The Bad Mother (27 page)

Shirley must have registered surprise, for the young man glanced suspiciously at him. This was the moment Mitch had dreaded but anticipated, so he forced himself to stand still and smile calmly. ‘We’ve never met,’ he said. ‘I’m here to introduce myself.’

The young man relayed his words, and a moment later Mitch looked across the room and encountered the steady
gaze of a woman with strikingly cut short hair with a straight fringe, all dyed a smart plum colour. He recognised Shirley from the photos on her website. She wore muted colours, and even though he knew she was in her late fifties, her pitch-perfect fashion sense made her appear much younger. She watched Mitch for a little longer then wove her way over and held out her hand.

‘I can certainly see a family resemblance,’ she said. ‘Come with me. We can talk in the meeting room. Coffee?’ This last was directed to the young man behind the desk, who nodded and went off to fetch it.

The meeting room turned out to be a partitioned cubicle at the back of the space with a long table, chairs and a board covering one wall to which was pinned a host of coloured Post-it notes connected by coloured threads wound around pins and linking photographs and what looked like pages cut out of magazines. Shirley smiled. ‘Work in progress. The client’s coming in later so I won’t have long, I’m afraid. Please,’ she gestured. ‘Sit down.’

Mitch sat down opposite Shirley, who rested her hands on the table and waited. He had rehearsed his opening speech. ‘My mother discovered recently that she’s adopted, and that Roy Weaver is her father. My grandfather.’

Shirley nodded, not taking her eyes off his face.

‘I’m sorry to turn up out of the blue like this, but I’d like to know more about him.’

‘I’d like to help you,’ she replied pleasantly, ‘but I’ve not been in touch with him for years.’

The door opened and, with a curious glance at Mitch,
the young man laid down a tray with everything they might need. Shirley turned to him. ‘Nick, can you bring me my iPad? Thanks.’

‘But you know where he is now?’ Mitch hated himself for asking the question.

Shirley was pouring the coffee and did not look up. ‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell me exactly what he did?’ asked Mitch; there seemed little point is not being direct.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Only that he killed his girlfriend.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. Mitch felt enormous relief: at least what Tessa had said – and had been told – was true, and Roy wasn’t some pervert who jumped out of bushes and abducted strangers.

Mitch could see that despite her friendly manner, Shirley was trying to disguise a wariness for which he could hardly blame her: she was right to be cautious. ‘I realise it must pretty awkward to be questioned by a complete stranger about your brother like this,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to know whatever you can tell me.’

‘You don’t look at all like a stranger.’ Shirley regarded him with quiet composure. Mitch decided she was pretty smart and that he liked her. ‘I can’t tell you much,’ she went on. ‘I know his victim was someone he’d lived with for quite a while, but I’m not sure I ever met her. Roy had walked away from us long before his conviction.’

‘So he’s not, like, a psychopath? Sorry,’ added Mitch, aware that he was blushing.

But Shirley looked amused. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘But he had been in trouble before.’

‘What for?’

‘Again, I don’t know for certain. But he had to give up his teaching job. Some kind of inappropriate behaviour with a female student.’

Mitch was aware of her looking at him, scanning his features, his hands, his proportions.

‘He was lecturing in a university, so she must’ve been over eighteen. He’d lost touch by that point, but I don’t think he ever went back to teaching. And I suspect maybe it wasn’t the first time,’ she added gently.

‘He told my mum that you don’t get on because your mother was an alcoholic,’ Mitch told her bluntly.

‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s nonsense. Typical Roy bullshit!’

Mitch couldn’t believe that such an unguarded reaction was anything but truthful.

‘He said you were older than him too.’

‘Yeah, poor little Roy!’

Mitch wanted to ask her what she meant, but Nick tapped at the door, handed Shirley an iPad and disappeared.

‘Oddly enough,’ she said, ‘I’ve just been digitising some family photos.’ She touched and swiped the screen to find what she wanted, then turned the device around to him. ‘That’s Mum.’ She pointed to a pretty woman smiling shyly at the camera, flanked by two teenagers. ‘If she had a glass of sherry at Christmas, she thought she was living the
high life. She most certainly was not an alcoholic. That’s me,’ she added, ‘and that’s Roy.’

Mitch felt ill again: the clothes and hairstyle were old-fashioned, but the face of the teenage boy was his own.

Shirley flicked at the screen so it displayed a second photograph. ‘Roy’s graduation.’

Roy wore an academic gown and hood and held an official scroll tied with red ribbon, standing in the traditional pose with a three-quarter turn to the lens and a fixed smile; once more Mitch saw his own face beneath the mortar board.

‘I’ll print these off for you, if you like.’

Mitch swallowed, unsure that he wanted them.

‘I’ve not seen my brother in twenty-five years,’ she told him. ‘Maybe more. And he chose not to come to Mum’s funeral. So seeing you standing there in reception just now, so like him – well, it was very strange indeed.’

Mitch looked at her miserably. ‘I want to know what kind of man my mum’s dealing with. None of us have met him.’

Shirley nodded and sat back, taking a sip of her coffee. ‘I don’t honestly know for sure. But Roy was always … I don’t know, self-centred, manipulative, used his charm as a strategy to get what he wanted. And wasn’t very nice if he didn’t get his own way. I guess that’s why he stopped bothering with us. But as for actual criminal behaviour, I have no idea how far it went.’

‘But he murdered a girlfriend.’

‘Yes.’ She turned her coffee cup around in the saucer so the handle was in line with the edge of the table. ‘I was
told that before he killed her, she had obtained a restraining order against him.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It meant he could be arrested if he went anywhere near her.’

‘My mum goes to visit him,’ said Mitch, willing himself not to start crying like a little kid.

‘Well, she can’t be in any great danger in a prison.’

Mitch wasn’t too sure about that. A couple of times he’d seen Tessa come home with a sort of feverish sparkle that didn’t look right, and now he was certain they were the days she’d visited Roy Weaver. ‘What if he gets out?’ he asked.

‘Is that likely?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m afraid I was glad not to get involved,’ Shirley admitted. ‘You can imagine how his conviction devastated my poor mum. Thank goodness Dad didn’t live to see it. All the same, Mum and I decided we had to be there, in case he wanted anything from us. I mean, imagine starting a life sentence. We kept on writing every couple of months for the first two years. He never replied.’

‘He told Mum you turned your back on him.’

‘He’s always told lies. Pointless lies. Except they’re not, once you start to see the pattern. Some of it’s mind games – putting the other person at a disadvantage, clever him getting one up on you. Gives him a thrill. And the rest is about how it’s never his fault. Big bad sister who dumped him. Alcoholic mother who abused him. He always was a
…’ Shirley rose abruptly to her feet. ‘Forgive me, but I’m going to stop here. This isn’t easy.’

Mitch rose too. He could see how angry and upset she was, and hoped she didn’t blame him. ‘I’m sorry for bothering you,’ he said humbly. ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘No, you were right to come.’ She held out her hand with a warm smile. ‘I hope we can stay in touch. I don’t have kids, and my mother died last year, so I’d like to have some family around me, to get to know you. If you want a great-aunt, you know where I am.’ Shirley laughed, her tone light and natural for the first time, and Mitch was glad that she seemed to like him.

He was already back out on the street when Shirley called to him. ‘Mitch? Tell your mother – warn her – if he’s fixed his attention on her, then he won’t let go. Tell her to take care.’ She slipped back inside, closing the big wooden door, leaving Mitch to find his way back to the station alone.

On the return journey, he was too exhausted to think about the visit in any detail. Apart from Tamsin, he wasn’t sure who else he ought to tell. Not his sister, for sure: although Lauren promised not to tell her friends at school, Mitch didn’t think she’d manage to keep quiet very long. Nor did he want to admit to Sam why he’d not sought his advice and had acted alone (and fibbed about it), which made it difficult now to confide in Hugo without being disloyal to his dad. Given how reluctant Tessa had been to raise the subject again once Lauren had been told, it
wasn’t going to be easy to tell her where he’d been today. Except he ought to deliver Shirley’s warning, explain about Roy’s pointless lies and discover in what other ways the evil bastard was getting a kick out of outsmarting his own daughter.

As the train neared Felixham and passed through more familiar places, Mitch tried instead to focus on imagining a future in which he had a great-aunt with a successful design business in Shoreditch, a future in which he might be at home among the girls in their art-student clothes beside hipsters in narrow jeans and plaid shirts, and remembered the awareness he’d had in Cambridge, exploring those narrow, high-walled streets all by himself, that he could be whoever he wanted to be. But as quickly as he invented alternative futures for himself, those visions were tainted by the superimposition of Roy Weaver’s uncannily familiar face, by his crimes, his mind games; it made him angry, and his anger made him feel unsafe.

THIRTY-SEVEN

When Tessa opened her front door, even though this time she was expecting to find Erin waiting on the step, she recalled the morning three months earlier when she’d turned up unannounced. This morning, looking agitated in pale slacks and a tailored blue-and-white striped shirt, Erin’s brightness seemed false and contrived. She’d rung the previous day to suggest they have ‘a good chat’, and although it was difficult for Tessa to spare the time with the B&B fully booked throughout the summer season, she could hardly refuse. At least the kids were still busy with the final few days of term and she didn’t have them to think about too.

‘Can we sit in here?’ Erin asked at the door to the unoccupied guests’ sitting room. ‘Would you mind?’

‘No, of course not.’

As Erin sat down and rummaged in her big handbag Tessa inspected the room, which had been freshly cleaned and aired this morning, the curtains nicely draped, the cushions plumped. She hadn’t actually sat in here since
her evening with Declan: the memory was pleasant. He’d called her a couple of times since, and though he’d kept things light, his attention gave her confidence. She smiled to herself, aware that she had every intention of indulging herself again on his next visit.

Erin drew out what looked like an old biscuit tin and leaned across to press it into Tessa’s hands. ‘Pamela gave me this.’

Tessa settled herself on the couch and prised open the tin: nestled in tissue paper she found three little dolls she had never seen before.

‘Pamela wants me to put them back.’ Erin nodded towards the doll’s house. ‘She said my mother took them out when I went away.’

Tessa looked more closely at the faded little figures, but their significance burdened her so she put them aside. ‘Maybe we should get rid of that thing? Forget the past. Start from where we are now.’

Erin opened her mouth to respond, but then looked down, inspecting her immaculately varnished nails for a few moments. ‘I hear you’ve been meeting up with Roy Weaver,’ she said. Tessa could imagine her opening a business meeting with that same upbeat tone.

‘Yes.’ Tessa had struggled with what she’d been forced to admit was jealousy at the thought of Erin seeing Roy again, yet supposed it was inevitable that the two of them would wish to meet. She was weary of endlessly having to negotiate, explain, mitigate her own relationship with Roy, while she always seemed to remain an invisible part
of the equation. Sometimes, she thought fiercely, it was as if Roy were the only person who actually saw
her
. ‘I haven’t told him yet that you were coming. I wasn’t sure how you’d want to play it.’

‘Pamela said he’d sent me a message?’

‘Yes, that he remembered you fondly.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He said you’d failed a music exam or something.’

Erin nodded. ‘That’s why I said yes when he asked me to go off for a walk with him. Averil was cross with me, said I hadn’t done enough practice, so I wanted to get back at her.’ She paused, her expression unreadable. ‘He must have a pretty good memory to hang on to a detail like that!’

Tessa picked up on the bitterness in Erin’s laugh, and wondered if maybe she still carried a torch for her first lover, still suffered from the old hurt that he’d left Felixham without a thought for her. ‘He liked the photographs I showed him of you when you were young,’ she offered, trying both to be generous and to bring the conversation back to the present. ‘He wrote that he’d been half in love with you.’

Erin seemed to wince, but refreshed her smile so fast that Tessa could not be sure.

‘What do you make of him?’ Erin stared at her daughter. ‘Do you like him?’

Caught off guard, Tessa laughed. ‘Yes.’ She could feel herself blushing. ‘Of course.’

Erin nodded and began to twist one of her big fashion
rings around her finger. ‘I liked him too. Thought he could charm the birds out of the trees.’

‘Do you want to come to the prison, to meet him again?’

‘No.’

Tessa was taken aback by Erin’s vehemence, and it seemed as if her question had resolved something for Erin, for she stopped playing with her ring and raised her chin.

‘There’s something I never told anyone except my mother,’ she began. ‘I’m not sure how much of it Pamela ever really knew or overheard. In any case, it doesn’t matter – Averil never believed me. And maybe she was right not to.’ She paused again, her determination appearing to ebb away.