Chapter 104

‘I need you to go home, Poe,' Superintendent Nightingale said.

‘I'm fine.'

‘Don't give me that macho shit. You're not fine. Anyone with half a brain can see you're not fine. How could you be? You've just watched six snuff movies while sitting next to one of the men responsible. I'd be worried if you were fine. I only watched a bit of the first one and I wanted to go home and hug my kids.'

It was quarter to four in the morning and they were in the back of Nightingale's car. Poe had met her in a layby, a mile from the Children of Job compound. Nightingale's uniformed cops had arrived at Cobb's and arrested him again. He was now safely tucked away in a police cell. And because Nathan Rose had chosen a short drop with a sudden stop, rather than face up to what he'd been involved in, Poe had made sure Cobb was put on suicide watch. He still had questions to answer.

CSI had turned up fifteen minutes after uniform and seized the videos. The team would stay in Cobb's house and process it with everything they had. Poe wasn't sure they would find anything else, but not doing it would be irresponsible.

Nightingale hadn't driven to Cobb's as Poe had expected. Instead, she had called and asked his opinion on the veracity of the videos. Poe had replied, ‘Trust, but verify, ma'am.' He thought they were real, but Bradshaw had told him there was now some bullshit called ‘deep fakes', where perverts put celebrities' faces on to porn stars. Apparently it looked very realistic. Poe didn't think that was the case here – the tapes looked as old as Cobb claimed they were – but until someone who knew about this stuff had checked, ‘trust but verify' was as certain as he was prepared to be.

Nightingale had thanked him, got a crusty old magistrate out of bed and demanded he sign a warrant to search the Children of Job compound. She told him she had six snuff movies he could watch if he didn't believe she had reasonable grounds. The magistrate had signed without comment.

The time on the warrant was 4 a.m. so there was a short delay before they could execute it. Nightingale's car was the last in a long line of police vehicles. Dogs, specialist search teams, CSI vans, the works.

At the stroke of four they would go in mob-handed.

‘OK, I'm not fine,' Poe admitted. ‘But I don't think going back to an empty cottage is the best thing for me right now. I need to be among the living for a bit longer.'

‘Estelle is—'

‘—in London, ma'am,' Poe cut in. ‘On her way to Brussels.'

‘If I can finish?'

‘Sorry.'

‘I was about to say that Estelle is getting on the first flight out of Heathrow,' Nightingale said. ‘She lands in Newcastle in a few hours.'

‘But how . . . ?'

‘How did she find out? How do you think?'

‘Tilly told her,' Poe said. ‘I really wish she hadn't.'

‘Face it, Poe; you have people who care about you now. You're no longer a weirdo loner. So go home. You've done enough; let us handle it from here. And don't forget, I'm a superintendent and you're a ten-a-penny sergeant. If I need to, I'll order you. Even have uniform follow you with their blues and twos on.'

Poe scowled. He knew Nightingale was right, knew that relationships were a two-way street, and Estelle being worried about him wasn't something he could brush off. But until he'd established, in his own mind at least, that the videos had been filmed in the old school basement, he wouldn't be able to sleep anyway.

‘You up for a compromise, ma'am?'

‘No. Go home.'

‘It won't take long to confirm the films were shot here,' Poe said regardless. ‘The amount of blood on those videos was considerable. Even if they used bleach on the floor, some of it will have soaked into the concrete. And if we find blood then it's safe to assume the murders weren't staged. As soon as we've established that, there's really nothing more for me to do. I'll gladly go home and wait for Estelle.'

‘Fine,' Nightingale said, throwing up her arms in capitulation. ‘You can stay until we've found blood. But, as we have a specialist cadaver dog with us, I imagine that will be two minutes after we're through the front door.'

Poe scowled again, realising he'd been played, but also recognising that Nightingale was operating from a good place.

She checked her watch. ‘Ten minutes,' she said. ‘Will they be expecting us?'

‘Doubt it,' Poe replied, thinking about Joshua Meade. ‘I kind of got the impression Cornelius had become a bit of an embarrassment to the newer members. Some might even have been relieved by his death. That it would allow Joshua and the more media-savvy bigots to press the reset button. The country's becoming less interested in organised religion every year, and he knows that while screaming into the void might have worked for them in the past, it won't now. But with Cornelius Green dead, Joshua can concentrate on reshaping the Children of Job into a lobby group.'

‘Out with the old cult, in with the new?'

Poe nodded. ‘I think if Joshua had known there were skeletons this smelly in the cupboard he'd have distanced himself from them a long time ago. People like him have an agenda, one they relentlessly pursue, and they can't afford scandal.'

‘Which leads me to my next question: now we know Bethany Bowman didn't murder Cornelius, who the hell did? I was going to ask if Joshua Meade was worth a pull, but I guess you'd say no?'

‘Anything's possible, but Joshua doesn't make sense,' Poe said, shrugging. ‘I think it's Aaron we need to be looking for now. I'm convinced that when he was old enough and big enough, he took his revenge on the parents who arranged for his baby sister to be murdered. It explains why it was only Noah and Grace's bodies that were recovered.'

Nightingale twisted in her seat to face him. ‘He faked his death?'

‘It fits every fact we have. He kills his parents and leaves behind evidence that it was his dead sister who did it. He probably still had some of her stuff. Maybe he even blamed her for what he'd been through.'

‘And the row between him and Bethany?'

‘Never happened,' Poe said. ‘Can't have happened – Bethany was already dead. But Noah and Grace needed to explain away her absence to both Eve and the school. They make up a row between Bethany and Aaron. Eve wouldn't have believed Bethany had run away after yet another argument with her parents – she was in almost permanent conflict with them by then – but running away after a row with her beloved Aaron? I imagine that was something Eve would believe.'

‘And it was in Aaron's interests to go along with it.'

‘It was,' Poe nodded. ‘He'd just seen what his parents were capable of. And he had just been involved in his sister's murder.'

‘And Cornelius's murder?' Nightingale said. ‘Do you think Aaron killed him as well?'

‘Hard to think anything else. If he's alive, he has every motive.'

‘Why wait all these years though?'

‘No idea. Maybe he tried to forgive Cornelius but couldn't. Or maybe something triggered him.'

They lapsed into silence as they worked out the kink in the new theory.

‘Badgers,' Nightingale said eventually.

Poe blew out a whoosh of relief. The gap between the murders must have been bothering him more than he'd thought.

‘It was all over the news,' Nightingale continued. ‘It was even on CNN and Al Jazeera.'

‘I remember. Sky News tried to interview me about it.'

‘That's right,' Nightingale laughed. ‘Sophy Ridge had to bleep out your response. But anyway, if Aaron had seen this on TV and understood the significance, it could have elicited something, a primal response he'd managed to keep in a bottle until then.'

‘Or maybe he just didn't want Cornelius talking,' Poe said. ‘He knew the badger would start an investigation, one that might lead to him. And he'd have known that somewhere there was a tape of his sister's murder.'

‘So why not kill Israel Cobb as well?' Nightingale said. ‘He'd already killed his parents and he's now killed the man who engineered the whole thing; why not go for the set? Why not kill the man who slit his sister's throat?'

‘We only found Israel because we put Tilly on it,' Poe replied. ‘Alice hadn't been able to find him, and she'd been looking for over fifteen years.' He paused. ‘Or maybe there's something we don't yet know.'

Nightingale snorted. ‘In this case? I'd be surprised if there wasn't. And you have no idea why Cobb showed you those videos? He must know he'll spend the rest of his life in prison.'

‘I don't think he gives a shit. Which is weird, as he certainly gave a shit when I first got there. Couldn't get his tattoo cover story in quick enough. Soon as he realised we'd linked them to the extra bodies in the graves he immediately blamed Cornelius. Said he had no idea what the alphanumeric strings meant. I don't doubt that what he and Cornelius had done had eaten away at him over the years – hell, I cried all the way over here and I've only lived with it for an hour – but something happened tonight that moved him from keeping his role covered up to full disclosure. At first, I thought it was something to do with Bethany; he certainly had a visceral reaction to Tilly's age-progression photo, but that doesn't make sense. She's dead, but so were the other five on the videos.'

‘Perhaps seeing her as the woman she would have become pushed him over the edge?' Nightingale said. ‘Like you said, there's only so much guilt you can suppress before it starts leaking. If the badgers triggered Aaron, maybe the age-progressed image of Bethany triggered Cobb?'

She checked her watch again.

‘We'll have to revisit this, Poe,' she said. ‘As far as I'm concerned it's four a.m. and I have a warrant to execute. Let's get these idiots out of bed.'