The kitchen was farmhouse style, with a purple Aga and plates displayed on a dresser. A scrubbed wooden table was surrounded by purple-painted chairs, and the fridge door was covered in a child’s paintings, mostly blobs of paint and squiggles, which were held up with magnets. There was also – and this, Robin thought, explained how a twenty-five-year-old came to find herself living in such an expensive house – a picture of Niamh in a bikini, arm in arm with a man in swimming trunks, who looked at least forty. A smell of baking was making Strike salivate.
‘Thanks very much for seeing us, Mrs—’
‘Call me Niamh,’ said their hostess, who, now that she didn’t have a fox terrier to manage, looked nervous. ‘Please, sit down, I’ve just made biscuits.’
‘You’ve just moved in and you’re baking?’ said Robin, smiling.
‘Oh, I love baking, it calms me down,’ said Niamh, turning away to grab oven gloves. ‘Anyway, we’re pretty much straight now. I only took a couple of days off because I had leave owed to me.’
‘What d’you do for a living?’ asked Strike, who’d taken the chair nearest the back door, at which Basil was now whining and scratching, eager to get back in.
‘Accountant,’ said Niamh, now lifting cookies off the baking tray with a spatula. ‘Tea? Coffee?’
By the time the two detectives and Niamh had their mugs of tea, and the biscuits were sitting on a plate in the middle of the table, Basil’s whines had become so piteous that Niamh let him back into the room.
‘He’ll settle,’ she said, as the dog zoomed around the table, tail wagging furiously. ‘Eventually.’
Niamh sat down herself, making unnecessary adjustments to the sleeves of her sweatshirt.
‘Who’s the artwork by?’ Robin asked, pointing at the blobby creations on the fridge, and trying to put Niamh more at ease.
‘Oh, my little boy, Charlie,’ said Niamh. ‘He’s two. He’s with his dad this morning. Nigel thought it would be easier for me to talk to you without Charlie here.’
‘I take it that’s Nigel?’ asked Robin, smiling as she pointed at the beach picture.
‘Yes,’ said Niamh. She seemed to feel something needed explaining. ‘I met him at my first job. He was actually my boss.’
‘How lovely,’ said Robin, trying not to feel judgemental. Given Nigel’s hair loss, the couple looked more like father and daughter in the picture.
‘So,’ said Strike, ‘as I said on the phone, we’re after background on the Universal Humanitarian Church. Is it OK if I take notes?’
‘Yes, fine,’ said Niamh nervously.
‘Could we start with what year you and your family went to Chapman Farm?’ asked Strike, clicking out the nib of his pen.
‘1999,’ said Niamh.
‘And you were eight, right?’
‘Yes, and my brother Oisin was six and my sister Maeve was four.’
‘What made your parents join, do you know?’ asked Strike.
‘It was Dad, not Mum,’ said Niamh. ‘He was always a bit, um… it’s hard to describe. When we were little he was politically quite far left, but he’s about as far right as you can go these days. I actually haven’t spoken to him for three years… he just got worse and worse. Weird ranting phone calls, temper tantrums. Nigel thinks I’m better off without contact with him.’
‘Was your family religious?’ asked Strike.
‘Not before the UHC. No, I just remember Dad coming home one evening, incredibly excited, because he’d been to a meeting and got talking to Papa J, who converted him on the spot. It was like Dad had found the meaning of life. He was going on and on about a social revolution. He’d brought home a copy of Papa J’s book,
‘She told us it’d be fun. We cried about leaving home, and all our friends, she told us not to do it in front of Dad, because he’d be upset. Anything for an easy life, that was Mum… we hated it, though, from the moment we got there. No clothes of our own. No toys. I can remember Maeve sobbing for the cuddly bunny she used to take to bed every night. We’d taken it to the farm, but everything was locked up, the moment we arrived, including Maeve’s bunny.’
Niamh took a sip of tea, then said,
‘I don’t want to be hard on Mum. From what I can remember, she had a tough time with Dad’s mood swings and how erratic he was. She wasn’t very strong, either. She’d had some kind of heart condition since childhood. I remember her as very passive.’
‘Are you still in contact with her?’ asked Robin.
Niamh shook her head. Her eyes had become damp.
