The Wrong Mother (21 page)

‘Okay.’ Charlie wasn’t sure what he wanted her to do with all this information. ‘So talk to Sam.’

‘Tried and failed. Tomorrow I’m phoning in sick and going to Cambridge to talk to Professor Jonathan Hey who co-wrote the article with Harbard. I made the appointment this morning. I want to know more.’

‘So why not talk to Harbard? Isn’t that what he’s there for?’

‘He’s too busy having his slap-head powdered by BBC make-up artists to talk to the likes of me. And he’s obsessed with one thing and one thing only: his prediction that more and more women are going to start committing familicide. That’s what gets people writing to the papers complaining about him, or applauding his bravery—that’s what keeps his name in the news and gets him the media appearances he loves.’

‘Why will more and more women kill their children?’ asked Charlie. ‘Can he get away with saying that?’

‘Try stopping him. His argument’s simple: in most areas of life, women are doing things that, at one time, only men used to do. Therefore women will start to kill their families. Therefore Geraldine Bretherick must have killed her daughter and herself. Does he bother trying to reconcile it with his own article, with all this stuff about financial factors and revenge? Does he bollocks. His reasoning’s bullshit. So, I want to know if his sidekick’s full of the same shit or if, as an expert of equal standing, his take on things is slightly different. Fancy coming with me?’

‘What?’

‘To Cambridge.’

‘I’m working tomorrow.’

‘Fuck work. I’m asking you to come with me.’

Charlie laughed in disbelief. ‘Look, why phone in sick? Tell Sam you want to talk to this Jonathan Hey—maybe he’d think it was a good idea. The more expert opinions the better, surely.’

‘Yeah, right. When’s that ever been the philosophy? Harbard’s our designated professor. I’d get the manpower-and-resources lecture if I got greedy and asked for another.’

‘Won’t Hey say exactly what Harbard’s said?’

Simon’s determination was etched on his face. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Harbard lives alone. Hey’s younger, married, a father . . .’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘The magic of Google.’

Charlie nodded. There was no point trying to talk Simon out of it. She wasn’t going to tell Sam. She’d have had nothing to tell if Simon hadn’t confided in her about his plans. Now he’d made her complicit. Was it some kind of test?

‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘I’m going to order this curry before I faint. It’ll take at least half an hour to get here and there’s not a crisp or peanut in the house, I’m afraid. All I’ve got’s eggs, stuff in tins and jars, and a packet of chicken stock cubes.’

Simon said nothing. Beads of sweat had appeared beneath his hairline.

‘Do you want to look at the menu?’ Charlie tried again.

‘I want you to marry me.’

He sat rigid, watching her, as if he’d just confessed to having a contagious fatal illness and was waiting for her to recoil in horror. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Now you know.’

 

‘This is the best thing that could have happened,’ Mark Bretherick told Sam Kombothekra. At least Sam knew the man in front of him
was
Mark Bretherick. He’d followed Proust’s instructions and checked more times than someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder would check, and in more ways. There was no doubt. Mark Howard Bretherick, born on the twentieth of June 1964, in Sleaford, Lincolnshire. Son of Donald and Anne, older brother of Richard Peter. This afternoon Sam had spoken to a teacher at Bretherick’s primary school, who remembered him clearly and said she was positive that the man whose photograph had been on the news and in the papers was the boy she had taught. ‘I’d know those eyes anywhere,’ she said. ‘Sad eyes, I always thought. Though he was a happy enough lad. Extraordinarily bright, too. I wasn’t surprised when I heard he’d done well for himself.’

Sam knew what she meant about the eyes. Gibbs had managed to unearth a photograph of Bretherick aged eleven. He’d won a school swimming competition and his picture was in the local paper. The man who sat in front of Sam now was that boy plus thirty-two years.

Bretherick’s voice on the phone, when he’d summoned Sam without explanation but insisting it was urgent, had been a little like a schoolboy’s: full of the sort of anarchic, high-pitched energy that puts adults instantly on their guard. Bretherick had insisted ‘something good’ had happened, and Sam had hurried round to Corn Mill House hoping the situation hadn’t deteriorated—though admittedly that was hard to imagine when you looked at things from Bretherick’s point of view—but fearing it had, somehow.

His last comment had got no reaction from Sam, so Bretherick tried again. ‘I allowed doubt to creep in,’ he said. ‘Because you seemed to have no doubts at all. I should have trusted my wife, not some stranger. No offence.’

Sam was gratified to hear that Bretherick had trusted him at all, however fleetingly—when? For an hour this afternoon, perhaps, in his absence?—even though the phase was now over. Bretherick’s skin was grey, the whites of his eyes speckled with red from lack of sleep. He and Sam were in his kitchen, sitting opposite one another across a large pine table. The green carpet on the floor bothered Sam, made him dislike the room as a whole. Who, he wondered, carpets a kitchen? Not Geraldine Bretherick—the carpet was stained and looked at least twenty years old.

He was inclined to believe Bretherick’s story. For a lie it was too elaborate; a man of Bretherick’s intelligence would invent something simpler. So either it had happened or Bretherick had become delusional overnight. Sam favoured the former explanation.

‘Mark, I understand that you’re telling me that a woman who looked like your wife stole two photographs from your house,’ said Sam carefully. ‘What I don’t understand is why you’re happy about it.’

‘I’m not happy!’ Bretherick was insulted.

‘All right, that’s the wrong word. I’m sorry. But you said this was the best thing that could have happened, both on the phone and a few seconds ago. Why?’

‘You told me Geraldine must have killed herself and Lucy because there were no other suspects—’

‘I didn’t quite say that. What I might have—’

‘There
is
another suspect. A man who pretended to be me. The woman who was here said she’d spent some time with him last year—I don’t know how long, but I got the impression she was talking about a significant amount of time. Reading between the lines, I think she might have been involved with him. Even though she was wearing a wedding ring. She said he went into detail about my life, talked to her at length about Geraldine and Lucy, about my work. Why would she lie? She wouldn’t. She’d have no reason to come here and make all that up.’

‘If she can steal, she can lie,’ said Sam gently. ‘You’re sure she took these two photographs?’

Bretherick nodded. ‘One of Geraldine and one of Lucy. I’d started packing up. I couldn’t bear the idea of throwing things away, but I couldn’t cope with having them in the house. Jean said she’d take it all, everything, until I was ready to have it back.’

‘Geraldine’s mum?’

‘Yes. I put the two photos in one of the bags. They were my favourites, of Geraldine and Lucy at the owl sanctuary at Silsford Castle. I kept them on my desk at work, since I spent more time there than at home.’ Bretherick rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger, perhaps as a cover for wiping his eyes, Sam couldn’t tell. ‘I brought them home yesterday. I couldn’t keep them out where I could see them. Every time I looked at them, I . . . it was like an electric shock of pain. I can’t describe it. Jean’s the opposite. If anything, she’s put up more pictures since they died. All Lucy’s framed drawings that used to be here, on the wall . . .’

‘You’ve been into work?’ asked Sam.

‘Yes. Something wrong with that?’

‘No. I didn’t know you had, though.’

‘I have to do something, don’t I? Have to fill my days. I didn’t
do
any work. I just went to the office, sat in my chair. Opened sympathy cards. Then I came home.’

Sam nodded. ‘Has anyone else been to the house, anyone who might have removed the photographs?’

Bretherick leaned forward, his eyes locking on Sam’s. ‘Stop treating me like a moron,’ he said, and for the first time since he’d reported finding the bodies of his wife and daughter, Sam could imagine him giving orders to his staff of seven at Spilling Magnetic Refrigeration. ‘I’m not treating you like one, although soon I might have to. The woman who looked like Geraldine, who was here this afternoon—she stole the photographs. I’d only put them in the bag an hour or so before she turned up, and no one’s been here since she left apart from my mother-in-law and now you. I might be bereaved but I’m not an idiot. If there was anyone else who might have stolen them, don’t you think I’d mention it?’

‘Mark, I’m sorry. I have to ask these questions.’

Bretherick twisted in his chair. ‘A man who pretends to be me has an affair with a woman who looks exactly like my wife—a woman who comes here this afternoon, refuses to answer my questions or tell me her name, and steals photographs of Geraldine and Lucy. I want to hear you say that this changes everything. Say it.’

This man has an interview technique, thought Sam. Not many people did, not unless they’d been trained. Sam knew his own interview technique wasn’t one of his strengths as a detective. He hated to put people on the spot, hated it even more when they did it to him.

‘You don’t know for certain that this woman was having an affair with—’

‘Irrelevant.’ Bretherick cut him off, began to tap his fingers on the table one by one, as if playing the piano slowly, one-handed.

Sam felt hot and flustered. This was a show of strength; Bretherick was trying to prove he was cleverer, as if that made him more likely to be right. Perhaps it did. Talking to him was like talking to Simon Waterhouse. Whose analysis, Sam was certain, would be identical to Bretherick’s.

‘How many suicides have you dealt with, Sergeant?’

Sam took a deep breath. ‘Some. Maybe four or five.’ None since he’d become a detective. One, he corrected himself: Geraldine.

‘Did any of those four or five have this many question marks surrounding them, this many strange, unexplained details?’

‘No,’ Sam admitted.
You don’t know the half of it.
He hadn’t told Bretherick that the diary file on Geraldine’s laptop was opened more than a year after the date of the last entry. He was still trying to work out what he thought of this man who had already been back to the office, already bagged up his wife and child’s possessions.

One detail had bothered Sam from the start, though he’d assumed he was wrong to be concerned about it since Simon Waterhouse seemed not to have registered it: when Mark Bretherick had first rung the police, he’d said, ‘Someone’s killed my wife and daughter. They’re both dead.’ The words had been clearly audible even through his hysteria. Interviewed later, Bretherick had claimed that he hadn’t read or even seen Geraldine’s suicide note in the lounge. He’d let himself into his house after returning from a long and tiring trip abroad, gone straight upstairs to his bedroom and found Geraldine’s body in the en-suite bathroom. His wife’s body, in a bath full of blood. The razor blade lying on her stomach; Bretherick didn’t touch it, left it in place for the scene-of-crime officers to find. Why hadn’t he called the police immediately from the telephone beside his bed? Instead he said he’d gone straight to Lucy’s room to check she was all right and then, when he failed to find her in there, he looked in all the other rooms upstairs and found her dead body in the family bathroom.

Maybe it makes sense, thought Sam. If you discover that the person you assume is looking after your child can’t be, because she’s lying in the bath with her wrists slashed, maybe the first thing you do is panic and search the house for your daughter. Sam tried for about the two hundredth time to imagine himself in Bretherick’s terrible position. He doubted he’d be capable of moving at all if he’d just found Kate dead. Would he even be able to pick up a phone? Would he think about where his sons were?

There was no point speculating. Mark Bretherick couldn’t have killed Geraldine and Lucy. He was in New Mexico when they died.

‘She said she’d come and see me again, but I don’t think she will,’ Bretherick was saying. ‘I was stupid to let her go. I need to know who she is.’

It was a few seconds before Sam realised he was talking about his visitor from this afternoon, not his dead wife.

‘We’ll do our best,’ said Sam.

‘It’ll be easy for you to find out. You can appeal on television. She could be Geraldine’s twin, she looks so much like her. She’s married . . . Oh, and she’s got one of those mobile phones that shuts like a . . . sort of like a clam shell. Silver, with a jewel on the front, looks like a little diamond. You need to find her and bring her back here.’

Sam let out a long, slow sigh, hoping Bretherick wouldn’t notice his sinking shoulders. A television appeal? That would be Proust’s call, and Sam could guess what the inspector would say, could almost hear him saying it: Mark Bretherick had appeared on the news many times in the past few days. His was the sort of tragedy that attracted attention, and possibly visits from local nutters. This woman, whoever she was, could easily have been lying. Should Sam suggest a TV appeal all the same? Lobby for one as Simon Waterhouse might? Perhaps if he’d been there longer . . .

Sam still felt like a stranger in a strange land at work. Every molecule in his body yearned to go back to West Yorkshire, to the lock-keeper’s cottage by the side of the Leeds-Liverpool canal that he and Kate had loved, with the wisteria climbing its walls. Sam hadn’t known what the plant was called but Kate had gone on about it so much when they’d first seen the house, he could hardly have avoided learning the name. But Kate’s parents lived near Spilling and she’d finally admitted she needed help looking after the boys so there was no way they’d be going back to Bingley. In the end, Sam thought with a mixture of pride and shame, it turns out I’m more sentimental than my wife.