The Wrong Mother (39 page)

‘There’s more. Amy Oliva’s nanny finally—Why do I bother?’ Sellers broke off, impatient. ‘If you’re interested, stop surfing porn sites and come to the briefing. You know they can find out what sites you’ve logged on to?’

‘I’m in Yahoo Mail at the moment.’ Gibbs grinned. ‘Porn sites? How do you know about those, then?’

Sellers gave up.

Once he’d gone, Gibbs typed in his ID and password. Amy Oliva was dead. Her body had been found in Mark Bretherick’s garden. It was optimistic to assume she might have replied to the e-mail Gibbs sent her yesterday.

She hadn’t. The only new message was from Gibbs’ sister. He opened it, saw that it had to do with arrangements for Christmas and closed it again without replying. It was August. Christmas wasn’t until December. You had to draw the line somewhere.

Porn sites. He sniffed contemptuously. Sellers had to be one of those sex addicts he’d read about, like . . . was it Kirk Douglas or Michael Douglas? The HTCU lot probably had a file on Sellers twenty inches thick. Gibbs thought about Norman Grace, who wore pink shirts and thin stripy scarves wound round his neck. And slip-on shoes. Kombothekra had entrusted the hard disk of Geraldine Bretherick’s laptop to a man who dressed like a woman. Once, Gibbs had seen Norman in the canteen reading a fashion magazine. If he was gay it wouldn’t be so bad, but the dickhead was straight, had loads of girlfriends—fit ones, too. So what was he playing at?

Gibbs was about to get up when he had an idea. Another job for Norman. Come to think of it, he probably didn’t need Norman. He could have a stab at it himself. He went to the Hotmail site. When the sign-in box appeared, he typed in Amy Oliva’s e-mail address, [email protected]. Then he clicked on ‘Forgot your password?’. If it was anything like Yahoo Mail . . .

It was. Gibbs smiled when he saw the security question: ‘Who wrote
Heart of Darkness
?’ He typed in ‘Blondie’ and swore under his breath when it didn’t get him in. He tried Debbie Harry, Deborah Harry and Debra Harry before remembering that the Blondie song was called ‘Heart of Glass’. Bollocks. He went to Google, typed in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and discovered that it was a book by a bloke called Joseph Conrad. He clicked back to the Hotmail screen and gave this name he’d never heard of a try.

Result. He had to create a new password for the account in order to read the messages, since he’d claimed to have forgotten the old one. He decided on ‘Debbie’. In honour of his wife, not Debbie Harry.

Amy Oliva had three new messages. Gibbs clicked on ‘Inbox’ and waited. His eyes widened when the next screen appeared. The unread communications were highlighted in yellow to distinguish them from the ones that had been opened. The first of Amy’s new messages was from Oonagh O’Hara. The second and third were from Great Western Hotels and the Halifax bank—junk mail.

Gibbs’ message, the one he’d sent from St Swithun’s yesterday, was the fourth one down. It wasn’t highlighted in yellow. He shivered, rubbing the back of his neck. He’d e-mailed a dead girl, believing her to be alive, and she’d opened the e-mail. Or someone had, probably the person who had killed her.

Gibbs looked at the names beneath his own. Oonagh O’Hara was a frequent correspondent, as was somebody called Silvia Ruiz Oliva—a relative, presumably. The rest was spam.

Silvia turned out to be Amy’s grandmother: her messages were all signed ‘Gran’. He read them all, finding them increasingly interesting as he took in the cumulative meaning. There had obviously been a family row. Silvia kept asking when she might see Amy. In one she had written: ‘Please tell Mummy that if she’s cross with me, I’m sorry.’ Gibbs scrolled down to see if there were any messages from Amy attached to the bottom of Silvia’s. There weren’t. He went to the ‘Sent Messages’ page. Nothing. Not a single message had been copied to the folder.

He opened one of Oonagh’s messages. Nothing out of the ordinary, if you didn’t count the fact that its recipient was no longer living when it was written and sent. He read to the end, then breathed in sharply when he saw that Amy’s original letter hadn’t been deleted. Gibbs scrolled down further and found, beneath Amy’s section, another message from Oonagh, probably one that was also in the inbox. Beneath that, another message from whoever was pretending to be Amy. A lengthy back-and-forth correspondence, all trailing from this one message. Oonagh’s e-mails, Gibbs noticed, contained the odd spelling mistake. Amy’s written English was faultless.

Stepford had interviewed Oonagh O’Hara yesterday and she’d told him she hadn’t heard from Amy since last May. Clearly she was lying. Or rather she
believed
she was lying. In fact, she’d told the truth: she had been exchanging letters with Amy’s killer, not with Amy.

Gibbs raced through the messages. At the end of each of her letters, before signing off, Oonagh had written, ‘Hows your mum?’ or ‘Is your mum okay?’ In one she’d gone further and said, ‘How are things with you and you’re mum?’ Twice, after enquiring about Encarna Oliva, Oonagh had written ‘Hows Patrick? ’ and once, ‘Hows Partick?’

Had Encarna Oliva left her husband for another man? Had Patrick worked at the bank with her? Or maybe he’d been a friend or colleague of her husband’s, someone Angel Oliva had worked with at Culver Valley General Hospital. There were some women, Gibbs knew, who’d think nothing of shagging their husbands’ mates. Gibbs thought it was inevitable that one day Sellers would try to bed Debbie; he was training himself to dislike Sellers in advance, so that when it happened he’d be prepared.

Amy’s replies to Oonagh’s e-mails were chatty but bland, full of news about watching bullfights and flamenco dancers. Clichés of Spain. Lies. Despite her e-mail address, Amy Oliva never got to Spain. She never got further than the garden at Corn Mill House. Interestingly, she—her killer, Gibbs corrected himself—had not once answered Oonagh’s enquiries about Encarna and Patrick.

Why had Oonagh O’Hara lied about when she’d last been in touch with Amy? There was nothing secret or personal about any of these e-mails. ‘Something weird’s going on,’ Gibbs said aloud.

He was on his way out of the CID room when the phone rang. It was Barbara Fitzgerald, the head of St Swithun’s. ‘Hello, Christopher,’ she said warmly, once Gibbs had identified himself. ‘I’m just phoning to let you know I’ve e-mailed you a full list of everyone who went on the owl sanctuary trip last year. I did forget a few names, as it turns out.’

Gibbs thanked her.

‘Is there . . . any news?’

‘No.’ He didn’t want to be the one to tell her that another of her pupils had been murdered. Nor did he want to talk, knowing what he was withholding; guilt made him more brusque than usual and eventually Barbara Fitzgerald gave up.

Feeling unsettled, ashamed of his cowardice, Gibbs navigated his way back to Yahoo Mail. He entered his ID and password, and was waiting for his inbox to appear when he realised his mistake. Barbara Fitzgerald didn’t know his Yahoo address; she would have sent the list of names to his work e-mail, the address from which he’d e-mailed her earlier.
Dick-brain.
He was about to log out of his Yahoo account when he saw that he had a new message. From Amy Oliva. No amount of blinking made it disappear.

Gibbs double-clicked on the envelope icon. The message had been sent from a Hotmail address, but a different one: [email protected]. It was only three words long, three ordinary words that worried Gibbs more than an overt threat would have. He got up and left the room, not bothering to sign out of his account.

 

Meeting room one for a team briefing? What was wrong with the CID room? Charlie had always found it perfectly adequate. She broke into a run as she turned the corner. By the time she got there she was out of breath. She knocked and opened the door. Sam Kombothekra, Simon, Sellers and Professor Keith Harbard sat in silence on comfortable blue leather chairs that looked as if they belonged in the executive row of a multi-screen cinema. Harbard was eating a muffin, dropping crumbs on the carpet around his feet.

Inspector Proust stood in the corner of the room by the water cooler with a mobile phone pressed to his ear, talking too loudly about a DVD player that was ‘too complicated’. Had he phoned a shop on the other side of the world to complain?

‘What’s going on?’ Charlie asked.

‘We’re waiting for Gibbs,’ said Sam.

The Snowman interrupted his phone call to say, ‘Round him up, will you, Sergeant?’

Charlie realised he was addressing her.
Bloody cheek.
‘I can’t stay, sir. I need one of you to come with me. I think I’ve got something that’s going to help you.’ She didn’t dare ask for Simon. Not in front of everyone.

‘Off you go, Waterhouse,’ said Proust. Charlie could have kissed him. ‘Don’t let it take too long, Sergeant.’

‘I feel like the kid whose mother turns up two hours early to collect him from the party,’ said Simon, following Charlie down the corridor.

She smiled at him over her shoulder. ‘Did your mother do that?’

No reply.

‘She did, didn’t she?’

‘What’s this about, anyway?’

‘By the time I’ve explained . . .’

They marched the rest of the way in silence. Charlie stopped outside interview room three and Simon walked into her. She grinned determinedly as he leaped back, alarmed by the unexpected physical contact.

She opened the door. A broad-shouldered woman with short spiky dyed hair and a pained expression on her face sat behind the table. She was wearing black tracksuit bottoms with pink stripes down the legs, pink lace-up pumps and a tight pale pink polo-necked jumper that clung to the rolls of flesh around her middle. ‘This is Pam Senior,’ Charlie told Simon. ‘Miss Senior, this is Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse. I’d like you to tell him what you’ve just told me.’

‘All of it?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘But . . . I can’t sit here all day, I’m self-employed. I’m a childminder. I thought you’d have told him already.’

When Charlie didn’t respond, Pam Senior sighed and started to talk. A woman she didn’t know had turned up on her doorstep last night, she said. Late: eleven o’clock. She’d introduced herself as Esther Taylor and said she was the best friend of a woman whose children Pam sometimes looked after—Sally Thorning. She’d demanded to know what Pam had done to Sally, and tried to force her way into Pam’s house.

‘She called me a liar, accused me of all sorts—pushing Sally under a bus, but I didn’t, I swear! Sally must have told her I did, though, and now she reckons Sally’s disappeared and I must know something about it. She was threatening to go to the police. ’ Pam’s nostrils flared. She sniffed several times. ‘So I thought I’d better come here first and tell you I’ve done nothing, absolutely nothing. What she’s saying’s slander, and that’s illegal, isn’t it?’

‘Under a bus?’ said Simon. ‘Are you sure that was what she said? Where do you think she got that from?’

‘Sally did have an accident with a bus, in Rawndesley a few days ago. I was there, I saw it. Well, I didn’t see it happen, but I saw a group of people all gathered round, so I went and looked, and it was Sally. I tried to help her, offered to take her to hospital to get checked out, but she wasn’t having any of it. She accused me of pushing her and shouted at me in front of everyone.’ Pam’s face reddened as she remembered the incident. ‘We’d had a bit of a row before, because of a mix-up over childcare arrangements, and I’ll admit I was furious with her, but . . . what sort of person does she think I am, that I’d do that?’

‘So you didn’t push her?’ said Charlie.

‘Of course not!’

‘And you didn’t see if anyone else pushed her?’

‘No. I told you. I’ve been upset about it all week. I was just starting to feel better—Sally left a message saying she was sorry, and I thought it was all over—and then this Esther Taylor woman turns up. She tried to barge into my house. Look.’ Pam held out her hand so that Simon could see it shaking. ‘I’m a wreck.’

‘Tell him the rest,’ said Charlie.

‘I managed to keep her out, slammed the door on her.’ Pam touched her throat. ‘She started yelling outside about Mark Bretherick, asking if he was the one who . . . who wanted Sally dead. I can hardly bear to say it, it’s so awful. I read the local paper every night, so I recognised the name. That was what freaked me out the most.’ She pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of her tracksuit trousers; it had the initials PS embroidered on it. It had been ironed, Charlie noticed, and folded into a neat square.

‘Do you know Mark Bretherick?’ asked Simon.

‘No!’

‘Did you know Geraldine or Lucy Bretherick?’

‘No, but I know how they died, and I don’t want anything to do with it!’

An odd way to phrase it, thought Charlie. ‘But, according to you, you haven’t got anything to do with it,’ she said. ‘You don’t know the Bretherick family. You’ve never known them.’

‘Well, obviously this Esther Taylor knows something about them, or Sally does, and I don’t want anything to do with any of them. I don’t want to be attacked in the middle of the night when I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong!’

‘All right,’ said Charlie. ‘Try to calm down.’

‘What did Esther Taylor look like?’ Simon asked.

‘About my height. Short, blonde hair. Glasses. A bit like the blonde one out of
When Harry Met Sally
, but uglier and with glasses.’

‘She didn’t look anything like Geraldine Bretherick? Do you know what Geraldine Bretherick looked like? Have you seen her photograph in the paper?’

Pam nodded. ‘No, this woman looked nothing like her.’

Charlie watched Simon watching Pam. What was he waiting for? She’d answered his question.

‘Actually . . .’ Pam’s hanky was taut in her lap, her left and right hands waging a subtle tug of war. ‘Oh, my God.
Sally
looks like Mrs Bretherick. I didn’t think of it until you just said . . . Why did you ask me that? What’s going on?’