It took Strike a further twenty minutes to extricate himself from the Heatons and their friends, but he did so as tactfully and pleasantly as he could manage, in case he needed to speak to them again. Once outside, he relaxed his facial muscles with relief, walked to the end of Garden Street and onto the esplanade.
The sky was a flat grey, with one silvered patch where the sun was attempting to break through. As Strike walked along the high promenade, he pulled his vape pen out of his pocket. Even after losing so much weight over the last year, the end of his stump was sore and the muscles in his right thigh tight. At last he spotted a short stretch of cabins selling coffees, burgers and beach toys, beside which was a small car park.
This, then, was the place where, twenty years previously, Cherie Gittins had parked the old farm truck and carried Daiyu down to the sea.
A salty breeze stung Strike’s tired eyes as he leaned on the railings, and squinted down onto the beach. In spite of the unpropitious weather, there were still people walking over the patches of dun-coloured sand that were strewn with rounded flints, like those that adorned the town’s older walls. A number of roosting seagulls appeared between the sea-worn stones like larger rocks. Strike could see neither seaweed nor shells, nor were there any danger flags flying; the sea looked fairly placid, and its briny smell, coupled with the familiar sound of the rhythmic rush and retreat of the waves, intensified an underlying melancholy he was doing his hardest to keep at bay.
Two drownings had happened here, seven years apart, to two individuals connected to Jonathan Wace. What had the sobbing Cherie said to Leonard Heaton? ‘I could have stopped it.’ Not ‘I could have stopped
It hadn’t escaped Strike’s notice that while three witnesses had seen Cherie and Daiyu driving away from Chapman Farm, and a further witness had seen Cherie carrying Daiyu down onto the beach, there were no witnesses at all for what had actually happened once they reached the sea. Neither the Heatons nor the jogger who’d passed them (who appeared in no press reports) had anything to say about that. For the critical stretch of time in which Daiyu had disappeared forever, the world had only the uncorroborated word of Cherie Gittins, and the myths that had been spun around the Drowned Prophet.
It had still been night when they reached the beach, Strike thought, looking down at the flint-strewn beach. Could Cherie have been meeting somebody secretly here, by arrangement? She’d been a very strong swimmer: had that been part of the plan? Had Cherie plunged into the black water, Daiyu perhaps clinging to her shoulders, so that Daiyu could be taken to a boat moored offshore, where somebody was waiting? Had that person spirited Daiyu away, perhaps killed her and buried her elsewhere, leaving Cherie to swim back to the shore and enact the tragedy of the accidental drowning? Or was it possible that Daiyu was still alive somewhere, living under a different name? After all, some abducted children weren’t killed, but kept captive, or raised by families unconnected to them by blood.
Or had Cherie perhaps carried Daiyu down to the beach because the child had been doped at some point during the journey? She must have been alive and alert on leaving Chapman Farm, given that she’d waved at the people who’d watched the van pass. Could Cherie have given Daiyu a drugged drink en route (‘There was a night when all the kids were given drinks that I now think must have been drugged,’ Kevin Pirbright had written), so that Daiyu drowned, not because she’d waded unwisely into the deeper water, but because she was barely conscious while Cherie held her down beneath the surface? In which case, had Cherie’s swimming prowess been required to drag the body out into deep water, in the hope that it would be forever lost, so that nobody could ever perform a post mortem?
