than her qualities in life. Even though Abigail had painted her father as a grifter and a narcissist, she’d claimed Wace had been genuinely upset about her mother’s death. The tawdry act of stealing Barker’s poem to get himself into the local paper was not, in Strike’s view, the act of a man truly grieving at all.