The Wrong Mother

by Sophie Hannah

  I try to think about this, but my mind feels as if it has been wrapped in tight material.

  ‘You take turns to get up with the kids at the weekend, but you’d almost rather get up early on Saturday and Sunday,’ says the voice. My words, his voice. He remembers every word I said. ‘You don’t enjoy your lie-ins. Nick enjoys his; when it’s your turn to do the early shift, he gets up at ten to find the house immaculate, the children dressed, fed and playing happily-teeth and hair brushed-and you still in your dressing gown, hungry, just starting to think about the possibility of getting some breakfast or a coffee for yourself.’

  And when it’s his turn, I get up at nine and find the kids hungry and whining, still in their pyjamas, and every toy we own out of its box and scattered all over the carpet, and a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, and Nick sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee and the newspaper…

  ‘I remember something else you said at Seddon Hall.’ The man’s voice cuts into my thoughts. Now I know he’s still there. Through the fug, my brain jolts. What has he been saying? Bad things about Nick. I can’t trust him. Has he drugged me? Is that why I feel like this? ‘You said you’d never regret lying, never regret our week together. You said, “If you see that no one else is going to look after you, you have to look after yourself.” ’

  His words drop into the narrow tunnel inside my head, which soon closes into blackness.

  ***

  When I wake up, he’s gone. I look at my watch. It’s quarter to four in the morning. I have a bad stomach ache and I’m horribly frightened and confused, but I can move more easily than before. I jump down from the bench and hear a clink, the sound of metal rattling. What is this thing I’ve been lying on? It has one wide silver leg, in the middle, with a round base. Wheels. I remember seeing but not registering it when I was lying on the carpet before. I bend and look again, to check my memory isn’t playing tricks on me. It isn’t. I hear another hard, metallic noise, quieter than the first.

  I pull away one of the towels, then another, and stare at the beige leather I’ve uncovered. I frown, trying to pin down a memory. A doctor’s examination table? Then my breath catches in my throat and I push away all the other towels at once. They fall in a heap on the floor. Something protrudes from one end of the long, thin leather table: a large horizontal loop, like a rigid noose, covered in the same beige leather. I knew it would be there. Still, my gut lurches.

  If I didn’t know what this was, the noose shape would terrify me. Recognition does nothing to lessen my fear. Because this thing shouldn’t be here. It doesn’t belong here; there’s something horribly wrong. It’s a massage table like the ones at Seddon Hall, the ones I lay on for the three or four massages I had during the week I spent with Mark.

  With someone who wasn’t Mark. With someone who lied.

  I turn, run for the door, knowing that this time no offers of food and rest will stop me from leaving. Nothing will stop me from getting back to my home, Nick and the children.

  Except that something does, and the wild scream that erupts from my throat when I remember the second metallic click, the sound I thought came from the bench-from the table-does nothing to alter the stark fact: the door is locked.

  Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723

  Case Ref: VN87

  OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra

  GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 5 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)

  3 May 2006, 9 p.m.

  One side-effect of being a mother is that I have lost some of my fears and some of my imaginative capacity. In some ways, this is quite liberating. I am so overpowered by my own feelings that I cannot believe anyone might feel differently. The perfect example: on Saturday, Cordy and I took Oonagh and Lucy swimming. On the way back we stopped at Waitrose. Both of the girls had fallen asleep. I suggested to Cordy that she and I run in and out quickly, leaving them locked in the car in the car park. I do it all the time with Lucy, but Cordy looked shocked. ‘We can’t do that,’ she said. ‘What if the car explodes? That happened once-I heard it on the news. Some kids died because they’d been left in a car and its petrol tank blew up.’

  ‘What if we take them with us and Waitrose’s roof falls in and crushes them to death?’ I said.

  ‘We can’t leave them alone,’ she insisted. ‘Some psycho might kidnap them.’

  ‘They’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave them to sleep. The car will be locked.’ This, I knew, was a weaker argument than my previous one. A psycho could smash a car window and kidnap two girls, easily. What I wanted to say, but didn’t feel able to, was that I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why anyone who didn’t have to cart two five-year-olds around with them should wish to do so. I knew Cordy meant paedophiles when she said ‘psychos’. I tried to imagine myself into the mind of a paedophile. It proved impossible, and not only for the obvious reasons. I find it hard to empathise with any adult who would seek out the company of children. I know people do it all the time, often innocently and with no evil intentions, but I still find it implausible. And what you cannot imagine, you cannot fear.

  I have also, I discovered last night when Mark suggested we go abroad during Lucy’s half-term holiday, lost my fear of flying. I know with absolute certainty that no plane I am on will crash, because if I died in a plane crash then I would be exempt from all future parenting duties, and Sod’s Law dictates that I won’t get out of it so easily. If I died in a plane crash, I would not have to spend another ten thousand Saturday afternoons standing beside bouncy castles that smell of vomit and sweaty socks, or sitting amid the debris of a game of pass-the-parcel like a tramp on a bed of newpapers while Lucy spits lumps of wet, unswallowed sandwich into my hand. I’m not saying I want to die-I simply know that I won’t.

  I told Mark I refused to be forced out of my home and forced out of the country at a time that’s not convenient for me, just because St Swithun’s has decided to award its teachers an extra long half-term. It makes me so angry: you pay a fortune for private education and they take longer holidays than in the state sector. I call that fraud.

  Michelle has made it clear that I can no longer rely on her. She’s going on holiday with her fat, ugly boyfriend who never speaks-the trip is already booked. I offered her an exorbitant sum of money to cancel it, but she’s in love (Gart knows how and why, given the absolute lack of provocation from her love-object) and seems now to be immune to my financial incentives. If I get desperate, I might ask one of the mums from school to have Lucy for half-term; one of them’s bound to be planning to ruin those two weeks of her life by spending them doing child things, so she can have my child too. I’ll buy her a new vacuum cleaner or apron or something to say thank you, and Lucy can spend a fortnight picking up tips on how to sacrifice yourself and become the family slave, since life is so much easier for all females who learn this lesson well and do not think to question it.

  Mum, who ought to be a great help to me, is out of the question. I rang her last night, but never found out whether she could or couldn’t have Lucy to stay for that fortnight because the conversation didn’t get that far. She told me I ought to want to look after my own daughter during her school holidays.

  ‘Ought I?’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t. I can’t face a fortnight of not being able to do a single thing I want to do. I might as well spend two weeks bound and gagged in a cellar.’

  Saying things I don’t mean, ‘barking worse than my bite’, is a necessary outlet for me, one way of exercising my power and freedom. Mum should be relieved that I’m dealing with my frustration humorously, verbally. I do it-I say these terrible things-to keep myself sane. If just once Mum would say, ‘Poor you, two weeks of being on mother duty, what a nightmare,’ I wouldn’t feel quite so negated. Or, an even cleverer response: ‘You need to start putting yourself first-why don’t you send Lucy to boarding school?’ I’d never do that, Gart forbid. I like to see Lucy every day, just not all of ever
y day. The suggestion of boarding school would stir up my maternal fervour, which (anyone shrewd would by now have worked out) might be exactly what I need.

  Sadly, Mum doesn’t understand about reverse psychology. She started crying and said, ‘I can’t understand why you had a child. Didn’t you know what it would involve? Didn’t you know it would be hard work?’

  I told her I’d had no idea what it would feel like to be a parent because I’d never done it before. And, I reminded her, she had lied to me. She’d said, over and over again while I was pregnant, that being a mother was hard work but that you didn’t mind because you loved your child so much. ‘That’s rubbish,’ I told her. ‘You love them, yes, but you do mind. Why should loving someone mean you’re willing to sacrifice your freedom? Why should loving someone mean you’re happy to watch your life become worse than it used to be in almost every way?’

  ‘Your life isn’t worse,’ said Mum. ‘You’ve got a beautiful, lovely daughter.’

  ‘That’s her life,’ I said. ‘Lucy’s life, not mine.’ And then, because of an article I’d read on the train yesterday, I said, ‘There’s a “conspiracy of silence” about what motherhood is really like. No one tells you the truth.’

  ‘Conspiracy of silence!’ Mum wailed. ‘All you ever do is tell me how awful your life’s been since you had Lucy. I wish there was a conspiracy of silence! I’d be a lot happier.’

  I put the phone down. She wanted silence, so silence was what I gave her. I could have won the argument decisively by pointing out that I am only as selfish as I am, as reluctant to subordinate my own needs to someone else’s, because from the moment I was born she treated me as if I was made of gold. Never did I get even the slightest hint that she had needs of her own and wasn’t simply there to serve me. In Mum’s eyes, I was an infant goddess. My every whim was attended to instantly. I was never punished; all I had to do was say sorry and I would be forgiven, and indeed rewarded for my apology. Lucy will be a more considerate woman than I am, I have no doubt, because she has grown up knowing that she is not ‘the only pebble on the beach’.

  My relationship with Mum has never fully recovered from the Big Sleep row. The Christmas after Lucy was born, Mark was away at a conference. Mum came to stay. She bought me an extra little present: a mug with a book cover on it, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I unwrapped it on Christmas morning after four sleepless nights in a row, four nights spent dragging myself round the house like a corpse with Lucy over my shoulder, patting her, trying to persuade her to close her eyes so that I could close mine. ‘The Big Sleep?’ I snapped at Mum, unable to believe she would be so cruel. ‘Is this your idea of a sick joke?’

  She acted all innocent. ‘What do you mean, love?’ she said.

  I lost my temper, started screaming at her. ‘Big Sleep? Big fucking sleep? I haven’t slept for more than an hour at a time for ten fucking weeks!’ I threw the mug at the fireplace and it smashed into pieces. Mum burst into tears and swore she hadn’t done it deliberately. Looking back, I don’t suppose she did. She’s not nasty, just thoughtless-too sensible to be sensitive.

  I couldn’t help noticing that, having told me I ought to want to look after Lucy during half-term, Mum didn’t ring back and offer to do so herself, as many a doting grandmother would have in her position. I am increasingly convinced that she only worries so much about Lucy because, in terms of offering practical help, she is willing to do so little.

  10

  8/9/07

  ‘This isn’t about me,’ said Mark Bretherick. ‘You’d like to pretend it is, but it isn’t. Do you know what your men are doing with the earth they’re digging out of my garden?’ He pointed out of the lounge window at the teams of officers in overalls. Sam Kombothekra, more silent and serious than Simon had ever seen him, stood guard beside them, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. Simon knew he was hoping they’d find nothing. Kombothekra hated the unpleasantness crime brought with it, the social awkwardness of having to arrest a person, of having to look a man in the face and tell him you think-or know, more often than not-that he’s done something terrible. Especially hard if that man is someone you’re used to treating very differently.

  His own fault. A bit less of the ‘Mark, we understand what you’re going through’ and he’d have found today a piece of piss.

  ‘Our men will repair the damage as best they can,’ Simon told Bretherick.

  ‘That’s not what I meant. It’s a very clever metaphor you’ve got going here. You look as if you’re unearthing, when burying’s what you’re really doing. That’s the true purpose of all the earth that’s flying around out there!’ Bretherick had finally exchanged the blue, sweat-stained shirt he’d worn for days for a clean, mustard-coloured one, which he wore with gold cufflinks.

  ‘Burying what?’ asked Simon.

  ‘The reality of the situation. You got it badly wrong, didn’t you? When facing up to that became unavoidable, you decided to make me the villain of the piece because it was easier than admitting that I’ve been right all along: that a man called William Markes, who you can’t find, murdered my wife and daughter!’

  ‘We don’t decide to make people villains. We look for evidence that will implicate or exonerate them.’

  Contempt twisted Bretherick’s features. ‘So you’re hoping to find proof that I’ve committed no crime hidden beneath a begonia, are you?’

  ‘Mr Bretherick-’

  ‘It’s actually Dr Bretherick, and you still haven’t answered my questions. Why are you hacking my garden to bits? Why are there people at my office, disturbing my staff, going through every scrap of paper? Clearly you’re looking for evidence that I killed Geraldine and Lucy. Well, you won’t find any, because I didn’t!’

  Simon and Kombothekra had said something similar to Proust yesterday: Bretherick had long since been proved innocent of the only crime known to have been committed. Why exactly were they here?

  ‘You’re right, Waterhouse,’ Proust had said for the first time since records began. If Simon had been wearing a hearing aid, he’d have taken it off and given it a good shake to check it was working properly. ‘Be grateful you aren’t in my shoes. I had to make a choice: either I end up a laughing stock, fooled into wasting thousands of pounds by some nameless fantasist’s rip-roaring tale of dead cats, red Alfa Romeos and bereaved men gardening at inappropriate times, or I go down in history as the DI who dismissed an important lead and never found the bodies hidden in the perishing greenhouse. Which you can bet your police pension would be discovered five years later by a pip-squeak bobby out sunbathing on his day off.’

  ‘Sir, either there are more bodies to find, or there aren’t,’ Simon had pointed out. ‘It’s not as if they’ll only be there if you don’t look for them.’

  A cold squint from the Snowman. ‘Don’t be a pedant, Waterhouse. The worst thing about pedants is that there’s only one way to answer them and that’s pedantically. What I was trying to say-and what, frankly, anyone whose brain was in good working order would have understood-is that I fear our searches will yield nothing. Equally, I fear that if I ignore the information contained in the anonymous letter-’

  ‘We completely understand, sir,’ Kombothekra had chipped in hastily. For a man who wanted no trouble, he’d made an odd career choice.

  ‘Does the name Amy Oliver mean anything to you?’ Simon asked Mark Bretherick.

  ‘No? Who is she? Is she the woman who came here, who looked like Geraldine?’

  ‘She’s a child. She was in Lucy’s class at school last year.’

  Simon saw his disappointment, quickly masked by anger.

  ‘Don’t you people listen? Geraldine dealt with all the school stuff.’

  A quiet voice came from behind Simon. ‘You didn’t know the names of any of Lucy’s friends?’ Kombothekra had joined them.

  ‘I think there was one called Uma. I probably met them all at one time or another, but-’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Am I allowe
d to answer?’

  Simon nodded, then listened as Bretherick issued a brief, baffling diatribe. ‘It has to be client-server based, and it has to have multi-level BOMS,’ was his conclusion.

  ‘Work?’ said Simon, once the conversation was over. How could Bretherick function professionally at a time like this?

  ‘Yeah. I suppose you’ve tapped my phone, haven’t you? If you want to know what anything means, feel free to ask.’

  Patronising turd, thought Simon. ‘The two photographs that you claim were stolen,’ he said, deciding it was time to retaliate. ‘Inside the frames, behind the pictures of Geraldine and Lucy, were two other photographs that we believe might be of Amy Oliver and her mother.’

  Bretherick exhaled slowly, a frown gathering around his eyes. ‘What? What do you mean? I… I didn’t have any photographs of… I didn’t know Amy Oliver, or her mother. Who told you that?’

  ‘Where did the pictures of Geraldine and Lucy at the owl sanctuary come from? Did you take them yourself?’

  ‘No. I’ve no idea who took them.’

  ‘Did you put them in their frames?’

  ‘No. I don’t know anything about them. One day they just appeared on the mantelpiece. That’s it.’

  Fundamentally Simon believed him, but it sounded lame. ‘They just appeared?’

  ‘Not literally! Geraldine must have put them in frames and… she did all that, framed her favourite photos and Lucy’s paintings and put them up. I saw those two and liked them and took them to my office. That’s all I know about them. But why would she have put photographs of this Amy Oliver girl and her mother inside the frames? It makes no sense.’