Chapter 62

‘You come across the phrase "bad biscuit" yet?' Poe said, glancing up from the journal entry he was reading.

Linus and Bradshaw both nodded.

‘If you give me ten seconds,' Bradshaw said, grabbing her laptop from Linus and typing something so fast her fingers went blurry, ‘I can tell you how many times.' Her laptop beeped. ‘The phrase "bad biscuit" is used twenty-seven times, Poe.'

Poe reread his entry.

Grace is a bad biscuit! She took the bulb out of my lamp tonight as she said I'd been reading when I should have been sleeping. I'm not even allowed books! I said I would tell my teacher what she'd done and she said that no one would believe me and even if they did, they would take me away and put me in a horrible orphanage and I'd never see Eve or Aaron again.

‘What do you think it means?' Poe said. ‘I've never heard that phrase before.'

‘I think it's an insult, Poe,' Bradshaw said. ‘I've scanned the whole document for swear words and there aren't any.'

‘Maybe some of that strict religious upbringing rubbed off on her,' Linus said. ‘Some of the worst killers in history were prudish when it came to curse words.'

‘Yes, thank you, Snoopy,' Poe said. ‘As Tilly and I both work for the unit responsible for studying serial killers, we were, of course, completely unaware of this.'

‘I was just saying.'

‘Well don't.'

Poe swiped right and read an earlier entry.

Grace and Noah call me Bethany at church and when they are forced to meet my teachers, but at home they call me ‘It'. ‘It' was talking to Aaron last night. ‘It' didn't come straight home from school today. We'd better give ‘It' some food, people will notice if ‘It's' underweight. I borrowed Stephen King'sIt from the school library and read it at Alice's house. Maybe if I were a killer clown instead of a thirteen-year-old girl they wouldn't pick on me so much. I wish they were dead!

She wasn't a killer clown, Poe thought, but had she turned into a murderer, nonetheless? Everything pointed to this. Alice might be viewing Bethany through love-tinted glasses, but Poe wasn't. Alice had asked why Bethany had waited five years to take her revenge, but Poe thought she was missing the point. If the journal was an accurate reflection of Bethany's childhood, the real question was why had it taken her so long?

He opened the index of the scanned journal and selected the final entry. He read it twice then checked the date. Bethany had written it two weeks before Aaron attended his course.

Something has happened! Grace was shouting at Aaron when he got back from school, REALLY shouting at him. She called him a bad biscuit and threatened to cut it off, although I couldn't hear what the ‘it' was. Aaron was crying and so was Eve. We all got sent to our rooms and for once it wasn't just me going without tea. Eve sneaked me in some cheese just before she went to bed, but she wouldn't tell me what had happened. She looked scared. I crept outside when the house was quiet, as I wanted to make sure Aaron was OK. I overheard Grace and Noah whispering. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but when they finished, Noah said, ‘OK, I'll go and see Cornelius.' I hope Aaron doesn't have to go to that horrible place. He's not strong enough. I wonder what he's done.

‘It all comes down to that course,' Poe said, turning off Bradshaw's tablet. ‘If that last entry is to be believed, Aaron did something, something that upset his parents. His father went to see Cornelius and two weeks later he was on one of those undocumented courses. Maybe Noah and Grace discovered Aaron was gay, maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, he went on that course and, when he got back, he and Bethany rowed. Bethany ran away immediately afterwards.'

‘Do you believe her, Poe?' Bradshaw asked. ‘If it's deception, it's very clever deception.'

‘My gut feeling says this isn't the bug-eyed ranting of a psychopath, Tilly; this is the real deal. I don't think a teenage girl would have the nuance or subtlety to make up something like this. Bethany did hate her parents, but I think Alice was right – they hated her first. And I don't think it was because she was getting close to another girl.'

‘But why, Poe? She was only a little girl. And why didn't they do those terrible things to Eve and Aaron as well? Why did they single out Bethany so much?'

‘I don't know,' he said, his eyes monstrous in North Lakes's dimly lit bar. ‘But I'll tell you one thing, Tilly – I will find out.'