Chapter Thirty-Seven

Seeing yet another missed call from Ethan, Cassie steeled herself to call him back.

‘Oh for fuck's sake, Cassie, it's been three days! I was frantic!' – sounding genuinely worried. ‘After sending you to see that SkAR geezer when I knew he might've .?.?. you know, had a pop at Bronte? Are you OK?'

‘Yeah, I'm fine.' Her default method of dealing with trauma: bury it and move on. Always a winning strategy. Haha. ‘But I think you were right about him, he's a disgusting predator .' Unable to disguise the venom in her voice.

‘Did he hurt you? Cos I'll—'

‘I'm fine,' she broke in. ‘But listen, do you know anything about his background? His family comes from the Troodos Mountains, the same bit of Cyprus as Bronte's mum – or dad. He might even come from the same village, a place called Perdikia? Did she never talk about going back there for a visit?

‘No .?.?. But the name does ring a bell. She showed me a pic in a guidebook. Said those mountains were where her family came from. Like she'd only just found out.'

‘Chrysanthi's family? Or George's?'

‘No idea. But I know her mother would have been dead set against her going there – she hated the place, apparently.'

The conversation left Cassie's brain whirring. Steve from Enfield had told Bronte something about her family history deliberately to hurt her, something that – perhaps even more than a sexual assault – had disturbed her, and made her determined to visit Cyprus, maybe to explore the family history. Was Perdikia where one, or both, of Chrysanthi's parents had been raised, at least until she went into care?

What had Babcia said Chrysanthi told her? That God had taken Bronte as some kind of ‘payment for sin'.

Hamartia. Cassie suddenly remembered the grief-stricken Chrysanthi using the word when she first saw her dead daughter. Opening her Greek dictionary app, she looked it up.

Hamartia was ancient Greek for sin – and also for sin offering.

Sacrifice .

Why didn't the devout churchgoer Chrysanthi take communion?

Cassie went online to read up on Orthodox theology, which appeared identical to traditionalist Catholic thinking on this topic. You must not take communion if you were guilty of a mortal sin, unless you had confessed it to your priest and made amends. There was a cheery little injunction she could just imagine that bleak old patriarch Father Michaelides intoning: ‘Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord.'

In other words, you'd be killing Jesus all over again. Heavy.

The list of mortal sins was a long one and included masturbation, suicide, abortion, ‘invalid marriage', such as remarrying after divorce, rape, and, of course, murder.

Cassie started to pace the cabin. Food was the recurring theme in the relationship between Bronte and her mother: from the specially prepared school lunch boxes that had continued into adulthood in the form of ‘food parcels' – home-made dishes delivered to the flat. Then she recalled Althea Knowles, their school nurse, saying Bronte got sick in the afternoons: in other words, after lunch .

Were Chrysanthi's attempts to control her daughter's diet designed to avert her lifelong stomach problems? Or to cause them?

Then there was Bronte's little brother, the twin who didn't live to see his third birthday. Chrysanthi had always struck her as a disturbed soul, full of hatred for her ex-husband, and obsessed with exerting control over her daughter's life.

What if Chrysanthi had channelled all that hatred against her innocent children?