I finish my story. He turns quickly away from me, rubbing his chin with his thumb. Nothing. Silence. I can’t stand this. ‘You know who he is, don’t you? You know him.’
He shakes his head.
‘But you’ve thought of something. What is it?’
‘Do the police know?’
‘No. Who is he? I know you know.’
‘I don’t.’
He’s lying. He looks like Nick does when he’s bought a new bike that costs a thousand pounds and he’s pretending it only cost five hundred. I want to scream at him to tell me the truth but I know that would only make him even more unwilling to talk. ‘Is there anyone you can think of who envies you, who might have had a thing about Geraldine? Someone who might have wanted to pretend to be you?’
He passes the bundle of paper across to me. ‘Read this,’ he says. ‘Then you’ll know as much as I do.’
When I look up eventually, once I’ve read each of the nine diary entries twice and taken in as much as I can, there is a mug of black tea on a slatted wooden table by the side of my chair. I didn’t notice him bringing either. He paces in front of me, up and down, up and down. I struggle not to let my revulsion show; this woman was his wife.
‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘Is that the diary of someone who would kill her daughter and herself?’
I reach for my drink, nearly ask for milk but decide not to. I take a gulp that scalds my mouth and throat. The mug is covered in writing: ‘SCES ’04, The International Conference on Strongly Correlated Electron Systems, July 26-30 2004, Universität Karlsruhe (TH) Germany ’.
‘It’s not the Geraldine I knew, the person who wrote all that. But then she says, doesn’t she? She’s got that part covered. “Whatever I feel inside, I do the opposite.” ’
‘She didn’t write it every day,’ I say. ‘From the dates, I mean. It’s only nine days in total. Maybe she only wrote it when she felt really down, and on other days she didn’t feel like that at all. She might have been happy most of the time.’
His anger surprises me. He knocks the drink from my hand, sending it flying across the hall, spraying tea everywhere. I watch the mug’s arc through the air, watch it fall on to the window seat as he yells, ‘Stop treating me like I’m mentally impaired! ’ I duck, making a hard shell of my body to fend off an attack, but he is already kneeling beside me, apologising. ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, are you okay? Christ, you could have got third-degree burns!’
‘I’m all right. Honestly. Fine.’ I hear the tremor in my voice and wonder why I’m rushing to reassure him. ‘It went on the floor, not on me.’
‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. God knows what you must think of me now.’
I feel dizzy, trapped. ‘I didn’t mean to make you angry,’ I tell him. ‘I was trying to find something positive to say. The diary’s horrible. You obviously know it is, and I didn’t want to make you feel worse.’
‘You couldn’t.’ His eyes seem to issue a challenge.
‘Okay, then.’ I hope I’m not about to break my own personal stupidity record. ‘Yes, I think this is the diary of someone who might kill her daughter. No, I don’t think it’s the diary of someone who would kill herself.’
He watches me closely. ‘Go on.’
‘The writer… the voice throughout seems to be screaming self-preservation at all costs. If I had to guess what sort of woman wrote it, I’d say-look, this is going to sound awful.’
‘Say it.’
‘Narcissistic, spoilt, superior-her way of doing things is better than everyone else’s…’ I bite my lip. ‘Sorry. I’m not very tactful.’ A ruthless ego, I add silently. Someone who starts to see other people as worthless and expendable as soon as they become obstacles to her getting her way.
‘It’s all right,’ says Mark Bretherick. ‘You’re telling me the truth. As you see it.’ For the first time, I hear a trace of anger in his voice.
‘Some of what she’s written is exactly what I’d expect,’ I say. ‘Being a parent can be massively frustrating.’
‘Geraldine never had a break from it. She was a full-time mum. She never said she wanted a break.’
‘Everybody wants a break. Look, if I had to look after my kids full-time, I’d need strong tranquillisers to get me through every day. I can understand her exhaustion and her need to have some time and space for herself, but… locking a child in a dark room and letting her scream for hours, pulling the door shut so she can’t get out, and that stuff about having to make her suffer in order to feel protective and loving towards her; it’s sick.’
‘Why didn’t she ask me to hire help? We could have afforded a nanny-we could have afforded two nannies! Geraldine didn’t have to do any of it if she didn’t want to. She told me she wanted to. I thought she was enjoying it.’
I look away from the anger and pain in his eyes. I can’t give him an answer. If I’d been Geraldine, married to a rich company director and living in a mansion, I’d have ordered my husband to stock up on a full team of servants the instant I emerged from the maternity ward. ‘Some people are better than others at asking for what they need,’ I tell him. ‘Women are often very bad at it.’
He turns away from me as if he’s lost interest. ‘If he can pretend to be me, he can pretend to be her,’ he says, blowing on his cupped hands. ‘Geraldine wasn’t narcissistic-the very opposite.’
‘You think someone else wrote the diary? But… you’d have known if it wasn’t Geraldine’s handwriting, wouldn’t you?’
‘Does that black print look like handwriting to you?’ he snaps.
‘No. But I assumed-’
‘Sorry.’ He looks disgusted, mortified to find himself having to apologise again so soon after the last time. ‘The diary was found on Geraldine’s computer. No handwritten version.’
There’s a sour taste in my mouth. ‘Who is William Markes?’ I ask. ‘The man she said might ruin her life?’
‘Good question.’
‘What? You don’t know?’
He barks out a laugh without smiling. ‘As things stand, you know more about him than I do.’
My breath catches in my throat. ‘You mean…?’
‘Ever since I first read that diary, I’ve had a name in my head with no one to attach it to: William Markes. Then out of the blue you turn up. You’re Geraldine’s double, physically, and you tell me you met a man who pretended to be me. But we know he wasn’t. So at the moment we’ve got no name to attach to the man you met in the hotel.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m a scientist. If I put those two facts together…’
‘You come to the conclusion that the man I met last year was William Markes.’
Sometimes, convenience has the appearance of logic: you link two things because you can, not because you must. I’m also a scientist. What if the two unknowns are unrelated? What if the man at Seddon Hall lied because he was breaking the rules for a week and wanted to cover himself, not because he’s a psychopath capable of murder?
If William Markes, whoever he is, faked Geraldine’s diary after killing her, why did he include his own name? Some kind of complicated urge to confess? Being a scientist and not a psychologist, I have no idea if that’s plausible.
‘You need to tell the police. They’ve given up looking for William Markes. If they hear what you’ve just told me…’
I am on my feet. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I say, pulling my bag out from where I left it behind the chair. I wrap my arms around it so that he doesn’t see the frame edges. ‘Sorry, I… I’ve got to pick up my kids from nursery at lunchtime today, and I’ve got some shopping to do first.’ A lie. Tuesday and Thursday are Nick’s days, the days when bags go astray and bills and party invitations vanish into thin air.
I have never, not once, collected Zoe and Jake at lunchtime. Their gruelling nursery regime is one of the many things I feel guilty about.