The Wrong Mother

23

Monday, 13 August 2007

‘Fay bootball? Fay cwicket bat, Mummy?’ Jake stands hopefully at the foot of the bed, holding a walking stick that the previous owners of our flat left in the airing cupboard, unaware it would become my son’s favourite toy, and his pink plastic ball. Zoe is sitting in bed with me, her arms round my neck. It makes me feel safe: protected by a fierce four-year-old.

‘Mummy’s not well enough to play cricket, Jake,’ Esther tells him. ‘Anyway, that looks more like a hockey stick than a cricket bat. Why don’t you ask Zoe if she’ll play hockey with you?’

Jake’s bottom lip juts out. He says, ‘Go back your house, Stinky.’

‘Don’t take it personally,’ I say.

‘Affawuds? Affawuds, Mummy?’

‘Jake, Mummy needs to rest,’ Zoe tells him firmly. ‘We need to look after Mummy.’

‘Yes, darling, I’ll play football and cricket with you afterwards, I promise.’ Being with my children again makes me almost breathless with joy. Seeing their faces, after I feared I might never see them again. I’ve told them I love them so often since I got back, they’ve started rolling their eyes whenever I say it.

Jake runs out of the room. Zoe leaps up off the bed and follows him, saying, ‘Walk, don’t run, Jake. We have to be extra good. It’s a mergency.’ A few minutes later I hear a muffled crack that comes from the direction of the lounge. Zoe shrieks, ‘No, Jake! That’s my Barbie!’ Nick makes them both laugh by doing his impression of a frog. I’d have got upset and confiscated the stick, and got a much worse result.

How will I ever be able to leave home again? How will I let Zoe and Jake out of my sight?

I catch Esther scrutinising my face, as she has taken to doing. ‘Stop it,’ I tell her.

‘What happened in that man’s house, Sally? What did he do to you?’

‘I’ve told you. Nothing.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘That’s up to you.’ I give her a tight smile.

‘Are you going to tell Nick?’

‘There’s nothing to tell.’

Nick knows what the police know: that Jonathan Hey imprisoned me in his house, and eventually hit me with a gun and left me there to die. The police have accepted my story for the time being. Nick has accepted it full-stop; he won’t ask any more questions. He thinks he understands the what and the why of it: Hey wanted to kill me because he’s a murderer, simple as that. Because he’s mad.

Nick has no time for anything strange, frightening or unpleasant. He refuses to make space for it in his head. This morning he brought me some flowers to cheer me up. The last time he bought flowers was to apologise, the day we moved to Spilling. I was busy in meetings all morning, and drummed it into him that he mustn’t forget to pack and bring the washing that was still wet in the machine. When I arrived at Monk Barn Avenue for the first time that afternoon, I found my black bra and several of my embarrassingly holey-toed socks lying in the hall, draped over sofas and chairs, hanging from wardrobe handles. My Agent Provocateur camisole was in the shower stall. Nick hadn’t bothered to put the wet clothes in a bag; he’d simply scooped them up out of the washing machine’s drum and chucked them into the back of the removal van.

I can’t help smiling, thinking about the absurdity of this.

‘What?’ says Esther suspiciously. ‘What was that envelope Sergeant Kombothekra gave you before?’

I remind myself that Esther is my best friend. I used to want to tell her everything. ‘A letter from Mark Bretherick. Thanking me for saving his life.’

Who saved my life? I have become obsessed with this question. Did I do it myself? Was it Esther? My thoughts keep coming back to Pam Senior. It’s odd to think that when she stood in the centre of Rawndesley and screamed abuse at me, she set in motion a chain of events that took her to the police station several days later. It was from Pam that the police first heard my name. If I hadn’t managed to escape from Jonathan Hey’s house, it would have been Pam’s visit to the police that led to my rescue.

‘Mark wants us to meet. Talk,’ I tell Esther.

‘Stay away from him, Sally. He’s just lost his wife, remember.’

‘Charitable.’

‘Stay away,’ she warns me. ‘What good could it possibly do?’

‘It might do him good. He must think it will, or he wouldn’t ask.’

Jonathan Hey smashed his skull with a metal bar, nearly killed him.

Nick’s appearance in the room prevents her from responding. ‘Sam Kombothekra phoned while you were asleep,’ he says. ‘I said you’d ring him back.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Another update, I think.’

‘Bring me the phone.’ I would rather get it over with, whatever it is.

‘Sal? There’s something I want to ask you,’ says Nick. ‘It’s been bugging me.’

Esther gives me a pointed look as she leaves the room.

‘Can you make her go home?’ I ask Nick once we’re alone. ‘It’s like being looked after by Count Dracula.’

‘That black notebook, Encarna Oliva’s diary: why did you bring it back with you?’

‘It was written in a foreign language. I opened it and… couldn’t understand what was in it.’ The truth. No part of what I said was a lie.

‘So you thought it might be something important?’ Nick looks at me expectantly. I nod. I assumed Amy Oliva’s father might be bilingual, since her mother was Spanish. When I found the notebook in his bathroom and saw Spanish handwriting, I thought he might have written something about me-how he felt about me, what he was doing to me or planned to do. I brought the black notebook home with me so that I could destroy it. Instead, I passed out and dropped it on the carpet in front of the police.

I’ve never seen myself as the passing-out sort, but since I’ve come home I keep waking up without having realised I’d fallen asleep. I am still so tired. Sam Kombothekra says it’s the shock.

Nick is impressed. ‘So, you were escaping from the house of a psychopath and you had the presence of mind to bring an important bit of evidence with you. That’s… efficient.’

‘It’s called multi-tasking,’ I say as my eyes close. ‘I’ll tell you about it some time.’