Free The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah Page A

grievances. She would have to start going to the supermarket if she wanted to avoid being buttonholed by the woman. It was a shame; Spilling Post Office was also a shop—a rather efficient one, Charlie thought. It was small, L-shaped and sold one variety of everything she needed, so she didn’t have to waste time choosing between rows of the same thing. Sliced white bread and mild cheddar could be found alongside more unexpected items: tinned pickled octopus, pheasant pâté. And it was on Charlie’s route home from work. All she had to do was pull in by the side of the road, get out of her car, and the door of the post office was right in front of her. It couldn’t have been more convenient. Charlie had started to base her day-to-day planning around what she knew Phyllis stocked: Cheerios for breakfast, a bottle of Gordon’s gin and a box of Guylian chocolates as birthday presents for her sister Olivia. For a bath, Radox Milk and Honey—the only bath oil Phyllis sold. It lived beside the freezer cabinet, on the third shelf down, between Colgate Total toothpaste and Always extra-long sanitary towels with wings.
    ‘I’ll make sure PC Meakin returns any post that comes to us by mistake,’ Charlie promised, once Phyllis’s rant had ground to a halt.
    ‘Well, it’s no good returning it to me, is it? It wants posting in a proper box, like the one outside.’
    ‘Anything with a stamp and an address on it that’s clearly not for us, we’ll undertake to send on to its rightful owner.’ Charlie didn’t know how to sound more reassuring. She had no grander, more impressive promises up her sleeve, so she hoped Phyllis would be content with this one.
    But the post office manager was not a woman to whom contentment came easily. ‘You’re not going, are you?’ she said, as Charlie started to inch towards the door. ‘What about the lady?’
    ‘Lady?’
    ‘The one who came in this morning. She reckons there’s a letter to her boyfriend in there, in your box. No one’s been to empty it for days, and she wants her letter. I turned round and said to her, “Leave it to me, love. I’ll make sure that superintendent comes and gets your letter out for you. This mess is all his fault in the first place!” ’
    Charlie swallowed a sigh. Why didn’t Phyllis’s lady phone her boyfriend? Or e-mail him? Or put a brick through his window, depending on the nature of the message she wanted to convey. ‘I’ll make sure PC Meakin comes as soon as he can.’
    ‘Why can’t you open the box?’ said Phyllis. ‘I thought you said you were a sergeant.’
    ‘I don’t have the key.’ Charlie decided to risk being honest. ‘Look, this postbox isn’t really my responsibility. I only offered to come because Robbie Meakin’s off on a week’s paternity leave and . . . well, I needed to do my shopping.’
    ‘I’ve got the key,’ said Phyllis, a triumphant gleam in her eye. ‘I keep it here behind the counter. But I’m not allowed to open the box. A police officer has to open it.’
    Charlie could no longer hold her two bulging carrier bags. She lowered them to the floor gently to avoid breaking the eggs and lightbulbs. So Phyllis had the key. Why did she have to be so irritatingly law-abiding? She could easily have opened the box, fished out the letter to the boyfriend and left the rest of the contents untouched. Why was she bothering Charlie when she could have dealt with it herself?
    And if Phyllis hadn’t been such a stickler for the rules . . . There would be nothing to stop a less scrupulous person having a nosey in the box whenever they fancied, perhaps even stealing letters when the police weren’t around—which, let’s face it, was most of the time. Whose ludicrous idea was it to leave the key at the post office? Charlie would have liked to turn round and say a few things to that person.
    She rubbed her sore hands while Phyllis went to fetch the key. Her fingers were numb; the handles of the carrier bags had cut