‘He’s the Anti-Proust,’ said Simon. ‘Kombothekra’s no expert, that’s for sure. He needs a few lessons on reading and summarising an academic text.’ Charlie mimed sticking her nose in the air, but he didn’t notice. ‘He’s scraping around for anything that’ll support his theory. He gave us an article today, Harbard’s latest, and made a big deal about one particular paragraph that said family annihilation is a predominantly middle-class crime, because the middle classes care more about appearances and respectability. He was trying to explain away all the interviews with Geraldine’s friends who swear blind she’d never have killed her daughter or herself-who know that she was happy. Kombothekra quoted this one paragraph, and that was supposed to prove that her happiness was just a front, that she was some kind of textbook case: someone whose life seemed perfect on the outside but whose unhappiness was building up in private to the point where she’d murder her own child-’
‘You can’t have it both ways,’ Charlie interrupted him. ‘Geraldine’s happiness wasn’t a sham but the anniversary cards are?’
‘I’m not talking about that any more,’ said Simon impatiently. And unreasonably, Charlie thought. ‘I’m saying Kombothekra misunderstood the article. Deliberately, because it suited him to do so. I’ll send you a copy, you can read it for yourself.’
‘Simon, I don’t work in-’
‘This thing about affluent middle-class people killing their families because they can no longer maintain the illusion of perfection? Later on-in the same fucking article!-it makes it clear that money’s always a big factor in those cases: men who have made the world believe in their wealth and success, and made their families believe it, who’ve been living way beyond their means and suddenly they can’t pretend any longer; things have slipped too far out of their control and they can’t sustain the fantasy however hard they try. Rather than face the truth, admit to everyone that they’re failures, and bankrupt, they kill themselves and take their wives and kids with them.’
‘Nice,’ Charlie muttered.
‘These men love their families, but they genuinely believe they’re better off dead. The article describes it as “pathological altruism”. They feel ashamed, because they’re unable to support their wives and kids, who they see as extensions of themselves, not as people in their own right. The murders they commit are a sort of suicide-by-proxy.’
‘Wow. Professor Harbard had better look to his laurels.’
‘I got all that from the article,’ said Simon. ‘Kombothekra should have got it too. None of it applies to Geraldine Bretherick. She’s not a man-’
‘Does the article say it’s always men?’
‘It implies it. She didn’t work-she had no financial responsibility for the family whatsoever. Mark Bretherick’s loaded. They had money coming out of their ears.’
‘There must be other cases that don’t fit that pattern,’ said Charlie. ‘People who kill their families for other reasons.’
‘The only other reason mentioned in the article is revenge. Men whose wives are leaving them or have left them, usually for new partners. In those cases it’s murder-by-proxy rather than suicide-by-proxy. The man sees the kids as an extension of the woman, his unfaithful wife, and he kills them because, as revenge, it’s even better than killing her. She has to carry on living knowing that her children have been murdered by their own father. And, of course, he kills himself to avoid punishment, and presumably-and this is me talking, not the article-presumably to align himself symbolically with the victims, because he feels like a victim. He’s saying, “Look, we’re all dead, me and the kids, and it’s your fault.” ’
‘So you’re saying it’s murder-by-proxy but the man doesn’t feel he’s the murderer?’
‘Exactly. The real murder victim is the happy family and the deserting wife is the one who’s killed it-that’s the way he’d see it.’
Charlie shuddered. ‘It’s gross,’ she said. ‘Offhand, I can’t imagine a worse crime.’
‘I just thought of that last part on my own,’ said Simon, looking surprised. ‘Does that make me a sociologist?’ He picked up the two anniversary cards and stuffed them in his trouser pocket, as if suddenly embarrassed by their presence. ‘Mark Bretherick didn’t have another woman on the go,’ he said. ‘If he had, we’d have found her. He wasn’t planning to leave Geraldine. So it doesn’t fit with the revenge model either.’
‘Okay.’ Charlie wasn’t sure what he wanted her to do with all this information. ‘So talk to Sam.’
‘Tried and failed. Tomorrow I’m phoning in sick and going to Cambridge to talk to Professor Jonathan Hey who co-wrote the article with Harbard. I made the appointment this morning. I want to know more.’
‘So why not talk to Harbard? Isn’t that what he’s there for?’
‘He’s too busy having his slap-head powdered by BBC make-up artists to talk to the likes of me. And he’s obsessed with one thing and one thing only: his prediction that more and more women are going to start committing familicide. That’s what gets people writing to the papers complaining about him, or applauding his bravery-that’s what keeps his name in the news and gets him the media appearances he loves.’
‘Why will more and more women kill their children?’ asked Charlie. ‘Can he get away with saying that?’
‘Try stopping him. His argument’s simple: in most areas of life, women are doing things that, at one time, only men used to do. Therefore women will start to kill their families. Therefore Geraldine Bretherick must have killed her daughter and herself. Does he bother trying to reconcile it with his own article, with all this stuff about financial factors and revenge? Does he bollocks. His reasoning’s bullshit. So, I want to know if his sidekick’s full of the same shit or if, as an expert of equal standing, his take on things is slightly different. Fancy coming with me?’
‘What?’
‘To Cambridge.’
‘I’m working tomorrow.’
‘Fuck work. I’m asking you to come with me.’
Charlie laughed in disbelief. ‘Look, why phone in sick? Tell Sam you want to talk to this Jonathan Hey-maybe he’d think it was a good idea. The more expert opinions the better, surely.’
‘Yeah, right. When’s that ever been the philosophy? Harbard’s our designated professor. I’d get the manpower-and-resources lecture if I got greedy and asked for another.’
‘Won’t Hey say exactly what Harbard’s said?’
Simon’s determination was etched on his face. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Harbard lives alone. Hey’s younger, married, a father…’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘The magic of Google.’
Charlie nodded. There was no point trying to talk Simon out of it. She wasn’t going to tell Sam. She’d have had nothing to tell if Simon hadn’t confided in her about his plans. Now he’d made her complicit. Was it some kind of test?
‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘I’m going to order this curry before I faint. It’ll take at least half an hour to get here and there’s not a crisp or peanut in the house, I’m afraid. All I’ve got’s eggs, stuff in tins and jars, and a packet of chicken stock cubes.’
Simon said nothing. Beads of sweat had appeared beneath his hairline.
‘Do you want to look at the menu?’ Charlie tried again.
‘I want you to marry me.’
He sat rigid, watching her, as if he’d just confessed to having a contagious fatal illness and was waiting for her to recoil in horror. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Now you know.’
‘This is the best thing that could have happened,’ Mark Bretherick told Sam Kombothekra. At least Sam knew the man in front of him was Mark Bretherick. He’d followed Proust’s instructions and checked more times than someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder would check, and in more ways. There was no doubt. Mark Howard Bretherick, born on the twentieth of June 1964, in Sleaford, Lincolnshire. Son of Donald and Anne, older brother of Richard Peter. This afternoon Sam had spoken to a teacher at Bretherick’s primary school, who remembered him clearly and said she was positive that the man whose photograph had been on the news and in the papers was the boy she had taught. ‘I’d know those eyes anywhere,’ she said. ‘Sad eyes, I always thought. Though he was a happy enough lad. Extraordinarily bright, too. I wasn’t surprised when I heard he’d done well for himself.’