The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah Read Free Book Online Page B

the phone today and she told me Oonagh is also preoccupied with monsters. Cordy blames the children in Lucy and Oonagh’s class who are from ‘the other side of the tracks’ (her expression, not mine). She said, ‘I bet their thick parents have been stuffing their heads full of nonsense about fairies and devils, and they’ve passed it on to our kids.’ She sounded quite cross about it. She says you pay through the nose to send your daughter to a private school where you trust she won’t encounter any ‘white trash’, but then she does because some white trash types have lots of money. ‘From setting up chains of tanning studios and pube-waxing emporia,’ she said bitterly. I didn’t ask what ‘emporia’ were.
    What else? Oh, yes, a man called William Markes is very probably going to ruin my life. But he hasn’t yet, and I admit I’m not in the most positive state of mind at the moment. Let’s wait and see.

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