Page 60 of The Mercy Chair

‘He did,’ Eve said.

‘You seem very sure.’

She sighed. ‘It’s not something I’m likely to forget, Sergeant Poe.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because when he got back, he and Bethany had a blazing row. I have no idea what the fight was about, and Aaron never spoke of it, but that night Bethany packed her bags and ran away. Again. Only this time she never returned.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Not until . . . well, you’re a police officer, youknowwhen she returned.’

Poe wasn’t there to get bogged down in the Bowman family massacre – Cumbria would merge it into the Cornelius Green murder, and he didn’t want to interfere with their witnesses any more than he had to.

‘This is going to seem like an odd question, Eve, but was your brother gay?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘You’d have to ask him. Oh, that’s right, you can’t, my psycho sister murdered him.’ She closed her eyes briefly. ‘Sorry. Even now it still hurts. Why do you ask?’

‘It’s possible Cornelius Green was running some of his conversion therapy courses off the books. It wasn’t a tax fiddle so we’re working on the presumption he was doing something he shouldn’t have been. I’m wondering if they were maybe more extreme versions of the courses on the regular curriculum.’

‘A course for super-gays, you mean?’

‘I mean a course misguided parents might send their sons on, maybe if they were at their wits’ end and didn’t know any better. I don’t pretend to understand why someone might think they can forcibly change someone’s sexuality, but I accept it happens, the same way I accept that the Metropolitan Police need a unit dedicated to protecting children accused of witchcraft.’

‘Fair enough,’ Eve said. ‘And Mum and Dadwerethe type of people to believe in that stuff. Whether or not Aaron was gay?’ She shrugged. ‘I’d be surprised. Not because a boy from an ultra-conservative Christian family can’t be gay, but because, even if hewasfeeling sexually attracted to someone of his own sex, he certainly wasn’t doing anything about it.’

‘I’m not sure I—’

‘We were rarely allowed out unsupervised, Sergeant Poe. All our social interactions were at the Children of Job. We were dropped off at school in the morning and collected in the afternoon. We weren’t allowed to join clubs or play sports. There is no way he had a boyfriend, not without me knowing anyway.’

‘Being gay isn’t simply about sex,’ Poe said. ‘It’s about who you are.’

‘I know that,’ Eve said. ‘But if Aaronwerehaving feelings like that, given what I’ve just told you, do you really think he’d have confided in Mum and Dad?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘There’s no suppose about it, Sergeant Poe. If he were going to confide in anyone, it would have been me.’

‘Not Bethany?’

‘No. Bethany was . . . troubled. Even from an early age she was in a constant state of war with Mum and Dad. They did the best they could, of course, but I don’t think they were equipped to handle someone so rebellious. Perhaps if a less Christian-centric family had raised her she might have turned out OK, but whenever she was bad, my parents’ response was either to consult Cornelius Green or seek solace in the Bible. I still believe in God, Sergeant Poe, but sometimes the answers to life’s problems are found in the real world, not in the pages of texts written thousands of years ago. And I’m not saying Bethany and me didn’t get on, because we did. I’m not even saying that some of her tantrums didn’t break up what was at times quite a monotonous childhood, but there was an edge to her. And while it was occasionally entertaining, it was always unpredictable.’

‘Aaron wouldn’t have confided in her?’

‘No, if he’d told her a secret like that, she’d have told Mum and Dad just to spite them. She wouldn’t have meant to hurt Aaron, but he would have ended up as collateral damage.’

Poe considered this. Decided that the more he knew about Bethany Bowman, the more she scared him. ‘Do you have a photograph of her?’ he asked.

‘From when she was fourteen?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble. Tilly’s a bit of a whizz on the old computer. She’ll be able to put it through some age-progression software the Cumbrian cops don’t have access to.’

‘Why don’t they have access to it?’

‘I only wrote it a month ago,’ Bradshaw said. ‘It’s still at the beta-testing stage.’

‘There’ll be some photographs in the filing cabinet,’ Eve nodded. ‘I’ll go and get one.’ She left the kitchen and walked through a door to what Poe had assumed was a larder, but it turned out to be the door to the basement. A lot of the old farmhouses had basements – a pre-fridge legacy, when root cellars were the only way to keep food fresh.

‘“A whizz on the old computer”?’ Bradshaw said. ‘You really are a twit, Poe.’

Eve returned a few minutes later with a handful of Polaroids. ‘I’m sorry they’re not digital; our parents wouldn’t let us have mobile telephones.’

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