The Wrong Mother (44 page)

The idea of putting on his clothes is unbearable. I cry, wanting my own clothes. Where has he put them? Two ideas come to me at once: the locked bathroom door. A pocket full of keys . . .

I shake them all out on to the landing carpet. Some are obviously too big, too small or the wrong shape. I push these to one side. There are five left. The fourth one I try opens the locked door. The bathroom is large, almost as big as the master bedroom, with a sunken bath in one corner. In the middle of the floor, like a pyre—some kind of sacrificial mound or a bonfire waiting to burn—is a heap of somebody’s possessions. Clothes, shoes, bags, school exercise books, Barbie dolls, a watch, a pair of yellow washing-up gloves, a bottle of Eau du Soir by Sisley, gold and pearl cuff links: hundreds of things. Things that once belonged to a woman and a girl. All their possessions, heaped up in this one room. And, on top, my clothes and shoes.
Thank God.

I push my way through the pile, hear things from the top falling into the bath and basin. The loudest crash comes from a black anglepoise lamp with a chrome base. It scares me until I realise what it is. It looks like a little creature—black head, silver spine. Its bulb has fallen out and smashed in the basin.

My heart thuds harder when I find two passports. I open the first one, flick to the back page. It’s her: the girl from the photograph. Amy Oliva. The other passport belongs to her mother, and her face is as familiar to me as her daughter’s for the same reason. Encarnación. A Spanish name? Yes. I flicked through a book a few seconds ago that was written in a foreign language.

Amy Oliva’s father.
But he told me his name was William Markes.

In a plastic bag that has been loosely tied at the top, I find something slimy and green. It’s a uniform: St Swithun’s. Amy’s school uniform. Why is it wet? Why does it smell so bad?
Did he drown her?

I can’t stay here surrounded by dead people’s things. I know Amy and Encarnación are dead as surely as if I’d found their bodies. I grab my clothes, run downstairs, turn on the shower in the tiny shower room and pull off the dressing gown. There’s a large dark red patch below the waist. It looks as if it’s been used to wrap a severed head.

I wash as quickly as I can, watching the water around my feet turn from red to pink to clear. Then I take the blue towel that’s neatly folded on top of the radiator, dry myself and get dressed.

Now I can leave, go home, call the police. I can bring them here, and they’ll find . . . No. There are things I can’t let them find. I have to be able to carry on living once I escape—the life I want, the life I used to have—or else there’s no point.

Nobody can know what he did to me.

I go back to the upstairs bathroom. Retching, I shake Amy Oliva’s foul-smelling uniform out of its plastic bag. Then I walk slowly round the house, collecting all the things I can’t risk leaving: the dressing gown, the syringe, the book written in Spanish.

I begin to shake violently as I walk across the yard and out on to the street.

 

 

Once he was certain 2 Belcher Close was empty, Sellers bent over, leaning his hands on his knees, and waited to get his breath back. It was clear what had happened: he’d locked her in and she’d smashed a window to get out.

Inside, keys were scattered on the landing and down the stairs. A loaded gun had been left on the kitchen work-surface. There was blood everywhere, and pieces of pink glass. Sellers was doing his best to touch nothing while he waited for scene-of-crime to arrive.

So much for his intuition. Yesterday, non-existent Harry Martineau had been oh-so-helpful, handing over the Olivas’ mail, promising he’d try to find the phone number and address they’d given him. With his crumpled suit jacket and open briefcase behind him.
I’ve managed to lose my wallet.
Flustered, dishevelled, harmless. And Sellers and Gibbs had fallen for it.

Sellers froze. The jacket. The suit jacket. There was a suit hanging up in a wardrobe upstairs. Sellers had been relieved to find it; he’d feared he might find a body in there.

He ran back upstairs to the master bedroom, opened the wardrobe again and stared at the suit. How the hell could he have missed it? The jacket had been lying in the hall yesterday, right in front of him. Sellers had spent hours walking round town with a photograph of the damn thing in his pocket. How many times had he taken out that photo and shown it to people?

He leaned into the wardrobe, looking for a label to confirm what he already knew. ‘Ozwald Boateng’, it said.

It was the suit Mark Bretherick had reported missing.

 

Michelle Jones sat opposite Sam Kombothekra in interview room one, crying into a handkerchief he’d given her and shaking her head every now and then, as if remembering yet another wrong that had been done to her. The healthy glow of her tanned skin was undermined by the red lines that cross-hatched the whites of her eyes. Her lips were chapped and peeling. She picked at them, crossing and uncrossing her legs continually.

Sam didn’t think much of Michelle’s recently acquired husband, who, instead of accompanying her to the police station, had put her in a taxi and gone home to bed. Charming. Sam’s own wife Kate would have divorced him if he’d ever behaved so inconsiderately. He often heard Kate’s voice in his mind and he heard it now, saying, ‘Well, that’s what you get for marrying someone you hardly know.’ Sam and Kate had lived together for eleven years before they got married, whereas Michelle had only met her husband in April 2006, fifteen months before she married him. April Fool’s Day, she’d told Sam, looking surprised that he was interested. He hoped she hadn’t been fooled into making a disastrous choice, but then maybe he was overreacting. He hadn’t met Jones, so he oughtn’t, he supposed, to leap to negative conclusions.

Michelle had been fond of Amy but she had ‘loved’ Encarna; that was the word she kept using. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said for about the fifteenth time. ‘It’s crazy. I mean, it’s not as if she was my boyfriend or anything, I wasn’t
in love
with her.’ She looked up. ‘Honestly, it was nothing like that. I just . . . thought we were best friends. Very good friends,’ she corrected herself.

A wealthy fine art banker, very good friends with a nanny? Sam wasn’t a snob, he hoped, but it struck him as unlikely. ‘You were saying Encarna got angry with you when you said you were going on holiday?’ he prompted.

Michelle nodded. ‘There was a half-term coming up . . .’

‘Late last May?’

‘Sounds about right, yeah. Encarna was in a panic because half-term was two weeks long and she needed to work and . . . well, I wasn’t available. I’d always been available before, when I was single. I didn’t have much of a social life, and Encarna’s family were like my family; that was what she always said, that she wanted me to feel part of the family, and I
did
.’ The hanky was so wet, Sam could see the pink of her fingers through the material. ‘I always said yes to everything and she paid so well—miles more than any of my friends who were nannies were getting. But it was different once I had a boyfriend. It was just bad luck that he’d suggested going away for those two weeks. I was so excited, I said yes before I’d checked with Encarna, and then once it was booked . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, would
you
have expected me to cancel?’

‘It sounds like a misunderstanding,’ Sam said diplomatically.

‘I couldn’t cancel! I had a feeling he was planning to propose and he did! It was so romantic: we’d only just met, but he said he knew. I did everything I could to help sort things out for Encarna. I phoned her mum in Spain and asked if she could come over, and she could. She was happy to, she said, but when I told Encarna she exploded. I should have realised—she didn’t get on that well with her mum, and she didn’t want her around for a whole fortnight.’ Michelle pressed her eyes shut, squeezing out more tears. ‘I thought she was going to kill me.’

‘Did she attack you physically?’

‘No. She just made me ring her mum back and tell her I’d made a mistake. It was awful. And I made it worse. I said I didn’t understand why it would be so bad, the half-term holiday. Amy’s dad had offered to have a week off work. He was always so good about doing his share—it wasn’t as if he left it all to Encarna . . .’

‘What was he like? Describe him.’

‘Oh, a real sweetie.’

Sam found it hard not to look disgusted.

‘He was lovely to Amy. Encarna used to say he had more maternal feelings than she did, and I think she was right.’

‘You were saying about the half-term holiday? He offered to have a week off work?’

‘Yeah, he suggested they share it,’ said Michelle. ‘Each stay at home for a week with Amy. I mean, that wouldn’t have killed Encarna, would it? I knew she wasn’t keen on doing the whole hands-on mum thing, but I didn’t realise she hated looking after Amy that much. She . . .’ Michelle seemed to think better of whatever she had been about to say.

‘What? If you’ve remembered something, whatever it is, you have to tell me.’

‘She didn’t mean it. She said if she ended up having to take a week off work to look after Amy, she’d kill her, but she was just . . . exaggerating. Letting off steam.’

Sam leaned forward. ‘What exactly did Encarna say about killing Amy?’

‘Look, she only said it to make me feel bad. She wanted to ruin my holiday.’ Michelle buried her face in her hands. ‘She
knew
I’d never been abroad before. She
knew
the only holidays I’d been on were to my mum and dad’s stupid caravan.’

‘So you’d never been abroad with Encarna, to look after Amy?’

‘No. I would have, like a shot, but they always went to the same place in Switzerland. Inder . . . Inter . . .’

‘Interlaken?’

‘That was it, yeah. It was called the Grand Hotel something-or-other, and it had a children’s club that was open all day, seven days a week. It had babysitting too.’ Michelle pulled her lips tightly together. ‘I didn’t get it myself, but there was a lot about Encarna that I didn’t understand. I suppose that was what I loved about her: she was unusual. I mean, most people go on holiday to spend more time with their kids, don’t they? That’s the whole point. Not to leave them with Swiss nannies.’

Sam found that he didn’t want to think too hard about the possibility of leaving his two sons with Swiss nannies. He and Kate could lie on sun-loungers by the pool, reading books and drinking cocktails like in the old days. The Grand Hotel Something-or-other in Interlaken. There was no point Googling it. Kate would veto the plan immediately, and he’d get bollocked for having dared to make so callous a suggestion.

‘I was actually flattered that Encarna was jealous,’ said Michelle bitterly. ‘When I told her I had a new boyfriend, that I wasn’t available to help her twenty-four hours a day any more.’