Page 384 of The Running Grave

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.’

‘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 call: 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?