Chapter 56

‘If anyone had a reason to kill Noah and Grace Bowman, it was Bethany,' Alice said. ‘She had a deep hatred for them.'

‘I sense a "but" coming,' Poe said.

‘But I don't think she did it.'

‘I've read the original file. The evidence is compelling.'

‘It is,' Alice agreed. ‘Her fingerprints were all over the clasp knife used to kill Noah and Grace and Aaron, the same knife she used to cut herself sometimes. And, as it was well known she hated her parents, she was the logical suspect. She was rebellious, had a history of violent behaviour and was known to self-harm. If I were a police officer, I might also have been tempted to think that the inevitable had happened.'

‘Which was?'

‘That a deeply damaged teenage girl, almost certainly suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness, had suffered a psychotic episode. She had fixated on a family that to the outside world had only ever had her best interests at heart, and acted upon some long-held grudge.'

Poe looked over her shoulder. He could see Linus sitting at the bar, sulking. He had his phone to his ear and every so often he glanced at Poe. ‘And yet you don't think that's what happened?'

‘If she had snapped, then yes, I could have believed it,' Alice said. ‘It had happened before, both at home and at school, and it was never pretty. If she'd had an episode while she'd been holding her clasp knife, again, yes, she certainly hated them enough to do something horrible. But to come back five years after she'd left, to murder them in that cold, premeditated way, made no sense. Not to me. And it shouldn't have to the police officers running the investigation either.'

‘What makes you say that?'

‘Because as troubled as Bethany was, she was also the most honest person I've ever met. If she'd killed her parents she would have owned it. She wouldn't have tried to hide the bodies; she would have called the police herself then waited for them to arrive. She'd have wanted to tell her story in court.'

‘Maybe,' Poe said. ‘Or maybe she panicked after she killed Aaron. The senior investigating officer never thought his murder had been part of her plan.'

‘And that's the other thing, Sergeant Poe,' Alice said. ‘She would never have killed her brother. She loved Aaron. Ask her teachers. Ask anyone who knew her. The Bowmans were the religious freaks at school and that should have made them bully magnets. But while Aaron was quite timid, Bethany was fierce and fearless. She was a year younger than Aaron, so he had to fend for himself when he was in secondary school and she was still in primary school. But a year later, when Bethany started secondary school as well, the kids soon learned that if they bullied Aaron they might as well have bullied Bethany. And no one bullied Bethany. She didn't care about consequences and she didn't care if she bled. She would fight until she dropped from exhaustion, then she'd get up and keep fighting. You can't beat someone like that. Aaron survived school because of Bethany and if it had come down to a choice between killing him and getting away, or letting him live and getting caught, well, that wouldn't have been a choice at all.'

‘You admit she hated her parents?'

‘She did,' Alice said.

‘But?'

‘But only because they hated her first.'