Sophie Hannah: The Wrong Mother

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.