Sophie Hannah - The Wrong Mother

‘Sir, either there are more bodies to find, or there aren’t,’ Simon had pointed out. ‘It’s not as if they’ll only be there if you don’t look for them.’

A cold squint from the Snowman. ‘Don’t be a pedant, Waterhouse. The worst thing about pedants is that there’s only one way to answer them and that’s pedantically. What I was trying to say-and what, frankly, anyone whose brain was in good working order would have understood-is that I fear our searches will yield nothing. Equally, I fear that if I ignore the information contained in the anonymous letter-’

‘We completely understand, sir,’ Kombothekra had chipped in hastily. For a man who wanted no trouble, he’d made an odd career choice.

‘Does the name Amy Oliver mean anything to you?’ Simon asked Mark Bretherick.

‘No? Who is she? Is she the woman who came here, who looked like Geraldine?’

‘She’s a child. She was in Lucy’s class at school last year.’

Simon saw his disappointment, quickly masked by anger.

‘Don’t you people listen? Geraldine dealt with all the school stuff.’

A quiet voice came from behind Simon. ‘You didn’t know the names of any of Lucy’s friends?’ Kombothekra had joined them.

‘I think there was one called Uma. I probably met them all at one time or another, but-’

The telephone rang.

‘Am I allowed to answer?’

Simon nodded, then listened as Bretherick issued a brief, baffling diatribe. ‘It has to be client-server based, and it has to have multi-level BOMS,’ was his conclusion.

‘Work?’ said Simon, once the conversation was over. How could Bretherick function professionally at a time like this?

‘Yeah. I suppose you’ve tapped my phone, haven’t you? If you want to know what anything means, feel free to ask.’

Patronising turd, thought Simon. ‘The two photographs that you claim were stolen,’ he said, deciding it was time to retaliate. ‘Inside the frames, behind the pictures of Geraldine and Lucy, were two other photographs that we believe might be of Amy Oliver and her mother.’

Bretherick exhaled slowly, a frown gathering around his eyes. ‘What? What do you mean? I… I didn’t have any photographs of… I didn’t know Amy Oliver, or her mother. Who told you that?’

‘Where did the pictures of Geraldine and Lucy at the owl sanctuary come from? Did you take them yourself?’

‘No. I’ve no idea who took them.’

‘Did you put them in their frames?’

‘No. I don’t know anything about them. One day they just appeared on the mantelpiece. That’s it.’

Fundamentally Simon believed him, but it sounded lame. ‘They just appeared?’

‘Not literally! Geraldine must have put them in frames and… she did all that, framed her favourite photos and Lucy’s paintings and put them up. I saw those two and liked them and took them to my office. That’s all I know about them. But why would she have put photographs of this Amy Oliver girl and her mother inside the frames? It makes no sense.’

‘Were the Olivers significant to Geraldine, do you know?’

Bretherick answered with a question. ‘How come you know all this, about the photographs? Have you found the woman who stole them?’ He leaned forward. ‘If you know who she is, you’ve got to tell me.’

‘Mark, what sort of thing did you and Geraldine used to talk about?’ Kombothekra asked. ‘You know-of an evening, after dinner.’

Simon made up his mind to draw the sergeant’s attention to the wedding anniversary cards, the oh-so-courteous messages inside them.

‘I don’t know! Everything. What a stupid question. My work, Lucy… Aren’t you married?’

‘Yes.’

‘No,’ said Simon quickly. He didn’t want to have to sit there worrying he would be asked the same question. Better to get it over with.

Bretherick stared at him. ‘Well, then you’ll never know how it feels when someone murders your wife.’ Simon thought that this was stretching the concept of looking on the bright side beyond its capacity.

‘I know the name of every single one of my sons’ friends, and their parents,’ said Kombothekra.

‘Bully for you,’ said Bretherick. ‘Do you know how to build, from scratch, a cryogen-free nitrogen-recycling cooling unit that every laboratory in the world will need to buy? That will make your fortune?’

‘No,’ said Kombothekra.

‘And I do.’ Bretherick shrugged. ‘We all have our strengths and weaknesses, Sergeant.’

Simon was starting to feel inadequate; it didn’t take much. He said, ‘Your mother-in-law says there are things in Geraldine’s diary that are factually incorrect. Jean didn’t buy Geraldine a mug with The Big Sleep on it, for example. Geraldine didn’t fly into a rage, smash the mug, accuse her mother of being insensitive to her sleep-deprived state.’

Bretherick nodded. ‘Geraldine didn’t write that diary. Whoever killed her wrote it.’

‘Yet you only became sure of this once you’d heard what Jean had to say. Isn’t that right?’ Bretherick had asked why he was a suspect; Simon hoped it was becoming clearer. ‘You read that diary long before Jean did-several times, I assume?’

‘Over and over. I can recite much of it from memory, my new party trick. What a popular guest I’ll be.’

‘Why didn’t you say straight away, “This didn’t happen, this isn’t true, my wife can’t have written this”?’

Simon watched uncomfortably as Bretherick’s face lost its colour. ‘Don’t turn that on me! You all told me Geraldine had killed herself and Lucy. You kept telling me. No, the diary didn’t sound like Geraldine-it sounded nothing like her-but you said it was her diary.’

‘I’m not talking about the feelings and attitudes she expressed, things you might have assumed she’d withheld from you,’ said Simon. ‘I’m talking about facts: the smashing of the mug, the things that simply didn’t happen.’

‘I don’t know anything about a mug! How was I supposed to know if it happened or not? That diary’s full of… distortions and lies. I told you it was all wrong. I told you someone else must have written it. I don’t recognise Geraldine’s voice, or her thoughts or her description of our lives. That business about God being called Gart? I never heard Geraldine or Lucy say that, not once.’

There was a tap on the lounge window, one of the search team from outside. Kombothekra, who had been leaning against the glass, turned, obscuring Simon’s view of the garden. Simon watched the sergeant’s back, its stiff stillness, and listened to the absence of background noise. No voices any more, no sound of shovels cutting into earth. His heart started to thump.

‘What?’ Bretherick saw the look on Kombothekra’s face. ‘What have you found?’

‘You tell me, Mark,’ said Kombothekra. ‘What have we found?’ He nodded at Simon and raised two fingers almost imperceptibly, the barrel of an imaginary gun. Either Simon had lost his ability to read signals or else two bodies had been found beneath Mark Bretherick’s rectangular lawn.

What no nod could tell him-for Kombothekra couldn’t possibly know at this stage-was whether these were the bodies of Amy Oliver and her mother. And now there was a new question that had leaped to the top of Simon’s list. More than anything, he wanted to find out the name of the anonymous letter-writer.

How did she know so much, and how the fuck was he going to find her?

‘Amy Oliver,’ said Colin Sellers, looking over Chris Gibbs’ shoulder at the photograph of a gangly, sharp-eyed young girl in school uniform sitting on a wall. Until today, neither detective had been in a school office since his teenage years, and neither felt entirely comfortable. Gibbs had been loathed by his teachers, and Sellers, though amiable and popular, had been berated daily for chatting to his friends when he should have been working.