The Wrong Mother

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘It can’t have been hard,’ said Simon. ‘You told me in Cambridge; you have to get close to the scrotes in order to write your books about them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Criminals. Offenders. Like Billy-remember telling me about him? You’ve got contacts who can get you whatever you want, I reckon. A gun, for example.’

  ‘Why did you kill Geraldine and Lucy, Jonathan?’ asked Charlie. ‘Tell us. You’ll feel better.’

  His eyes glazed over. ‘She would have been happy with me. Geraldine. I redecorated Amy’s playroom for her. I wouldn’t have rushed things. I wanted her to have her own space.’ Looking down at his hands, he started to mumble, ‘She loved cranberry glass. Mark wouldn’t let her have it in the house; he said it was too feminine.’

  ‘And Lucy?’ said Simon. ‘Did you have a room for her?’

  Hey’s face shut down. What was it about Lucy?

  ‘Tell us about the massage table.’

  ‘After I saw Sally in Rawndesley, I… I realised, of course.

  Almost instantly, after the shock had faded. I knew Geraldine was dead. Sally…’

  ‘We understand,’ said Charlie. ‘Sally was still alive. Geraldine’s room became Sally’s room. You bought the massage table for Sally.’

  Hey hunched forward in his chair. ‘You’ve got to stop,’ he said. ‘You’re making it sound so… bad. It is bad. I know it is. There’s nothing you know that I don’t, believe me.’ His eyes seemed to challenge Simon. ‘I wanted a happy family. That’s all. Please, don’t let Sally think it was like that, the way you’ve just described it. Don’t say I was on the rebound. She’ll never forgive me if you tell her that.’

  ‘Why did you try to kill Mark Bretherick?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell him I’m sorry. I can’t forgive him, but I’m sorry.’

  ‘Forgive him? For what? For having the happy family you wanted? For having Geraldine?’

  ‘Was your family ever happy, Jonathan?’ Charlie asked. ‘You, Encarna and Amy?’

  ‘Before Encarna went to work for a bank, yes,’ Hey said bitterly. ‘A bank! I couldn’t believe it. She was so brilliant, so talented, she could have done anything. But she chose to be a cog in the capitalist machine. She used to say making money was an art, and mocked me for disapproving. This is the woman who got the highest first in her year at Oxford.’ Hey shook his head. ‘Not just in History of Art-in any subject.’

  ‘What did Encarna think about your work?’ asked Simon. ‘She must have known you and Keith Harbard were working on family annihilation killings.’

  Hey stared down at the table, eyes wide, body tensed.

  ‘Did your work put the idea into her head? She hated being a mother, and-’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Did she know that you and Harbard had been discussing whether women might start to commit familicide with increasing frequency?’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Encarna killed Amy, didn’t she, Jonathan?’ It had to be. Nothing else made sense. Something had to have tipped Hey over the edge. He hadn’t always had it in him, this madness, the ability to kill. ‘And you blame yourself, for putting the idea in her head. She committed murder and suicide in the same instant.’

  ‘No! She never would have-’

  ‘You came home and found their bodies in the bath. And Amy’s night light. And you couldn’t stand for the world to know: the professor whose life’s work is to explain and prevent this terrible crime-’

  ‘No! No!’ Hey’s face was red and wet. ‘Encarna would never have hurt Amy. Look, please, believe me! I… I can’t prove it, but-’

  ‘You’re doing it again, Jonathan,’ said Charlie, standing up.

  ‘What?’ Simon could have smacked her in the face. He’d been so close to breaking Hey; what was she playing at?

  ‘You mislead us, then you tell the truth. More lies, more truth. You can’t decide what you want us to believe, can you?’

  ‘Stop, please…’

  ‘At first you hoped to pass off Encarna and Amy’s deaths as a family annihilation killing. Your speciality. That’s why they were both naked in the bath: you wanted us to believe Encarna did it. But now, when you hear us say it, when we’re in danger of really believing it, you can’t allow that, can you? You have to defend Encarna, because if you don’t who will?’

  Charlie stopped. Hey was convulsing, and Simon was staring at her, outraged. ‘Encarna didn’t kill Amy, or herself,’ she told him. Seeing Simon’s eyes move towards Hey-guessing he was reverting, mentally, to his original theory-she said quickly, ‘No. Jonathan didn’t kill them either.’

  23

  Monday, 13 August 2007

  ‘Fay bootball? Fay cwicket bat, Mummy?’ Jake stands hopefully at the foot of the bed, holding a walking stick that the previous owners of our flat left in the airing cupboard, unaware it would become my son’s favourite toy, and his pink plastic ball. Zoe is sitting in bed with me, her arms round my neck. It makes me feel safe: protected by a fierce four-year-old.

  ‘Mummy’s not well enough to play cricket, Jake,’ Esther tells him. ‘Anyway, that looks more like a hockey stick than a cricket bat. Why don’t you ask Zoe if she’ll play hockey with you?’

  Jake’s bottom lip juts out. He says, ‘Go back your house, Stinky.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally,’ I say.

  ‘Affawuds? Affawuds, Mummy?’

  ‘Jake, Mummy needs to rest,’ Zoe tells him firmly. ‘We need to look after Mummy.’

  ‘Yes, darling, I’ll play football and cricket with you afterwards, I promise.’ Being with my children again makes me almost breathless with joy. Seeing their faces, after I feared I might never see them again. I’ve told them I love them so often since I got back, they’ve started rolling their eyes whenever I say it.

  Jake runs out of the room. Zoe leaps up off the bed and follows him, saying, ‘Walk, don’t run, Jake. We have to be extra good. It’s a mergency.’ A few minutes later I hear a muffled crack that comes from the direction of the lounge. Zoe shrieks, ‘No, Jake! That’s my Barbie!’ Nick makes them both laugh by doing his impression of a frog. I’d have got upset and confiscated the stick, and got a much worse result.

  How will I ever be able to leave home again? How will I let Zoe and Jake out of my sight?

  I catch Esther scrutinising my face, as she has taken to doing. ‘Stop it,’ I tell her.

  ‘What happened in that man’s house, Sally? What did he do to you?’

  ‘I’ve told you. Nothing.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘That’s up to you.’ I give her a tight smile.

  ‘Are you going to tell Nick?’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  Nick knows what the police know: that Jonathan Hey imprisoned me in his house, and eventually hit me with a gun and left me there to die. The police have accepted my story for the time being. Nick has accepted it full-stop; he won’t ask any more questions. He thinks he understands the what and the why of it: Hey wanted to kill me because he’s a murderer, simple as that. Because he’s mad.

  Nick has no time for anything strange, frightening or unpleasant. He refuses to make space for it in his head. This morning he brought me some flowers to cheer me up. The last time he bought flowers was to apologise, the day we moved to Spilling. I was busy in meetings all morning, and drummed it into him that he mustn’t forget to pack and bring the washing that was still wet in the machine. When I arrived at Monk Barn Avenue for the first time that afternoon, I found my black bra and several of my embarrassingly holey-toed socks lying in the hall, draped over sofas and chairs, hanging from wardrobe handles. My Agent Provocateur camisole was in the shower stall. Nick hadn’t bothered to put the wet clothes in a bag; he’d simply scooped them up out of the washing machine’s drum and chucked them into the back of the removal van.

  I can’t help smiling, thinking about the absurdity of this. />
  ‘What?’ says Esther suspiciously. ‘What was that envelope Sergeant Kombothekra gave you before?’

  I remind myself that Esther is my best friend. I used to want to tell her everything. ‘A letter from Mark Bretherick. Thanking me for saving his life.’

  Who saved my life? I have become obsessed with this question. Did I do it myself? Was it Esther? My thoughts keep coming back to Pam Senior. It’s odd to think that when she stood in the centre of Rawndesley and screamed abuse at me, she set in motion a chain of events that took her to the police station several days later. It was from Pam that the police first heard my name. If I hadn’t managed to escape from Jonathan Hey’s house, it would have been Pam’s visit to the police that led to my rescue.

  ‘Mark wants us to meet. Talk,’ I tell Esther.

  ‘Stay away from him, Sally. He’s just lost his wife, remember.’

  ‘Charitable.’

  ‘Stay away,’ she warns me. ‘What good could it possibly do?’

  ‘It might do him good. He must think it will, or he wouldn’t ask.’

  Jonathan Hey smashed his skull with a metal bar, nearly killed him.

  Nick’s appearance in the room prevents her from responding. ‘Sam Kombothekra phoned while you were asleep,’ he says. ‘I said you’d ring him back.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Another update, I think.’

  ‘Bring me the phone.’ I would rather get it over with, whatever it is.

  ‘Sal? There’s something I want to ask you,’ says Nick. ‘It’s been bugging me.’

  Esther gives me a pointed look as she leaves the room.

  ‘Can you make her go home?’ I ask Nick once we’re alone. ‘It’s like being looked after by Count Dracula.’

  ‘That black notebook, Encarna Oliva’s diary: why did you bring it back with you?’

  ‘It was written in a foreign language. I opened it and… couldn’t understand what was in it.’ The truth. No part of what I said was a lie.

  ‘So you thought it might be something important?’ Nick looks at me expectantly. I nod. I assumed Amy Oliva’s father might be bilingual, since her mother was Spanish. When I found the notebook in his bathroom and saw Spanish handwriting, I thought he might have written something about me-how he felt about me, what he was doing to me or planned to do. I brought the black notebook home with me so that I could destroy it. Instead, I passed out and dropped it on the carpet in front of the police.

  I’ve never seen myself as the passing-out sort, but since I’ve come home I keep waking up without having realised I’d fallen asleep. I am still so tired. Sam Kombothekra says it’s the shock.

  Nick is impressed. ‘So, you were escaping from the house of a psychopath and you had the presence of mind to bring an important bit of evidence with you. That’s… efficient.’

  ‘It’s called multi-tasking,’ I say as my eyes close. ‘I’ll tell you about it some time.’

  24

  8/13/07

  Sam braced himself, then walked into the interview room where Simon, Charlie and Jonathan Hey were sitting in silence. He emptied the contents of a labelled evidence bag on to the table: a pile of green clothes-wet, rank-smelling. ‘Amy’s uniform, ’ he said.

  Hey recoiled.

  ‘She was wearing it when she died,’ said Charlie. ‘You stripped her. If I’m wrong, tell me what these clothes mean. Why are they wet and mouldy?’

  Nothing. No response.

  ‘It was Amy,’ said Charlie. ‘Amy killed Encarna.’

  Hey shook his head, glassy-eyed. He had refused a lawyer, so there was nobody present to stop Charlie from putting the same suggestion to him nearly forty times. Lawyers-like bankers, Hey claimed-profited by exploiting others.

  Sam didn’t know what to think. He trusted Charlie’s judgement, and it counted for a lot that Simon was backing her theory, but he needed to hear Hey say it before he could be sure.

  ‘Who but Amy would you want to protect so badly that you’d be willing to take the blame for two murders you didn’t commit?’ said Simon. ‘With vultures like Harbard waiting to write their articles and books about the five-year-old girl who killed her mother.’

  ‘I’d kill him,’ Hey whispered.

  ‘He wouldn’t care about your pain,’ said Charlie. ‘He’d write whatever suited him, you know he would. He’d say it on television too, on documentaries and discussion programmes. Think of who Harbard is, what he does, and then think how close he is to this, because of you.’ She leaned forward. ‘If you tell us the truth, the whole story, he won’t be able to capitalise on your tragedy. He won’t be able to write a book saying Encarna was a family annihilator.’

  Sam watched with interest. A new approach: threatening Hey with the devil he knows. He prayed it would work.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Simon. ‘Harbard’ll do what he’s so fond of doing: invent his own conclusions, in advance of any evidence. If we don’t charge you with Amy and Encarna’s deaths-which we’re not going to-what’s he going to think? You told me he wanted to write a book about Geraldine Bretherick, but he now knows she didn’t kill herself and Lucy. How long do you think it’ll be before he latches on to Encarna as a replacement? If you tell us the truth, no one will be interested in listening to Harbard, Jonathan, I promise you.’ Simon’s voice cracked. He and Charlie had been questioning Hey for days. ‘You’ve got to speak for your family now. Don’t leave it to someone who didn’t know them or care about them.’

  Hey’s head moved. Was it a nod? A small nod?

  ‘Tell us what you found, the day Encarna and Amy died,’ said Sam calmly, though he felt anything but calm. ‘When you came home. Where had you been?’

  Hey fixed his eyes straight ahead and stared, held by an invisible horror, watching it unfold.

  ‘You called out, but no one answered?’ Sam suggested.

  ‘I’d been at a colleague’s leaving party. Not even a colleague I liked. I got back late. If I hadn’t gone, Amy and Encarna would still be alive.’ He covered his eyes with his hands. ‘Everybody would still be alive.’

  ‘What did you find in the bathroom, Jonathan?’

  ‘They were dead in the bath. Both of them. And there was… a lamp. That was also in the water. Amy’s night light. And the book Encarna had been reading.’

  ‘They’d been electrocuted,’ said Simon gently.

  ‘Yes. Amy was… lying on top of Encarna, still in her school uniform. It was soaked. I thought it was an accident,’ Hey sobbed. ‘The lamp fell in, and Amy, seeing Encarna was in trouble, must have grabbed her, tried to pull her out, and because the bath was set into the floor, so damned low… She must have tried to pull her out, she’d grabbed hold of Encarna’s arm. I had to prise her fingers off.’ He shuddered. ‘She was only five! In that split second of panic, seeing her mother dying, she wouldn’t have known that by putting her hands in the water she was risking her own life! She wouldn’t have meant to kill Encarna either, not really-a five-year-old doesn’t know what it means to kill someone.’

  Sam tried not to picture the events Hey was describing. It was hard.

  ‘You wanted to believe it was an accident,’ said Charlie. ‘But you didn’t. Not deep down. You suspected that, however briefly, Amy had meant her mother harm. At the very least, you feared it. You feared she’d pushed the lamp into the water deliberately.’

  ‘No.’ Hey’s eyes were wild. He ran his hands through his hair repeatedly. ‘No, no.’

  ‘No? Then why not call an ambulance, if it was a tragic accident? Why bury their bodies in the Brethericks’ garden?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I did it.’

  ‘You don’t have much self-confidence, do you, Jonathan?’ said Simon. ‘In spite of your professional success. You thought the bodies you’d taken such care to hide might be found one day-because it would be just your luck, wouldn’t it? And you had to protect Amy from people knowing what she’d done. You stripped her so that she too would look like a victim
, if someone found her and Encarna.’

  Hey looked as if he might faint. ‘Yes,’ he breathed.

  Charlie took over. ‘Everyone knows murderers aren’t stripped naked and buried. Victims are. You removed Amy’s clothes to convince yourself as much as anyone else: that it might have been an accident. That Amy and her mum were having a bath together, perhaps, and the night light fell in. Was that the story you’d planned, if the bodies were found? Jonathan?’

  ‘Or did you plan to pretend Encarna killed both of them?’ asked Simon. ‘A family annihilation. Your wife took her inspiration from your work, that’s what you could have told everyone, and you buried the bodies to protect her reputation. If you’d said that, no one would have suspected it was Amy you were really trying to protect.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Hey. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Did Amy ever tell you she wanted to kill her mother?’ Sam asked.

  ‘You know enough now. I’ve told you enough.’

  Sam thought of the e-mails to Amy from Oonagh O’Hara. How’s your mum? Is your mum okay? Oonagh had asked that question, or a version of it, at the end of every message. ‘She told him,’ he said to Simon and Charlie. ‘She told Oonagh O’Hara too, and Oonagh told Lucy Bretherick.’ That had to be the secret Lucy had forced out of Oonagh, that Oonagh had felt so bad about revealing. ‘That’s why you killed Lucy.’ Sam wasn’t sure he was right until he saw Hey’s face.

  ‘What sort of child would say such a thing?’ Hey spat, his sadness overlaid by a vicious, contorted hatred. ‘Everyone thought Lucy Bretherick was an angel. Would an angel say that to a father about his own child?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Let me tell you what Lucy was really like. Encarna and I couldn’t stand her. She was a bossy show-off, an irritating, insensitive, arrogant, self-satisfied… creature. Her parents had made sure she was in no doubt about her importance in the world, made her believe she was better than everyone else. She was repugnant! Oh, I tried, I really did. I tried so hard to like her, for Geraldine’s sake. I so wanted it to work for us as a family. But it never would have, I can see that now. Your children have to be your own.’