Strike read the letter through twice, taking particular note of the ‘I’m so tired’ at the end. He had to admire Robin’s resourcefulness in thinking up a way of obfuscating her relatives’ whereabouts at short notice, but like her, felt he should have foreseen the necessity for a safe address for mail. Strike also wondered whether there’d been a letter for Murphy this week, but could think of no way of asking without arousing the suspicions of Pat and the other subcontractors. Instead, he texted Midge to ask her to write the letter from Theresa, as he feared his own handwriting looked too obviously masculine.
As Ted’s snores were still emanating from the sitting room, Strike opened his next email, which was from Dev Shah.
Having spent hours the previous day searching online records for Cherie Gittins under her birth name of Carine Makepeace, Strike had at last succeeded in finding her birth certificate and death certificates for both her father, who’d died when she was five, and the cousin in Dulwich with whom she’d stayed after fleeing Chapman Farm. However, Cherie’s mother, Maureen Agnes Makepeace, née Gittins, was still alive and living in Penge, so Strike had asked Shah to pay her a visit.
Visited Ivychurch Close this morning, Shah had written. Maureen Makepeace and her flat are both falling apart. She looks & talks like a heavy drinker, v aggressive. Neighbour called out to me as I was approaching the front door. He hoped I was from the council, because there’ve been arguments over bins, noise, etc. Maureen says she’s had no contact with her daughter since the latter ran away, aged 15.
Inured as he was to leads petering out in this way, Strike was nevertheless disappointed.
He made himself a mug of tea, resisted a chocolate biscuit, and sat back down in front of his laptop while Ted’s snores continued to rumble through the open door.
The difficulty he was having tracing Carine/Cherie was making Strike commensurately more interested in her. He now began Googling combinations and variations of the two names he knew for certain the girl had used. Only when he returned to the British Library’s newspaper archive did he finally get a hit on the name ‘Cherry Makepeace’ in a copy of the
The news story described a robbery and stabbing committed by Isaac Mills, which was the name of the young man with the bad teeth. He’d stolen morphine, temazepam, diazepam and cash from a pharmacy before knifing a customer who’d tried to intervene. The victim had survived, but Mills had still been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
The report concluded:
Cherry Makepeace, 21, also known as Cherry Curtis, drove Mills to the pharmacy on the day of the robbery and waited for him outside. Makepeace claimed she was unaware of Mills’ intention to rob the pharmacy and didn’t know he possessed a knife. She was convicted of aiding and abetting a criminal and received a six-month sentence, suspended for three years.
Strike jotted down the names Carine/Cherie/Cherry along with the surnames Gittins/Makepeace/Curtis. Where the last of these had come from, he had no idea; perhaps she’d simply pulled it out of thin air. The regular name changes suggested someone keen not to be found, but Strike tended to believe that Colonel Graves’ assessment of Cherie as ‘feather-brained’ and ‘easily influenced’ had been correct, given her dumbstruck look in the
He now navigated to the Pinterest page of Torment Town, with its eerie drawings of Daiyu Wace and grotesque parodies of the UHC logo. Torment Town hadn’t responded to the message Strike had sent them, over which he’d taken more trouble than the few words might have suggested.
A particularly loud snore from the sitting room made Strike turn off his laptop, feeling guilty. He’d soon need to make his way back to Falmouth for the overnight train. It was time to wake Ted so they could have a last chat before leaving him, once more, to his loneliness.
