Realizing he felt awkward about answering considering what they’d been discussing, Cristy leaned forward to click on for him.
‘Hey,’ Jodi cried, ‘are you on your way back yet? Only I’ve had a call from Edward Har—’
‘Cristy’s in the car,’ Connor cut in. ‘Why don’t you say hi?’
‘Sorry,’ Jodi groaned. ‘Got my mummy head on. Hi Cris. How are you?’
‘I’m OK, thanks,’ Cristy replied, wondering if Connor had just stopped his wife deliberately. Edward Har—? It didn’t ring any bells, and maybe projecting her own secrecy onto others wasn’t a good way to go. ‘Sorry I kept your husband out all night,’ she attempted to joke.
‘I’m dying to hear about it,’ Jodi responded. ‘Have you come away with all the answers you were hoping to get? Like, is it a cult?’
Cristy glanced at Connor.
‘Not obviously,’ he admitted, ‘but I think Cristy’s smitten with the main guy—’
‘That’s not true,’ she protested. ‘I’ll admit he’s charming and attractive …’
‘I rest my case.’ Connor laughed. ‘But listen to this. I haven’t shared it with you yet, Cris, but something occurred to me in the early hours that I’m still trying to get my head around. I did some googling to check, and it turns out that every one of the staff at that place has a biblical name.’
Cristy blinked.
‘Bear with,’ he told her. ‘Meier’s clearly a kind of leader and all that stuff about miracles—’
‘What?’ Jodi exclaimed.
‘Later,’ he told her. ‘Now here goes with the names: Johan, John. Simeon, Simon. Marko, Mark. Susanna, Susanna—’
‘Who?’ Jodi cut in, as Cristy wondered if Connor had experienced some bizarre existential event in the night.
‘In the Bible, Susanna is a wealthy woman who supports Christ’s ministry,’ Connor explained. ‘And here’s another: Maggi, whose name is actually Magda, as in Magdalene.’
Incredulous, Cristy said, ‘How much wine did you have last night?’
‘OK, I might be overthinking it,’ he conceded, apparently realizing he wasn’t selling his theory well, ‘but you can’t deny those names are all New Testament, and you’ve got to have seen how followerish they all seemed. Plus, what about those “explanations” of miracles? Like he was there or something, so heknowswhat really happened. And – you’re going to love this one,’ he told Jodi, ‘they called the calf Barnabus. You know who he was, don’t you?’
‘What calf?’ Jodi asked.
To Cristy, Connor said, ‘To be honest, I don’t actually know who he was, just that he was around at that time and definitely a kind of missionary.’
‘I’m worried about you, Connor,’ Jodi put in.
‘Me too,’ Cristy assured her, ‘although he’s right in that they are all biblical names.’
Seeming to wish he’d never started this, Connor said, ‘OK, getting back to whether we came away with any answers? Putting aside what I’ve just told you, we need to listen to the recording in order to give it a proper assessment …’
‘But what about Nicole and the twins?’ Jodi cut in. ‘Are you any closer to finding out what really happened?’
‘I wish we could give a yes to that.’ Cristy sighed. ‘But the best I can tell you right now is that things seem to be opening up, and the deeper into it we go, the more convinced I am that we’re going to find those kids.’
Connor glanced at her in surprise. ‘So you reckon Maggi was … what? Trying to throw us off the scent, because they’re actually still out there somewhere?’
‘Jesus,’ Jodi muttered.
‘It would be an odd way of doing it if they are,’ Cristy admitted, ‘but as far as I’m concerned, there’s a whole lot more to that place and those people than we’re even beginning to see right now.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The following afternoon, the whole team was in the office, working through the weekend again to put together an episode for Tuesday. The debriefing of Cristy and Connor’s visit to Bryn Helyg had to wait, for now. With most of the backstory having been covered in the first three episodes, it was time to move on to Nicole’s sentence and continued claims of innocence – until her sudden and so far unexplained confession. All this could be achieved without giving rise to suspicions that they were in touch with her; however, any mention of Claude Meier’s and Lauren Hawkes’s prison visits was proving tricky. It wasn’t the right time to play in Meier’s interview, since it had to be combined with Nicole’s, and as for Lauren … Given they still didn’t have a way of contacting her, there was nothing much they could say about her really.
