The Wrong Mother (16 page)

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 . . .’

‘You come to the conclusion that the man I met last year was William Markes.’

Sometimes, convenience has the appearance of logic: you link two things because you can, not because you must.
I’m also a scientist.
What if the two unknowns are unrelated? What if the man at Seddon Hall lied because he was breaking the rules for a week and wanted to cover himself, not because he’s a psychopath capable of murder?

If William Markes, whoever he is, faked Geraldine’s diary after killing her, why did he include his own name? Some kind of complicated urge to confess? Being a scientist and not a psychologist, I have no idea if that’s plausible.

‘You need to tell the police. They’ve given up looking for William Markes. If they hear what you’ve just told me . . .’

I am on my feet. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I say, pulling my bag out from where I left it behind the chair. I wrap my arms around it so that he doesn’t see the frame edges. ‘Sorry, I . . . I’ve got to pick up my kids from nursery at lunchtime today, and I’ve got some shopping to do first.’ A lie. Tuesday and Thursday are Nick’s days, the days when bags go astray and bills and party invitations vanish into thin air.

I have never, not once, collected Zoe and Jake at lunchtime. Their gruelling nursery regime is one of the many things I feel guilty about.

‘Wait.’ Mark follows me across the hall. ‘What hotel was it? Where?’

I pull open the front door, feel more real as the fresh air hits my face. It’s sunny outside, only a few feet from where I am now, but still the light looks far away. ‘I don’t remember the name of the hotel.’

‘Yes, you do.’ He looks sad. ‘You will tell the police, won’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everything? The name of the hotel?’

I nod, my heart tightening with the deception.
I can’t.

‘Will you come back?’ he asks. ‘Please?’

‘Why?’

‘I want to talk to you again. You’re the only person who’s read the diary apart from me and the police.’

‘All right.’ At this point I will say anything I have to if it means I can leave. He smiles. There is a hardness in his eyes: not pleasure but determination.

I have no intention of ever returning to Corn Mill House.

I drive to Rawndesley, feeling shell-shocked from my encounter with Mark, needing to forget everything to do with him, with what’s happened. In the Save Venice Foundation’s office, I spend several hours trying and failing to sort out the mess that Salvo, Vittorio and the TV producer have, between them, created. Natasha Prentice-Nash doesn’t comment on my bruised face, nor does she thank me for coming in on a Tuesday or apologise for landing something on me that shouldn’t be part of my job purely because I’m the only person in the office with basic social skills. By five o’clock I can’t stand it any more, so I head for home.

There’s no one there when I get back. Looking up through the car window, I see that our lounge curtains are open. Normally at this time they’re closed, with the warm glow of the lamp behind them so that Zoe and Jake can watch whatever CBeebies has to offer without sunlight interfering with the picture.

I climb out of the car, dragging my handbag after me, and look up and down the street for Nick’s car. It’s not there. Even so, I shout out my family’s names as I let myself into the flat. I look at my watch: quarter to six. Maybe the children are still at nursery. Nick might have left work late. Not that he’s ever done that in all the years I’ve known him. It must be nice, I’ve often thought, to have a job like that.

A horrible possibility occurs to me. What if Nick’s forgotten he’s supposed to be picking up Zoe and Jake? No, he’d still be back by now. He’s never later than five thirty. All I want is to come home to my normal messy, noisy house, two boisterous children and a husband holding out a glass of wine. So where are they?

I run upstairs to the kitchen. My stomach twists with worry when I see there’s no note on the table. Nick always leaves a note; I’ve finally managed to drum it into him that I worry if I don’t know where he is. At first he said things like, ‘What’s there to worry about? I mean, I’m obviously somewhere, aren’t I?’ Zoe and Jake are obviously somewhere too; the problem is that it’s not at all obvious to me where that somewhere is, and that’s not good enough.

Where could they be?

As I turn to leave the room, to search all our other rooms and each of our many carpeted steps for the note Nick had bloody well better have left, I see a flash of colour at the edge of my vision. The work-surface on both sides of the sink is covered in pools of bright red, some small, some bigger. There are red smears all over the kitchen wall. Blood.
Oh, no. No, please . . .

On the floor, light reflects off small pieces of something on the lino. Broken glass.

I leap up the stairs three at a time to get to the lounge. I grab the phone and am about to ring the police when I notice a scrap of paper on top of the television: ‘Gone to Mum and Dad’s for tea,’ Nick has written on it. ‘Back eight-ish. Was going to make spag puttanesca for kids’ tea, but smashed passata jar—will clear up later!’ I’ve pressed the nine button twice before the significance of Nick’s words reaches my brain. I throw the phone on to the sofa and run back to the kitchen, where I start to laugh like a maniac. Passata. Of course. All over the room. The police had a lucky escape; I would have been their most hysterical caller of the day.