Page 136 of The Mercy Chair

‘You’re Bethany Bowman.’

‘Yet you seem surprised to see me,’ she said.

‘You’re not wrong,’ Poe replied. ‘I watched you die.’

‘Please explain.’

Poe did. Told her that until the previous night she’d been the main suspect in the murder of Cornelius Green, her parents and her brother. He talked her through his meeting with Mad Alice and how that had started him down a path that ended with him being whacked on the head with a tent-peg mallet.

‘They filmed what they did to me?’ Bethany asked.

‘Not just you. They filmed them all.’

‘I saw the camera, but I didn’t think for a second there was film in it. Why on earth would they film themselves committing murder?’

‘Leverage,’ Poe said. ‘As long as those tapes existed, no one could claim they weren’t there. The tapes provedeveryonewas complicit.’

‘Well, it seems that rumours of my death, yada yada yada.’

‘I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask what happened that night.’

Bethany said, ‘Not yet,’ and zapped him with the stun gun.

Chapter 118

‘Bethany was alive all this time?’ Doctor Lang asked in bewilderment.

‘She was.’

‘But you saw Israel slit her throat.’

‘I did.’

‘They staged the whole thing then?’

‘They didn’t,’ Poe said. ‘Those rocks were real. That Stanley knife was real. The blood gushing from Bethany’s throat was real.’

‘Then why—?’

‘Why wasn’t she dead? Why wasn’t she in a grave on the side of a sunny hill like Israel claimed?’

Doctor Lang nodded. She looked bewildered.

‘Because the case still had one more arrow in its quiver,’ Poe said. ‘And in the end, it all came down to why Noah and Grace had hated their daughter . . .’

Chapter 119

Poe came to first. He hadn’t been zapped for as long as Eve or the man he now knew was Aaron, but it was the second time in an hour he’d been knocked unconscious and he was starting to feel punch drunk. His head felt like it had been pumped with too much blood and his chest burned where he’d been zapped. He was almost glad he was still tied to the basement’s supporting post; he doubted he could have sat up straight without assistance.

Almostglad.

Bethany was nowhere to be seen, although Poe thought he could hear noises coming from the kitchen. Five minutes later, Aaron woke.

‘Where am I?’ he said groggily. Poe waited for his brain to catch up with his mouth. ‘Why would Eve tie me up; it’s you we have to kill?’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Poe said. He wasn’t surprised at Aaron’s conclusion. He knew better than most what Eve was capable of. He must have lived through the last decade with a niggling doubt at the back of his mind, wondering what Eve would do if she ever tired of him.

‘You’re a policeman,’ he said to Poe.

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