The Wrong Mother (12 page)

‘The one on the news, whose wife and daughter died?’

‘Yes. I’m sure I’ll be fine, but if by any chance I don’t phone you within two hours to say I’m out of there and safe, phone the police, okay?’

‘Not okay. Sal, what the
fucking hell
is going on? If you think you can fob me off with—’

‘I promise I’ll explain everything later. Just, please, please, do this one thing for me.’

‘Has this got anything to do with Pam Senior?’

‘No. Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘You don’t
know
?’

‘Esther, you mustn’t say anything about this to Nick. Swear you won’t.’

‘Ring me in two hours or I’m calling the police,’ she says as if it was her idea. ‘And if you can’t explain or go into detail then,
I’ll
push you under a bus. All right?’

‘You’re a star.’

I drop my phone on the passenger seat and head for Corn Mill House.

 

 

‘There’s been a development.’ Sam Kombothekra addressed the whole team but his eyes kept swerving back to Simon. ‘I’ve just taken a call from a Sue Slater, a legal secretary for a firm of solicitors in Rawndesley that specialises in family law. Two weeks before Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick’s bodies were found, Mrs Slater took a call from a Geraldine Bretherick, who gave her name and asked to be put through to a lawyer. Mrs Slater didn’t think anything of it until she heard the name on the news. It was an unusual name so it stuck in her mind.’

‘Kombothekra’s an unusual name,’ said Inspector Giles Proust. ‘There must be thousands of Brethericks.’ The sergeant laughed nervously and Proust looked gratified.

‘Apparently Mrs Bretherick asked to speak to “somebody who deals with divorces, custody cases, that sort of thing”—that’s a word-for-word quote. When Mrs Slater asked her if she needed to engage a lawyer’s services herself, she seemed to lose her nerve. She said it didn’t matter and put the phone down. Mrs Slater said she nearly didn’t ring in, but in the end she thought she ought to, just in case it turned out to be important.’

‘Very public-spirited of her.’ The Snowman leaned against the wall of the CID room, passing his mobile phone from one hand to the other. Every few seconds he glanced at its screen. His wife Lizzie was away all week on a cookery course. Proust had allowed her to go—it was the first time in thirty years that she’d left the marital home for more than one night, he’d told Simon—on the condition that she ‘kept in touch’. ‘I’m sure she will, sir,’ Simon had said, resisting the urge to add, ‘I believe they have telephones in Harrogate.’ Lizzie had left yesterday morning, since when the Snowman had been keeping in touch with a frequency that amounted to surveillance. He’d phoned Lizzie five times yesterday and three times today. And those were only the calls Simon had witnessed, calls with no purpose other than to track Lizzie’s movements, as far as Simon could make out. ‘She’s in her hotel room,’ Proust would mutter darkly every so often, or, ‘She’s in a shop buying a sweatshirt. Apparently it’s chilly there.’ Because Proust was Proust, the responding words ‘We don’t give a shit’ went unspoken.

To the left of the inspector’s bald head was a large rectangular whiteboard on to which Geraldine Bretherick’s suicide note had been transcribed. Below it, also in black marker pen, someone had copied out the letter that had been posted in PC Robbie Meakin’s box at Spilling Post Office: ‘Please forward this to whoever is investigating the deaths of Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick. 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.’

Proust had been cagey about how this note had made its way to his desk from Spilling Post Office. Simon didn’t doubt for a second that Charlie had passed it on. Which meant she’d chosen to go to Proust instead of him. So how come Simon hated the whole world at the moment apart from her?

‘Well, Sergeant?’ Proust asked Kombothekra. ‘Is Mrs Slater’s contribution important?’

‘It is, sir. At least, I believe it is. It’s possible Geraldine Bretherick wanted to leave Mark Bretherick and phoned this law firm—Ellingham Sandler—for that reason. Because she wanted to find out, before she initiated anything, what her chances were of getting custody of Lucy.’

‘Would she have wanted custody?’ asked Proust. ‘On the basis of the laptop diary, I’d say not.’

‘She talks about her friend Cordy leaving her husband and letting him keep their daughter,’ said Chris Gibbs, rubbing his thick gold wedding ring with the fingers of his right hand. ‘Might there be a connection there?’ Gibbs had got married a little over a year ago. Ever since, he had turned up at work each day with a strange gloss on his thick dark hair, and wearing clothes that smelled, in Simon’s opinion, like those colourful plastic devices you sometimes saw in toilet bowls, designed to replace foul smells with aggressive floral ones that were even more offensive.

‘You mean Geraldine might have been phoning on Cordy’s behalf?’ said Colin Sellers, scratching one of his bushy sideburns. If he didn’t watch out, they’d take over his entire face. Simon thought of the dark green plant that clung to the walls of Corn Mill House.

‘Was it you who spoke to Mrs O’Hara, Waterhouse?’

Simon inclined his head in Proust’s direction. Since Kombothekra had taken over from Charlie, Simon had made a point of saying as little as possible in team meetings. No one had noticed; it was a protest with no audience, specially designed for minimum effect.

‘Speak to her, again. Find out if she changed her mind about letting her husband keep the daughter to appease her guilt and asked Geraldine Bretherick to phone a lawyer for her.’

Simon allowed his scorn to show on his face. Cordy O’Hara wasn’t timid or inert. She’d have phoned a lawyer herself.

‘I didn’t mean that, sir,’ said Gibbs. ‘Geraldine was envious of Mrs O’Hara being able to get shot of her daughter—she said so in the diary, explicitly. Maybe it inspired her to try the same thing.’

‘That’d be a bit extreme, wouldn’t it?’ said Sellers. Seeing the rest of the team’s expressions, he held up his hands. ‘I know, I know.’

All eyes fixed on the enlarged photographs of the crime scenes that took up a quarter of a wall: the matching high-sided white bathtubs with gold claw feet, the clear water in one bath and the livid red water of the other, the curled tendrils of wet hair that formed a corona around each face like the black rays of a dead sun. Simon couldn’t bring himself to look at the two faces. Especially the eyes.

‘I should probably say . . .’ Kombothekra glanced down at his notes. ‘Custody—it’s not called that any more. Mrs Slater told me lawyers talk about residency these days, and primary carers. The family courts look at everything from the child’s point of view.’

‘That would seem to be a foolish way to proceed,’ said Proust.

‘It’s not about one of the parents winning and one losing. It’s about what’s in the child’s best interests. Whenever possible they try to come up with some sort of joint residency arrangement.’

‘Sergeant, fascinating as this insight into our nation’s social and legal history may be—’

‘I’ll get to the point, sir,’ said Kombothekra, his Adam’s apple working frantically as it always did when he was the focus of negative attention. ‘It’s just a hypothesis, but . . . Geraldine Bretherick hadn’t worked since her daughter was born. She didn’t have any savings; her husband brought in all the money. Money equals power, and women who stay at home with young children day in day out often lose confidence.’

‘That’s true, sir,’ Sellers chipped in. ‘Stacey’s always banging on about it. Now she’s persuaded me she needs to learn French, and I’m forking out for a two-hour lesson every week. She’s talking about signing up at the sixth form college to do an AS level. I can’t see how it’ll make her more confident, unless she’s planning to move to France, but . . .’ He shrugged.

‘Mid-life crisis,’ Gibbs diagnosed.

Simon dug his nails into his palm, sickened by the deliberate stupidity. If Stacey Sellers was lacking in confidence, chances were it had nothing to do with not speaking another language and everything to do with Sellers’ years-long affair with Suki Kitson, a much younger woman who made her living singing in restaurants, hotel bars and, occasionally, on cruise ships. If Sellers wanted to save money, he should trying packing Suki in and seeing what happened. Maybe Stacey would decide she could live without learning French after all.

‘A lot of stay-at-home mums start to feel that the outside world is no longer their domain, if you like—’ Kombothekra went on.

‘I don’t like.’ Proust lurched forward, shaking out his arms, as if suddenly aware that he’d been still for too long. He aimed his mobile phone at Kombothekra. ‘If I’d wanted a commentary on societal norms I’d have phoned Émile Durkheim. A Frenchman, Sellers, so no doubt your wife knows all about him. It’s bad enough that we’ve had that self-promoting idiot Harbard foisted on us without you turning into a sociologist as well, Sergeant. Stick to the facts and get to the point.’

None of the team had enjoyed working with Professor Keith Harbard, but Superintendent Barrow had insisted; CID needed to be seen to be bringing in outside expertise. Familicide, as some newspapers and television commentators had called it, was too sensitive and newsworthy a crime to be dealt with in the usual way. Particularly when the killer was a woman, a mother. ‘We need all the whistles and bells on this one,’ the superintendent had said. What they’d got was a fat, balding academic who bandied about the phrase ‘family annihilation’, especially when there were cameras pointed at him, and mentioned the titles of books and articles he’d written to anyone who would listen; who blatantly thought he was the mutt’s nuts, as Sellers had so aptly put it.