Chapter 63
‘Bad biscuit?’ Doctor Lang said, frowning. ‘She used the phrase bad biscuit to describe someone she didn’t like?’
Poe nodded. ‘According to Tilly she used it twenty-seven times in her journal but never swore once, and believe me, Doctor Lang, she had every reason to.’
‘For someone like her, that’s . . . unusual. Language is one of the few things the powerless have at their disposal.’
‘I called Alice about it and she said Bethany never swore as she hadn’t wanted Aaron to copy her. And Snoopy said that whether they liked it or not, some of Grace and Noah’s values had imprinted on their daughter.’
‘Had she been writing daily entries?’
‘No. Which isn’t surprising considering she had to keep her journal at Alice’s house. Sometimes there were one or two a week; sometimes there was a month-long gap.’
‘What did Cumbria Police make of this new evidence?’
‘The cop in charge of the original investigation was called Ian Gamble and he’s long retired. Superintendent Nightingale is in charge now and she thought the same as me.’
‘Which was?’
‘That they’d finally found their missing motivation.’
‘For the Bowman family massacre?’
‘And Cornelius Green’s murder. We didn’t know what the link was at that point, but everything seemed to start with Noah Bowman contacting Cornelius Green about whatever it was that Aaron had done.’
‘We have a young girl undoubtedly suffering from rejected child syndrome and her brother, the only person in the family she has any real attachment to, is forced to go away for some real or imagined transgression. She must have been terrified.’
‘Why?’
‘Children are tough and adaptable, Washington. In situations like Bethany’s, they develop coping mechanisms. Bethany had Alice and her temper and her rebellious nature. I would imagine it’s why she was never physically beaten. I suspect her parents knew there was a line they couldn’t cross with her. But if they had threatened her brother with something, well, that could have been a psychological tipping point.’
‘It was threatening Aaron that sent her over the edge, not the abuse she suffered. That seems . . . counterintuitive.’
‘That’s because you’re thinking like an adult male, not a fourteen-year-old girl. You said she saw her role as Aaron’s protector. That she defended him from bullies at school and she bore the brunt of her parents’ ill behaviour at home. If something horrible happened to Aaron, in her eyes, she had failed him completely. And when she tried to internalise that, it could easily have manifested as violence towards him. She might have blamed him for putting himself in a situation in which she was unable to protect him. That might have been why they rowed.’
‘You said she would have suffered from rejected child syndrome?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s where children are rejected by the very people who are supposed to love and care for them. And it goes beyond favouritism, it feels like parents actively dislike a child. Biologically, as vertebrates, the mother’s bond with the child is supposed to become unbreakable within the first three years of life. It used to be essential for survival. If that bond isn’t established, the rejection can continue well into adolescence. The child will never feel like part of the family and, as feelings of security and stability are fundamental to emotional development, getting through adolescence without making unfortunate decisions will take a great deal of luck. And, as it was in Bethany’s case, when the child has siblings, the emotional trauma can be even more profound. It will feel like their brothers and sisters can do no wrong, while they’re punished for minor infractions.’
‘Bethany wasn’t even allowed to eat with the family,’ Poe said. ‘I suppose if she’d been an only child she might have been able to rationalise what was happening as the norm, but when her rejection was so blatant, so cruel, it was perhaps inevitable she became who she did?’
‘And recent studies have confirmed what we therapists have always known – that the anterior cingulate cortex, the cortical area of the brain that registers physical pain, is also involved in the detection and monitoring of social and emotional pain. An Australian study even showed that remembering physically painful events is less traumatic than remembering emotionally painful events.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, if a child was physically tortured for fourteen years no one would be surprised if they subsequently developed behavioural problems. Now we understand emotional trauma a little better, we should not be surprised to learn that things such as rejected child syndrome lead to similar problems.’
‘Tell me what the long-term effects might be.’ He already knew some, of course, but it was interesting to hear a professional’s opinion.
Doctor Lang considered this carefully. ‘In cases like Bethany’s, I would expect the child to suffer from type-two post-traumatic stress disorder,’ she said. ‘And, as the reason you’re sitting in this makeshift office is trauma related, you’ll know that comes with a whole range of symptoms.’
‘I suffer from nightmares,’ he said. ‘I assume that’s one of the milder ones?’
‘The long-term effects have primarily been studied in the US.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because of their mass shootings. Although lots of countries have what we would consider lax gun laws, the US is the only country to regularly suffer from this phenomenon.’
‘Extreme violence is one of the long-term effects?’
‘A rare one, but yes.’
‘What would be more usual?’
‘Alcoholism and drug abuse. Postures that show self-protection, like slouching or haircuts that hide most of the face. Membership of a gang isn’t uncommon and paradoxically neither is the desire for extreme solitude.’
Poe sucked air through his teeth. His mother had abandoned him when he was a toddler, and although he had subsequently discovered she’d had reasons he could understand, he had always been a bit of a loner. Herdwick Croft was in the middle of nowhere and until Estelle Doyle had entered his life, he had never had a relationship that had lasted more than a few weeks. He could count on one hand the number of people he trusted. He wondered if it all stemmed from his childhood.
‘Alice said if Bethany was going to murder her family she would have just snapped, she wouldn’t have waited five years,’ he said. ‘Does that bear out with the studies into mass shootings in the US?’
‘No,’ Doctor Lang replied. ‘That’s not what the studies found. The evidence suggests that mass shooters enter into a long-term plan. Their anger builds up over a significant period of time, often since childhood. They rarely snap.’
‘So a five-year gap between running away and returning to murder her family . . . ?’
‘Is entirely consistent with the US studies, yes.’ Doctor Lang tapped the file on the table. ‘Can I remind you, Washington, that I haven’t read this part yet as I want to hear your version first? Other than knowing the guilty parties are either dead or behind bars, I have no idea who did what to whom.’
‘We’re getting there, Doctor Lang,’ Poe said. ‘In fact, we’re now getting to the stage where things started to go wrong, both in the case and for me personally.’
‘What happened?’
‘You remember the alphanumeric tattoos I told you about?’
‘The ones Cornelius Green had on his body? You said Israel Cobb might have had them too.’
‘You have to understand that at this stage of the investigation our priority was finding out what had happened on those secret courses. We believed that once we knew, we would be one step closer to finding out who else Bethany Bowman might target. We’d sort of put the tattoos on the backburner. Tilly was spending a little bit of time on them when she could, but they weren’t our priority.’
‘And they should have been.’
‘Like I said before, the tattoos were the key to everything. Something we were left in no doubt of after our visit to Nathan Rose.’
‘And this was where things started to go wrong?’
Poe looked at the cuts and scars on his hands. Some had healed; some were fresh. Some were little more than scratches; others were deep and had needed stitches. None of them were older than six months. ‘It was,’ he said.
‘What happened?’
‘I’d been reading Bethany’s journal on the way there and by the time I got to the Roses’ I guess I was looking for a fight. Mrs Rose and I took an instant dislike to each other.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose it saved time.’
‘Washington,’ Doctor Lang warned, ‘we’ve talked about your use of humour as a deflection technique.’
‘Sorry,’ Poe said.
‘What happened?’
‘Something horrible. And later on it gave certain people everything they needed.’