The Wrong Mother (36 page)

‘What was that all about?’ asked Simon.

As she explained, he picked up the sheet of paper that Stacey, in her distress, had left behind. He walked up and down as he read it. ‘An Englishman wrote it. Right?’

‘Obviously.’

‘The name François’s meant to make you think it’s by a Frenchman, so it can’t be or it’d be too easy.’

‘What? You’re kidding, right?’

Simon wasn’t.

‘Come on, it’s obvious.’

‘Not to me,’ he said.

‘Then you’re as thick as Stacey Sellers,’ said Charlie. ‘What do you want, anyway?’ She tried to sound off-hand.

‘You heard what we found at Corn Mill House?’

‘You want to talk about work? Your work? Go and wake up Sam Kombothekra. I’m off to bed.’

‘I also wondered . . . if you’d thought any more about the other business.’

‘The other business? The
other business
?’ She flew at him, slamming the palms of her hands into his chest, sending him staggering across the room. ‘You can’t even say it, can you? Because you don’t mean it! You don’t love me—at least, you’ve never said you do. Well?’ She was aware that she needed to create some silence if she wanted him to respond.

‘You make it impossible for me to say any of the things I want to say,’ he managed eventually.

‘Tough,’ Charlie snapped. ‘You used to treat me like a leper and now you want to marry me, when we’ve never even slept together, never been out on a date? What changed?’

‘You did.’

Charlie waited.

‘You need me now. You didn’t before. Even then, I cared more about you than I did anyone else, though I might not have shown it.’

Charlie dropped her cigarette end into what was left of Stacey’s vodka. ‘Maybe I should push the boat out and slit my wrists,’ she said. ‘Make myself utterly irresistible to you.’

Simon shook his head. ‘There’s no point, is there? I might as well go.’

‘No. Stay. Tell me about the case.’ Charlie needed time to think about what he’d said.

‘What if I don’t feel like it?’

‘I’m not asking for a declaration of love.’ Charlie smirked. ‘The mood doesn’t have to be right.’

He sighed. ‘We think the writer of the anonymous letters is called Esther Taylor, although we’ve yet to find an Esther Taylor who looks anything like Geraldine Bretherick. There are a couple we’ve not managed to track down yet, so hopefully she’s one of them. Anyway, the photographs that were hidden in the frames she took from Corn Mill House are of Amy Oliva and her mother, Encarna. That’s been confirmed by the school.’

‘Encarna?’

‘Encarnación. They’re Spanish. She was a banker at Leyland Carver in London, and Amy’s father, Angel Oliva, was a heart surgeon at Culver Valley General. They’re supposed to have moved to Spain, except the contact details they left with Harry Martineau, the guy who bought their house, don’t check out. I could have been in Spain by now, but the Snowman wants to dig up every inch of Mark Bretherick’s garden before he’ll fork out for a plane fare, tight-arse that he is. He reckons we’re going to find Angel Oliva’s body. So does Kombothekra.’

‘And you disagree?’

Simon looked away. ‘The name Harry Martineau ring any bells?’ he asked.

‘With me? No.’

He closed his eyes, folded his hands behind his head and rubbed the top of his neck hard with his thumbs. ‘I’ve seen it before—I know I have. Or heard it.’

‘You’ve got a theory, haven’t you?’ said Charlie.

‘I’m waiting for Norman to come back to me about something. ’

‘HTCU Norman?’

Simon nodded.

‘So it’s something about the computer, Geraldine’s laptop?’

‘I’ll tell you when it’s been confirmed.’

No question that it would be confirmed; Simon was sure he was right. As usual. Charlie couldn’t resist. ‘If I was your wife, would you tell me things before they’d been confirmed?’

‘Would you tell me the answer to Stacey Sellers’ French puzzle?’

She laughed. Reluctantly, Simon grinned.

‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘Work it out all by yourself and I’ll marry you.’

He looked curious. ‘Seriously? You’d do it, just based on that?’

Just based on that.
He was unbelievable. Charlie didn’t have the energy to be solemn, or worry about it any more. She didn’t have the energy to accept or reject Simon’s offer of marriage in the proper spirit of either, with the earnestness and anguished soul-searching that was required, the meticulous calculation of probabilities, the thousands of tiny equations featuring the words ‘hope’ and ‘fear’. If she took the matter of his proposal and her response to heart, the only outcome could be terrible pain: of that Charlie was certain. So, might as well let it depend on something absurd. Send it up mercilessly. That way, the end result wouldn’t matter.

‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘
Vraiment.
That means “really” in French.’

 

Mark Bretherick’s solicitor, Paula Goddard, was waiting for Sam Kombothekra outside the custody suite. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I wanted a quick word before we go in.’

Sam walked and she followed, struggling to keep up. Her legs were short and her shoes looked like instruments of torture. ‘Shouldn’t you be having a last-minute consultation with your client?’ Sam said.

Goddard stopped walking. ‘I’m not spraining my ankle to keep up with you.’

Sam considered not stopping; it was past eleven o’clock. He’d missed his boys’ bedtime two nights running. They were too young to understand, old enough to know how to turn their disappointment into a weapon. His four-year-old was bound to be explicit about Sam’s new position in the family hierarchy the next time he saw him. ‘I don’t like you any more, Daddy. I only like Mummy.’ Or words to that effect.

Sam slowed down. ‘Sorry,’ he said. It wasn’t Paula Goddard’s fault that the way she’d said, ‘There you are,’ as if he’d been hiding from her deliberately, had reminded Sam of his wife Kate, whose there-you-ares tended to mean, ‘Stop skulking in the lounge with the newspaper when there’s Lego to be put away.’

Goddard folded her arms. ‘Let me say from the outset: I haven’t got time for the pointless battles that cops and lawyers go in for. I’m not your enemy and you’re not mine, right? I know two dead bodies were found in my client’s garden . . .’

‘You forgot the two in his house.’

‘. . . and I know how bad that looks. And you know he was in New Mexico when his wife and daughter died; that’s been established to everyone’s satisfaction, right?’

Sam leaned against the wall. Nothing about this case was satisfactory, nothing at all.

‘I haven’t been Bretherick’s lawyer for long,’ said Goddard. ‘Less than twelve hours. His family asked around and someone recommended me.’

‘Should I have heard of you, then?’

‘Depends how well-informed you are. The point is . . . I’ve represented men who are guilty of murder and men who are innocent. I work just as hard for both. And I’ve never seen a more innocent man than Mark Bretherick.’

‘He might be a good liar,’ said Sam. ‘However good your judgement is, however experienced you are, you might be wrong about him.’

‘I’m not.’ Goddard started walking. Sam had no choice but to follow. ‘He only says he hasn’t killed anyone when I ask him outright. He thinks it’s that obvious, he forgets he needs to say it. Plus, he’s not asking me to get him out. He doesn’t want to go anywhere.’

‘I can understand that. I also wouldn’t want to go back to a house where four people at least had been killed.’ Anticipating her next point, Sam added, ‘Even if I was the one who’d killed them. Especially then.’

‘That’s not why,’ said Goddard briskly. Either she was exceptionally talented at presenting her beliefs as solid facts or else she knew something Sam didn’t. ‘He thinks you lot aren’t investigating these murders in the right way; he’s convinced Geraldine and Lucy were killed by a third party, incidentally. Not by Geraldine. He wants to stick around and make you listen to him. If he could, he’d glue himself to you twenty-four hours a day, Sergeant.’

‘Maybe he’s got a guilty conscience and that’s why he’s happy to be in custody,’ said Sam. ‘Being caught and locked up can be a relief—not having to run any more. Plus, he gets his meals cooked.’

Goddard squinted at him. ‘How long have you been in the job?’

‘Twenty-two years.’

‘How many people have you known who want to stay locked up?’

Sam nodded, conceding the point.

‘Most people prefer to have their freedom, even if that means making their own tea, for God’s sake,’ Goddard muttered crossly. ‘Anyway, I’ll let him speak for himself, but . . . I just wanted to warn you, you’re wasting your time if he’s your chief suspect. Mark Bretherick’s killed no one.’

Sam didn’t necessarily disagree with her. He was more concerned with what Mark knew, the information he could provide, than with what he might have done. After speaking to Cordy and Oonagh O’Hara, Sam had new questions he wanted to put to Bretherick. He had no intention of sharing these with Paula Goddard. Her little speech about lawyers and police not being enemies had been classic manipulation.

Goddard was also the second woman today who seemed to expect Sam to roll over and agree unreservedly with her every opinion. Cordy O’Hara had been adamant that neither Geraldine nor Mark Bretherick had killed anybody. ‘You asked about Amy Oliva,’ she’d said. ‘Amy’s mum, Encarna, now there’s someone I can imagine running amok with a machete. I quite enjoyed her company—she was certainly never boring—but not many people did. She could be ferocious.’

Sam had stored this information in his mind. He’d liked Cordy’s flat with its exposed brick walls, colourful woven rugs and tall, jungle-like plants. He’d liked the way she’d worn her baby in a sling against her chest while they were talking, and the baby’s name: Ianthe. There was a bronze sculpture of a large, crushed tin can in the middle of Cordy’s living room, with a flat bronze circle for a base. The green silk curtains had threads of pink running across them, and fell all the way to the floor, pooling on the dark floorboards. Nothing matched anything else in the way that his wife Kate decreed things ought to within a home, but somehow the ensemble worked.

Six-year-old Oonagh O’Hara, with a grave expression on her face, had told Sam a secret, after much encouragement from her mother, a secret Lucy Bretherick had told her. Sam wondered if there was any truth in it. He hoped he was about to find out.

Mark Bretherick stood up when Sam entered the interview room with Paula Goddard. ‘What’s happened?’ he said.

‘You mean other than the discovery of two dead bodies in your garden?’

‘I mean what’s happened since? Do you know whose the bodies are?’

‘Not yet,’ said Sam.

‘The detective who interviewed me before, Gibbs, he kept asking about Amy Oliva from Lucy’s class, and her mother. Do you think that’s who they are?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘I think that’s who they are,’ said Bretherick, turning to his solicitor. ‘DC Waterhouse told me about the photos hidden in the frames, behind the ones of Geraldine and Lucy.’

Bretherick seemed almost as well-informed as the investigating team. ‘The head of St Swithun’s has seen the pictures and confirmed that they’re of Encarna and Amy Oliva,’ Sam told him. ‘Now, I’ve got some questions I’d like to ask
you
, Mark.’

‘Listen: if those bodies turn out to be Amy and her mother, you’ve got to look again for William Markes. You couldn’t find him before because Geraldine didn’t know him. Maybe he’s an associate of this other woman—Encarna.’

Sam smiled politely, fighting down his irritation. Colin Sellers had made the same suggestion about half an hour earlier.

‘You’ve got to take that school apart. Markes is connected to St Swithun’s somehow, and it looks as if he’s targeting mothers and daughters from Lucy’s class. Have you done anything about warning the other families? I’d want to be warned if I were them.’

Sam turned to Paula Goddard. ‘Do you want to ditch him and take me on as your client instead? Since I’m the one who seems to be under interrogation.’

‘All right.’ Bretherick held up his hands. ‘Ask away.’

‘I want to talk to you about last year, the May half-term holiday.’

‘What about it?’

‘The school was closed between Friday the nineteenth of May and Monday the fifth of June.’

‘So?’

‘You and your family went to Florida,’ said Sam.

‘I’m not sure of the dates, but . . . yeah, we went to Tallahassee last year, spring. We rented an apartment for two weeks. And Lucy came, so it must have been school holidays. I mean . . .’ He blushed. ‘I don’t mean Lucy came as in we might have gone without her. Geraldine would never have done that.’

‘Did you often take your family on holiday?’

‘No. Hardly ever.’

Goddard rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair.

‘I went away all the time for work, never made time for holidays. I don’t like being on holiday, I get fed up. I don’t think you can arrange to relax. And Geraldine didn’t work, so it wasn’t as if she needed a break from anything, and she loved our house so much, she said, she didn’t mind staying at home—’

‘Yet you went on holiday to Florida for two weeks.’ Sam cut short the justifications.

‘Yes.’ Bretherick frowned, as if worried by the discrepancy. ‘It wasn’t a holiday for me. I was working at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory; hold on a minute.’ He bowed his head. ‘That’s right. My trip had been arranged for a while when Geraldine told me she and Lucy wanted to come too.’

‘She didn’t normally tag along on your work trips?’

‘No. That was the first and only time.’ Bretherick flinched. The word ‘only’ hung in the air.

‘Can we get to the point, Sergeant?’ said Goddard.

‘So why this one in particular?’ Sam asked.

‘I don’t know. Florida’s, you know . . . Disney World. She took Lucy to Disney World.’