Page 58 of The Mercy Chair

Understanding slid across his face. ‘Wait, he’sthatAaron? The one from the Keswick massacre? He was killed by his own sister?’

Poe nodded. ‘Bethany Bowman. She’d been estranged for four or five years by then, but for reasons that were never established, she broke into the family home and murdered Grace and Noah Bowman while they slept. Used a clasp knife to slit their throats from ear to ear. She left it on the kitchen table as if it were a trophy. Covered in blood and her fingerprints. I was a detective constable up here then and I’ve seen the crime scene photographs. The sheets from her parents’ bed looked like they’d been used to clean an abattoir floor. The senior investigating officer thought killing Aaron had never been part of Bethany’s plan. He was supposed to be with his other sister Eve at a Children of Job Bible study group, but he’d been ill and had stayed at home. The SIO believed Aaron had got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night and stumbled into what Bethany was doing. She murdered him where he stood – right outside his parents’ bedroom door. The SIO believed Bethany only killed Aaron so she could get away. Eve Bowman found the murder scene when she returned the next afternoon.’

‘I remember watching the documentary,’ Linus said. ‘Bethany stole a boat and dumped all three bodies in the sea, didn’t she?’

‘She did,’ Poe confirmed. ‘Bloodstains showed that she used a wheelbarrow to take the bodies to her dad’s old Range Rover. Drove them to St Bees and stole an inflatable dinghy. Wrapped them in chains and threw them overboard. She hadn’t counted on the strong riptides, and Grace and Noah washed up a couple of days later. That’s what the SIO concluded anyway.’

‘But Aarondidn’twash up?’

‘His body was never recovered. It seems while the tide sent Grace and Noah to the beach at Seascale, it had different plans for Aaron.’

‘The documentary I watched will be a few years old now,’ Linus said. ‘Was Bethany ever caught?’

Poe shook his head. It was one of Cumbria Constabulary’s burning failures. Bethany Bowman had disappeared like morning mist. ‘The case is reviewed every year as it’s technically still open,’ he said, ‘but between you and me, they aren’t actively pursuing her any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because, although she was nineteen when she murdered her family, she was fourteen when she ran away from home – no one has a clue what she looks like now. Their best hope is that she’ll be arrested for something minor and get fingerprinted. There’s an INTERPOL red notice out on her so if she ever pops up in any one of the one hundred and ninety-four member countries, Cumbria will extradite her to the UK for trial. I don’t think Bethany makes those kinds of mistakes though.’

‘What do you think happened? As inreallyhappened?’

Poe turned on to a road so twisty and narrow it was like a theme park water chute. He tapped his brakes and slowed down. If he met a car coming the other way he would have to stop to avoid a head-on collision; the road was too narrow to pass each other. The two drivers would stare at each other for a moment, before one of them buckled under the pressure and reversed to one of the rare passing spaces. ‘I think fourteen-year-old girls don’t run away from home without a reason. And, if they do, they certainly don’t return five years later to slaughter their own family.’

‘Maybe she’d been abused?’

‘There’s certainly something we don’t know. Whatever her reasons, now we’ve established a link between her brother, Aaron, and Cornelius Green, Bethany Bowman is a suspect. She has to be.’

‘I thought the Bowman family lived in Keswick – why aren’t we heading there?’

‘They did live in Keswick, Snoopy, but they owned two houses; the Underbarrow property belonged to her mother’s parents. After the massacre Eve moved away. She must have missed Cumbria though, as three years ago she moved to the house in Underbarrow. I imagine the house in Keswick held too many dark memories for her. She rents it out now.’

‘Why bother coming back?’

‘Tilly says she’s recently married,’ Poe said. ‘Probably wants to raise a family and there really isn’t a better place. The village is safe and the schools are excellent. She works part-time for an estate agent in Kendal so hopefully she’ll be in.’

‘And we’re here to question her?’

‘No, Snoopy, we’re here towarnher.’

Chapter 51

Eve Bowman lived in an old farmhouse, all whitewashed walls and traditional slate roof, same as all the other houses in the area. Underbarrow fell within the Lake District National Park boundary so she was limited in what she could do to the exterior of the house. ‘Restrict unwelcome change’ was what the National Park Authority called it, which Poe believed was just an excuse to make everything look like a Beatrix Potter film set. Tradition was OK, but not at the expense of the people who lived there.

A tumble of outbuildings and a bunch of chickens roaming in the old farmyard completed what was a lovely, isolated property. Poe imagined coming back to Cumbria had been a big deal for Eve. She’d probably yearned to return but hadn’t wanted to cope with being a curiosity. The sole survivor of an infamous massacre. Someone to point at and whisper about. Underbarrow was far enough away from Keswick for her to start again, while still having the fells and lakes that she’d have fallen in love with as a child.

Eve Bowman was thirty-two years old but looked younger. She had watched them walk up the long and winding garden path from her front room, where she had been halfway through a strenuous yoga workout. She beat them to the front door and opened it as Poe was reaching for the bell. She wore black leggings, jade-green trainers and a matching vest. She was slightly out of breath. She was a tall, rangy woman and the muscle definition on her arms was perfect, suggesting she had played sport in her youth. A university sport, such as rowing or fencing. The kind you only ever saw during the opening week of the Olympics. Her face was free of makeup and her hair was pageboy short.

Poe hadn’t done the death knock since he was in uniform, and although he wasn’t there to tell Eve that someone she loved was dead, he had the same sense of unease. How did you tell someone the person who’d butchered her entire family might be back? During death notification training, it had been drummed into Poe that, apart from checking you were delivering the bad news to the right person, the most important thing to do was use plain language. Phrases like ‘I am very sorry to tell you that such-and-such is dead’, rather than phrases that could be misinterpreted like ‘passed away’ or ‘gone to a better place’. Although the reality was that you just had to find a way that worked, Poe had always tried to do as he’d been trained. So, after he had shown her his identification he said, ‘May I come in, Ms Bowman? I’m afraid I have some bad news.’

She clamped a hand over her mouth and Poe realised his mistake at once.

‘It’s not about your husband,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m sorry, I should have led with that.’

‘Thomas is OK?’

‘As far as I’m aware,’ Poe said. ‘He’s not here? I was hoping to speak to him too.’

‘He’s at work.’ She stared at Poe; her relief at her husband not being dead tempering what would have been wholly justified anger. ‘You’d better come in.’

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