The Wrong Mother Page 14

  ‘You have no way of knowing that,’ I say, and put the phone down before she can argue with me. I wait for her to ring me back but she doesn’t. My punishment.

  All they’re interested in is getting the facts. What was the Alfa Romeo’s registration? I knew it this morning. I memorised it.

  I’ve forgotten. In the hours between then and now, it has slipped out of my mind. Idiot, idiot, idiot.

  I pick up the four photographs, take them downstairs and put them in my handbag. Then I go back to the lounge and throw the two wooden frames into the wastepaper basket. The chances of Nick noticing or asking about them are zero; for once I’m glad I haven’t got a husband who’s observant and on the ball.

  I think about the police. Real shaggers. How observant can they be if they didn’t find the two hidden photographs? Assuming they were hidden. Surely the house was searched after Geraldine and Lucy died. Why didn’t anybody find those pictures?

  I know what school Lucy Bretherick went to: St Swithun’s, a private Montessori primary in North Spilling. Mark… the man at Seddon Hall told me. I’d heard of Montessori, knew it was a kind of educational ethos, but I wasn’t sure what exactly it entailed, and didn’t ask because he clearly assumed that as a fellow middle-class parent I knew all about it.

  I don’t, but I plan to find out as much as I can-about the school, about both girls whose photographs are in my bag, and their families. Tomorrow morning, as soon as I’ve dropped Zoe and Jake off at nursery, I’m going to St Swithun’s.

  Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723

  Case Ref: VN87

  OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra

  GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 3 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)

  23 April 2006, 2 a.m.

  Tonight, Michelle babysat while Mark and I went out for dinner. I didn’t have to negotiate about bedtime, how many stories, brushing teeth. I didn’t have to turn on the night light or leave the door open at exactly the right angle. All that was Michelle’s responsibility, and she was paid handsomely for it.

  ‘Mark’s taking me to the Bay Tree, the best restaurant in town,’ I told Mum on the phone earlier. ‘He thinks I’m stressed and need a treat to cheer me up.’ There was a touch of defiance in my voice, I’m sure, and after I’d delivered my news I sat back and waited to see if Mum would agree or disagree.

  She asked her usual question, ‘Who’s looking after Lucy?’, her voice full of concern.

  ‘Michelle,’ I said. She always does, on the rare occasions that Mark and I aren’t too shattered to venture out at night. Mum knows this but still asks every time, to check I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, Michelle’s busy tonight, but don’t worry, I found a tramp on the street earlier-he’s agreed to do it for a bottle of methylated spirits and we won’t even have to give him a lift home afterwards.’

  ‘You won’t be back late, will you?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Probably, yes,’ I said. ‘Since we’re unlikely to set off till after eight thirty. Why? What does it matter what time we get back?’ Every time Mark and I dare to go out for the evening alone, I think of that poem I learned at school: on a dark night, full of inflamed desires-oh, lucky chance!-I slipped out without being noticed, all being then quiet in my house.

  Mum said, ‘I just thought… Lucy’s a bit funny at night at the moment, isn’t she? This whole scared-of-monsters thing. Will she be okay if she wakes up and there’s only Michelle there?’

  ‘If you mean would she prefer to have me dancing attendance on her in the small hours, yes, she probably would. If you mean will she survive the night, yes, she probably will.’

  Mum made a clucking noise. ‘Poor little thing!’ she said. ‘Mark and I could always just have a starter and a glass of tap water each and be back here by nine thirty,’ I said-another test for her to fail.

  ‘Do come back as soon as you can, won’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Mark thinks I need a break,’ I said loudly, thinking: This is absurd. If I took a half-hearted overdose, everyone would be quick to say it was ‘a cry for help’. But when I actually cry for help in the more literal sense, my own mother can’t hear me. ‘Do you think I need a break, Mum?’ For over thirty years I was the person who mattered most to her; now I’m just the gatekeeper to her precious granddaughter.

  ‘Well…’ She started spluttering and making throat-clearing noises, anything to avoid answering. What she thinks is that I shouldn’t even be aware of my own needs now that I’m a mother.

  I didn’t enjoy the meal, as it turned out. Not because of Mum. I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short, from Lucy. I look forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate on anything other than the sensation of it trickling away. Proper freedom is the kind you can keep. If you have to buy it (from Michelle), and are only granted it by someone else’s kind permission (school, Michelle), then it’s worthless.

  When I’m not with Lucy, it’s almost worse than when I am. Especially at the end of a period away from her, when ‘crunch time’ is approaching. I dread the moment when I first see her, when she sees me, in case it’s worse than ever before. Sometimes it’s fine, and then the dread goes away. I sit next to Lucy on the sofa and we hold hands and watch TV, or we read a book together, and I say to myself, ‘Look, this is fine. You’re doing fine. What’s there to be so terrified of?’ But other times it isn’t fine and I run round the house like a slave pursued by the master’s whip, trying to find the toy or game or hairclip that will pacify her. Mark says I set too high a standard for myself, wanting her to be happy all the time. ‘No one is happy all the time,’ he says. ‘If she cries, she cries. Sometimes you should try just saying, “Tough,” and seeing what happens.’

  He doesn’t understand at all. I don’t want to see what happens. I want to know what’s going to happen in advance. This is why I can’t relax in Lucy’s presence, because there seems to be no law of cause and effect in operation. I do my absolute best every single moment that I’m with her, and sometimes it works and everything is fine, and other times it’s a disaster-I put on her favourite DVD and she shrieks because it’s the wrong episode of Charlie and Lola. Or I suggest that we read her favourite book and she spits at me that she doesn’t like that book any more.

  When I do succeed in pleasing her, I sit beside her with a tense smile plastered to my face, trying not to do anything that might bring about a change of mood. I love Lucy too much-I can’t extricate my own mood from hers, and this offends my independent spirit. I can barely express how much I resent her when she puts the itchy hook of her discontent into my mind. That one tiny action is enough to shatter my good mood. I look at her face, contorted in dissatisfaction, and I think, I can’t separate myself from this person. I can’t forget about her. She’s got me, for ever. And then I think about how much she takes from me every day in terms of energy and effort and even my essence, even the bit of me that makes me who I am-she takes all that, without appreciating it, every minute of every day, and despite all this she chooses to make things even worse for me by whining when she’s got nothing to be unhappy about. That’s when I’m aware of the danger.

  I’ve never really done anything. The only objectively bad thing I’ve done is drive away from Lucy once, when she was three. It was a Saturday morning and we’d been to the library. I didn’t particularly want to go. I’d have preferred to go for a sauna or a manicure-something for me. But Lucy was bored and needed an activity, so I silenced the voice in my mind that was shouting, ‘Somebody please shoot me in the head, I can’t bear any more of this tedium!’ and took my daughter to the library. We spent over an hour looking at children’s books, reading, choosing. Lucy had a brilliant time, and I even started to relax and enjoy it a bit (though I was constantly aware that people who didn’t have children were spending their Saturday mornings in ways that were far superior). The p
roblem arose when I said it was time to go home. ‘Oh, Mummy, no!’ Lucy protested. ‘Can’t we stay for a bit longer? Please?’

  At moments like this-and there are many when you’ve got children, at least one a day and usually more-I feel like a political leader wrestling with a terrible dilemma. Do I appease and hope to be treated leniently? That never works. Appease a despot and he will only oppress you even more, knowing he can get away with it. Do I steel myself for a fight, knowing that whether I win or lose there will be terrible devastation on all sides?

  I knew Lucy would get hungry very soon so I stood firm and said, no, we needed to go home and have lunch. I promised to bring her to the library again the following weekend. She screamed as if I’d proposed to gouge out her eyeballs, and refused to get into the car. When I tried to pick her up, she fought me, kicking and punching with all her might. I stayed calm and told her that if she didn’t cooperate and get into the car, I would go home without her. She paid no attention. She shrieked, ‘I’m not happy about you, Mummy, you’re making me very cross!’ So I got into the car and drove away, alone.

  I can’t describe how exciting it was. Inside my head I was cheering, ‘You did it! You did it! Hooray! You finally stood up to her!’ I drove slowly, so that I could see Lucy’s face in the rear-view mirror. Her angry screams stopped abruptly, and I watched the expression on her face turn from blank shock to panic. She didn’t move, didn’t run towards the car, but she threw her arms out in front of her, opening and closing the fingers of both hands, as if by doing that she could grasp me and pull me back. I could see her mouth moving, and lip-read the word ‘Mummy!’, repeated several times. Never in a million years would she have expected me to drive away without her.

  I probably should have stopped the car at that point, while she could still see me, but I was full of exhilaration and, just for a few seconds, I wanted to believe that it could last for ever. So I drove quickly round the block. I pulled up outside the library again about half a minute later. Lucy was sitting cross-legged on the floor, howling. A woman was trying to comfort her and find out what had happened, where her mother was. I got out of the car, bundled Lucy up, saying ‘Thank you very much!’ to the puzzled woman, and we drove back home. ‘Lucy,’ I said calmly. ‘If you’re naughty and don’t do what Mummy says, and if you make life difficult for Mummy, that’s the kind of thing that will happen. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sobbed.

  I hate the sound of her crying, so I said, ‘Lucy, stop crying right this minute, or I’ll stop the car and make you get out again, and next time I won’t come back for you.’

  She stopped crying instantly.

  ‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘Now, if you’re good and make life easy for Mummy, then Mummy will be happy and we’ll all have a nice time. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Mummy,’ she said solemnly.

  I felt a mixture of triumph and guilt. I knew I’d done something bad, but I also knew that I couldn’t help it. It’s hard enough behaving well when the people around you also are, when whoever you’re with is leading by example. Sometimes you think, I want to do a bad, selfish thing now, but I can’t because everyone else is being so infuriatingly decent. But when you’re trapped in an explosive situation with someone who is determined to break all records for appalling behaviour, how, dear Gart, do you maintain your composure and do the right thing?

  It isn’t only Lucy who sets me off. I’ve often had to sit on my hands, so tempted have I been to whack a friend’s child round the head. Like Oonagh O’Hara, who only has to whinge or stamp her foot to set both her parents off with their, ‘Sweetie! Come for a cuddle!’ nonsense. Gart, how I would love to punch Oonagh in the face. If I could do it once, I think I’d be happy for ever.

  6

  8/7/07

  DC Colin Sellers sniffed the arm of his jacket when he was sure no one was looking. Inconclusive. He sniffed again, but couldn’t tell if it was his clothes or his surroundings that stank. What was it about charity shops? He resolved never again to tell Stacey she ought to buy her clothes at Oxfam instead of Next. He hadn’t been inside a charity shop for years, hadn’t realised they all smelled like a stale stew of the past, layers of rancid odours piled one on top of the other like the decades of a life that has disappointed its owner.

  Sellers wasn’t normally prone to maudlin reflections, but the shops were bringing it out in him. He’d done all the dry-cleaners first-and the chemical stench of those had been bad enough-but now he wished he’d done it the other way round, saved the best for last. Anything was better than the charity shops.

  At the moment he was in the Hildred Street branch of Age Concern in Spilling, which was, thank God, the last of them. Tonight he’d make sure to tell Stace to wash his clothes at an extra high temperature. Or maybe he’d just throw them away. One thing he wouldn’t do: donate them to a manky shop for some other poor sod to buy. From now on, Sellers was against second-hand clothes. People ought to give money to these dogooder organisations, and that’s it, he thought. A nice, clean cheque that doesn’t smell of grease or death or failure.

  It occurred to Sellers that he had never in his life given any money to charity. Because he couldn’t afford to, because he had Stacey and the kids to pay for as well as making sure Suki, his girlfriend, always had a good time and didn’t get bored of him. And then there were Stacey’s French lessons, which irked him more than he was able to express. S’il vous plaît. If he heard her say that one more time, he might actually ram her fag-packet-sized French dictionary down her throat.

  Eventually, an old woman wearing a purple nylon polo-neck and a string of large, fake pearls emerged from behind the beaded curtain, holding the two colour print-outs Sellers had given her much younger and considerably more attractive assistant a few minutes earlier. One was of Geraldine Bretherick, the other of a brown Ozwald Boateng suit like the one Mark Bretherick had reported missing from his house.

  ‘You’re a policeman?’ The old woman did her best to look down at Sellers, even though she was several inches shorter than he was. She looked about seventy, had fluffy white hair, several prominent moles like lumps of brown putty stuck to her face, a beak of a nose, and about ten times more skin on her eyelids than a person could ever need; each one was like a small, fleshy concertina. ‘You want to know if anyone’s brought in a suit like this?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘No. I’d have remembered. It’s got funny lapels.’ She glared at Sellers, daring him to disagree. ‘I don’t think our customers would like it at all.’

  ‘What about this woman? Do you remember seeing her in the last few weeks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really?’ Sellers perked up. So far, the response had been a resounding ‘no’. He’d been to every dry-cleaner and charity shop in the Culver Valley and he might as well not have bothered. ‘Did she bring something in?’

  ‘No.’ The old lady leaned her beak towards him. ‘You asked if I remembered seeing her. I do. She often went into the picture-framer’s opposite. I saw her all the time, getting out of her car right outside the shop-she’d park on the double yellow line, plain as the nose on your face.’ Sellers tried very hard not to look at the nose on her face as she spoke, fearing he might laugh uncontrollably. ‘Usually she’d be carrying some dreadful picture-nothing more than splodges and scrawls, really, obviously by a child. Many a time I said to Mandy, “That woman ought to have her head examined.” I mean, Blu-Tacking them to the fridge door is one thing, but framing them… And why didn’t she wait and bring them in all at once? Didn’t she have anything better to do?’

  ‘Mandy? Is that your assistant?’ Sellers glanced in the direction of the beaded curtain, but there was no sign of the pretty young girl who’d served him. I’ve already got a pretty young girl, he reminded himself: Suki’s my pretty young girl.

  ‘If she had the time to take each squiggle of crayon to the framer’s individually then she had time to park her car properly,’ sai
d the old woman. ‘No doubt she thought she’d only be nipping in and out, but all the same, there’s no excuse for parking on a double yellow line. We’ve all got to obey the rules, haven’t we? We can’t go making exceptions for ourselves whenever we feel like it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sellers, because he could hardly say otherwise. And he agreed, by and large. Apart from where matters of the heart were concerned. The heart and other equally important organs.

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ Folds of skin rearranged themselves around the old woman’s eyes as she looked up at Sellers. ‘I saw it on the news.’

  ‘Right.’ And you’re still worried about her illegal parking habits? Get a life, you old bat.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Nearly seven.’

  ‘You’d better make yourself scarce. Our evening event’s about to start.’

  ‘I’ve finished, anyway.’ Sellers eyed the three neat semicircular rows of grey plastic chairs in the middle of the shop. A wild time would be had by all, he didn’t think.

  ‘You should have come in the afternoon.’

  ‘I did. You were closed.’

  ‘Mandy was here all afternoon,’ the old woman contradicted him. ‘We’re open every weekday from nine thirty until five thirty. And, in addition, we have our evening events.’

  Sellers nodded. So Mandy had snuck an afternoon off, had she? He was liking her more all the time. He wondered if she would be taking part in tonight’s event, and was about to ask what, precisely, Age Concern in Spilling had to offer him this evening. He came to his senses just in time, thanked the old woman for her help and left.

  The Brown Cow pub, where he was due to meet Gibbs half an hour ago, was a five-minute walk away. As he strode along the High Street, smiling at any female with long legs and large breasts who looked as if she might be up for it, Sellers admitted to himself that he’d been thinking about other women a lot recently. Which had to mean he was a greedy bastard. He had two already; wasn’t that enough? And for how long would he be able to stop at thinking? How long before he gave in to the urge that was building inside him?