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2

8/7/07


It struck DC Simon Waterhouse that, as usual, everything was wrong. He was feeling this more and more lately. The lane was wrong, and the house was wrong-even its name was wrong-and the garden, and what Mark Bretherick did for a living, and the fact that Simon was here with Sam Kombothekra in Kombothekra’s silent, fragrant car.

Simon had always objected to more things than would offend most people, but recently he had noticed he’d started to baulk at almost everything he came into contact with-his physical surroundings, friends, colleagues, family. These days what he felt most often was disgust; he was full of it. When he had first seen Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick’s dead bodies, his mouth had filled with the undigested remnants of his last meal, but even so, their deaths didn’t stand out in his mind in the way he knew they ought to. Each day he worked on this case he felt sickened by his own numbness in the face of such horror.

‘Simon? You okay?’ Kombothekra asked him as the car lurched over the deep potholes in the lane that led to Corn Mill House. Kombothekra was Simon’s new skipper, so ignoring him wasn’t an option and neither was telling him to fuck off. Wanting to tell him to fuck off was wrong, too, because Kombothekra was a fair and decent bloke.

He had transferred from West Yorkshire CID a year ago, when Charlie had deserted. Selfishly, she didn’t leave altogether-she still worked in the same nick, so Simon had to see her around the building and suffer her stilted, polite greetings and enquiries about his well-being. He’d rather never see her again, if things couldn’t be how they were.

Charlie’s new job was a travesty. She must know that as well as I do, thought Simon. She was head of a team of police officers who worked with social services to provide an encouraging and positive environment for the local scum, to discourage them from re-offending. Simon read about her activities in the nick’s newsletter: she and her underlings bought kettles and microwaves for skag-heads, found mind-expanding employment for coke-dealers. Superintendent Barrow was quoted in the local press talking about caring policing, and Charlie-with her new, fake, photo-opportunity smile-was head of the care assistants, arranging for all the scrotes to have their arses wiped with extra-soft toilet tissue in the hope that it’d turn them into better people. It was bullshit. She ought to have been working with Simon. That was the way things were meant to be: the way they used to be. Not the way they were now.

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.

But either Mrs O’Hara hadn’t bothered to seek out Kombothekra and repeat her insights to him, or else she had failed to make any impact on his certainty that Geraldine was responsible for both deaths. Simon had noticed that Kombothekra’s softly spoken politeness cloaked a stubborn streak that would not have achieved its goals nearly so often were it more overt.

‘Michelle Greenwood wasn’t someone Geraldine Bretherick knew well.’ Kombothekra sounded apologetic about contradicting Simon. ‘She babysat for Lucy from time to time, that was all. And, yes, she referred to her husband and daughter in the diary as “Lucy” and “Mark”, but what about “my terminally cheerful mother”?’

‘There’s a clear difference between inventing your own private, comic labels for friends and family and saying “a man called William Markes”. Don’t tell me you can’t see it. Would you ever describe the Snowman as “a man called Giles Proust”? In a diary that no one else was meant to read?’ Come to think of it, Simon had never heard Kombothekra refer to Inspector Proust as ‘the Snowman’. Whereas Simon, Sellers and Gibbs often forgot that it wasn’t his real and only name.

‘Okay, good point.’ Kombothekra nodded encouragingly. ‘So, where does that take us? Let’s say William Markes was someone Geraldine didn’t know. But she knew of him…’

‘Obviously.’

‘… so how could someone she doesn’t know and has never met be in a position to ruin her life?’

Simon resented having to answer. ‘I’m a disabled, gay, Jewish communist living in Germany in the late 1930s,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ve never met Adolf Hitler, and I don’t know him personally…’

‘Okay,’ Kombothekra conceded. ‘So something she’d heard about this William Markes person made her think he might ruin her life. But we can’t find him. We can’t find a William Markes-even with the surname spelled in all its possible variations-who had any connection with Geraldine Bretherick whatsoever.’

‘Doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist,’ said Simon as they got out of the car. Mark Bretherick stood in the porch, watching them with wide, stunned eyes. He had flung open the front door while they were still undoing their seat belts. The same had happened yesterday. Had he been waiting in the hall, peering through the leaded stained glass? Simon wondered. Walking round his enormous house, searching every room for his missing wife and daughter, who were as alive in his mind as they’d ever been? He was wearing the same pale blue shirt and black corduroy trousers he had worn since he’d found Geraldine and Lucy’s bodies. The shirt had tide-marks under the arms, dried sweat.

Bretherick stepped outside, on to the drive, then immediately reversed the action, retreating back into his porch as if he’d suddenly noticed the distance between his visitors and himself and didn’t have the energy.

‘She wrote a suicide note.’ Kombothekra’s quiet voice followed Simon towards the house. ‘Her husband and her mother said there was no doubt the handwriting was hers, and our subsequent checks proved them right.’ Another thing Kombothekra did all the time: hit you with his best point, the one he’d been saving up, at a moment when he knew you wouldn’t be able to reply.

Simon was already extending a hand to Mark Bretherick, who seemed thinner even than yesterday. His bony hand closed around Simon’s and held it in a rigid grip, as if he wanted to test the bones inside.

‘DC Waterhouse. Sergeant. Thank you for coming.’

‘It’s no problem,’ said Simon. ‘How are you bearing up?’

‘I don’t think I am.’ Bretherick stood aside to let them in. ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing, if anything.’ He sounded angry; it wasn’t the bewildered voice Simon had grown used to. Bretherick had found a fluency; each word was no longer a struggle.

‘Are you sure this is the best place for you to be? Alone?’ asked Kombothekra. He never gave up. Bretherick didn’t answer. He’d been adamant that he wanted to return home as soon as the forensic team had finished at Corn Mill House, and he’d refused the police’s repeated attempts to assign him a family liaison officer.

‘My parents will be here later, and Geraldine’s mum,’ said Bretherick. ‘Go through to the lounge. Can I get you a drink? I’ve managed to work out where the kitchen is. That’s what happens when you spend more time in your own home than half an hour at the beginning of the day and an hour at the end of it. Pity I was never here while my wife and daughter were still alive.’

Simon decided he’d leave that one for Kombothekra to respond to, and the sergeant was already saying all the right things: ‘What happened wasn’t your fault, Mark. Nobody is responsible for another person’s suicide.’

‘I’m responsible for believing your stories instead of thinking for myself.’ Mark Bretherick laughed bitterly. He remained standing as Simon and Kombothekra sat down at either end of a long sofa that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a French palace. ‘Suicide. That’s it then, is it? You’ve decided.’

‘The inquest won’t be heard until all the relevant evidence has been collated,’ said Kombothekra, ‘but, yes, at the moment we’re treating your wife’s death as suicide.’

On one wall of the lounge, twenty-odd framed drawings and paintings hung from the wood panelling. Lucy Bretherick’s art-works. Simon looked again at the smiling faces, the suns, the houses. Often the figures were holding hands, sometimes in rows of three. In some the words ‘mummy’, ‘daddy’ and ‘me’ were floating nearby, in mid-air. If these pictures were anything to go by, Lucy had been a normal, happy child from a normal, happy family. How had Cordy O’Hara put it? Geraldine wasn’t just content, she was radiantly happy. And I don’t mean in a stupid, na"ive way. She was realistic and down-to-earth about her life-she took the piss out of herself all the time. And Mark-God, she could be hilarious about him! But she loved her life-even silly little everyday things made her excited: new shoes, new bubble bath, anything. She was like a kid in that respect. She was one of those rare people who enjoyed every minute of every day.

Witnesses, especially ones close to the victim, could be unreliable, but still… Kombothekra needed to hear what Simon had heard. Cordy O’Hara’s words felt more real to him than the words in Geraldine Bretherick’s suicide note.

The Brethericks had celebrated their ten-year wedding anniversary three weeks before Geraldine and Lucy had died. Simon noticed that the anniversary cards were still on the mantelpiece. Or back on the mantelpiece, rather, since the scene-of-crime and forensic teams had presumably moved them at some stage. If Simon had still been working with Charlie, he’d have talked to her about the anniversary cards, about what was written in them. Pointless to talk to Kombothekra about it.

‘One of my suits is missing,’ Bretherick said, folding his arms, waiting for a response. He sounded defiant, as if he expected to be contradicted. ‘It’s an Ozwald Boateng one, brown, double-breasted. It’s disappeared.’

‘When did you last see it? When did you notice it was gone?’ Simon asked.

‘This morning. I don’t know what made me look, but… I don’t wear it very often. Hardly ever. So I don’t know how long it’s not been there.’

‘Mark, I don’t understand,’ said Kombothekra. ‘Are you implying that this missing suit has some bearing on what happened to Geraldine and Lucy?’

‘I’m more than implying it. What if someone killed them, got blood on his clothes and needed something to wear to leave the house?’

Simon had been thinking the same thing. Kombothekra disagreed; his oh-so-sensitive tone made that apparent, to Simon at least. ‘Mark, I understand that the idea of Geraldine committing suicide is extremely distressing for you-’

‘Not just suicide-murder. The murder of our daughter. Don’t bother trying to be tactful, Sergeant. It’s not as if I’m going to forget that Lucy’s dead if you don’t say it out loud.’ Bretherick’s body sagged. He put his arms around his head, as if to protect it from blows, and began to cry silently, rocking back and forth. ‘Lucy…’ he said.

Kombothekra walked over to him and patted him on the back. ‘Mark, why don’t you sit down?’

‘No! How do you explain it, Sergeant? Why would my suit have disappeared, apart from the reason I’ve given you? It’s gone. I’ve searched the whole house.’ Bretherick swivelled round to face Simon. ‘What do you think?’

‘Where did the suit normally live? In the wardrobe in your bedroom?’

Bretherick nodded.

‘And you definitely haven’t removed it? Left it in a hotel or at a friend’s house?’ Simon suggested.

‘It was in my wardrobe,’ Bretherick insisted angrily. ‘I didn’t lose it, imagine it or donate it to charity.’ He wiped his wet face with his shirt sleeve.

‘Might Geraldine have taken it to the dry-cleaner’s before… say, last week?’ Kombothekra asked.

‘No. She only took clothes to the cleaner’s when I asked her to. When I ordered her to, because I’m too busy and important to make sure my own clothes are clean. Sad, isn’t it? Well, they’re not clean any more.’ Bretherick raised his arms to reveal new damp patches on his shirt, superimposed over the dry sweat stains. ‘You might well wonder why I’m so upset.’ He addressed the coving on the ceiling. ‘I hardly ever saw my wife and daughter. Often they were there but I didn’t look at them-I looked at the newspaper or the television, or my BlackBerry. If they hadn’t died, would I ever have spent time with them, enough time? Probably not. So, if I look at it that way, I’m not really going to be missing much, am I? Now that they’re dead.’

‘You spent every Saturday and Sunday with them,’ said Kombothekra patiently.

‘When I wasn’t at a conference. I never dressed Lucy, you know. Not once, in the whole six years of her life. I never bought her a single item of clothing-not one pair of shoes, not one coat. Geraldine did all that…’

‘You bought her clothes, Mark,’ said Kombothekra. ‘You worked hard to support your family. Geraldine was able to give up work thanks to you.’

‘I thought she wanted to! She said she did, and I thought she was happy. Staying at home, looking after Lucy and the house, having lunch with the other mums from school… Not that I knew any of their names. Cordy O’Hara: I know that name now, I know a lot about my wife now that I’ve read that diary.’

‘Which dry-cleaner’s did Geraldine use?’ Simon asked.

A hard, flat laugh from Bretherick. ‘How should I know? Was I ever with her during the day?’

‘Did she tend to shop in Spilling or in Rawndesley?’

‘I don’t know.’ His expression was despondent. He kept failing new tests, ones he hadn’t anticipated. ‘Both, I think.’ He sank into a chair, began to mutter to himself, barely audible. ‘Monsters. Lucy was scared of monsters. I remember Geraldine wittering on about night lights, vaguely-I could hardly be bothered to listen. I thought, You sort it out, don’t bother me with it, I’m too busy thinking about work and making money. You sort it out-that was my answer to everything.’

‘That’s not what the diary says,’ Simon pointed out. ‘According to what Geraldine wrote, you were concerned enough to persuade her to let Lucy sleep with her door open.’

Bretherick sneered. ‘Believe me, I didn’t give my daughter’s fear of monsters a second thought-I thought it was a phase.’

‘Children go through so many, it’s natural to forget about them once they’ve passed.’ Kombothekra had a seven-year-old and a four-year-old, both boys. He carried photos of them in his wallet, in the same compartment as his money. The pictures fell out whenever he pulled out a note; Simon often found himself having to scoop them up off the floor.

‘Geraldine didn’t write that diary, Sergeant. I know that now.’

‘Pardon?’

Simon watched Kombothekra’s eyes widen: a satisfying sight.

‘The man who wrote it knew enough about her life to make it convincing. I’ve got to hand it to him-he knew more about Geraldine and Lucy’s lives than I did.’

‘Mark, you’re letting your-’

‘I let my family down in many ways, Sergeant. Too many to count, too many to bear. There’s not a lot I can do for them now, but I’ll do the one thing that’s within my power. I’ll refuse to accept your feeble theory. There’s a murderer out there. If you don’t think you can find him, tell me and I’ll pay someone else to do it.’

Kombothekra was starting to look uncomfortable. He never issued direct challenges and hated even more to receive them. ‘Mark, I understand how you feel, but it’s a big leap from a suit going missing to opening a full-scale murder enquiry when there are no obvious leads or suspects, and when a suicide note was found at the scene. I’m sorry.’

‘Have you found William Markes yet?’

Simon tensed. That would have been his next question too. He didn’t like the idea of himself and Bretherick as allies and Kombothekra the outsider, didn’t want to identify too closely with this stranger’s thought processes in case they took him closer to his pain. Bretherick, he knew, was picturing William Markes-insofar as one could picture a stranger-leaving Corn Mill House carrying a bundle of bloodstained clothes and wearing a brown Ozwald Boateng suit. As was Simon. Well, a brown suit, anyway. The fancy name meant nothing to Simon, apart from ‘bound to be ludicrously expensive’.

‘I want to know who he is,’ said Bretherick. ‘If Geraldine was… seeing him…’

‘We’ve found nothing to suggest Geraldine was involved with another man.’ Kombothekra smiled, making the most of this opportunity to say something that was both true and encouraging. ‘So far the name William Markes has drawn a blank but… we’re doing our best, Mark.’

Doing, or have done? Simon wondered. Originally there were three teams working on the case. Now, with Mark Bretherick ruled out as a suspect, nothing to indicate Geraldine wasn’t responsible for both deaths and a suicide note to suggest that she was, the investigation had been scaled down to Simon, Sellers, Gibbs and Kombothekra. With Proust waiting in the wings to shower them with his icy disapproval when they least deserved it-his idea of team leadership. Simon doubted any further attempts would be made to track down the William Markes mentioned in the diary.

He needed a piss, and was about to excuse himself when he remembered: there was no toilet in Corn Mill House apart from those that were in the two bathrooms upstairs. Simon had asked Bretherick during an earlier visit and been told that converting the large pantry beside the utility room into a downstairs shower room had been next on the list of home improvements. ‘Won’t happen now,’ Bretherick had said.

Geraldine’s body had been found in the large, sunken en-suite bathroom, a small flight of steps down from the master bedroom, and Lucy’s in the second, smaller-though still large-bathroom on the landing next to her bedroom. Simon thought about the contrast: the bathtub full of bloodstained water in the en-suite, so red it might have been pure, undiluted blood, and the pristine white marble of the house bathroom, the clear water, Lucy’s unmarked body, her submerged face. The floating strands of hair, like black seaweed in the water. Polished limestone steps leading down to one bath, the other in the middle of the floor… Both focal points. Almost as if the rooms were stage sets, had been designed to present these two monstrous deaths as dramatically as possible.

Simon decided to wait. He wouldn’t go into either of those rooms again unless he was compelled to.

‘My mother-in-law, Geraldine’s mum… she’s asking to read the diary,’ said Bretherick. ‘I don’t want her to. I haven’t told her how bad it is. It’ll destroy her. Unlike me, she’d believe Geraldine wrote those things because the police believe it.’ His voice was full of scorn. ‘What should I say? What normally happens in cases like this?’

There are no other cases like this, thought Simon. He hadn’t seen any, at any rate. He’d seen a lot of stabbings outside night-clubs, but not mothers and daughters dead in matching white bathtubs with funny curled-over tops and gold claw feet… as if the bath might suddenly run towards him, disgorge its contents over him…

‘That’s a tough decision to make.’ Kombothekra was patting Bretherick again. ‘There’s no right answer. You have to do whatever you think is best for you, and for Geraldine’s mother.’

‘In that case I won’t show it to her,’ said Bretherick. ‘I won’t upset her unnecessarily because I know Geraldine didn’t write it. William Markes wrote it. Whoever he is.’


‘I knew it was trouble,’ said Phyllis Kent. ‘At that first meeting, I told the superintendent. I turned round and said to him, “This’ll be nothing but trouble.” Not for him, not for you lot, so you won’t care. Trouble for me. And I was right, wasn’t I?’

Charlie Zailer allowed the manager of Spilling Post Office to finish her tirade. They stood side by side looking at a photograph of a grinning PC Robbie Meakin. The picture was attached to a small red postbox on the wall, to the right of the post office counter area, and advertised Meakin as one of Spilling’s community policing team. ‘Culver Valley Police-working to build safer communities.’ The slogan, in large bold capitals, looked slightly threatening, Charlie thought. There was a phone number for Meakin beneath the photograph, and an appeal for members of the public to contact him about any topic that might concern them.

‘I turned round and said to the superintendent, “Why does it have to be red? Our postbox outside is red, for proper letters. People’ll confuse it.” And they have. They turn round and say to me all the time, “I think I posted my letter in the wrong box.” Course, it’s too late by then. Your lot have been in and taken everything, and their correspondence has gone missing.’

‘If anything comes to us by mistake, I’m sure we do our best to send it on,’ said Charlie. What sort of idiot would fail to notice the large police logo on the box, the obvious differences between this and a normal postbox? ‘I’ll speak to PC Meakin and the rest of the team and check that-’

‘There was a lady came in this morning,’ Phyllis went on. ‘She was in a right state. She’d posted a letter in there to her boyfriend and it never got to him. I turned round and said to her, “It’s not my fault, love. Ask the police about it.” But I’m the one who gets the aggro. And why won’t the superintendent come in here and talk to me about it? Why’s he sent you instead? Is he too embarrassed? Realised what a bad idea it was? It’s all very well you turning round and saying to me…’

On and on it went. Charlie yawned without opening her mouth, wondering how Phyllis Kent managed to be both in front of and behind everyone she spoke to: ‘I turned round and said, he turned round and said, you turned round and said…’ There was an identical police postbox in the post office at Silsford, and, as far as Charlie knew, there had been no complaints about that one. The market research she’d commissioned last year had proved unequivocally that people wanted as much community policing as possible, as visible and accessible as possible.

Charlie suspected Phyllis Kent savoured grievances. She would have to start going to the supermarket if she wanted to avoid being buttonholed by the woman. It was a shame; Spilling Post Office was also a shop-a rather efficient one, Charlie thought. It was small, L-shaped and sold one variety of everything she needed, so she didn’t have to waste time choosing between rows of the same thing. Sliced white bread and mild cheddar could be found alongside more unexpected items: tinned pickled octopus, pheasant p^at'e. And it was on Charlie’s route home from work. All she had to do was pull in by the side of the road, get out of her car, and the door of the post office was right in front of her. It couldn’t have been more convenient. Charlie had started to base her day-to-day planning around what she knew Phyllis stocked: Cheerios for breakfast, a bottle of Gordon’s gin and a box of Guylian chocolates as birthday presents for her sister Olivia. For a bath, Radox Milk and Honey-the only bath oil Phyllis sold. It lived beside the freezer cabinet, on the third shelf down, between Colgate Total toothpaste and Always extra-long sanitary towels with wings.

‘I’ll make sure PC Meakin returns any post that comes to us by mistake,’ Charlie promised, once Phyllis’s rant had ground to a halt.

‘Well, it’s no good returning it to me, is it? It wants posting in a proper box, like the one outside.’

‘Anything with a stamp and an address on it that’s clearly not for us, we’ll undertake to send on to its rightful owner.’ Charlie didn’t know how to sound more reassuring. She had no grander, more impressive promises up her sleeve, so she hoped Phyllis would be content with this one.

But the post office manager was not a woman to whom contentment came easily. ‘You’re not going, are you?’ she said, as Charlie started to inch towards the door. ‘What about the lady?’

‘Lady?’

‘The one who came in this morning. She reckons there’s a letter to her boyfriend in there, in your box. No one’s been to empty it for days, and she wants her letter. I turned round and said to her, “Leave it to me, love. I’ll make sure that superintendent comes and gets your letter out for you. This mess is all his fault in the first place!” ’

Charlie swallowed a sigh. Why didn’t Phyllis’s lady phone her boyfriend? Or e-mail him? Or put a brick through his window, depending on the nature of the message she wanted to convey. ‘I’ll make sure PC Meakin comes as soon as he can.’

‘Why can’t you open the box?’ said Phyllis. ‘I thought you said you were a sergeant.’

‘I don’t have the key.’ Charlie decided to risk being honest. ‘Look, this postbox isn’t really my responsibility. I only offered to come because Robbie Meakin’s off on a week’s paternity leave and… well, I needed to do my shopping.’

‘I’ve got the key,’ said Phyllis, a triumphant gleam in her eye. ‘I keep it here behind the counter. But I’m not allowed to open the box. A police officer has to open it.’

Charlie could no longer hold her two bulging carrier bags. She lowered them to the floor gently to avoid breaking the eggs and lightbulbs. So Phyllis had the key. Why did she have to be so irritatingly law-abiding? She could easily have opened the box, fished out the letter to the boyfriend and left the rest of the contents untouched. Why was she bothering Charlie when she could have dealt with it herself?

And if Phyllis hadn’t been such a stickler for the rules… There would be nothing to stop a less scrupulous person having a nosey in the box whenever they fancied, perhaps even stealing letters when the police weren’t around-which, let’s face it, was most of the time. Whose ludicrous idea was it to leave the key at the post office? Charlie would have liked to turn round and say a few things to that person.

She rubbed her sore hands while Phyllis went to fetch the key. Her fingers were numb; the handles of the carrier bags had cut off her circulation. While she waited, she pulled her phone out of her handbag and deleted a dozen saved text messages which, in an ideal world, she would have liked to keep. But it was something to do. She was terrified of being unoccupied. There was no danger of that at work, or at home, where there was more than enough DIY to keep her busy. Charlie had stripped the walls and floors of her house just over a year ago and was rebuilding the rooms one by one, starting from scratch. It was a long, slow process. So far she’d done the kitchen and made a start on her bedroom. The rest of the house was plaster and floorboards. It looked abandoned, as if it was waiting for vagrants and rats to move in.

‘Couldn’t you have kept the old furniture until you bought new?’ her sister regularly grumbled, wriggling on a wooden kitchen chair that was understudying indefinitely for the comfortable armchair Charlie would one day buy for the lounge. Olivia was ideologically opposed to slumming it. The round contours of her figure were not suited to right angles and hard seats.

‘I wouldn’t have kept myself if there’d been any choice,’ Charlie had told her. ‘I’d have replaced me with someone better.’

‘No shortage of candidates there,’ Olivia had shot back merrily, trying to goad Charlie into sticking up for herself.

The truth was, Charlie didn’t want to get the house finished; what would happen after that? What would be her project? Could she find anything big enough to leave no room for thinking or feeling? Old wallpaper was easy to strip down and replace with something more cheerful; despair wasn’t.

Phyllis Kent emerged from the back office with the key in her hand. She passed it to Charlie and stood back, ready to make an infuriating comment as soon as one occurred to her. Charlie wondered if Phyllis had read about her in the papers last year. Some people had, some hadn’t. Some knew, some didn’t. Phyllis seemed the sort who might make an ill-judged remark if she did know, and she’d said nothing so far, but Charlie wasn’t going to allow herself to imagine she was in the clear. She’d done that too many times before and been floored when, almost as an afterthought, whoever she was talking to had suddenly mentioned it. It felt a bit like being shot in the back-the emotional equivalent.

Most people Charlie knew well were understanding, non-judgemental. Every time she was told it wasn’t her fault, something inside her faded. They didn’t even think enough of her to be honest and say, ‘How the hell could you have been so stupid? ’ Charlie knew what they were all thinking: It’s too late, so we might as well be nice.

She unlocked the box and took out the four envelopes and one loose scrap of lined paper that were inside. Two of the envelopes were addressed to Robbie Meakin, one had no name or address written on it, and a bulging one that looked as if it might burst at the seams was addressed to a Timothy Lush and had a first-class stamp on it. ‘Here’s your lady’s letter,’ said Charlie, pitying poor Mr Lush. He’d have to wade through at least seven pages of-don’t leap to premature conclusions, Charlie-aimless emotional snivelling, and try to work out what to do next. Charlie had been tempted, many times since last spring, to write a letter of exactly that sort to Simon. Thank God she’d restrained herself. Telling people how you felt was never a good idea. It was bad enough feeling it-why would you want to let it loose in the world?

Phyllis whipped the envelope out of Charlie’s hand and dropped it in the metal tray under the counter’s glass window, as if prolonged contact with human skin might cause it to burst into flames. Charlie threw the two Meakin envelopes back into the box and unfolded the lined sheet of paper. This was also a letter to Meakin, from Dr Maurice Gidley FRS OBE, who had been out for a meal at the Bay Tree in Spilling last week and been pestered by teenagers on his way back to his car. The youths hadn’t attacked him but they had taunted him in a manner that he described as ‘unacceptable and intimidating’. He wanted to know if anything could be done to prevent ‘ne’er-do-wells’ loitering outside his favourite restaurants, which, he informed Meakin, were the Bay Tree, Shillings Brasserie and Head 13.

Ah, yes, Doctor, of course. The 2006 Ne’er-do-wells Act… Charlie smiled. She’d have liked to tell Simon about Dr Gidley’s absurd note, but she didn’t have that sort of conversation with him any more. And now she didn’t even have his text messages. She regretted deleting them already, even though she could remember many of them word for word: ‘It’s a serious one. Time to sober up and face the music.’ This had been Simon’s reply to an enquiry from Charlie about his hangover after a particularly boozy work night out. ‘Walking, floating, air, sky, moonlight, etc’: that had been her favourite of Simon’s texts. She’d been mystified when she’d got it, hadn’t understood it at all. Later, she’d asked him what it meant.

‘The Snowman was looking for you. Those are the lyrics from The Snowman. You know, Aled Jones. I mixed the words up to make it cryptic, in case your phone fell into the wrong hands.’

Charlie had deleted it. Stupid idiot. Stupid for pressing a button that would destroy something she knew she wanted to keep, stupid for wanting to keep it in the first place. Simon’s unspectacular, no longer relevant words from over a year ago. God, I’m a pathetic cow.

She put Dr Gidley’s letter back in the box and used her thumbnail to open the fourth envelope, the one that wasn’t addressed to anybody. It was probably hate mail or porn, Charlie guessed. Blank, sealed envelopes were usually bad news.

‘Are you allowed to open that?’ Phyllis’s voice floated over her shoulder.

Charlie didn’t answer. She was staring at the short, typed letter, at first aware of nothing except that it was a chance. To reestablish contact. Too good to miss. Charlie blinked and looked again to check that the words ‘Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick’ were still there. They were. This was current, the case Simon was working on at the moment. Him and the rest of the team.

Charlie missed them all. Even Proust. Standing in his office, being patronised and hectored by him… Sometimes when she walked past the CID room she could feel her heart leaning towards it, straining to go in, to go back.

‘Please forward this to whoever is investigating the deaths of Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick,’ the letter said. It was only one paragraph long, printed in a regular but small sans-serif type-face. ‘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.’

That was it. No explanation, no name or signature, no contact details.

Charlie pulled her phone out of her bag. She highlighted Simon’s number on the screen, her finger hovering over the ‘call’ button. All you need to do is press it. What’s the worst that can happen?

Charlie knew the answer to that one from past experience: worse than you can possibly imagine, so there’s no point trying. She sighed, scrolled up, and rang Proust instead.


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