The Wrong Mother (8 page)

‘There was a lady came in this morning,’ Phyllis went on. ‘She was in a right state. She’d posted a letter in there to her boyfriend and it never got to him. I turned round and said to her, “It’s not my fault, love. Ask the police about it.” But I’m the one who gets the aggro. And why won’t the superintendent come in here and talk to me about it? Why’s he sent you instead? Is he too embarrassed? Realised what a bad idea it was? It’s all very well you turning round and saying to me . . .’

On and on it went. Charlie yawned without opening her mouth, wondering how Phyllis Kent managed to be both in front of and behind everyone she spoke to: ‘I turned round and said, he turned round and said, you turned round and said . . .’ There was an identical police postbox in the post office at Silsford, and, as far as Charlie knew, there had been no complaints about that one. The market research she’d commissioned last year had proved unequivocally that people wanted as much community policing as possible, as visible and accessible as possible.

Charlie suspected Phyllis Kent savoured grievances. She would have to start going to the supermarket if she wanted to avoid being buttonholed by the woman. It was a shame; Spilling Post Office was also a shop—a rather efficient one, Charlie thought. It was small, L-shaped and sold one variety of everything she needed, so she didn’t have to waste time choosing between rows of the same thing. Sliced white bread and mild cheddar could be found alongside more unexpected items: tinned pickled octopus, pheasant pâté. And it was on Charlie’s route home from work. All she had to do was pull in by the side of the road, get out of her car, and the door of the post office was right in front of her. It couldn’t have been more convenient. Charlie had started to base her day-to-day planning around what she knew Phyllis stocked: Cheerios for breakfast, a bottle of Gordon’s gin and a box of Guylian chocolates as birthday presents for her sister Olivia. For a bath, Radox Milk and Honey—the only bath oil Phyllis sold. It lived beside the freezer cabinet, on the third shelf down, between Colgate Total toothpaste and Always extra-long sanitary towels with wings.

‘I’ll make sure PC Meakin returns any post that comes to us by mistake,’ Charlie promised, once Phyllis’s rant had ground to a halt.

‘Well, it’s no good returning it to me, is it? It wants posting in a proper box, like the one outside.’

‘Anything with a stamp and an address on it that’s clearly not for us, we’ll undertake to send on to its rightful owner.’ Charlie didn’t know how to sound more reassuring. She had no grander, more impressive promises up her sleeve, so she hoped Phyllis would be content with this one.

But the post office manager was not a woman to whom contentment came easily. ‘You’re not going, are you?’ she said, as Charlie started to inch towards the door. ‘What about the lady?’

‘Lady?’

‘The one who came in this morning. She reckons there’s a letter to her boyfriend in there, in your box. No one’s been to empty it for days, and she wants her letter. I turned round and said to her, “Leave it to me, love. I’ll make sure that superintendent comes and gets your letter out for you. This mess is all his fault in the first place!” ’

Charlie swallowed a sigh. Why didn’t Phyllis’s lady phone her boyfriend? Or e-mail him? Or put a brick through his window, depending on the nature of the message she wanted to convey. ‘I’ll make sure PC Meakin comes as soon as he can.’

‘Why can’t you open the box?’ said Phyllis. ‘I thought you said you were a sergeant.’

‘I don’t have the key.’ Charlie decided to risk being honest. ‘Look, this postbox isn’t really my responsibility. I only offered to come because Robbie Meakin’s off on a week’s paternity leave and . . . well, I needed to do my shopping.’

‘I’ve got the key,’ said Phyllis, a triumphant gleam in her eye. ‘I keep it here behind the counter. But I’m not allowed to open the box. A police officer has to open it.’

Charlie could no longer hold her two bulging carrier bags. She lowered them to the floor gently to avoid breaking the eggs and lightbulbs. So Phyllis had the key. Why did she have to be so irritatingly law-abiding? She could easily have opened the box, fished out the letter to the boyfriend and left the rest of the contents untouched. Why was she bothering Charlie when she could have dealt with it herself?

And if Phyllis hadn’t been such a stickler for the rules . . . There would be nothing to stop a less scrupulous person having a nosey in the box whenever they fancied, perhaps even stealing letters when the police weren’t around—which, let’s face it, was most of the time. Whose ludicrous idea was it to leave the key at the post office? Charlie would have liked to turn round and say a few things to that person.

She rubbed her sore hands while Phyllis went to fetch the key. Her fingers were numb; the handles of the carrier bags had cut off her circulation. While she waited, she pulled her phone out of her handbag and deleted a dozen saved text messages which, in an ideal world, she would have liked to keep. But it was something to do. She was terrified of being unoccupied. There was no danger of that at work, or at home, where there was more than enough DIY to keep her busy. Charlie had stripped the walls and floors of her house just over a year ago and was rebuilding the rooms one by one, starting from scratch. It was a long, slow process. So far she’d done the kitchen and made a start on her bedroom. The rest of the house was plaster and floorboards. It looked abandoned, as if it was waiting for vagrants and rats to move in.

‘Couldn’t you have kept the old furniture until you bought new?’ her sister regularly grumbled, wriggling on a wooden kitchen chair that was understudying indefinitely for the comfortable armchair Charlie would one day buy for the lounge. Olivia was ideologically opposed to slumming it. The round contours of her figure were not suited to right angles and hard seats.

‘I wouldn’t have kept myself if there’d been any choice,’ Charlie had told her. ‘I’d have replaced me with someone better.’

‘No shortage of candidates there,’ Olivia had shot back merrily, trying to goad Charlie into sticking up for herself.

The truth was, Charlie didn’t want to get the house finished; what would happen after that? What would be her project? Could she find anything big enough to leave no room for thinking or feeling? Old wallpaper was easy to strip down and replace with something more cheerful; despair wasn’t.

Phyllis Kent emerged from the back office with the key in her hand. She passed it to Charlie and stood back, ready to make an infuriating comment as soon as one occurred to her. Charlie wondered if Phyllis had read about her in the papers last year. Some people had, some hadn’t. Some knew, some didn’t. Phyllis seemed the sort who might make an ill-judged remark if she did know, and she’d said nothing so far, but Charlie wasn’t going to allow herself to imagine she was in the clear. She’d done that too many times before and been floored when, almost as an afterthought, whoever she was talking to had suddenly mentioned it. It felt a bit like being shot in the back—the emotional equivalent.

Most people Charlie knew well were understanding, non-judgemental. Every time she was told it wasn’t her fault, something inside her faded. They didn’t even think enough of her to be honest and say, ‘How the hell could you have been so stupid? ’ Charlie knew what they were all thinking:
It’s too late, so we might as well be nice.

She unlocked the box and took out the four envelopes and one loose scrap of lined paper that were inside. Two of the envelopes were addressed to Robbie Meakin, one had no name or address written on it, and a bulging one that looked as if it might burst at the seams was addressed to a Timothy Lush and had a first-class stamp on it. ‘Here’s your lady’s letter,’ said Charlie, pitying poor Mr Lush. He’d have to wade through at least seven pages of—
don’t leap to premature conclusions, Charlie
—aimless emotional snivelling, and try to work out what to do next. Charlie had been tempted, many times since last spring, to write a letter of exactly that sort to Simon. Thank God she’d restrained herself. Telling people how you felt was never a good idea. It was bad enough feeling it—why would you want to let it loose in the world?

Phyllis whipped the envelope out of Charlie’s hand and dropped it in the metal tray under the counter’s glass window, as if prolonged contact with human skin might cause it to burst into flames. Charlie threw the two Meakin envelopes back into the box and unfolded the lined sheet of paper. This was also a letter to Meakin, from Dr Maurice Gidley FRS OBE, who had been out for a meal at the Bay Tree in Spilling last week and been pestered by teenagers on his way back to his car. The youths hadn’t attacked him but they had taunted him in a manner that he described as ‘unacceptable and intimidating’. He wanted to know if anything could be done to prevent ‘ne’er-do-wells’ loitering outside his favourite restaurants, which, he informed Meakin, were the Bay Tree, Shillings Brasserie and Head 13.

Ah, yes, Doctor, of course. The 2006 Ne’er-do-wells Act . . . Charlie smiled. She’d have liked to tell Simon about Dr Gidley’s absurd note, but she didn’t have that sort of conversation with him any more. And now she didn’t even have his text messages. She regretted deleting them already, even though she could remember many of them word for word: ‘It’s a serious one. Time to sober up and face the music.’ This had been Simon’s reply to an enquiry from Charlie about his hangover after a particularly boozy work night out. ‘Walking, floating, air, sky, moonlight, etc’: that had been her favourite of Simon’s texts. She’d been mystified when she’d got it, hadn’t understood it at all. Later, she’d asked him what it meant.

‘The Snowman was looking for you. Those are the lyrics from
The Snowman
. You know, Aled Jones. I mixed the words up to make it cryptic, in case your phone fell into the wrong hands.’

Charlie had deleted it.
Stupid idiot.
Stupid for pressing a button that would destroy something she knew she wanted to keep, stupid for wanting to keep it in the first place. Simon’s unspectacular, no longer relevant words from over a year ago.
God, I’m a pathetic cow.

She put Dr Gidley’s letter back in the box and used her thumbnail to open the fourth envelope, the one that wasn’t addressed to anybody. It was probably hate mail or porn, Charlie guessed. Blank, sealed envelopes were usually bad news.

‘Are you allowed to open that?’ Phyllis’s voice floated over her shoulder.

Charlie didn’t answer. She was staring at the short, typed letter, at first aware of nothing except that it was a chance. To reestablish contact. Too good to miss. Charlie blinked and looked again to check that the words ‘Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick’ were still there. They were. This was current, the case Simon was working on at the moment. Him and the rest of the team.

Charlie missed them all. Even Proust. Standing in his office, being patronised and hectored by him . . . Sometimes when she walked past the CID room she could feel her heart leaning towards it, straining to go in, to go back.

‘Please forward this to whoever is investigating the deaths of Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick,’ the letter said. It was only one paragraph long, printed in a regular but small sans-serif type-face. ‘It’s possible that the man shown on the news last night who is meant to be Mark Bretherick is not Mark Bretherick. You need to look into it and make sure he’s who he says he is. Sorry I can’t say more.’

That was it. No explanation, no name or signature, no contact details.

Charlie pulled her phone out of her bag. She highlighted Simon’s number on the screen, her finger hovering over the ‘call’ button.
All you need to do is press it. What’s the worst that can happen?

Charlie knew the answer to that one from past experience:
worse than you can possibly imagine, so there’s no point trying.
She sighed, scrolled up, and rang Proust instead.

 

 

Someone followed me this morning. Or else I’m going insane.

I head for my desk, keeping my eyes down and reminding myself to take deep breaths as I cross the large, open-plan office. The advantage of everybody being so visible is that we tend to go out of our way not to notice one another, to pretend we work in closed, private rooms.

I turn on my computer, open a file so that it looks as if I’m working. It’s an old draft of a paper I’m presenting in Lisbon next month: ‘Creating Salt-marsh Habitats Using Muddy Dredged Materials’. That’ll do.

Is there any evidence that taking deep breaths ever made anyone feel better?

Someone followed me in a red Alfa Romeo. I memorised the registration: YF52 DNB. Esther would tell me to ring the DVLA and sweet-talk them into giving me the name of the car’s owner, but I’m not good at sweet-talking, and although every Holly-wood film contains at least one maverick office-worker eager to break company rules and give confidential information to strangers, in the real world—in my experience, at any rate—most employees are champing at the bit to tell you how little they can do for you, how absolutely forbidden they are to make your life one iota easier.

I’ve got a better idea. I pick up the phone, ignore the broken dialling tone that tells me I have messages, dial 118118 and ask to be put through to Seddon Hall Hotel and Spa. A man with a Northern Irish accent asks me which town. ‘York,’ I tell him.

‘Oh, right, got it.’ I hold my breath, silently urging him not to ask me the question that always makes me want to bash my head against something hard. He does. ‘Would you like to be put through?’

‘Yes. That’s why I said, “Can you put me through?” ’ I can’t resist adding.
Think for yourself, dork. Don’t just stick to the script, because every time you do that, every time one of your colleagues does it, it’s five seconds of my life wasted.

Even if someone isn’t trying to kill me, I still haven’t got any life to spare. I try to find this funny and fail.