Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

“I’m not on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram, and he’s not on Facebook—or at least, I didn’t find him there if he is. I’m asking you to send him one little message, that’s all.”

  “Saying what? How are you after all these years, and are your children by any chance five and three in Hemingford Abbots as well as being seventeen and fifteen in Florida?”

  “Obviously not that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Just ‘How are you?’ would be a start.”

  Dom laughs. “I see. So this one message, the only one I needed to send a minute ago, is now ‘a start.’ Start of what? A long back-and-forth?”

  “Hopefully, yes. A chat. At some point you could say ‘Beth said she was in Hemingford Abbots the other day and saw a woman who looked exactly like Flora,’ or something. You could ask after Georgina, say, ‘Hey, I was looking at your Instagram photos and there are loads of Thomas and Emily but none of Georgina—’”

  “Whoa, hold on . . . I’m not going to message a guy I haven’t seen for twelve years, and accuse him of discriminatory parenting. Look . . .” Dom hauls himself into an upright position. “You want a definitive answer, I get that. But you’re never going to get one. There are loads of reasons—nonsinister ones—why Lewis might not put pictures of Flora and Georgina on Instagram.”

  “Such as?”

  “Maybe Georgina’s shy and doesn’t like having her photo taken, or doesn’t like the idea of pictures of her being online. Maybe Flora’s . . . I don’t know, a schoolteacher, and doesn’t want pictures of her private life online for her pupils to see. Or it’s a coincidence that means nothing: Flora and Georgina happened to be somewhere else on the days Lewis took those photos.”

  “Flora, a schoolteacher?”

  “It’s possible, Beth. We haven’t seen them for twelve years.”

  “I saw Flora yesterday,” I say quietly.

  Dom looks at me hard. “I need coffee,” he says.

  Five minutes later we’re in the kitchen: Dom leaning against the counter, me sitting at the table waiting for whatever speech he’s about to deliver. I know him so well, and can feel him preparing to say something labeled in his mind as “difficult but necessary.”

  Finally, he says, “You want me to contact Lewis in the hope that it’ll help to make sense of what you saw yesterday. I understand that, but . . . it won’t work, because there’s no sense to be made of it. Think about it. We’ve seen Thomas and Emily on Lewis’s Instagram, we know they’re teenagers, we know they’re in Delray Beach, Florida. Yes, they might divide their time between America and the UK, they might still own that house . . . but they can’t still be five and three, can they?”

  “No.”

  Dom looks relieved. “Right—and that means you can’t have seen what you thought you saw. You might have seen another woman with two different children, but you didn’t see Flora Braid with Thomas and Emily twelve years younger than we know they are.”

  “So we’re going with the ‘I had a funny turn’ theory?”

  “I mean . . . unless Flora and Lewis have had two more kids and were crazy enough to name them after their two oldest kids. Does that seem likely to you? It’d explain the strong resemblance, but . . . no.”

  Five children: Thomas, Emily, Georgina, Thomas and Emily. No. That’s not the explanation. Lewis might be weird, but he’s not that weird.

  “Beth, there’s no point in contacting Lewis Braid. Seriously. The only way he could give you the closure you want is if he says, ‘Oh, yeah, my kids exist in two different time streams. They’re simultaneously teenagers and toddlers.’ Since we know he’s not going to say that, because it’s factually and scientifically impossible . . .” Dom shrugs and takes a sip of his coffee. “I’ve got a better idea. We can sort this out without any help from Loony Lewis.”

  “How?”

  “By going back to Hemingford Abbots.”

  “What? Really?” My mood lifts a little. The only thing I can’t face is the prospect of doing nothing at all, which was what I expected Dom to suggest: do nothing, forget about it, assume I imagined the whole thing.

  “Really,” he says. “It’s Sunday, neither of us is working. Let’s do it, and draw a line under this today. My guess is, there’s a brunette woman who looks superficially like Flora living in that house, and she’s got two small kids. If you see them again, you’ll realize . . . what must have happened.”

  “I’m up for it if you are.” Is it possible that, a few hours from now, I’ll be saying, “I can’t believe I was so certain that three complete strangers were Flora, Thomas and Emily”? If that happens, what should I do? Go to the doctor and get my brain tested? I’m not sure which is worse: seeing the impossible and being the only person who knows it’s real, or not being able to trust my own senses.

  “What about the kids? Our kids,” I clarify.

  Dom pulls his phone out of his bathrobe pocket and starts tapping out a message. “Zan’s got her key. I’ll tell Ben to make sure she’s home before he comes back.”

  While Dom has a shower, I go back to his computer, back to Facebook. Is it possible that the Braids aren’t on here at all, any of them? It seems they’re really not. Maybe they were until recently. I heard something on the radio a few weeks ago about people deleting their Facebook accounts because they objected to something or other that the company had done.

  I go from Facebook back to Lewis’s Instagram to check that he hasn’t posted anything new in the past few hours. He hasn’t. I go to his Twitter page: no new posts there either.

  I notice something that I didn’t spot last night: a row of numbers underneath the company-birthday-celebration banner-photo. Lewis’s “Following” number is 432. I click on it, not thinking it will work the way I want it to. Surely I won’t be allowed to see who Lewis is following if I’m not one of his Twitter friends or whatever it’s called.

  Unbelievably, there seems to be no such restriction. The screen fills with names, and small pictures of smiling faces. My heart starts to pound. If any other Braid family members have Twitter accounts . . .

  I scroll through as fast as I can. Grinning man, grinning man, cartoon character, business logo, business logo, woman in sunglasses, baseball team . . .

  I force myself to slow down. I can’t afford to miss any account that might be Flora or one of the children.

  After a minute or so of doing this, my right hand starts to ache. I take a break to release a couple of trigger points with my left—one of the useful things about being a massage therapist is knowing exactly where to press, on the parts of my body that I can reach.

  Once I’ve smoothed the ache away, I scroll down again and almost immediately find what I’m looking for. Thomas Braid is on Twitter. He’s @tomtbraid2002. The “t,” I remember suddenly, is for Tillotson—his middle name and Flora’s surname before she married Lewis.

  2002. Thomas’s birth year. Making him seventeen now.

  He has fewer followers than his father—only twenty-seven. He also hasn’t put anything up on his page since June last year, when he reposted something from someone called “Bav” saying, “If you hear them chat shit about me, remember there will have been a time I was good to those goons.”

  A lot of Thomas’s followers look similar to him: long-haired surfer types. Oh—and here’s Emily Braid, who of course follows her brother. I click on the little picture of her and her page appears. I read her biographical blurb, and . . . wait. Does this mean . . .

  My heart staggers an irregular beat, like a dancer out of time with the music.

  “Soulmate of @ScobyJoe, sister of @tomtbraid2002, daughter of @VersaNovaLewB #LoveFlorida #sunshine #goodvibetribe.” Followed by three small red hearts.

  No mention of Georgina or Flora.

  All right, so they’re not Twitter users. That’s the obvious answer. She’s only included the important people in her life who have “@” names on this site. That makes sense.

  But Flora and Georgina are also the only two family mem
bers missing from Lewis’s Instagram. So . . . they don’t do Twitter, and they don’t like having their photographs taken?

  I read through Emily Braid’s Twitter posts. She’s done many more than Thomas. They’re generally dull: “Can’t wait for Friday!” and “Need to have my lashes done again!” above a photograph of the top half of her face that is presumably meant to reveal the woeful state of her eyelashes. They look fine to me.

  Dom appears behind me, showered and dressed. “All sorted on the Ben and Zan front. Shall we go?” He squints at the screen. “What are you doing? Is that Emily Braid’s timeline?”

  “It’s her Twitter.”

  “Same thing.”

  There’s no point drawing his attention to the missing mother and sister in her blurb about herself. I know what he’d say; I’ve just said it to myself.

  And I’m not convinced. Irrational though it may be, I’m increasingly certain that something must be wrong in the Braid family.

  I turn to face Dominic. “Please answer the question I’m about to ask you honestly, without trying to please me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you remember Georgina Braid? When I mentioned her yesterday, you’d forgotten all about her.”

  “There’s not much to remember. She was a tiny sprog the only time I met her.”

  “But you remember her? You remember them all coming around, and Georgina being there—a baby? Flora carried her in and rocked her in her car seat, in our living room.”

  “I don’t remember the car seat or the rocking, but, yeah, I remember the baby.”

  Good. That means I didn’t imagine Georgina Braid and I don’t need to go and look at the photograph I cut up all those years ago. The thought of holding the pieces in my hands makes me feel slightly nauseous.

  “Ready?” Dom says, his voice full of confidence. He’s eager to get going, sure we’ll be back from Hemingford Abbots before lunchtime, having sorted out this mess once and for all.

  I don’t see how he can be right, but I hope he is.

  * * *

  Wyddial Lane hasn’t changed. But then, why would it?

  We’re in Dom’s car, not mine, parked across the road from Newnham House. Yesterday’s heat has disappeared and it’s cool and damp, the sky as gray as wet slate.

  “Right.” Dom claps his hands together. “Are we doing this, or what?”

  There’s something I’ve been trying not to say for a while now. I decided I wasn’t going to ask him. I still think I shouldn’t, but I know I’ll blurt it out eventually, so I might as well get it over with. “Do you really not remember why it ended?”

  “Why what ended?”

  “Our friendship with the Braids.”

  “Did Lewis decide we weren’t bling enough, once he’d inherited all that money?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Beth, I’ve no idea. I don’t think that. You’re right, I don’t know why we stopped seeing them. I might have known once, but I’ve forgotten.” He says all this in a God-help-us tone, as if it’s petty to care why a long friendship suddenly ended.

  “Money had nothing to do with it,” I tell him. “It was because of Georgina.”

  Chimpy. It’s the kind of nickname you might give your youngest child . . . but then why did talking to Georgina, if it was her, make Flora cry? Is the answer to that question something to do with Georgina being nowhere in evidence on Lewis’s Instagram? Is she, for some reason, a source of misery to both her parents?

  “Who’s Georgina?” Dom chuckles. “Just kidding.”

  “For God’s sake, Dom.”

  “Beth, lighten up. And also . . . focus. We’re here to investigate number 16, not to analyze the breakdown of our friendship with the Braids or discuss the miscarriage.”

  “The miscarriage?” Not a word I was expecting to hear today. “You mean my miscarriage?”

  “Yeah. Should I not have mentioned it? You said the friendship ended because of Georgina. I thought you were implying that Flora having a third child just after you lost a baby . . . I guess I was wrong.”

  “I was nine weeks pregnant. I didn’t think of it as losing a baby. Do you really think I’d allow my closest friendship to end for such a stupid reason—my jealousy because Flora had successfully had a third child when I’d failed? Am I that pathetic?”

  “No, I . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “I wasn’t jealous. Not at all.”

  “I believe you. But then what did you mean—” He breaks off. “Look, shall we do what we came here to do? When Captain Cook arrived at Botany Bay after sailing all the way from England, did he disembark and explore the terrain or did he sit in his boat, chatting about his friends’ babies?”

  I couldn’t know less about Captain Cook if I tried, but I play along. “The first, I’m guessing. Who’s going to do the talking, assuming someone’s home?”

  Will he ask me later, or forget about it, content never to know in what way Georgina Braid caused the end of my friendship with Flora?

  “What if the door opens and Lewis is standing there?” I ask.

  “That won’t happen, because Lewis lives in Delray Beach, Florida, but if it does—if he still owns this house too, and he happens to be in it today—I’ll say, ‘Hi, Lewis. Long time no see. Would you mind showing me your secret stash of tiny cloned children?’”

  Soon Dom and I are both laughing uncontrollably. It’s probably nerves. We’re about to do something a lot of people would never dream of doing.

  Once we’ve pulled ourselves together, we get out of the car and walk briskly across Wyddial Lane toward the large wooden gates of number 16. Dom presses one of the illuminated buttons on the intercom. We stand and wait.

  Nothing.

  “Fuck,” I say. “They’re out.”

  “Then we wait,” says Dom.

  “How long?” Please say, “All day.”

  “Half an hour?”

  It’s not long enough. I want to wait until these gates open, however long it takes.

  “Maybe an hour,” Dom concedes. “Not longer, surely? They might have set off on a family holiday last night and not be due back for a week. Why don’t we go for a walk and come back in a bit? It’s better than just standing here.”

  “No. If we go anywhere, we might miss them. What about the neighbors? We could try them. The people at numbers 14 and 18 will know the name of the family at number 16. I bet everyone knows everyone on this street. It’s a private road, so the council don’t deal with it—and yet look how well maintained it is.”

  “Tarmac smoother than a baby’s ass,” Dom agrees.

  “That means the neighbors will have regular meetings, and a residents’ committee, coffee mornings . . . It’s that kind of street.”

  “I know some of our neighbors’ names, but I wouldn’t give them out to a pair of strangers who turned up unannounced and said, ‘Please tell me who lives next door.’ I’d say something bland like, ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly divulge . . .’ or words to that effect. Which is what numbers 14 and 18 will say if we ask them.”

  “It’s worth a try. We’ve come all this way. I’m not going home with nothing.”

  “Beth, we might have to.”

  I shake my head.

  “All right, if you want to do it, let’s do it,” Dom says wearily. “I suppose the worst they can say is no. Or they might not be home.”

  I don’t care. I’m waiting here on Wyddial Lane until I find someone who can answer my questions. I don’t care if I’m being obsessive. Something inexplicable has happened, and I want to know why. Dom would be exactly the same if it had happened to him, if he knew he’d seen something he couldn’t possibly have seen.

  “I’m going to tell the truth,” I say.

  “To?”

  “Any neighbors I talk to. Everyone. Until we got here, I was thinking I’d invent some story, but it’s better to be upfront. Don’t say anything, okay? Let me do the talking.”

  I head
for number 14 and press the buzzer on the intercom next to the wrought-iron gates. Immediately, there’s movement.

  “Dom, look.”

  “At what?”

  I point through the gates’ metal bars. “The front door’s opening.”

  5

  “No, it isn’t,” says Dom.

  “It is. Just very slowly. Wait. Now it’s stopped. It opened a tiny bit. Look, now it’s moving again.”

  The door edges farther open but I can’t see anybody, and no one comes out of the house.

  Number 14 is a completely different kind of house from number 16: mock-Tudor, black and white lines all over it in a diamonds-within-squares pattern that would make my eyes ache if I looked at it for too long. There’s a round pond in the middle of a turning circle in front of the house, with a squat little water fountain at the center of it.

  “The door looks closed to me,” Dom says.

  “It’s opening. I think someone’s spying on us from inside.”

  As I say this, the front door of 14 Wyddial Lane closes with a click.

  “Did you hear that?” I say. “Whoever’s in there decided they didn’t want to talk to us.”

  Dom nods. “You were right. Come on, let’s try number 18.”

  “Wait. Look.” Number 14’s door is opening again. Slowly, it moves until it’s all the way open. A woman emerges from the house: midsixties, short gray hair, large pearl earrings, beige trousers with sharp creases ironed into them. A white blouse with a fussy, flouncy bit at the top that looks like an attached scarf. Pinned to this is a coral-pink and white cameo brooch.

  She approaches slowly, as if hoping to work out who Dominic and I are before she reaches us. Eventually she arrives at the gate, which she doesn’t open.

  “Is everything all right?” she asks me sharply.

  This throws me. “Yes, thanks.”

  “I heard an argument. Raised voices.”

  It was hardly an argument, but I’m not going to quibble. “Yes, that was us, but we’re fine, thank you. I wanted to—”

  “If this gentleman’s bothering you, I can summon help.” Keeping her eyes on me, she nods at Dominic.

  “Everything’s fine, honestly. He’s my husband.”