Chapter 50

Bradshaw said that when she cross-referenced the Children of Job's bank records against the register of course attendees, she had uncovered six payments made between 2001 and 2007 that hadn't corresponded to anything on the curriculums provided by the Bishop of Carlisle. There was a gap in 2002, otherwise there had been one a year for six years. Four of those payments appeared to have been made in cash, and that was where the trail ended, but the remaining two had been made by credit card. Working on the hypothesis that the payments might have been for more intensive versions of the routine conversion therapy courses the Children of Job ran, she checked whether either of the credit cards belonged to families who, between 2001 and 2007, had sons in their teens or early twenties. They both had. In 2004, Nathan Rose was twenty, and in 2007, Aaron Bowman was fifteen. Their families had both paid the Children of Job one thousand pounds.

But it wasn't until she had fed the name Aaron Bowman into the National Crime Agency database that she reached for her phone to call Poe.

‘How did Tilly find this so quickly?' Nightingale asked.

Poe had called Nightingale immediately after Bradshaw had called him.

‘Cornelius wasn't just a zealot, ma'am, he was also a shrewd businessman,' Poe replied. ‘Even if he was running courses he wasn't prepared to put on paper, I figured he'd still be charging for them. Money always leaves an auditable trail, so I asked Tilly to look for any unreconciled deposits. She was supposed to be doing this today, but you know what she's like. I don't think she sleeps at night; she simply plugs herself into the mainframe.'

‘What did she find?'

‘Six large bank deposits that didn't correlate with any course on the curriculum. There was no trail at all for four of them, so we're assuming they were cash payments, but the other two were paid with credit cards.'

‘And one of those payments was made by Aaron Bowman?'

‘His parents, yes.'

‘Just when I thought this case couldn't get any bloody weirder,' she said. ‘OK, can you follow this up? I have a manhunt to arrange.'

‘Who's Aaron Bowman?' Linus said.

Poe had picked them both up at Shap Wells and they were now on their way to Underbarrow, a small but geographically dispersed village on the outskirts of Kendal. Poe hadn't been there in years. It was a beautiful village, full of charm and largely unspoiled, but if you were driving to Underbarrow it was because you wanted to be in Underbarrow – the road didn't lead anywhere else.

‘He's a kid Tilly thinks might have attended one of these secret courses,' Poe explained. ‘The courses the note said had stopped when Israel Cobb left the Children of Job.'

‘Is Aaron Bowman a suspect?'

‘I doubt it, Snoopy; he's dead.'

‘Dead? How?'

‘He was murdered in 2012. I'm surprised you didn't recognise his name; he was killed at the same time as his mother and father.'

Understanding slid across his face. ‘Wait, he's that Aaron? The one from the Keswick massacre? He was killed by his own sister?'

Poe nodded. ‘Bethany Bowman. She'd been estranged for four or five years by then, but for reasons that were never established, she broke into the family home and murdered Grace and Noah Bowman while they slept. Used a clasp knife to slit their throats from ear to ear. She left it on the kitchen table as if it were a trophy. Covered in blood and her fingerprints. I was a detective constable up here then and I've seen the crime scene photographs. The sheets from her parents' bed looked like they'd been used to clean an abattoir floor. The senior investigating officer thought killing Aaron had never been part of Bethany's plan. He was supposed to be with his other sister Eve at a Children of Job Bible study group, but he'd been ill and had stayed at home. The SIO believed Aaron had got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night and stumbled into what Bethany was doing. She murdered him where he stood – right outside his parents' bedroom door. The SIO believed Bethany only killed Aaron so she could get away. Eve Bowman found the murder scene when she returned the next afternoon.'

‘I remember watching the documentary,' Linus said. ‘Bethany stole a boat and dumped all three bodies in the sea, didn't she?'

‘She did,' Poe confirmed. ‘Bloodstains showed that she used a wheelbarrow to take the bodies to her dad's old Range Rover. Drove them to St Bees and stole an inflatable dinghy. Wrapped them in chains and threw them overboard. She hadn't counted on the strong riptides, and Grace and Noah washed up a couple of days later. That's what the SIO concluded anyway.'

‘But Aaron didn't wash up?'

‘His body was never recovered. It seems while the tide sent Grace and Noah to the beach at Seascale, it had different plans for Aaron.'

‘The documentary I watched will be a few years old now,' Linus said. ‘Was Bethany ever caught?'

Poe shook his head. It was one of Cumbria Constabulary's burning failures. Bethany Bowman had disappeared like morning mist. ‘The case is reviewed every year as it's technically still open,' he said, ‘but between you and me, they aren't actively pursuing her any more.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because, although she was nineteen when she murdered her family, she was fourteen when she ran away from home – no one has a clue what she looks like now. Their best hope is that she'll be arrested for something minor and get fingerprinted. There's an INTERPOL red notice out on her so if she ever pops up in any one of the one hundred and ninety-four member countries, Cumbria will extradite her to the UK for trial. I don't think Bethany makes those kinds of mistakes though.'

‘What do you think happened? As in really happened?'

Poe turned on to a road so twisty and narrow it was like a theme park water chute. He tapped his brakes and slowed down. If he met a car coming the other way he would have to stop to avoid a head-on collision; the road was too narrow to pass each other. The two drivers would stare at each other for a moment, before one of them buckled under the pressure and reversed to one of the rare passing spaces. ‘I think fourteen-year-old girls don't run away from home without a reason. And, if they do, they certainly don't return five years later to slaughter their own family.'

‘Maybe she'd been abused?'

‘There's certainly something we don't know. Whatever her reasons, now we've established a link between her brother, Aaron, and Cornelius Green, Bethany Bowman is a suspect. She has to be.'

‘I thought the Bowman family lived in Keswick – why aren't we heading there?'

‘They did live in Keswick, Snoopy, but they owned two houses; the Underbarrow property belonged to her mother's parents. After the massacre Eve moved away. She must have missed Cumbria though, as three years ago she moved to the house in Underbarrow. I imagine the house in Keswick held too many dark memories for her. She rents it out now.'

‘Why bother coming back?'

‘Tilly says she's recently married,' Poe said. ‘Probably wants to raise a family and there really isn't a better place. The village is safe and the schools are excellent. She works part-time for an estate agent in Kendal so hopefully she'll be in.'

‘And we're here to question her?'

‘No, Snoopy, we're here to warn her.'