The Wrong Mother (20 page)

She picked up the jar of chilli, twisted open its lid and emptied it into a small orange pan.
Welcome to the most miserable dinner party in the world.
She didn’t even have any lager.

‘I want to talk to you about it. Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick. ’ Simon’s voice closed in behind her. ‘You’re the only person I want to talk to about it. It’s not the same without you. Work, I mean. It’s shit.’

‘Sam’s been keeping me up to date,’ said Charlie.

‘Sam? Kombothekra?’

‘Yeah. There’s no need to look like that.’

‘You see him? When? Where?’ Simon made no attempt to conceal his displeasure.

‘He and his wife have me round for dinner sometimes.’

‘Why?’

‘Thanks a lot, Simon.’

‘You know what I mean. Why?’

Charlie shrugged. ‘They’re new in town. Well, new
ish
. I don’t think they’ve got many friends.’

‘They’ve never invited me.’

‘Why don’t you get your mum to ring and complain? Pathetic, Simon!’

‘Why d’you go?’

‘Free food, free booze. And they don’t expect to be invited back, ever, because I’m single and pitiable and in need of looking after. Kate Kombothekra thinks all single women over the age of thirty live in brothels without kitchens.’

Simon yanked a chair out from under the table, scraping its legs along Charlie’s new tiled floor. He sat down and hunched forward, his large hands on his knees, looking as if he might pounce. ‘You don’t speak to me for a year, but you go round to Kombothekra’s house for dinner.’

Charlie stopped stirring the chilli. She sighed. ‘You’re the person I was closest to. Before. I found it—I
still
find it—easier to be with people who—’

‘What?’ Simon’s mouth was set; his next move might be to punch her. He used to hit people all the time. Men. Charlie hoped he remembered she was a woman; you could never tell with Simon.

‘People I don’t know very well,’ she said. ‘People I can relax with, and not worry that they know exactly how I feel.’

The anger drained from his face. Whatever had been eating him up, Charlie’s words seemed to have lanced it. ‘I have no idea how you feel,’ he mumbled after a few seconds, following her with his eyes as she walked up and down the small room.

‘Bollocks! The way you said, “last year”, when you first got here.’

‘Charlie, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just wish things could be like they used to be, that’s all.’

‘Like they used to be? That’s your ambition? I’ve been miserable ever since I met you, do you know that? You make me feel too much. And this has got nothing to do with
last year
.’ Charlie shouted the offending words. ‘You make me want to close down and . . . become a robot!’ She covered her face with her hands, digging her nails into the skin of her forehead. ‘I’m sorry. Please, forget I said all that.’

‘Is that sauce burning?’ Simon shifted in his seat, not looking at her. Probably itching to get away. Back to the Brown Cow, where he could report to Sellers and Gibbs about how mad she’d gone. The old Charlie would never have let out so much truth in one go; she’d had too much to lose.

The ready-made chilli had got what it deserved. Charlie took the pan off the flames and dropped it in the washing-up bowl. Soapy water poured in over the sides. She stood and watched the pan sink, watched the lumpy meat and tomato sauce disappear beneath the suds until it was no longer visible.

‘So Kombothekra’s told you what he thinks, then? About Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick?’

‘Is there any doubt? The mother killed them both, didn’t she?’

‘Proust doesn’t think so. I don’t either.’

‘Why? Because of the letter I picked up at the post office? That’s bound to be some dick’s idea of a joke.’

‘Not only that. Did Kombothekra tell you about William Markes?’

‘No. Oh, yeah. The name in the diary? Simon, that could be anyone. It could be . . . I don’t know, someone she met one day who annoyed her.’

‘And the cards?’ Simon nodded at the table.

Charlie sat down opposite him, looked at them again. ‘Sam didn’t mention the cards.’

‘
Sam
is no detective. He hasn’t noticed anything wrong about them, and I haven’t told him what I think. I haven’t told anyone.’

Their eyes met; Charlie understood that Simon had been saving this for her.

She opened the first card again. It was odd to see the message—a message from Geraldine Bretherick to her husband—written out in Simon’s tiny, meticulous handwriting. ‘To my darling Mark, Thank you for ten wonderful years of marriage. I’m sure the next ten will be even better. You are the best husband in the world. Your loving wife, Geraldine.’ And three kisses. The second card—Simon’s writing again—said: ‘To my beloved Geraldine, Happy tenth wedding anniversary. You have made me so happy for the first ten years of our married life. I am looking forward to our future together, which I know will be every bit as amazing as the years we’ve had so far. All my love for ever, Mark.’ Four kisses on this one; Mark Bretherick had out-kissed his wife.

‘Aren’t people odd?’ said Charlie. ‘Course, it doesn’t help that it’s in your handwriting. Imagine you writing something like that.’ She giggled.

‘What would I write?’

‘Hey?’

‘If I’d been married for ten years. What would I write?’

‘You’d probably put “To whoever” at the top and “love Simon” at the bottom. Or maybe even just “Simon”.’ Charlie narrowed her eyes. ‘Or you wouldn’t send a card at all—you’d decide it was crass.’

‘What would you write?’

‘Simon, what are you driving at?’

‘Come on, answer.’

Charlie sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘ “To whoever, happy anniversary, I can’t believe I haven’t divorced you yet for your gambling-stroke-laziness-stroke-unsavoury sexual practices. Love you loads, Charlie.” ’ She shuddered. ‘I feel as if I’m taking my drama O level all over again. What point are you making?’

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 just 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.’