Page 88 of The Mercy Chair

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘And please do forgive the mess.’

‘Nothing to forgive,’ Poe said. ‘And I’m sorry for the unannounced visit; we were in the area with a bit of time to kill.’

‘And you could smell the warm jam?’

Poe laughed. ‘It does look good.’

Eve washed her hands then dipped a foot-long wooden spoon into a pot of bubbling yellow liquid. ‘Taste this,’ she said, holding out the spoon. ‘It’s vanilla peach with whisky. Careful, it’s hot.’

When they were seated around the kitchen table, Eve said, ‘Although my jam is award-winning, Sergeant Poe, I doubt it’s why you’re here.’

‘We’re now in possession of your sister’s journal, Eve,’ Poe said. ‘I wanted to talk to you about it.’

‘Her journal? How on earth did you get that? I assumed she’d taken it with her.’

‘It seems she kept it at her friend’s house. That friend recently handed it in to the police.’

‘You don’t mean Alice, do you? Alice Symonds?’

Poe nodded. Although it was technically a breach of confidentiality, Bethany had only had one friend and Eve didn’t need the brains of Bradshaw to work out where the journal had been stashed. He would have liked to mention Nathan Rose as well. See if Eve knew him, see if she had any insight into his suicide, but that would have been a breach too far. Nightingale would have had him strung up.

‘Gosh, I haven’t seen Alice for years. I haven’t eventhoughtabout her for years, truth be told.’

‘How well did you know her?’

Eve shrugged. ‘As well as any sister knows her younger sister’s friends, I suppose. Mum and Dad didn’t allow us to have visitors, so we only ever really interacted with other children when we were at school or church. But I knew her well enough to know she was a nice girl. Bethany used to go round to hers after school. She would pretend she was doing extra lessons or had to help the teacher or something. Mum and Dad rarely took an interest in what she was doing so they never thought to check, and Aaron and I weren’t going to tell them she was lying.’

Poe nodded. That fitted with what was in the journal.

‘Have you read it?’ Poe said. ‘She makes some extraordinary claims.’

‘I saw it every now and then,’ Eve admitted. ‘Bethany kept it well hidden most of the time, but I’d occasionally stumble across it; usually when I was trying to find her cigarettes.’

‘She smoked?’

‘Of course, she was a rebel. She smoked, she drank, she fooled around with boys. I never told her this, but I thought she was about the coolest person in the world. The way she stood up to Mum and Dad. I know I couldn’t have done it. So, if she smoked, I wanted to smoke.’

‘And the journal entries?’

‘Some were exaggerated, but not much.’

‘It was an accurate account of her childhood?’ Poe said. ‘You didn’t mention she was being abused.’

‘I didn’t realise itwasabuse,’ Eve said. ‘Not back then. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to question whether Bethany caused my parents to treat her the way they did, or if it was the other way round; that she behaved that way as a result of what they did to her.’

‘And what did you decide?’

‘That Bethany had a spark of life that Mum and Dad couldn’t stamp out. There was just something about her that they didn’t like. They said she was a bad biscuit; pretty much their worst name for someone.’

‘I’m familiar with the phrase,’ Poe said. ‘It’s peppered throughout her journal entries. They thought she was a bad biscuit and Bethany thoughttheywere bad biscuits.’

Eve nodded. ‘I don’t know what their problem was, Sergeant Poe, but when I view things through my older, and hopefully wiser, eyes, I see that although none of us had happy childhoods, Bethany’s was dreadful.’

‘Yet you didn’t mention this when I spoke to you earlier in the week?’

‘It’s . . . hard to talk about your parents like that, Sergeant Poe. Were they monsters? No, I don’t think they were. Did theybehavemonstrously? Yes, occasionally, they absolutely did.’

‘I sense an unsaid “but”,’ Poe said.

---