The Wrong Mother Page 27

  ‘That’s not true…’

  ‘You’re the perfect wife and mother, Sally. That’s something I’ve realised recently. You know why? Because you know how to strike a balance. You’re devoted to Zoe and Jake-you adore them, you look after them brilliantly-but you also have a life and a purpose of your own. Which makes you an excellent role model.’ He smiles. ‘Especially for Zoe.’

  I try to jerk my body away from him. How dare he talk about my daughter as if he knows and cares about her, as if she is our shared concern?

  ‘Don’t let Nick talk you into sacrificing yourself so that his life can be even easier. So many husbands make their wives do that-it’s not healthy.’ He tucks the gun into his trouser pocket and rubs his hands together. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Lecture over. Let’s go and get you settled in your room.’

  Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723

  Case Ref: VN87

  OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra

  GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 6 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)

  9 May 2006, 10.30 p.m.

  Today I did what I’ve often fantasised about doing but never believed I would. I underestimated my own audacity. My mobile phone rang at ten o’clock this morning. It was Mrs Flowers, ringing to say that Lucy had been sick, instructing me to come and collect her. I felt as if concrete slabs were falling inside my chest one by one, a ‘domino effect’ of horrified realisation: everything I wouldn’t be able to do if I went straight to St Swithun’s as I was being ordered to.

  Children are sick all the time; usually it is insignificant. I asked how Lucy was now.

  ‘Subdued,’ said Mrs Flowers. ‘She’s sitting on Miss Toms’ knee, reading a story. I’m sure she’ll perk up no end when she sees Mummy.’

  I heard myself say, ‘I wish I could come and get her, but I’m in Prague.’ I don’t know why I picked Prague. Perhaps because its name is short and terse, easy to bark when you’re in a foul mood. ‘Even if I got on the first flight back…’ I stopped, as if I was trying to work it out. ‘No, you’d better ring Mark,’ I said.

  ‘I already have,’ said Mrs Flowers. ‘He’s recorded a message on his voicemail saying he won’t be back until after lunch.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ I tried to sound anguished. ‘Can you cope until then?’

  Mrs Flowers sighed. ‘We can cope. It’s Lucy I’m thinking of. Never mind. We’ll give her lots of cuddles and try to keep her happy until we can get hold of Daddy.’

  You’ll try, and you’ll succeed, I thought, because you’re brilliant with small children. I too was thinking of Lucy, however selfish Mum might say I am. Last time I picked Lucy up early from school because she was ill, I ended up threatening her, tears of fury pouring down my face. ‘I was poorly at school today, Daddy,’ she told Mark later. ‘And it made Mummy poorly too-she cried all the way home. Didn’t you, Mummy?’ Mercifully, she didn’t tell Mark the rest: that I shook my finger in her face and said, ‘If you’re ill, you’ll go straight to bed when we get home and have a long sleep; you’ll sleep for the rest of the day and let Mummy get on with all the things she has to do. If you don’t want to sleep, that means you’re well enough to stay in school and I’ll take you straight back there.’ A terrible thing to say, I know, but it was a Monday. I look forward to Mondays like nobody would believe; after each weekend, my need to get away from Lucy and have some time and thinking space for myself is overwhelming. I love my daughter but I’m terrible at being a mother. The sacrifices that are required of me are against my nature, and it is time that the world-including Mrs Flowers-started to take my innate deficiencies into account. If I said I was a dreadful tennis player, no one would urge me to keep trying until I’m as good as Martina Navratilova.

  We ought all of us to ‘play to our strengths’. Which is why I felt betrayed when Cordy told me she is planning to give up her job when her new baby is born. So much for my theory about her leaving Dermot in order to be able to leave Oonagh and motherhood behind as well. ‘I can afford not to work for a few years,’ she said, in response to my asking why. ‘I’ve got quite a bit saved up. And I haven’t really enjoyed being a working mum. I want to be there for my kids myself, not have to rely on my ageing parents or a semi-literate childminder. I want to do the whole mummy thing. Properly.’

  I felt bilious, and was unable to speak while I waited for the feeling to subside. So that’s that, I thought: the end of the career of one of the brightest women I have ever met. Cordy could make it to the top of any profession she chose. If she doesn’t like being a financial adviser she could do something else-train to be a lawyer or a doctor, write a book, anything. I have always had so much more respect for her than for the mothers who immerse themselves in what Cordy calls ‘the whole mummy thing’, the ones who are only so good at mothering because they have to be, because they are afraid of setting foot outside their own front doors and they need the perfect excuse. Can’t hack it in the real world? Have a baby, then, and let everyone praise you for your commitment and devotion to your child above all else. Pride yourself on stuffing your child’s school bag full of papayas and kiwis for snack time, instead of the small dented apples that working mothers rely on. Stand at the school gates twittering, ‘All I’ve ever wanted is to be a mum.’

  People without children can’t get away with making an equivalent statement, can they? ‘Excuse me, madam, but why do you sit at home all day doing sod all?’ ‘Oh, well, it’s because I want to devote myself full-time to being a niece. I’ve got an aunt, you see. That’s why I’ve decided not to achieve anything ever. I really want to pour all my time and energy into my niecehood.’ People would be quite blunt and say, ‘Don’t you think you ought to do something else as well as being a niece?’ I know the obvious answer: babies and children take up more time than aunts. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental truth in what I’m saying.

  I asked Cordy if she was familiar with the ghost story about the monkey’s paw. She wasn’t. It didn’t help that I couldn’t remember all the details. I told her a trimmed-down version. ‘An old couple find a monkey’s paw, which enables them to make a wish. Any wish they make will come true,’ I said. ‘They lost their only son in tragic circumstances-he fell into a piece of machinery at the factory where he worked and got mangled so badly that he died…’

  ‘They wish for him not to be dead?’ Cordy guessed.

  I smiled. You have to word it in exactly the right way or else the story doesn’t work. ‘The couple closed their eyes, held the monkey’s paw in their hands and said, “Please, please, bring back our only son-that is our wish.” That night, there’s a knock at the door. They rush to open it, and it’s him. Except it’s not him as he used to be: it’s a walking, breathing, bloody mangled mess, a grotesquely twisted lump of meat brought back to life, unrecognisable as human-’

  ‘Yuck!’ Cordy elbowed me in the ribs. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I always think of that story when I think about working mothers.’

  ‘Why, for God’s sake?’ Cordy asked.

  I told her: because, for Gart’s sake, when a woman returns to work after having a child or children, she is not the same. She is a semi-destroyed version of her former self. Mangled, virtually falling apart, she goes back to her workplace and she knocks on the door, and her colleagues are horrified to see how she’s changed.’

  ‘Christ on a bicycle,’ Cordy muttered. ‘Maybe I ought to give up work straight away.’

  ‘No!’ I snapped at her. She had entirely missed the point. ‘The monkey’s-paw mother doesn’t care what she looks like. She doesn’t give a damn! She knows where she belongs and she’s determined to go back there, no matter how inconvenient it is for everybody else.’

  Cordy looked at me as if I was weird.

  ‘Don’t sacrifice your career,’ I begged her. ‘Think of all the other monkey’s-paw mothers struggling on, turned inside out but still fighting. If you give up, you’ll be letting th
em down.’

  She told me she’d think about it, but I had the sense she was only saying that to placate me. Later, I realised my little sermon had been pointless. You can’t tell anyone anything; no one listens. Look at Mark and me. He thinks I’ve sold myself short, thrown away all my talents. And I think he’s wrong. He would like me to paint or sculpt. He says I’d be more fulfilled, but that is utter rubbish. He wants these things for me not for my own sake but because it would make him feel better if I earned ‘pocket-money’.

  12

  8/9/07

  ‘Overpriced and ugly,’ said Sellers, looking up at number 2 Belcher Close. ‘I hate these new dolls’ house estates.’ He knew this would be his girlfriend Suki’s view. She’d prefer a converted church or stable block-something centuries old and unusual.

  ‘I don’t mind ’em,’ said Gibbs. ‘They’re better than your place. Debbie was after me to buy her one a while back. I told her to dream on. The four-bedroomers go for about half a million.’

  Sellers’ mobile phone started to ring. Gibbs began to mutter beside him, ‘All right, love, wipe yourself, your taxi’s here…’ His crude impression of Sellers had become a regular performance piece.

  ‘Will you give it a rest? Sorry, Waterhouse.’ Sellers turned away. ‘Yeah, no problem. If they know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘He wants us to find out Amy Oliva’s dad’s first name.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he ring St Swithun’s?’

  ‘School’s closed, dickhead.’

  Sellers rang the doorbell. A man’s voice yelled, ‘Coming!’ They waited.

  He was red-faced when he opened the door, pulling off his tie. Hair dishevelled, sticking up in odd places. Late twenties, early thirties, Sellers guessed. His suit jacket lay in a crumpled heap on the stairs behind him and his briefcase was open in the middle of the hall, its contents scattered around it.

  Well-meaning but fucking useless, Gibbs was thinking.

  ‘Sorry. Just got in from work and I’ve managed to lose my wallet. I was upstairs looking for it. It’s been one of those days, I’m afraid. I’m sure I brought it home, but…’ He looked down at his feet, then turned to look behind them. ‘Anyway…’

  ‘DCs Sellers and Gibbs, Culver Valley CID,’ said Sellers, showing the man his ID.

  ‘CID? What… Are my children all right?’

  ‘We’re not here with bad news,’ Sellers told him. ‘We’re trying to trace the Oliva family. Was that the name of the people you bought this house from?’

  ‘Huh!’ said the man. ‘Wait here. Just wait.’ He dashed down the hall and disappeared into a room at the far end. When he came back he was carrying a pile of envelopes, about ten inches high, in both hands. ‘When you find them, you can give them these. They had their post redirected for the first year after they moved, but obviously they didn’t renew it because…’ He tried to pass the letters to Gibbs, who stepped back to avoid taking them.

  ‘Do you have a forwarding address?’

  The man looked peeved. ‘They left one, and a number; turns out they were fake.’

  ‘Fake?’ Sellers felt a prickle of excitement. There was about to be a development. He could often feel it, just before it happened. Suki said he was intuitive.

  ‘I rang the number and the people there had never heard of the Olivas. I asked a few more questions and found out that the phone number didn’t belong to the address they gave me. So either they got the number wrong, or they lied, didn’t want us to know where they were going.’ The man shrugged. ‘Lord knows why. The sale went through amicably enough. We didn’t bicker over curtains and light fittings, like the stories you sometimes hear.’

  Sellers took the letters from him. Most were junk mail, addressed to Encarna Oliva, Encarnación Oliva and Mrs or Ms E. Oliva. There were a couple of envelopes addressed to Amy. Nothing for her father, Sellers noticed.

  ‘Mr Oliva: what was his first name?’

  ‘Oh… um… hang on.’ The man at the door chewed his thumbnail.

  ‘Was it a Spanish name?’ said Gibbs.

  ‘Yes! How did you… oh, right, because they were Spanish and went to Spain.’ The man laughed, embarrassed. ‘That’s why you work for CID and I don’t. And why I’ve lost my wallet. Oh-Angel, that was it. Spanish for angel, but it’s pronounced Ann-hell. Different countries, different customs, I suppose. I wouldn’t like to be an English bloke called Angel.’

  ‘Do you know what he did for a living?’ asked Sellers.

  ‘Heart surgeon at Culver Valley General.’

  ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘Harry Martineau. That’s e-a-u at the end.’

  ‘When did you buy the house from the Olivas?’

  ‘Um… oh, God, you’d have to ask my wife. Um… last year, May some time, I think. Yes, May. I remember because it wasn’t long after the FA Cup final. We watched it in our old house, but we’d already started packing. Sorry, I’m very shallow! ’ He laughed.

  Gibbs disliked Martineau. There was nothing shallow about remembering where you were for the FA Cup final. Gibbs had missed it this year for the first time in his adult life. Debbie had had a miscarriage; they’d spent the whole day and a night in hospital. Gibbs hadn’t told anyone at work, and he’d told Debbie not to say anything in front of Sellers or the others. He didn’t mind her workmates knowing, but he didn’t want it talked about at the nick.

  ‘Have you still got that address and phone number?’ Sellers asked Martineau.

  ‘Somewhere, but… look, could you pop back tomorrow, about the same time? My wife’ll know where it is. Or, tell you what, why don’t you come in and wait? She won’t be long. Or you could nip back first thing in the morning. We don’t leave the house until-’

  ‘If you find it, ring me.’ Sellers gave Martineau his card, keen to staunch the flow of unappealing offers.

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Tosser,’ Gibbs muttered as he and Sellers walked back to the car.

  Sellers was already talking to Waterhouse. Gibbs listened to one end of the conversation, heard Sellers’ tone change from satisfied to frustrated to baffled.

  ‘How can that be?’ Sellers wondered aloud, tapping his phone against his chin as they got into the car. Where was his intuition now? Maybe he had none; Stace never mentioned it. Maybe Suki was patronising him. ‘Waterhouse says he’s heard the name before,’ he told Gibbs. ‘Recently. He sounded worked up-you know the way he gets.’ Sellers pulled the list of names Barbara Fitzgerald had given him out of his pocket: the owl sanctuary trip list. No, it wasn’t there. Suddenly, all the names on the list struck Sellers as familiar somehow. Was he going mad? Was it because he’d read the list already, when the headmistress had first given it to him?

  ‘Waterhouse has heard the name Ann-hell Oliva?’ said Gibbs. ‘Then why the fuck-’

  ‘No.’ Sellers cut him short. ‘Harry Martineau. Spelled e-a-u at the end. That’s what he said-exactly what Martineau said. Word for word.’

  Charlie Zailer sat cross-legged on her lounge floor with two swatches of fabric in front of her: Villandry Champagne and Caitlyn Biscuit. One was a ribbed light gold, the other a sumptuous crushed velvet, also gold. Charlie had been looking at them for nearly an hour and was no closer to making up her mind. How did one decide these things? It was dark outside, but she couldn’t be bothered to get up and close the curtains.

  Choosing between the fabrics her sister had brought round wasn’t the only challenge; she would also need to pick a chair and sofa to be upholstered in the chosen material. A Winchester chair? A Burgess sofa? Charlie had spent most of the evening flicking through the pages of the Laura Ashley catalogue that Olivia had given her, flustered by her inability to decide. Despite her initial resistance, she was fascinated by the catalogue. She couldn’t stop looking at its pinks and mauves, the tassels, glass beads and sequins-things she would once have hated. The luxurious, shimmering rooms pictured in the ‘Inspirations’ pages looked like… well, they looked like rooms
that belonged to the sort of women men wanted to marry.

  Charlie groaned in disgust, horrified by the thought. What kind of drooling, simpering slush-brain was she turning into? Still, the idea persisted: if my bedroom looked like this one, I could marry Simon and be certain it would work. Women with butterscotch satin bedspreads don’t get dumped.

  How embarrassing to be more pathetic at the age of thirty-nine than she’d been at sixteen.

  Caitlyn Biscuit. Villandry Champagne. Either would do. Charlie’s bones ached from sitting in the same position for too long.

  The doorbell rang. She sprang to her feet as if she’d been caught out. Had whoever was at the door looked in through the window and seen her hunched over the two squares of gold cloth? Hopefully not. She looked at her watch: ten to eleven. Simon. It had to be. I’ll let him choose, she thought. Thrust the two swatches under his nose and give him five seconds to pick his favourite. See what he makes of that.

  It wasn’t Simon. It was Stacey, Colin Sellers’ wife. Charlie’s smile shrivelled. Stacey was wearing pyjamas-white, with pink pigs on them-under a black belted raincoat. One of her feet was bare, the other stuffed into a navy mule slipper. The other slipper was behind her, lying on its side in the small front yard. Stacey was shaking, sobbing hard.

  Charlie led her into the hall, then stood back, watching and wondering what to do. Stacey made a gurgling noise and wrapped her arms around herself. This will be easy, Charlie thought. You know nothing about Suki Kitson. You are not aware of any infidelity on Sellers’ part, but at the same time you’re not saying he’d never do such a thing; you simply don’t know. You have no information, and you have no opinion. All you have is vodka and Marlboro Lights, and all you can spare is half an hour.

  She took Stacey through to the kitchen, poured two large drinks and lit a cigarette. She only had three left so she didn’t offer one to Stacey. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked. It was hard to sound sympathetic when all she felt was anger. Stacey probably had no idea of the effect the mere mention of her name had had on Charlie ever since Sellers’ fortieth birthday party. Did the sodden, bawling creature slumped over the kitchen table even remember?