The Wrong Mother (6 page)

 

 

It struck DC Simon Waterhouse that, as usual, everything was wrong. He was feeling this more and more lately. The lane was wrong, and the house was wrong—even its name was wrong—and the garden, and what Mark Bretherick did for a living, and the fact that Simon was here with Sam Kombothekra in Kombothekra’s silent, fragrant car.

Simon had always objected to more things than would offend most people, but recently he had noticed he’d started to baulk at almost everything he came into contact with—his physical surroundings, friends, colleagues, family. These days what he felt most often was disgust; he was full of it. When he had first seen Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick’s dead bodies, his mouth had filled with the undigested remnants of his last meal, but even so, their deaths didn’t stand out in his mind in the way he knew they ought to. Each day he worked on this case he felt sickened by his own numbness in the face of such horror.

‘Simon? You okay?’ Kombothekra asked him as the car lurched over the deep potholes in the lane that led to Corn Mill House. Kombothekra was Simon’s new skipper, so ignoring him wasn’t an option and neither was telling him to fuck off. Wanting to tell him to fuck off was wrong, too, because Kombothekra was a fair and decent bloke.

He had transferred from West Yorkshire CID a year ago, when Charlie had deserted. Selfishly, she didn’t leave altogether—she still worked in the same nick, so Simon had to see her around the building and suffer her stilted, polite greetings and enquiries about his well-being. He’d rather never see her again, if things couldn’t be how they were.

Charlie’s new job was a travesty. She must know that as well as I do, thought Simon. She was head of a team of police officers who worked with social services to provide an encouraging and positive environment for the local scum, to discourage them from re-offending. Simon read about her activities in the nick’s newsletter: she and her underlings bought kettles and microwaves for skag-heads, found mind-expanding employment for coke-dealers. Superintendent Barrow was quoted in the local press talking about caring policing, and Charlie—with her new, fake, photo-opportunity smile—was head of the care assistants, arranging for all the scrotes to have their arses wiped with extra-soft toilet tissue in the hope that it’d turn them into better people. It was bullshit. She ought to have been working with Simon. That was the way things were meant to be: the way they used to be. Not the way they were now.

Simon hated Kombothekra calling him by his Christian name. Everyone else called him Waterhouse: Sellers, Gibbs, Inspector Proust. Only Charlie called him Simon. And he didn’t want to call Kombothekra ‘Sam’ either. Or even ‘Sarge’.

‘If you’re unhappy about something, I’d rather you told me,’ Kombothekra tried again. They were coming to the point where the pitted lane divided in two. The right-hand branch led to the cluster of squat, grey industrial buildings that was Spilling Velvets, and was smooth, concreted over. The track on the left was too narrow and contained even more craters than the wider lane. Twice before on his way to Corn Mill House, Simon had met a car coming in the opposite direction and had to reverse all the way back to the Rawndesley road; it had felt like driving backwards over a rough stone roller-coaster.

Mainly, Simon was unhappy about Charlie. Without her he felt increasingly cut off, unreachable by other human beings. She was the only person he’d ever been close to, and, worst of all, he didn’t understand why he’d lost her. She’d left CID because of him—of that Simon was certain—and he had no idea what he’d done wrong. He’d risked his job to protect her, for fuck’s sake, so what was her problem?

None of this was Kombothekra’s business or what he’d meant. Simon forced his mind back to work. Plenty of negative feeling there too. He didn’t think Geraldine Bretherick had killed her daughter or herself; he was staggered that most of the team seemed to favour this hypothesis. But he’d been wrong in the past—spectacularly so—and the Brethericks’ minds and lives felt utterly foreign to him.

Mark Bretherick—and Geraldine, Simon assumed—had chosen to live in a house at the bottom of a long lane that was almost impossible to drive down. Simon would never buy a house with such an approach. And he’d be embarrassed to live in one that was known by a name instead of a number; he would feel as if he was pretending to be an aristocrat, inviting trouble. His own home was a neat rectangular two-up two-down cottage in a row of similar neat rectangles, opposite an identical row across the street. His garden was a small square of lawn bordered by thin strips of earth and a tiny paved patio area, also square.

A garden like the Brethericks’ would have terrified him. It had too many components; you couldn’t look out of one window and see all of it. Steep terraces crammed full of trees, bushes and plants surrounded the house on all sides. Many were in flower, but the colours, instead of looking vibrant, appeared sad and reckless, swamped by too much straggly green. A blanket of something dark and clingy climbed up the walls, blocking some of the windows on the ground floor and blurring the boundary between garden and house.

The terraces led down to a large rectangular lawn at the back, which was the only tidy part of the garden. Below the lawn was a ramshackle orchard that looked as if no one had set foot in it for years, and beyond that a stream and an overgrown paddock. At the side of the house stood a double greenhouse that was full of what looked to Simon like tangled, hairy green limbs and troughs full of murky water. Ropes of foliage pressed against the glass like snakes pushing to escape. In the wide driveway at the side of the house were two free-standing stone buildings that appeared to have no use. Each was probably big enough to house a family of three. One had a dusty, long-since-defunct toilet with a cracked black seat in one corner. The other, a young bobby at the scene had told Simon, used to be a coal store. Simon didn’t know how anyone could bear to have two buildings on their land that did nothing, were nothing. Waste, excess, neglect: all these things disgusted him.

Between the two outbuildings, a flight of stone steps led up to a garage, the access to which was from Castle Park Lane. If you climbed to the top of the steps and looked down, you might think Corn Mill House had fallen off the road and landed upright in a hammock of untamed greenery. The house itself had a black-tiled hipped roof but the rest of it was grey. Not solid grey, like the filing cabinets in the CID room, but a washed-out ethereal grey like a damp, misty sky. In certain lights it was more of a sickly beige. It gave the house a spectral look. No two windows were in alignment; all were odd shapes and rattled in the wind. Each one was divided into smaller panes by strips of black lead. The enormous living room and the not-much-smaller entrance hall were wood-panelled on all sides, which made for a dark and sombre look.

There were no window sills, which was disconcerting: the glass was set into the stone of the walls. Simon thought it made the place feel like a dungeon. Still, he had to admit that he hadn’t come here in the best of circumstances; he’d been called in after the balloon had gone up at the nick, had arrived knowing he’d find a dead mother and daughter. He supposed it wasn’t the house’s fault.

Mark Bretherick was the director of a company called Spilling Magnetic Refrigeration that made cooling units for low-temperature physicists. Not that Simon had a clue what that entailed. When Sam had explained it to the team at the first briefing, Simon had pictured a huddle of shivering scientists in thin white coats, their teeth chattering. Mark had conceived and built up the company himself and now had a staff of seven working for him. Very different, Simon imagined, from being given your purpose and instructions by someone who was paid more than you. Am I jealous of Bretherick? he wondered. If I am, I’m sicker in the head than I’ve ever been.

‘You think he did it, don’t you?’ said Sam Kombothekra, parking on the concrete courtyard in front of Corn Mill House. Twenty cars could have parked there. Simon hated men who cared about impressing people. Was Mark Bretherick in that category or did he need parking for that number of cars? Did he feel he deserved more than the average man? Than, say, Simon?

‘No,’ he told Kombothekra.
Don’t invent stupid opinions and ascribe them to me.
‘We know he didn’t do it.’

‘Exactly.’ Kombothekra sounded relieved. ‘We’ve been over him with a microscope: his movements, his finances—he didn’t get a professional in to do the job. Or if he did, he didn’t pay them. He’s in the clear, unless something new turns up.’

‘Which it won’t.’

A man called William Markes is very probably going to ruin my life.
That’s what Geraldine Bretherick had written in her diary. Typed, rather. The diary had been found on the laptop computer that lived on an antique table in a corner of the lounge—Geraldine’s computer. Mark had his own, in his home office upstairs. Before she had given up her job to look after Lucy, Geraldine had worked in IT, so clearly computers were her thing, but even so . . . what sort of woman types her personal diary on to a laptop?

Kombothekra was watching him keenly, waiting for more, so Simon added, ‘William Markes did it. He murdered them. Whoever he is.’

Kombothekra sighed. ‘Colin and Chris looked into that and got nowhere.’ Simon turned away to hide his distaste. The first time Kombothekra had referred to Sellers and Gibbs as ‘Colin and Chris’, Simon hadn’t known who he was talking about. ‘Unless and until we find a William Markes who knew Geraldine Bretherick—’

‘He didn’t know her,’ said Simon impatiently. ‘She didn’t know him. Otherwise she wouldn’t have said “a man called William Markes”. She’d just have said “William Markes”, or “William”.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Think of all the other names she mentioned, people she knew well: Lucy, Mark, Michelle. Cordy. Not “a woman called Cordelia O’Hara”.’ Simon had spent two hours yesterday talking to Mrs O’Hara, who had insisted he too call her Cordy. She’d been adamant that Geraldine Bretherick had killed nobody. Simon had told her she needed to speak in person to Kombothekra. He’d doubted his own ability to convey to his sergeant, in Cordy O’Hara’s absence, how persuasive her account of Geraldine Bretherick as someone who would commit neither murder nor suicide had been. It was far more perceptive and detailed than the usual ‘I can’t believe it—she seemed so normal’ that all detectives were familiar with.

But either Mrs O’Hara hadn’t bothered to seek out Kombothekra and repeat her insights to him, or else she had failed to make any impact on his certainty that Geraldine was responsible for both deaths. Simon had noticed that Kombothekra’s softly spoken politeness cloaked a stubborn streak that would not have achieved its goals nearly so often were it more overt.

‘Michelle Greenwood wasn’t someone Geraldine Bretherick knew well.’ Kombothekra sounded apologetic about contradicting Simon. ‘She babysat for Lucy from time to time, that was all. And, yes, she referred to her husband and daughter in the diary as “Lucy” and “Mark”, but what about “my terminally cheerful mother”?’

‘There’s a clear difference between inventing your own private, comic labels for friends and family and saying “a man called William Markes”. Don’t tell me you can’t see it. Would you ever describe the Snowman as “a man called Giles Proust”? In a diary that no one else was meant to read?’ Come to think of it, Simon had never heard Kombothekra refer to Inspector Proust as ‘the Snowman’. Whereas Simon, Sellers and Gibbs often forgot that it wasn’t his real and only name.

‘Okay, good point.’ Kombothekra nodded encouragingly. ‘So, where does that take us? Let’s say William Markes was someone Geraldine didn’t know. But she knew
of
him . . .’

‘Obviously.’

‘. . . so how could someone she doesn’t know and has never met be in a position to ruin her life?’

Simon resented having to answer. ‘I’m a disabled, gay, Jewish communist living in Germany in the late 1930s,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ve never met Adolf Hitler, and I don’t know him personally . . .’

‘Okay,’ Kombothekra conceded. ‘So something she’d heard about this William Markes person made her think he might ruin her life. But we can’t find him. We can’t find a William Markes—even with the surname spelled in all its possible variations—who had any connection with Geraldine Bretherick whatsoever.’

‘Doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist,’ said Simon as they got out of the car. Mark Bretherick stood in the porch, watching them with wide, stunned eyes. He had flung open the front door while they were still undoing their seat belts. The same had happened yesterday. Had he been waiting in the hall, peering through the leaded stained glass? Simon wondered. Walking round his enormous house, searching every room for his missing wife and daughter, who were as alive in his mind as they’d ever been? He was wearing the same pale blue shirt and black corduroy trousers he had worn since he’d found Geraldine and Lucy’s bodies. The shirt had tide-marks under the arms, dried sweat.

Bretherick stepped outside, on to the drive, then immediately reversed the action, retreating back into his porch as if he’d suddenly noticed the distance between his visitors and himself and didn’t have the energy.

‘She wrote a suicide note.’ Kombothekra’s quiet voice followed Simon towards the house. ‘Her husband and her mother said there was no doubt the handwriting was hers, and our subsequent checks proved them right.’ Another thing Kombothekra did all the time: hit you with his best point, the one he’d been saving up, at a moment when he knew you wouldn’t be able to reply.

Simon was already extending a hand to Mark Bretherick, who seemed thinner even than yesterday. His bony hand closed around Simon’s and held it in a rigid grip, as if he wanted to test the bones inside.

‘DC Waterhouse. Sergeant. Thank you for coming.’

‘It’s no problem,’ said Simon. ‘How are you bearing up?’

‘I don’t think I am.’ Bretherick stood aside to let them in. ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing, if anything.’ He sounded angry; it wasn’t the bewildered voice Simon had grown used to. Bretherick had found a fluency; each word was no longer a struggle.