The Wrong Mother

by Sophie Hannah

  Mark Bretherick-how else can I think of him?-walks past me and sits in one of the two chairs in front of the fire. ‘The lounge is full of bin-bags,’ he says.

  I lower myself into the chair next to his. He’s not looking at me any more. He’s staring at the glowing coals and logs through the stove door. I’m still chilly, even now that I can feel the warmth on my face. I look at the window nearest to me and see a drop of water on the stone beneath the glass, like a single tear trickling into the room.

  ‘Cold,’ he says. ‘The old ruin. This room’s always freezing.’

  ‘It’s cooler today than it was yesterday,’ I say. ‘Yesterday it was sweltering.’ I fill the air between us with pointless words to make the occasion of our meeting appear less bizarre.

  ‘That was Geraldine’s nickname for it-the old ruin. We did our bedroom and the bathrooms when we first bought it, but nothing else. Everything else could wait, Geraldine said.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful house.’

  ‘Plenty of time, she said. Thirty thousand pounds each bathroom cost me. Geraldine thought they were the most important rooms in the house. I had to take her word for it. I was never in the house.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He turns to face me. ‘I almost can’t stand the sight of you,’ he says.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He shakes his head. Every time he moves, the hard, sharp smell of dirt wafts towards me. ‘That’s where I found their bodies. Did you know that?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the baths upstairs. Geraldine was in one and Lucy was in the other. You didn’t know that?’

  ‘No. All I know is what I saw on the news last night.’

  ‘Do you know what GHB is?’

  ‘You mean GBH? Grievous bodily harm?’

  His mouth laughs, though his eyes are remote, empty. ‘You hear about things like this, things that are so far… beyond… and you wonder how people can carry on living after they happen. How can they be hungry or thirsty? How can they tie their shoe-laces or comb their hair?’

  ‘I know. I’ve thought that.’

  ‘When you rang the bell I was sorting out the flowerbeds.’

  I am sitting beside him, but I am light years away from his grief. I can feel it like an iron barrier between us.

  He looks at me again. ‘Wait here. I want to show you something. ’ He springs out of his chair. It’s enough to make me leap up too. Unpredictable; I don’t like unpredictable. I know I wouldn’t be able to stand it if he showed me anything to do with Geraldine or Lucy’s deaths. What if he’s gone up to one of the bathrooms? What’s he going to have in his hands when he returns? I picture a knife, a gun, an empty pill bottle.

  I don’t know how Geraldine killed her daughter or herself. It’s a question I don’t think I can bring myself to ask.

  I run my hands through my hair. What the hell am I doing here? What am I hoping to achieve? It can’t be helping him to have me here. I should open the door and run.

  My phone rings and I jump. I answer it quickly, to stop its mundane trill from polluting the mournful silence. Too late, I realise I could have switched it off; that would have had the same effect. It’s Owen Mellish from work. ‘Naughty girl,’ he says. ‘Where’ve you disappeared to?’

  ‘I can’t talk now,’ I tell him. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Not for me. But I thought I should let you know that Madam Snoot’s phoned twice since you left the office. She wasn’t pleased to hear you’d decided to take the day off. I told her you’d probably gone shopping.’

  ‘I’ll ring her. Thanks for letting me know.’ I cut him off before he has a chance to enrage me further. I can hear ominous creaks above my head. I don’t know if I’ve got time to phone Natasha Prentice-Nash before Mark Bretherick reappears, or whether I can do it without him hearing me, but I’m not sure I can stay here unless I do something ordinary. I need to take my mind off the man upstairs and his dead family, the souvenirs he might be about to show me.

  I stand as far away from the stairs as I can, highlight Natasha’s name on my phone’s screen and press the call button. She answers after two rings and says her name, putting her heart and soul into the vowel sounds as she always does. ‘It’s Sally,’ I whisper.

  ‘Sally! At last. We’ve got a bit of a problem, I’m afraid. The Consorzio gang have arrived.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t okay, really. There’s been some kind of misunderstanding at their end about the documentary.’

  ‘Don’t tell me it’s off.’ I close my eyes, wishing I could say, ‘Actually, I’m not Sally Thorning. I’m someone who’s standing in for her, but I’ve only taken over the easy parts of her life.’

  ‘I spoke to the producer today,’ says Natasha. ‘She’s still keen.’

  ‘Great. So…’ I feel painfully self-conscious. There’s a door to my left. As quietly as possible I open it and slip through to an even larger room. It’s a lounge, though nothing like the one in my flat. ‘Lounge’ is too casual a word to describe it-drawing room would suit it better. Like the hall, it’s dark and wood-panelled and could almost be an elegantly proportioned cave that has been refurbished for the gentry, the temporary bolt-hole of a king in hiding. I don’t have time to notice much else about the room before my eyes are drawn to the black bin-bags. There must be at least a dozen, in a heap on the Persian carpet in front of the fireplace.

  ‘Vittorio seems to think he and Salvo are both being interviewed, but Salvo says you and he agreed he’d be interviewed alone,’ Natasha is saying. ‘He’s accusing us of messing him around.’

  I sigh. ‘Him and Vittorio together-that’s always been the plan. Salvo doesn’t like it, but he’s known about it for ages.’

  ‘Could you ring and butter him up, then? Tell him how important he is? You know the sort of thing he wants to hear.’

  I’d rather tell him how intensely irritating he is. I tell Natasha I’ll do my best to pacify him and she dismisses me with a curt ‘Ciao.’ I switch off my phone and put it in my bag, then open the door and lean out into the hall. There is no sign of Mark, no sound coming from upstairs. What will I do if he doesn’t come back soon? How long will I wait before going to check that he’s all right? Or leaving? It seems unlikely that I will do either.

  I walk towards the pile of bin-bags that look so out of place on the elaborately patterned rug. I pull open the one nearest to me, taking care not to rustle the plastic any more than I have to. Apart from a pair of small pink Wellington boots on top, it’s full of women’s clothes. Geraldine’s: lots of black trousers-velvet, suede, corduroy, no jeans-and cashmere jumpers in all colours. Did she collect cashmere? I look in another bag and find dozens of bottles, tubes and sprays, and about twenty paperback books, mostly with pastel-coloured covers-peach, lemon yellow, mint green. Beneath these there is something with a hard edge, something that swings into my ankle as I move the plastic sack, making me grunt through clenched teeth.

  I look over my shoulder to check I’m safe, then reach to the bottom of the bag and pull out two chunky wooden frames. Photographs of Geraldine and Lucy. Quickly, I hold them at a distance, not ready for the shock of seeing them so close to me. Geraldine is smiling, standing with her head tilted to one side. She’s wearing a white scoop-neck T-shirt, a black gypsy skirt, silver sandals with straps round the ankles and black sunglasses on her head like a head-band. She’s got the arms of a silver-grey sweater tied round her waist. There’s a cherry blossom tree behind her and a squat, flat-topped building, painted blue, with white blinds at the windows. She’s leaning against a red brick wall.

  I bring the picture closer, staring, feeling my heartbeat in my ears. My arms are shaking. I know that place, that stubby blue building. I’ve seen it. I’m pretty sure I’ve stood where Geraldine is standing in this photograph, but I can’t remember when. The last thing I wanted to discover was another connection between Geraldine and me. But what is it? Where is it? My mind races round i
n circles, but gets nowhere.

  The picture of Lucy, which I can look at only briefly, has the same background. Lucy is sitting on the brick wall, wearing a dark green pinafore dress and a green and white striped shirt, white ankle socks and black shoes, her two thick plaits sticking out on either side of her head. She’s waving at the camera. At whoever was holding the camera…

  Her father. The words pierce me like a cold needle. The man upstairs, whoever he is, is throwing away photographs of his wife and daughter. Of Mark Bretherick’s wife and daughter. Jesus Christ. And I allowed myself to feel safe around him, in his house.

  I don’t stop to think. I yank the bag’s yellow drawstring and close it, without replacing the photographs. I’m taking them with me. I run to the door, out into the hall, and freeze, nearly dropping the pictures. He’s there, back in his chair in front of the stove. His head bent, gazing down at his lap. Has he forgotten I’m here? I stare in horror at the photographs in my hand, hanging in the air between us. If he turned now, he’d see them. Please don’t turn.

  I unzip my handbag and stuff them in, pulling out my phone. ‘Sorry,’ I say, waving it in the air, a cartoon gesture. ‘My mobile rang and… I thought I’d take it in there. I didn’t want to… you know.’ I can’t do this. I can’t stand here with photographs of Geraldine and Lucy in my handbag and talk to him as if nothing’s changed.

  My fingers tug at the zip but my bag won’t close. I hold it so that it hangs behind my body. If he looked closely he would see the edges of the frames poking out, but he hasn’t even glanced in my direction. There’s a pile of A4 paper on his lap. White, with print on it. That’s what he’s looking at. ‘I want you to read something,’ he says.

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Geraldine kept a diary. I knew nothing about it until after she was dead. I need you to read it.’

  I baulk at the word ‘need’. In his chair, with his long legs crossed at the ankles and those pages on his knee, he looks harmless once again. Frail. Like a daddy-long-legs that you could brush with your hand and it would fall to the ground.

  ‘You haven’t asked me what I want.’ I inject what I hope is a reasonable amount of suspicion into my voice. ‘Why I’m here.’

  His eyes slide to the floor. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Bad manners. Bad host.’

  ‘Last year, I met a man who told me his name was Mark Bretherick. He claimed to live here, in Corn Mill House, and to have a wife called Geraldine and a daughter called Lucy. He told me he had his own company, Spilling Magnetic Refrigeration…’

  ‘That’s my company.’ A whisper. His eyes are sharper and brighter suddenly as he turns to face me. ‘Who… who was he? What do you mean, he told you? He pretended to be me? Where did you meet him? When?’

  I take a deep breath and tell him an edited version of the story, describing the man I met at Seddon Hall in as much detail as I can. I leave out the sex because it’s not relevant. Just something bad and wrong I needed to do so that I could come home and be good again.

  Mark Bretherick listens carefully as I speak, shaking his head every so often. Not in mystification; almost as though I’m confirming something, something he’s suspected for a while. He has someone in mind. A name. Hope mixed with fear starts to stir inside me. There’s no getting away from it now; he’s going to tell me something I’ll wish I didn’t know. Something that led to a woman and a little girl being killed.

  I finish my story. He turns quickly away from me, rubbing his chin with his thumb. Nothing. Silence. I can’t stand this. ‘You know who he is, don’t you? You know him.’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘But you’ve thought of something. What is it?’

  ‘Do the police know?’

  ‘No. Who is he? I know you know.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  He’s lying. He looks like Nick does when he’s bought a new bike that costs a thousand pounds and he’s pretending it only cost five hundred. I want to scream at him to tell me the truth but I know that would only make him even more unwilling to talk. ‘Is there anyone you can think of who envies you, who might have had a thing about Geraldine? Someone who might have wanted to pretend to be you?’

  He passes the bundle of paper across to me. ‘Read this,’ he says. ‘Then you’ll know as much as I do.’

  When I look up eventually, once I’ve read each of the nine diary entries twice and taken in as much as I can, there is a mug of black tea on a slatted wooden table by the side of my chair. I didn’t notice him bringing either. He paces in front of me, up and down, up and down. I struggle not to let my revulsion show; this woman was his wife.

  ‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘Is that the diary of someone who would kill her daughter and herself?’

  I reach for my drink, nearly ask for milk but decide not to. I take a gulp that scalds my mouth and throat. The mug is covered in writing: ‘SCES ’04, The International Conference on Strongly Correlated Electron Systems, July 26-30 2004, Universität Karlsruhe (TH) Germany ’.

  ‘It’s not the Geraldine I knew, the person who wrote all that. But then she says, doesn’t she? She’s got that part covered. “Whatever I feel inside, I do the opposite.” ’

  ‘She didn’t write it every day,’ I say. ‘From the dates, I mean. It’s only nine days in total. Maybe she only wrote it when she felt really down, and on other days she didn’t feel like that at all. She might have been happy most of the time.’

  His anger surprises me. He knocks the drink from my hand, sending it flying across the hall, spraying tea everywhere. I watch the mug’s arc through the air, watch it fall on to the window seat as he yells, ‘Stop treating me like I’m mentally impaired! ’ I duck, making a hard shell of my body to fend off an attack, but he is already kneeling beside me, apologising. ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, are you okay? Christ, you could have got third-degree burns!’

  ‘I’m all right. Honestly. Fine.’ I hear the tremor in my voice and wonder why I’m rushing to reassure him. ‘It went on the floor, not on me.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. God knows what you must think of me now.’

  I feel dizzy, trapped. ‘I didn’t mean to make you angry,’ I tell him. ‘I was trying to find something positive to say. The diary’s horrible. You obviously know it is, and I didn’t want to make you feel worse.’

  ‘You couldn’t.’ His eyes seem to issue a challenge.

  ‘Okay, then.’ I hope I’m not about to break my own personal stupidity record. ‘Yes, I think this is the diary of someone who might kill her daughter. No, I don’t think it’s the diary of someone who would kill herself.’

  He watches me closely. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The writer… the voice throughout seems to be screaming self-preservation at all costs. If I had to guess what sort of woman wrote it, I’d say-look, this is going to sound awful.’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘Narcissistic, spoilt, superior-her way of doing things is better than everyone else’s…’ I bite my lip. ‘Sorry. I’m not very tactful.’ A ruthless ego, I add silently. Someone who starts to see other people as worthless and expendable as soon as they become obstacles to her getting her way.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Mark Bretherick. ‘You’re telling me the truth. As you see it.’ For the first time, I hear a trace of anger in his voice.

  ‘Some of what she’s written is exactly what I’d expect,’ I say. ‘Being a parent can be massively frustrating.’

  ‘Geraldine never had a break from it. She was a full-time mum. She never said she wanted a break.’

  ‘Everybody wants a break. Look, if I had to look after my kids full-time, I’d need strong tranquillisers to get me through every day. I can understand her exhaustion and her need to have some time and space for herself, but… locking a child in a dark room and letting her scream for hours, pulling the door shut so she can’t get out, and that stuff about having to make her suffer in order to feel protective and loving towards her; it’s sick.�
��

  ‘Why didn’t she ask me to hire help? We could have afforded a nanny-we could have afforded two nannies! Geraldine didn’t have to do any of it if she didn’t want to. She told me she wanted to. I thought she was enjoying it.’

  I look away from the anger and pain in his eyes. I can’t give him an answer. If I’d been Geraldine, married to a rich company director and living in a mansion, I’d have ordered my husband to stock up on a full team of servants the instant I emerged from the maternity ward. ‘Some people are better than others at asking for what they need,’ I tell him. ‘Women are often very bad at it.’

  He turns away from me as if he’s lost interest. ‘If he can pretend to be me, he can pretend to be her,’ he says, blowing on his cupped hands. ‘Geraldine wasn’t narcissistic-the very opposite.’

  ‘You think someone else wrote the diary? But… you’d have known if it wasn’t Geraldine’s handwriting, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Does that black print look like handwriting to you?’ he snaps.

  ‘No. But I assumed-’

  ‘Sorry.’ He looks disgusted, mortified to find himself having to apologise again so soon after the last time. ‘The diary was found on Geraldine’s computer. No handwritten version.’

  There’s a sour taste in my mouth. ‘Who is William Markes?’ I ask. ‘The man she said might ruin her life?’

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘What? You don’t know?’

  He barks out a laugh without smiling. ‘As things stand, you know more about him than I do.’

  My breath catches in my throat. ‘You mean…?’

  ‘Ever since I first read that diary, I’ve had a name in my head with no one to attach it to: William Markes. Then out of the blue you turn up. You’re Geraldine’s double, physically, and you tell me you met a man who pretended to be me. But we know he wasn’t. So at the moment we’ve got no name to attach to the man you met in the hotel.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m a scientist. If I put those two facts together…’