The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah Page A

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