Or did the truth lie between these two theories? A body dragged to a boat, where it could be tied to weights, and disposed of in a patch of water the coastguard wouldn’t think to search, because the tides should have taken Daiyu in an entirely different direction? Yet if a boat had been moored off the dark beach, it would have been exceptionally lucky to escape the notice of the coastguard: the time margins were too slim for anything but a large, powerful vessel to escape the area in time, in which case the Heatons would surely have heard the motor across the sea in the stillness of the dawn.
There was, of course, one other possibility: that this was a case of two genuine accidents, happening in the same place, seven years apart.
Strike gazed out at the measureless mass of water, wondering whether what remained of Daiyu was somewhere out there, her bones long since picked clean, entangled in a broken fishing net, perhaps, her skull rolling gently on the sea bed as the waves tumbled far above. In which case, ‘I could have stopped it’ meant ‘I could have stopped her demanding to go to the sea’ or ‘I could have stopped doing everything she told me to do’.
After all, if Wace had planned his stepdaughter’s murder to get his hands on the quarter of a million pounds Daiyu was worth dead, why instruct Cherie to take her to precisely the same spot where his first wife had lost her life?
Because murderers tended to be creatures of habit? Because, having successfully murdered once, they stuck to the same modus operandi ever after? Might Wace have been planning a brazen double bluff to the police? ‘If I was going to drown her, why would I do it
Except that there was a problem with this theory, too: the death of the first Mrs Wace really had been an accident. George’s testimony corroborated Abigail’s: Wace hadn’t been in the water when his wife drowned, and had tried his utmost to save her. Unless… watching the waves break on the flints below, Strike wondered whether it was possible to induce an epileptic fit in somebody. He tugged his notebook out of his pocket and wrote a reminder to himself to look into this. He then looked back out to sea, postponing the moment when he’d have to walk again, and thinking about Cherie Gittins.
The girl who’d so foolishly driven her larcenous, knife-toting boyfriend to the pharmacy by daylight a few short years later, and who’d been loose-lipped enough to blurt out ‘I could have stopped it’ to Leonard Heaton outside the coroner’s court, was no mastermind. No, if Daiyu’s disappearance had been planned, Strike was certain Cherie had been a tool, rather than the architect of the plot.
His stomach rumbled loudly. He was tired, hungry and his leg was still aching. The last thing he felt like doing was driving back to London this evening. Turning reluctantly away from the sea, he retraced his steps, registering the presence of an enormous and fairly ugly redbrick hotel facing the pier as he turned back into Garden Street. The temptation of checking in was increased by the sight of the King’s Head pub, which had a paved beer garden, tucked up the High Street to his left. The rear entrance to the redbrick Hotel de Paris (why Paris?) lay directly opposite the beer garden, beckoning invitingly.
He’d explain the overnight stay to the agency’s pernickety accountant by claiming to have been detained by his investigation. Inside the King’s Head, he glanced at a menu on the bar before ordering a pint of Doom Bar and a burger and chips, justifying the latter by the seven preceding days of good dietary behaviour.
The damp beer garden was deserted, which suited Strike, because he wanted to concentrate. Once settled at a table with his vape pen, he took out his mobile and got back to work. Having looked up lidos in the vicinity of Cherie’s childhood home, he found one in Herne Hill. Not forgetting that her youthful swimming career would have happened under her birth name of Carine Makepeace, Strike kept Googling, and at last, on page four of his search results, he found what he was looking for: an old photo of a swimming team comprising both boys and girls, posted to the Facebook page of a woman called Sarah-Jane Barnett.
