The Wrong Mother

by Sophie Hannah

  Simon stood up and faced the window. He always got twitchy when she mentioned sex. Always had. ‘Happy anniversary, ’ he repeated. ‘Not happy tenth anniversary?’

  ‘I might write that, I suppose.’

  ‘Both Mark and Geraldine seem obsessed with the number ten. It’s printed on the front of both cards and they each mention it twice.’

  ‘Isn’t ten years meant to be the first significant milestone?’ said Charlie. ‘Maybe they were proud of their score.’

  ‘Read the words,’ said Simon. ‘What sort of couple would write those things to one another? So formal, so elaborate. It’s like something from Victorian times. It sounds as if they hardly know each other. In your card, your imaginary card, you made a joke about gambling-’

  ‘Don’t forget the sexual practices.’

  ‘A joke.’ Simon refused to be sidetracked. ‘When you’re close to someone, you make jokes, little comments other people might not get. These read like the phoney, stilted thank-you letters I was forced to write to my aunties and uncles as a child. Trying to say the right thing, trying to drag it out a bit so that it’s not too short-’

  ‘You can’t be suspicious because there are no jokes! Maybe the Brethericks were a humourless couple.’

  ‘It sounds as if they weren’t a couple at all!’ Simon’s shoulders sagged. His posture became looser, as if he’d released some tension by voicing his suspicion. ‘These cards are for display purposes. I’m sure of it. They go on the mantelpiece and everyone who sees them is fooled. Kombothekra’s fooled-’

  ‘You’re saying their marriage was a sham?’ Charlie was getting hungry. If Simon hadn’t been here, she would have taken the pan out of the sink, decanted the chilli into another pan, heated it up and tried to ignore the burned bits and the taste of Fairy Liquid. ‘I’m going to ring a home-delivery curry place,’ she said. ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘Curry and beer. You think I’m wrong?’

  She considered it. ‘I would never in a million years write a card like that. You’re right, it’s that polite thank-you-letter tone, and I’d hate to be married to someone who expressed his feelings in that way, but… well, people’s relationships are peculiar. What newspaper do they read?’

  Simon frowned. ‘Telegraph.’

  ‘Delivered every day?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘There you go, then. They probably had Lucy christened even though they never go to church, and Mark probably asked Geraldine’s father for her hand in marriage and congratulated himself on his love of tradition. A lot of people are frighteningly keen on stupid formalities, especially the English upper-middle classes.’

  ‘Your folks are upper-middle class,’ said Simon, who had met Charlie’s parents only once.

  Charlie waved her hand dismissively. ‘My mum and dad are Guardian-reading ex-hippies who like nothing better than a good old CND march at the weekend-it’s completely different.’ She opened a drawer, looking for the Indian takeaway menu. ‘As for the number ten… Did you find lots of home-made films at the house? Lucy blowing out the candles on birthday cakes, Lucy doing not very much in a bouncy chair?’

  ‘Yeah. Stacks. We had to watch them all.’

  ‘Some families are obsessed with recording everything, keener on filming their lives than they are on living them. The Brethericks probably wrote their wedding anniversary cards with the family keepsake box in mind.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Simon sounded far from convinced.

  ‘By the way, I don’t think much of your expert.’

  ‘Harbard?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘He was on telly again tonight.’

  ‘Kombothekra’s shy,’ said Simon. ‘He can get away with taking a back seat with the media if Harbard’s on telly every day-CID’s pet professor.’

  ‘He seems cheap and nasty to me,’ said Charlie. ‘You can imagine him turning up on Celebrity Big Brother in a few years, once his career’s hit the rocks. He looks like a fat version of Proust, have you noticed?’

  ‘He’s the Anti-Proust,’ said Simon. ‘Kombothekra’s no expert, that’s for sure. He needs a few lessons on reading and summarising an academic text.’ Charlie mimed sticking her nose in the air, but he didn’t notice. ‘He’s scraping around for anything that’ll support his theory. He gave us an article today, Harbard’s latest, and made a big deal about one particular paragraph that said family annihilation is a predominantly middle-class crime, because the middle classes care more about appearances and respectability. He was trying to explain away all the interviews with Geraldine’s friends who swear blind she’d never have killed her daughter or herself-who know that she was happy. Kombothekra quoted this one paragraph, and that was supposed to prove that her happiness was just a front, that she was some kind of textbook case: someone whose life seemed perfect on the outside but whose unhappiness was building up in private to the point where she’d murder her own child-’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ Charlie interrupted him. ‘Geraldine’s happiness wasn’t a sham but the anniversary cards are?’

  ‘I’m not talking about that any more,’ said Simon impatiently. And unreasonably, Charlie thought. ‘I’m saying Kombothekra misunderstood the article. Deliberately, because it suited him to do so. I’ll send you a copy, you can read it for yourself.’

  ‘Simon, I don’t work in-’

  ‘This thing about affluent middle-class people killing their families because they can no longer maintain the illusion of perfection? Later on-in the same fucking article!-it makes it clear that money’s always a big factor in those cases: men who have made the world believe in their wealth and success, and made their families believe it, who’ve been living way beyond their means and suddenly they can’t pretend any longer; things have slipped too far out of their control and they can’t sustain the fantasy however hard they try. Rather than face the truth, admit to everyone that they’re failures, and bankrupt, they kill themselves and take their wives and kids with them.’

  ‘Nice,’ Charlie muttered.

  ‘These men love their families, but they genuinely believe they’re better off dead. The article describes it as “pathological altruism”. They feel ashamed, because they’re unable to support their wives and kids, who they see as extensions of themselves, not as people in their own right. The murders they commit are a sort of suicide-by-proxy.’

  ‘Wow. Professor Harbard had better look to his laurels.’

  ‘I got all that from the article,’ said Simon. ‘Kombothekra should have got it too. None of it applies to Geraldine Bretherick. She’s not a man-’

  ‘Does the article say it’s always men?’

  ‘It implies it. She didn’t work-she had no financial responsibility for the family whatsoever. Mark Bretherick’s loaded. They had money coming out of their ears.’

  ‘There must be other cases that don’t fit that pattern,’ said Charlie. ‘People who kill their families for other reasons.’

  ‘The only other reason mentioned in the article is revenge. Men whose wives are leaving them or have left them, usually for new partners. In those cases it’s murder-by-proxy rather than suicide-by-proxy. The man sees the kids as an extension of the woman, his unfaithful wife, and he kills them because, as revenge, it’s even better than killing her. She has to carry on living knowing that her children have been murdered by their own father. And, of course, he kills himself to avoid punishment, and presumably-and this is me talking, not the article-presumably to align himself symbolically with the victims, because he feels like a victim. He’s saying, “Look, we’re all dead, me and the kids, and it’s your fault.” ’

  ‘So you’re saying it’s murder-by-proxy but the man doesn’t feel he’s the murderer?’

  ‘Exactly. The real murder victim is the happy family and the deserting wife is the one who’s killed it-that’s the way he’d see it.’

  Charlie shuddered. ‘It’s gross,’ she said. ‘Offhand, I can’t imagine a worse crime.’

  ‘I jus
t thought of that last part on my own,’ said Simon, looking surprised. ‘Does that make me a sociologist?’ He picked up the two anniversary cards and stuffed them in his trouser pocket, as if suddenly embarrassed by their presence. ‘Mark Bretherick didn’t have another woman on the go,’ he said. ‘If he had, we’d have found her. He wasn’t planning to leave Geraldine. So it doesn’t fit with the revenge model either.’

  ‘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 w
as 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.