The Bad Mother: The addictive, gripping thriller that will make you question everything

2

Lucy listened to the wind howling through the eaves and was extremely grateful that she had avoided an uncomfortable commute to work through torrential rain, unlike poor Adam. Converting the loft into an art studio had been her husband’s idea and had been undertaken shortly after Lucy had moved into the house in West Kirby a year ago. She could have continued to rent studio space in Liverpool but Adam knew how she hated driving through the Kingsway tunnel and it was a journey she was happy to surrender. She liked that she could set to work whenever inspiration struck, although her artistic flare seemed to be misfiring of late.

Wrapping her hands around a mug of peppermint tea that was too hot to drink, Lucy inhaled the scented steam to ease her mind. It was late morning and she had yet to pick up a paintbrush, while Adam had probably fixed whatever system bug had caused him to rise at five thirty.

He had left for work hours before Lucy had crawled out of bed, and she had lounged in her PJs, eating porridge and watching morning TV for far longer than she intended. When she had dressed, she had forgone her usual uniform of paint-splattered crop pants and T-shirt for an oversized shirt to make room for the swell of her belly that grew by the day.

Setting down her drink on the workbench, Lucy tied back her hair with an old bandana and lifted the dust sheet covering her current work in progress. Her easel had been set up close to the Juliet balcony window to catch the natural light, but the storm had stolen the day and she wasted the next few minutes repositioning her work beneath one of the spotlights.

Taking a step back, she took time to consider her latest commission. It was a portrait of a dog called Ralph, or at least that was the plan. Since leaving college, Lucy had made a decent living painting portraits and most of her work came from either personal recommendation or online requests. She painted people as well as pets, but preferred animal fur to flesh because it suited her style. The last time she had painted a cocker spaniel, it had been one of her best ever portraits and she had been excited by the prospect of doing another.

What Lucy hadn’t realized from the initial enquiry was that Ralph was completely black except for the flash of white on his chest. The first photo her client had sent was impossible to work from, and even though Lucy now had a series of images pinned to the top of her easel, there was a chance that the end product would be no more than a silhouette set off by the spaniel’s sparkling – and admittedly adorable – eyes. The only aspect of the composition she was confident about tackling was the background. Her trademark was the inclusion of symbolic references, which in Ralph’s case was the window where he awaited his master’s return. There would also be a slipper caught beneath his paw with the toe torn to shreds.

Having sketched an outline and blocked out the basic contours of the dog’s head and body the day before, Lucy’s task for today was to add some much-needed texture. She picked up her palette and began adding her oil colours. She squeezed out a generous amount of titanium white, a dab of Prussian blue and, as an afterthought, some French ultramarine. There would be no black on the canvas until she was happy with the curve of the dog’s snout and the ripples of fur on his silken ears.

Picking up an unlabelled glass bottle, Lucy twisted the cap and squeezed the dropper to draw up the clear liquid that would thin the paints. She dribbled a few drops across her palette before selecting a wide flat brush and, as she mixed her colours, she couldn’t help but notice the smell of her paints had changed. She wondered if it might be the steam rising from her tea, or perhaps the metallic scent of the storm in the air – or was it simply that her perceptions were changing along with her body?

Adam had a point about her becoming a newer version of herself but, in the software industry, that implied an improvement to the old. In some ways, Lucy was changing for the better. She had clung on to her student days a little too long and it was time to accept that she was a proper grown-up with a husband and a baby on the way.

Taking a deep breath, Lucy began to add paint to the stretched canvas. She used curved brushstrokes to add texture, but the oils worked against her and after half an hour of trying and failing to add some depth to her painting, she put down her palette. With her brow furrowed, she picked up the bottle she had used to thin the paint and raised it to eye level. She made up her own thinner mixture from equal parts of linseed oil and turpentine but one sniff confirmed her suspicions. If there was any oil present at all, it was the remnants from a previous mix.

The rain was beating down on the roof hard enough to make the tiles quake and as the noise intensified, so did Lucy’s frustration. She poured the contents of the bottle on to a rag and used it to wipe clean her palette. She could have rescued the paints she had been using, but she would feel better starting over. She was almost tempted to cast aside the canvas too, but it was salvageable, assuming she did everything right next time.

Lucy took extra care as she half-filled the offending bottle with turpentine before adding the linseed oil. Such a simple task would normally be undertaken while she was planning her work, or thinking about what to have for lunch. It shouldn’t need her undivided attention and Lucy’s ineptitude annoyed her. And then it worried her. What if she made similar mistakes when the baby was born? Mixing incorrect ratios of thinner and oil was one thing, but what if she were making up formula milk? What if something went terribly wrong because of her carelessness?

The thought of being a mother terrified Lucy more than she had ever anticipated. She hoped her daughter would be blessed with health and happiness – nothing short of a perfect life – but for that, she would need the perfect mother. How could life be so perverse that part of preparing a woman’s body for motherhood should involve giving her an overdose of hormones to screw up her mind?

Shaking the bottle, Lucy attempted to release some of her tension. She was being overdramatic. It was a simple slip-up.

‘Bloody hormones,’ Lucy muttered.

Picking up her peppermint tea, Lucy studied the canvas. It wasn’t that bad and she wondered if she had been too quick to jump to conclusions about the thinner mix. With renewed determination, she picked up her paintbrush and this time used gentle strokes to transform her previous dabs of paint into a smooth wash that gave some sense of light and shadow to Ralph’s features. She felt calmer, and Adam chose the perfect time to call.

‘Hello,’ she said with a soft smile.

‘I can hardly hear you,’ Adam shouted. ‘Are you in your studio? Am I disturbing you?’

Lucy took another look at the canvas. ‘No, I’ll go downstairs,’ she yelled back as she dropped her brush in a jar of thinner so it wouldn’t dry out.

With her phone cradled against her shoulder, Lucy held her mug in one hand and used the other to grasp the handrail as she made her way down the staircase to the door on the first-floor landing. The entrance to her studio fitted seamlessly in with the rest of the house and Lucy reminded herself that she had reason to be proud of her accomplishments.

It had been hard graft, project-managing the building work and the wedding at the same time, but she had done it without so much as a mishap. Of the two, the wedding had been the simplest because she and Adam had chosen to marry on a beach in Santorini with only their mums in attendance. Adam’s boss had insisted on hosting a party for them on their return but it had been deliberately low-key because their budget had been tight. Adam had already invested all his money in the house, and most of Lucy’s savings – or at least the money her mum had saved up through the years on her behalf – had been earmarked for the loft conversion. They hadn’t wanted a big fuss anyway. They had each other and that was what marriage was all about as far as they were concerned.

Reaching the ground floor where the staircase split the house in two, Lucy said, ‘Can you hear me now?’

‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Do you need to make a drink?’

‘No, I’ve got one, but I might grab a biscuit unless you’re going to tell me I’m fat again,’ she said, turning right. Her bare feet slapped against the ice-cold porcelain tiles as she crossed the kitchen diner in search of sustenance. If she had been around when Adam had refitted the kitchen, she would have insisted on installing underfloor heating but at least the room itself was warm. In fact, it grew distinctly toasty as she passed the gas hob.

‘I would never call you fat and you know it,’ Adam said. ‘A bit bumpy around the middle maybe …’ He was expecting a retort but was met with silence. ‘Lucy?’

She was staring at a flickering blue circle. One of the burners had been left on its lowest setting. ‘Sorry, what?’ she asked as she quickly extinguished the flame.

‘Are you OK?’

Lucy considered whether or not to tell Adam. She certainly wasn’t going to mention the mix-up with the thinner because, the more she thought about it, the more likely it was that she had simply been doubting herself. Leaving the gas on, however, was irrefutably her fault. She had made breakfast hours ago and although she had eaten her porridge slouched in front of the TV, she had returned to the kitchen to wash up, and once more to make her peppermint tea. She had been distracted by the storm and her reluctance to set to work, but it was no excuse. Taking a sip of her tepid tea, she said. ‘I left a burner on.’

‘On the hob?’

‘It must have been when I made breakfast. Unless …’ she added as a thought occurred. ‘You didn’t use the hob this morning, did you?’

‘Did you see the gas lit when you made your porridge?’

‘There’s no need to snap. I only left it on for ten minutes.’

In the silence that followed, Lucy sensed Adam judging her and her anger began to build. She knew it wasn’t his fault but if he dared suggest she could have burnt the house down, or that the flame could have flickered out and sparked an explosion, there was a good chance she was going to scream.

‘Lucy,’ he said at last. ‘You have to be more careful.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’

‘OK, sorry, forget about it,’ he said as kindly as he could, but Lucy took offence anyway.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she scoffed. ‘Forgetting is the one thing you can count on with me.’

No longer feeling hungry, Lucy left her mug on the counter and headed to the far end of the kitchen. The large patio doors looked out on to a simple courtyard with a scattering of pots and planters. Her eyes settled on the winter-bare fruit shrubs she had failed to nurture during the summer, which were now being bullied by gale-force winds.

West Kirby was on the exposed western tip of the Wirral, a peninsula pinched between the fingers of the Dee and Mersey estuaries, and there was little to stop the storm sweeping in from the Irish Sea. Lucy felt its force as a sheet of rain hit the patio doors, causing her to slump down on to a chair at the dining table.

‘I take it you slept in this morning?’ Adam asked with a yawn. He was taking Lucy’s snappishness in his stride and his patience was irritating.

‘Only ’til about eight,’ she said. It had been nearer nine, which still wasn’t bad for someone who had refused to rise before midday in her misspent youth.

‘I wish I could have stayed there with you, but then again, your fidgeting is getting worse. I hardly slept a wink last night.’

‘Is that why you got up so early?’ she asked as she trailed a finger across the surface of the table, leaving a faint mark in a layer of fine dust that had no right to be there.

Lucy hated the monotony of housework. She and Adam shared their duties but he was a little more particular and she felt guilty whenever he came home after a long day and picked up the chores she never seemed able to finish. She didn’t remember housework being this hard when she lived with her mum, but that was probably because her mum had done most of it.

Adam groaned and she imagined him stretching his spine. ‘I needed to make an early start anyway. I thought I’d cracked it with this new user interface but unless there’s some miracle breakthrough in the next few hours, I’ll have to go to Manchester tomorrow to work on site,’ he said, his tone giving away his disappointment and his lethargy. He worked for a software company thirty miles away in Daresbury and while he loved his job when it was going right, dealing with clients and their ever-changing needs was the bane of his life.

‘I suppose I shouldn’t keep you then,’ she said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. She wasn’t ready to make another attack on her painting and she sensed Adam was in no rush to get back to his modules and macros either.

‘Are you going to have another stab at Ralph?’

That’s what I was doing when you phoned,’ Lucy said as she pulled out a second chair to rest her feet. Arching her back, she unbuttoned her shirt to reveal her white lace briefs and the gentle rise of her stomach punctuated by a belly button that had recently popped out. ‘I’ve spent an hour getting nowhere when I would have been better off catching up on housework.’

‘But I thought you’d just had breakfast?’

Lucy went to open her mouth to correct him but she knew why he was confused. She had lied about how long she had left the gas on. ‘What is this, Adam? Since when did I need to report all my movements to you?’ she asked, knowing the answer was an obvious one.

‘How long did you leave the gas burning, Lucy?’ Adam asked, his gentle tone fuelling her anger.

As she hauled her legs off the chair to straighten up, Lucy’s feet thumped hard enough against the porcelain tiles to sting her heels. ‘I don’t know, an hour or two. Does it matter? Nothing happened.’

‘Thank goodness it didn’t, but why bother lying about it? If you could stop getting so wound up over these things, you’d relax more and maybe then you’d make fewer mistakes.’

‘I am relaxed!’ Lucy said as her finger drew sharp lines through the dust on the table to form two words in capital letters. There were a lot of ‘F’s.

When Adam didn’t respond, it was as if he could read what his wife had written. She hung her head in her hands and as she leant over the table, she felt a strange fluttering in her stomach – except it wasn’t in her stomach, but a spot lower down. It was the first time she had felt her baby move and for all Lucy knew, her daughter’s movements were signs of distress caused by her mother’s roiling emotions.

She wanted desperately to say something to Adam. Only the night before, he had splayed his hand across her stomach, impatient to feel a part of what had been exclusively her experiences of pregnancy so far. They needed to share this special moment together, but now was not the right time.

Taking a deep breath, Lucy reminded herself that none of this was Adam’s fault. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s OK. Maybe I’m the one who needs to up my game. I could juggle my schedule and try to work from home more often.’

‘Except when you have to go to Manchester,’ she reminded him, proof that her short-term memory didn’t always misfire.

‘Isn’t it time you started to take things easy?’ he tried. ‘You could always stop taking commissions for a while. It’s not like you haven’t been slowing down already and I’m sure we could manage without your income.’

‘Painting isn’t simply a job, it’s my passion. I can’t not paint.’

‘Then paint for pleasure,’ Adam persisted as if he could solve her like one of his programs. ‘Let me worry about the bills. Please think about it, Lucy. Why don’t you go for a walk along the beach and clear your head?’

Glancing towards the tall beech tree in their neighbour’s garden swaying from side to side, she said, ‘Have you seen the weather?’

‘Then go somewhere indoors, go shopping.’

‘Maybe,’ she said as a means to halt Adam’s attempts to fix her. He meant well but if he threw one more suggestion at her, she was going to explode.

‘And when you do go out,’ Adam said, his voice rising as he sensed he was getting through to her, ‘make sure you turn everything off and lock up.’

Lucy’s lips cut a thin line across her face as she stared at the words written in the dust. She could feel them forming on her tongue and cut the call dead before they spilled out.

3

Lucy huddled against the corner of the large L-shaped sofa that took up most of the space in the living room. The black leather upholstery complemented the monotone colour scheme, as did the sixty-inch TV screen dominating one wall. With the exception of a couple of paintings Lucy had hung up to soften the sharp edges of Adam’s choice of décor, the entire house bore the hallmarks of a bachelor pad, although Lucy was grateful that no previous love had stamped her mark on the place before her.

There had been only one significant other in Adam’s life prior to Lucy, but Rosie had never moved in, which had been a lucky escape by all accounts. She had been a work colleague and had used Adam to rise up the career ladder by taking credit for his work and apportioning blame to everyone else when she messed up. Something had gone disastrously wrong and Adam had been forced to move jobs, but he had put his past mistakes behind him and Lucy was determined not to be the next.

Adam was different from the other men she had dated, and there had been quite a few. She had flitted from one casual affair to the next, avoiding commitment and responsibility as best she could. When Adam came along, the eight-year age difference had felt pronounced and she had been embarrassed by her immaturity. She had been a wild thing and he had tamed her, or so Adam told her. He was probably right, although Lucy was beginning to wonder if she had accepted the role of Adam’s wife under false pretences. She couldn’t be trusted to take care of herself or the house, and she didn’t know how she was going to look after a baby.

The transition might have been easier if she lived closer to her mum, but Lucy was getting used to life on the Wirral. She loved that it was a five-minute stroll to the beach, although that proposition had not been a tempting one today despite Adam’s helpful suggestion.

When she heard the front door opening, Lucy lifted her book higher to obscure her face. She hadn’t spoken to Adam since hanging up on him, nor had she replied to his text messages. He had apologized and she wished he hadn’t. She was the one acting like a child.

When the house fell silent, Lucy realized Adam had gone straight into the kitchen, confirmed a moment later when she heard the oven door slam. Adam had offered to pick up some food from Marks and Spencer on his way home and had asked her what she fancied. She wondered if he had responded to her radio silence by choosing his favourite cuisine, which was Chinese, or opting for hers. Her mouth watered at the thought of garlic dough balls; one of her many cravings in recent months.

Adam was head chef and they didn’t often resort to ready meals but she presumed he had thought his time would be better spent shoring up his wife’s fragile ego while keeping a safe distance from the offending gas hob. As the seconds ticked by, however, Lucy began to fear that he didn’t want to speak to her at all. She put down her book and tucked her knees as close to her chin as her bump would allow.

Rather than return to her studio after the argument, Lucy had spent the afternoon soaking in the bath and feeling sorry for herself. She had taken time on her make-up, which was perfectly understated, and had teased her damp mane into copper coils. She wore leggings and a sloppy jumper to give the illusion of vulnerability, but that feeling became unpleasantly real as she waited for Adam to appear.

Lucy chewed her lip and stared at the door as she listened to Adam coming out of the kitchen. Her pulse quickened when his footsteps paused and for a moment she feared he had retreated upstairs, but then the door swung open. A breakfast tray appeared with a single red rose in a vase, two glasses of what looked like pink champagne but would be sparkling cordial, and a bowl of cheese puffs; another of her cravings.

When Adam stepped through the door, his expression was one of caution, as if he were approaching a wild animal. ‘I know Valentine’s Day is a week off but I feel like I should make an effort,’ he said. ‘The lasagne’s going to be a while so these are to tide you over.’

Lucy went to speak but it came out as a sob. ‘I’m such an evil cow,’ she cried. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m being so horrible to you and I don’t deserve any of this!’

Hiding her face in shame, Lucy couldn’t see Adam’s reaction but she heard him place the tray on the coffee table. The sofa sagged and a moment later, he was pulling her into his arms. She heard him take a breath to speak but she got there first.

‘Don’t you dare say nice things to me,’ she warned. ‘Tell me I’m a bitch.’

He kissed the top of her head.

When she looked up into his face, she hoped their daughter would inherit Adam’s kind eyes. They melted her heart. ‘I know you’re only trying to take care of me.’

‘And failing miserably,’ he said.

‘No, you’re not,’ she replied as she relaxed into him. ‘I shouldn’t need taking care of.’

Adam had taken off his suit jacket and tie but, despite a day in the office, Lucy could still smell the fabric conditioner on his shirt. Adam could choose to go to work in T-shirt and jeans if he wasn’t meeting clients but he liked to dress smartly. He had been wearing a formal jacket when she had first met him that fateful summer’s evening, albeit matched with chinos.