The Wrong Mother (26 page)

Simon frowned. ‘You don’t honestly think you and Harbard writing your books and articles is going to stop things like this from happening? Or make it easier for those who are left behind? ’

‘I can’t bring people back from the dead, obviously,’ said Hey. ‘But I
can
try to understand, and understanding always helps, doesn’t it?’

Simon was doubtful. Would he feel better if he understood why Charlie, in response to his suggestion that they get married, had burst into tears, screamed obscenities at him and thrown him out of her house? Eternal confusion might be preferable; some things were too hard to face up to.

‘Anyway, whether you approve or not,’ said Hey, with a small, apologetic shrug. ‘Keith and I decided to devote ourselves, research-wise, to familicide. That was four years ago. At this moment in time, we’re two of a handful of experts on the subject in the UK. From what I know about Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick’s deaths, they don’t fit in with any family annihilation model that we’ve come across in our research. Not at all.’

‘What?’ Simon’s hand was in his jacket pocket, fumbling for his notebook and pen. ‘You’re saying you don’t think Geraldine Bretherick was responsible for the two deaths?’

‘No,’ said Hey unequivocally.

‘Harbard disagrees,’ Simon pointed out.

‘I know.’ For a second, Hey looked stricken. ‘I can’t talk sense into him, however hard I try. He’s going to write a misleading, entirely wrong-headed book, and it’s all my fault.’

‘How?’

Hey rubbed his face with his hands, as if he was washing. ‘Familicide’s not like murder, that’s the first thing you need to understand. People commit murder for a variety of reasons—it’s a crime with an extensive motive pool. Whereas you’d be surprised to discover how few prototypes there are for family-annihilation killings. Few enough for me to run through them all before dinner.’ Hey glanced at his watch. ‘First off, there are the men who kill their
entire
families—wives, children, themselves—because they’re facing financial ruin. They can’t cope with the shame, the sense of failure, the disappointment and disgrace they imagine their families will feel. So they choose death as the better option. These are men who have always been perceived as—and indeed, have
been
—loving, caring fathers and husbands. They can’t go on—the inevitable alterations to their self-image would be too painful—and they can’t envisage a life for the family with them gone. They view the murders as their final act of care and protection, if you like.’

‘They’re usually middle-class?’

‘Right. Middle, upper-middle. Good guess.’

‘It wasn’t. I read it in your article, yours and Harbard’s.’

‘Oh, right.’ Hey looked surprised but pleased. ‘Okay, second model: the men like Billy’s prison colleague, who kill their children to take revenge on former partners who’ve left them, wives who are planning to leave them or have been unfaithful. These instances of familicide usually come from the opposite end of the social spectrum—men with low incomes, manual jobs if they’ve got jobs at all.’

‘You make it sound as if there are plenty of cases to choose from. It must be an incredibly rare crime.’

‘One familicide in the UK every six weeks. Not as rare as you might think.’ Hey paced the floor, from one end of his Space Invader rug to the other. ‘The second prototype—the vindictive, vengeful family annihilator—sometimes he kills the woman too. The kids and the wife or partner. It varies. Depends on whether he thinks killing her would be a better revenge than leaving her alive once her children are dead. If there’s another man involved, he might not want his rival to get his hands on the woman that he regards as his property, just as he doesn’t want his children to end up calling another man “Dad”. Sometimes he wants to end his wife or girlfriend’s bloodline: he doesn’t want anything of her to live on, which is why he has to kill the children too, his own children.’

‘You keep saying “he”. Are family . . . annihilators always men?’ Simon asked.

‘Almost always.’ Hey perched on the arm of his sofa. ‘When women do it—traditionally—it’s for different reasons. Women don’t kill their children to avoid facing bankruptcy; as far as we know, that’s never happened, not once. And the revenge-motivated familicide is male, not female. Simple reason: even in our supposedly equal modern society, children are still seen as belonging more to the woman than the man. He kills them as a way of destroying something that’s hers. Very few women would see their children as belonging more to their husbands than to themselves, so they wouldn’t be destroying his treasured possessions—only their own. See what I mean?’

‘So when women do it, what’s their motive?’ asked Simon. ‘Depression?’

Hey nodded. ‘Keith’s told me about the diary Geraldine Bretherick left, and, granted, it sounds as if she was seriously dissatisfied. I’m not sure if she was depressed. But she wasn’t delusional, and most mothers who kill their children are. They tend to have a
history
of depression dating back to childhood, linked, often, to disastrous family backgrounds and a total lack of support networks.’

‘What kind of delusions?’ asked Simon. He was wondering about William Markes, a man no one had been able to find.

‘All kinds. Some believe that they and their children are suffering from terminal illnesses,’ said Hey. ‘Murder and suicide are their escape routes, to avoid prolonged suffering. They’re not ill at all, of course, but they’re absolutely convinced they are. Or else the women are suicidal, and feel so protective of their children, so attached to them, that they can’t kill themselves and leave the children alive: that feels too much like abandonment.’

Simon wrote all this down.

‘I haven’t seen Geraldine Bretherick’s diary, but Keith’s described it to me and shown me passages from it. It’s full of complaints about her daughter, right?’

‘Pretty much,’ said Simon.

‘The women who kill their children and then commit suicide, they don’t express negative feelings about their children beforehand. Love is their motivation, albeit a twisted love. Not resentment. At least, that’s true of every case I’ve ever heard of.’

‘So . . .’ Simon tapped his pen against his leg, thinking. ‘Harbard should know all this. Yet he’s convinced Geraldine Bretherick—’

‘He’s convinced because he wants to be.’ Hey’s pained expression had returned. ‘It’s my fault.’

‘How so?’

‘There was a case a while ago, in Kenilworth, Warwickshire—a man whose business empire was falling apart. He owed millions. Meanwhile his wife and four teenage kids had no idea there was a problem, and were busy splashing out on credit cards, booking holidays, buying cars, taking their wealth and privilege for granted. The wife didn’t work, she didn’t think she had to. She thought she had a rich husband.’

‘He killed them all?’ Simon guessed.

‘Stabbed them in their beds while they were sleeping, then hanged himself. His sense of identity collapsed when he was forced to confront his inability to provide for his family. Keith and I were talking about it one night, I’d had a bit to drink . . . I said it was more and more common for the woman to be the main breadwinner. Not only the breadwinner, but the one who administrates the family finances. I wondered aloud—and, believe me, I wish I hadn’t—if one day we would start to hear about cases of women who killed their husbands and children for the same reason.’

‘Do you think that’s likely?’ asked Simon.

‘No!’ Hey looked cornered, bewildered. ‘I don’t. If it was going to happen, it would be happening already. That’s my hunch. I was just . . . idly speculating. But Keith’s eyes lit up. He said he was sure I was right—it
would
start to happen. He seemed . . . I almost had the impression he
wanted
it to happen. No, that’s a terrible thing to say, of course he didn’t. But I could tell he’d latched on to the idea. Women have always borne the burden of domestic responsibility pretty much single-handedly, he said. Which is true, even in our so-called enlightened society. Women take responsibility for the home and the kids, and often view their husband as an extra child, someone else to be looked after. Men used to be the ones who brought in the money, but even that’s changing. Women are keen to work outside the home now, which means men get to have it even easier. More and more of us marry women who earn more than we do—’ Hey stopped suddenly. ‘Are you married?’ he asked.

‘No.’ The word rang in Simon’s ears.

‘Girlfriend?’

‘Yes.’ Another ‘no’ would have been too difficult.

‘Does she earn more or less than you?’

‘More,’ said Simon. ‘She’s a sergeant.’

‘My wife used to earn more than I did. Embarrassingly more—my salary was pocket money.’ Hey smiled. ‘I didn’t care, from a macho point of view. Do you?’

‘No.’ Simon did. Only a little, but he did.

‘It often changes once you’ve had children. Now I’m the sole breadwinner.’ Hey sounded as if he felt guilty. ‘Anyway, naturally women are more nurturing and more protective than men. They shoulder burdens rather than delegate them to their husbands or partners. Often they assume a man wouldn’t be able to cope in the way that they can. Plus, they want to make everyone happy, even if it’s at their own expense—you know, the martyr mentality. The “have-the-men-had-enough?” mentality.’

Simon had no idea what Hey was talking about.

‘Whereas men—again, huge generalisation—men tend only to care about making themselves happy. We’re undeniably more selfish.’

‘Apart from the men who are so distressed about not being able to provide for their families that they kill them,’ Simon reminded him.

‘Ah, but it’s their own egos they really care about. Not their wives and children. Obviously, because they murder them. And that’s why, ultimately, I don’t think women
will
start to commit familicide in the same numbers as men. Women care more about their families than about preserving their own vanity.’

‘You have a low opinion of men,’ said Simon, both admiring and resenting Hey’s honesty.

‘Some of us are all right. You see, this is my point.’ Hey smiled sheepishly. ‘I think aloud, and it causes trouble. All I said to Keith was that I wondered if, eventually, we’d start to come across cases of
women
whose business empires collapsed and who, rather than admit that they’d failed to look after their families properly . . .’ He chewed the inside of his lip. ‘Two weeks later, Keith had dashed off an article predicting more familicides committed by women for financial reasons.’

‘And then Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick were found dead.’ Simon stood up, couldn’t keep his body still when his mind was all over the place. ‘You’re saying Harbard’s using our case. He wants Geraldine Bretherick to have proved him right.’

Hey nodded. Patches of red had appeared on his cheeks. ‘I don’t think she has,’ he said. ‘Geraldine Bretherick was a full-time mother and home-maker. She had no financial responsibilities, and she had the security of knowing that her husband was rich and likely to become richer. So that’s prototype one down the pan. And the vengeful, vindictive model: Keith says there’s no evidence Mark Bretherick was planning to leave her, or had another woman?’

‘None,’ said Simon.

Hey held up his hands. ‘I just don’t see it. I keep telling Keith that none of the predictions he made in his article are borne out by this case, not a single one, but he keeps insisting he was right: he predicted more women would kill their children and now Geraldine Bretherick has. That’s what he says; he seems determined to ignore the specifics. It’s as if all the detail we’ve gone into, all those years of both our lives, have just been wiped out!’

Simon looked up from his notes.

‘Sorry,’ Hey muttered. ‘Look, it’s not my career I’m thinking about. I feel responsible. I’m one of the few people in the country who know as much about this topic as Keith does. Now that I’ve told you my opinion . . . well, at least the police know there’s another point of view.’

‘You’ve been very helpful,’ said Simon.

Hey looked at his watch. ‘We’d better start heading down to dinner.’

Simon had no appetite. ‘I might give it a miss, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a tiring day and tomorrow’s going to be another one. I ought to start driving back.’

‘Oh.’ Hey sounded disappointed. ‘Well, if you’re sure. We don’t have to talk about this sort of thing. I mean, I don’t want you to think my conversation’s limited to—’

‘It’s not that,’ said Simon. ‘Really, I should get back to Spilling.’

Hey showed him to the door. ‘If Geraldine didn’t do it . . .’ he said. ‘Sorry, I’m thinking aloud again.’

Simon paused at the top of the stone staircase. ‘We’re short on suspects. That’s why, from our end, everyone’s lapping up Harbard and his theories.’

‘The husband?’ asked Hey.

‘Alibi,’ Simon told him. ‘And no motive. They were happy. Bretherick had no one waiting in the wings.’

‘I have to say this.’ Hey frowned. ‘It would worry me if I let you leave without having said it. When men do murder their wives . . . well, in the majority of cases the wives don’t work or have any status outside the home. It’s much rarer for a husband or partner to kill a woman he regards as his equal. Valued by people other than himself.’

Simon mulled this over as he walked back to his car. It was enough to make pregnant professional women give birth at board meetings, he thought. Geraldine Bretherick had been valued by her friends, but had they loved her? Needed her? Cordy O’Hara’s life would go on without her. There was her mother, of course, but Simon had a feeling Hey would say that didn’t count in this context.

Apart from Mark, perhaps even more than Mark, Lucy Bretherick must surely have been the person who most valued and needed Geraldine. Lucy, who was also dead.

 

When Charlie opened the door to her sister, the first thing she noticed was what looked like a large book in Olivia’s hands, roughly the size and shape of the Spilling and Rawndesley telephone directory. Olivia held it up; it was a Laura Ashley catalogue, Spring/Summer 2007. ‘Before you complain, their prices are very reasonable. You’d be surprised. I know what a skinflint you are, and you know I don’t settle for second-best. Laura Ashley is perfect—affordable designer.’