The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah

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.

3
    Tuesday, 7 August 2007
     
     
    Someone followed me this morning. Or else I’m going insane.
    I head for my desk, keeping my eyes down and reminding myself to take deep breaths as I cross the large, open-plan office. The advantage of everybody being so visible is that we tend to go out of our way not to notice one another, to pretend we work in closed, private rooms.
    I turn on my computer, open a file so that it looks as if I’m working. It’s an old draft of a paper I’m presenting in Lisbon next month: ‘Creating Salt-marsh Habitats Using Muddy Dredged Materials’. That’ll do.
    Is there