Chapter 60

Poe swiped to the first page of Bethany's journal. ‘Welcome to my wonderful life by Bethany Bowman, aged 12 years old' was written on it. He was using one of Bradshaw's tablets. Bradshaw was on some sort of e-reader Poe hadn't seen before, and Linus had been afforded the rare privilege of being allowed to touch her laptop.

‘I have disabled the internet and Bluetooth connections, so you won't be able to email yourself a copy,' she told him. ‘You don't have the skills to reconnect them and if you try I'll know.'

‘And why would you do that?' Linus asked.

Poe put his hands to his face and formed a loudspeaker. ‘Because we don't trust you, Snoopy.'

They didn't have time to read everything, so Poe decided to choose pages at random. See if he could get a quick flavour. He would read it cover-to-cover in the order it had been written when he got home. Bethany wrote using curved, bubbly letters. Neater than his untidy scrawl, but easily identifiable as a teenage girl's. Extravagant doodles filled the margins. Whole pages were dedicated to drawings of flowers and butterflies and small dogs and anything else that looked like it had caught her attention that day. All harmless stuff. He swiped a few more pages until he came across one that was different in scale to the others. Up until then, Bradshaw had scanned one page per file. This one was two pages. It was why it had stood out. They were the centre pages, where the photograph of the main footballer would have been in Shoot magazine, the one you pinned to your wall after carefully removing the staples. Bethany had used the bigger canvas to draw a much more detailed picture. Poe zoomed in. ‘Ah, shit,' he said.

‘What is it, Poe?' Bradshaw asked.

‘You seen file . . .' – he checked the number – ‘124?'

Bradshaw found the right page. ‘Crikey,' she said.

‘That settles it,' Linus said.

Bethany's masterpiece was a full-colour, crude rendition of what Poe could only assume was Noah and Grace Bowman. They were bound to a tree, heads at an angle, necks cut almost through, obviously dead. Bethany must have used all of her red felt-tip pen colouring in the blood. Next to the corpses of her parents was a young girl. She appeared to be holding a knife. She was smiling.

Poe's phone rang. It was Superintendent Nightingale.

‘Have you seen—'

‘The centre pages?' Poe finished for her. ‘Just now.'

‘Seems young Bethany wants an encore. I know we've just had a meeting, but we're regrouping in Conference Room B in fifteen minutes. Any chance you can pop your head in? We've upgraded Bethany Bowman to our number-one suspect. This is now a nationwide manhunt.'

Poe was about to say of course, but the drawing stayed his hand. In 2012 Bethany's rage had been focused on her parents; now it was Cornelius Green. ‘I'll keep my meeting with Nathan Rose, if you don't mind, ma'am?' he said. ‘Perhaps I can get a steer on who else she might have in her sights.'

‘I'll put an alert on Eve Bowman's house. Underbarrow is so isolated that even if she called nine-nine-nine, it could be forty minutes before we get to her. I'll make sure the area patrols get cosy.'

‘Yep. Eve doesn't think Bethany is a risk to her, but better safe than sorry. Maybe keep a close eye on Alice Symonds as well? They were in a developing relationship when Bethany disappeared. I doubt she'll try to make contact but we'd be fools to ignore the possibility.'

‘I'll keep Alice at HQ for a while. Even if I have to arrest her.'

‘And you'd better have someone swing by Israel Cobb's as well. He knows more than he's letting on.'

‘Will do,' she said. ‘And Poe, I don't care how late it is, I want you to call me after your meeting with Nathan Rose.'

After Nightingale had hung up Poe checked the time. They still had an hour before they needed to leave. Poe swiped to another page and lived a little longer in the nightmare that had been Bethany Bowman's childhood. This time he ignored the drawings and focused on her written entries.

If anything, they were worse.