Page 104 of The Mercy Chair

‘Aaron Bowman was fifteen years old, Sergeant Poe,’ Cobb said, ‘but he could easily have passed for twelve. He was gentle and sweet and he was petrified from the moment he arrived. He didn’t understand why he was there and for some reason Cornelius was treating him more harshly than anyone else we’d worked with so—’

‘No one knows I’m here, Mr Cobb!’ Poe snapped. ‘If you describe torturing children as “work” one more time your body will never be found. Are we fucking clear?’

Cobb swallowed hard and nodded once. ‘That’s fair,’ he said.

‘I need to know everything you did to him.’

‘I’m not sure I can, Sergeant Poe. The memory of it is . . . too painful.’

‘I don’t care. I need to know.’

‘We tortured him!’ he yelled. ‘Are you happy now? He was fifteen years old and we tortured him just like we tortured the others. He cried and he screamed and he begged us to stop and we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t stop hurting him and he wouldn’t stop screaming.’

‘I need details, Mr Cobb.’

‘Why?!’

‘Because after the course he had a blazing row with his younger sister, Bethany,’ Poe said. ‘I now think they were arguing about how she had failed to protect him from what you had put him through.Thisis why she ran away from home that night.’

Cobb winced.

‘And it’s why she returned five years later to slaughter her parents,’ Poe continued. ‘She’d wanted revenge for what they did to Aaron, but at the time she was only fourteen and wasn’t physically strong enough. Or maybe she’d simply had time to mull it over. Decided that her parents didn’t deserve to live any longer.’

‘I remember from the newspapers that the constabulary believe Aaron’s murder was accidental. That the murderer hadn’t meant to kill him.’

‘Murderer?’ Poe said.

‘Aaron spoke warmly of Bethany. He said she was a wonderful person and the best sister a brother could ever have. From what he told me, if Bethany had accidentally killed him, she’d have been overcome with grief. She certainly wouldn’t have hidden what she’d done. She would have waited beside his body until the police arrived.’

Which was exactly what Alice Symonds had said, Poe thought. ‘You don’t think Bethany Bowman killed her parents, do you?’

Cobb shrugged. ‘I never met the girl. I suppose the more important question is what doyouthink, Sergeant Poe?’

Poe paused a beat. ‘I think I want you to start from the beginning.’

‘But I’ve already told—’

‘From the beginning,’ Poe said.

So Cobb told his story again.

He told Poe about the mental and physical abuse of six young men and boys. He told Poe about the pornographic pictures he had held in front of their faces while Cornelius whipped the soles of their feet with a hosepipe. He said the area between the ball and the heel was particularly pain sensitive but remarkably resistant to injury, even bruising. He explained how when the courses were over he would bathe the boys’ feet and apply a cooling balm. It was at this stage that Cornelius would tattoo everyone involved. He said it was a reminder of what they’d all been through. Poe asked again why the tattoos were the locations of graves, but Cobb insisted he hadn’t known they were until that evening.

Cobb said he and Cornelius would meet with the concerned parents after each course had finished. They were anxious to discover if it had worked and what follow-up therapy would be required. Poe asked if the parents had known what the courses entailed, and Cobb confirmed they had. Poe made a note of this and underlined it three times. With nothing recorded anywhere, he doubted Superintendent Nightingale would have enough to arrest the parents for conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm with intent, but he knew she’d give it a go.

Cobb eventually got to the end of his monstrous tale. Poe asked a few follow-ups but it was clear he’d been told everything. He reviewed his notes and saw he’d filled sixteen pages.

Poe had one last question.

‘Why aren’t you dead, Mr Cobb?’ he said.

‘I may have a drink problem, Sergeant Poe, but I can assure you I’m still a man of reasonable health.’

‘That’s not what I meant and you know it. I want to know why we haven’t found you stoned to death as well. It doesn’t matter if it was Bethany or someone we don’t yet know about who killed Cornelius Green, he was almost certainly killed for what he did to those boys. And even if you’ve massively exaggerated your own role, you’re clearly as culpable as your former partner in crime. So I’ll ask again – why aren’t you dead?’

Cobb sighed. ‘Despite what I’ve just told you, I doubt this was a case ofpost hoc ergo propter hoc, Sergeant Poe.’

Bradshaw occasionally used this Latin phrase. It meant, ‘After this, therefore because of this.’ Or, if event B follows event A, event B must have beencausedby event A.

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