Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  “That, I’m afraid, is no guarantee of anything,” the woman says sternly.

  I’m not sure how to reply. “There’s no problem, really.”

  “What can I do for you, then, if you don’t need help?”

  “My name’s Beth Leeson,” I tell her. “This is going to sound a bit weird. I was here yesterday, and—”

  “I know you were.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. You parked your car over there, as you have today, except it was a different car. You had a boy with you. Then you drove away, and returned a short while later without the boy.”

  I smile at her. “You’re very observant.”

  “One needs to be.”

  “That was my son, Ben. I dropped him off at his football match and then I came back.”

  “What business do you have on Wyddial Lane?”

  “None, probably. That’s what I’m hoping you can help me with. I had some friends who lived next door, at number 16, a few years ago. Lewis and Flora Braid.”

  “Before my time. When did they leave? I’ve only been here three years.”

  “I’m not exactly sure. But . . . I’m assuming you know the names of the people who live in the house now?”

  Her eyes narrow. “I do, yes.”

  “Are their names Lewis and Flora Braid?”

  “No. Didn’t you just tell me that your friends have moved away?”

  “Yes. I was pretty sure they had, but I wanted to check.”

  “Well, now you’ve checked. A different family lives in the house now. No one by the name of Braid.”

  “Thank you,” says Dom. “That’s incredibly helpful to know.”

  She gives him a curt nod.

  “Come on, Beth.”

  “Hold on. Would you mind telling me the name of the family that lives at number 16 now?” I ask the woman.

  “I think I would, yes. I wouldn’t appreciate it if they gave my name to complete strangers. Why do you care what they’re called? I thought it was your friends the Braids you were interested in.”

  “It is,” says Dom. “Thank you. Sorry for bothering you.”

  “Wait a second,” I say. “Maybe if I tell you—”

  “Beth,” says Dom forcefully. He puts his hand on my arm and tries to steer me away.

  “I’m not ready to leave yet,” I snap at him. Great. Now the woman behind the gate will be confirmed in her suspicion that he’s a tyrannical wife beater.

  “They’re called Cater,” she says unexpectedly. “Kevin and Jeanette Cater.”

  “Thank you so much. Do they have young children? Is one of them known as Chimp, or Chimpy?”

  The woman looks affronted. She takes a step back.

  “Why on earth would you ask me that?”

  “Does either of them drive a silver Range Rover?”

  “May I ask what is going on here?” She stares at me with undisguised suspicion. “This is starting to feel more than a little irregular. A great deal more is involved, I suspect, than a desire to know if an old friend is still in the same house.”

  “Yes. You’re right.” If I want more information from her, I’m going to have to tell her. “My friends—the Braids—are supposed to have moved away. To America. But when I was here yesterday morning, I saw a silver Range Rover drive up and go in through the gates. A woman and two kids got out, and . . . they were my friend and her two oldest children. They were the Braids. I . . . I recognized them.”

  The woman shakes her head. “I’m afraid your story doesn’t add up, Mrs. . . .”

  “Beth Leeson. You can call me Beth.”

  “My name is Marilyn Oxley.” She says this as if she thinks it should make a difference to what happens next. “If you knew your friends had moved away, why on earth would you come and park outside their former home? Hmm?”

  “I didn’t know at that point.”

  “The silver Range Rover you saw is Jeanette Cater’s car.”

  I swallow hard.

  “What’s more, I heard a voice that I recognized as the voice of Mrs. Cater. As you can imagine, I know her voice rather well, from living next door to her. Now, if you’re telling me that your friend Mrs. Braid got out of the car with her two children, why on earth didn’t you rush over and say hello? You didn’t do that, did you? You waited and you watched, while Mrs. Cater got out of her car and spoke to somebody on the telephone. I saw you, from my bedroom window.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “I was. It’s not common for cars to appear on our street and for nobody to get out of them. We residents of Wyddial Lane take our home security seriously. I decided your behavior was suspicious, so, yes, I watched you until you left.”

  “It’s not at all suspicious once you know why,” I tell her. “If I could maybe . . .” Stop it. You can’t invite yourself into her house. “If we can talk properly, I’ll tell you the whole story. Flora Braid and I were once best friends, but we’re not anymore.”

  “I think I’ve heard enough,” says Marilyn Oxley. “You’d better be on your way. I’ve told you who lives next door, against my better judgment. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”

  “Please, just one more thing. You’ve been so helpful. If you could tell me . . . is Jeanette Cater around five foot six, with wavy, dark brown, shoulder-length hair?”

  A long, tense pause follows. Then, “Yes, that is an accurate description of Mrs. Cater. Good-bye, Mrs. Leeson.”

  “Does she have two children, about five and three?”

  She must have heard me, but she keeps walking in the opposite direction.

  “Thomas and Emily?” I call after her.

  She stops. Turns to face me. Her expression makes me gasp. She didn’t look this angry or disgusted a moment ago.

  “Never come back to Wyddial Lane again,” she says. “If I see you here, I shall call the police.”

  She walks briskly back to her house.

  “Wait . . .” I whisper.

  The front door of number 14 slams shut.

  * * *

  “I’ll be the judge of this.” Zannah flops down on the sofa next to me. She’s wearing pajamas again—different ones: white, dotted with pink and green watermelons. Her hair is wet, her face pink and glowing. She smells as if she’s spent the last few hours marinating herself in some sort of rose and lemon mixture.

  “The judge of what?” says Dom.

  “Your and Mum’s stupid argument.”

  “Not an argument,” I say. “A discussion.”

  It’s one that’s been in progress ever since I typed the names Kevin and Jeanette Cater into Google’s search box several hours ago. LinkedIn soon offered me a Kevin Cater who worked for a company called CEMA Technologies in Cambridge between 1997 and 2008. In 2008, Kevin left CEMA and went to work for a different company, also in Cambridge, that went bankrupt two years later. We could find nothing online about what he did after that.

  Both Lewis and Flora Braid used to work for CEMA Technologies. Dom has been trying to persuade me that this is pure coincidence.

  There were a few Jeanette Caters in our search results, but none who could conceivably be the woman living at Newnham House. A search for the name “Cater” along with the Wyddial Lane address yielded nothing.

  “I agree with Mum,” Zannah says. If she’s able to take a side, she must have been eavesdropping. Again. “It’s too big a coincidence. It’s another link between the new owners of the house and the old: first Mum sees the Braids outside the Caters’ house when they’re supposed to have moved to Florida, then it turns out Lewis and Flora and this Kevin guy all worked together. That’s weird. Like, significant weird.”

  “They didn’t necessarily work together,” says Dom. “They worked for the same company.”

  “At the same time,” I mutter.

  “All three of them were Cambridge-based science-and-tech types—in 1997 there weren’t as many of those kinds of companies in Cambridge as there are now.”

  “Dad, how of
ten have you bought a house from someone you used to work with? Never, right?”

  “Zannah, mock all you like, but in real life there are plenty of coincidences. Did Mum tell you what happened when we went to Hemingford Abbots this morning?”

  “Yup. And the Twitter and Instagram stuff from last night—which is also just too messed up. If I ever have three kids, there’s no way I’ll put photos of only two of them on my Instagram. I think something freaky’s going on.”

  “So do I. I’m sure of it.” I have the confidence to say this out loud, now that my brave daughter has said it first.

  “I’ve no idea what, though. I can tell you what Murad and Ben think, if you like?”

  “You’ve told them? Zan!”

  “Was I not supposed to? You didn’t say it was a secret. Why shouldn’t they know? Ben’s your son and Murad’s your future son-in-law.” As an afterthought, she mutters, “Unless he bails on me, which he’d better not.”

  It seems my daughter is unofficially engaged. I wonder if she’s ever going to tell us more formally.

  “When did you tell him? You haven’t seen him since I told you.”

  Zan rolls her eyes. “I communicated with him using my electronic device, Mother. Relax. He’s not going to tell anyone.”

  Dom says, “Shouldn’t you be revising? Your GCSEs start in a month.”

  I wait for Zannah to blow up, but instead she says with a knowing weariness, “Ugh, Dad. Yeah, I should be doing a lot of things,” as if he couldn’t possibly imagine the full horror of everything in her life that’s getting neglected at the moment.

  She’s right—he can’t. I can, though. I never see her do any homework. Whenever I walk into her bedroom, I find it full of old plastic water and Diet Coke bottles, bowls of congealing cereal, used makeup pads covered in patches of beige foundation, false painted nails, torn pairs of tights. It takes me at least an hour to sort out the mess each time and make the room look nice again.

  When I was a child, I didn’t need to tidy my room. Not once. It never got messy. Tidiness was a house rule, one of the most important to my retired navy officer father. I would never have dreamed of leaving a discarded pair of tights on the floor overnight; I’d been trained to believe it wasn’t a possibility.

  Dom and I have left it too late to introduce a strict tidiness policy with Zannah and Ben, and I’m not sure I’d want to. I look at their lives and feel instinctively that they’re much harder than mine was at their age. They both complain about stress in a way that I never did. Their friends are more troubled and difficult; their school is full of self-harmers, drug takers and kids with a whole range of conditions I hadn’t heard of until I was at least thirty. I’m pretty sure Zan and Ben aren’t being taught properly, even in the lessons that aren’t sabotaged by out-of-control behavior from the most chaotic students.

  I didn’t love school as a teenager, but I didn’t hate it either—not the way Zannah and Ben hate Bankside Park. And I don’t remember resenting my teachers anywhere near as much as I resent theirs for the way they gleefully dish out detentions to anyone who doesn’t hand in their homework on time, while at the same time marking and returning only a tiny fraction of the work their pupils submit. Neither Zannah nor Ben has ever had a piece of English homework returned with a mark or a comment from a teacher on it—not once since they started secondary school. I’ve talked to the head about it several times. He makes soothing noises, but nothing ever changes.

  “What do Murad and Ben think?” I ask Zan.

  “About the Caters and the Braids?”

  This throws me a little. The Caters and the Braids. As if they’re a kind of foursome.

  “About what I saw. Or what I think I saw.”

  “They both think Jeanette Cater is Flora Braid—same person, new name.”

  “Why would she change her name?” Dom asks.

  “Dad, I’m not psychic. But it’d explain Mum being sure she saw Flora, and the old woman saying she heard the voice of Jeanette.”

  “Hold on. No.” Dom paces up and down the room. “That particular neighbor hasn’t lived on Wyddial Lane for very long, but others must have been there longer. They’d have noticed if Flora Braid suddenly changed her name to Jeanette Cater.”

  “Maybe they did notice,” I say. “We don’t know that they didn’t.”

  “Murad thinks it’s too much of a coincidence for both the Caters and the Braids to have kids called Thomas and Emily.” Zannah picks up the remote control, turns on the TV and immediately mutes it. She and Ben always do this; I’ve no idea why.

  “Right,” says Dom. “So, he thinks they’re the same two kids, then? Do they belong to the Caters or the Braids? If the latter, how does he explain their failure to get taller or older, despite the passing of twelve years? And the fact that they’re also teenagers living in Florida?”

  “He can’t explain any of that, and neither can you,” Zannah fires back triumphantly.

  “I think I might be able to. We know a lot more than we did yesterday. Jeanette Cater is the same physical type as Flora Braid, with the same hair color and style.” Dom looks at me. “The car you saw her get out of is Jeanette Cater’s car, according to her neighbor. And you saw her outside a house that you believed, at the time, belonged to Flora. So . . . here’s my best guess: the Caters have two young children. They might be called Thomas and Emily—”

  “No,” Zan talks over him. “Another huge coincidence? No way.”

  “I agree, it’s unlikely. So maybe one of them’s called Thomas and the other’s called something else.” He’s making it up as he goes along. “Superficially, they look like Thomas and Emily Braid did when they were little . . .”

  “So did I imagine hearing Flora’s voice, then?” I ask him. “Did I imagine recognizing her face, and hearing her, clearly, call them Thomas and Emily? You saw and heard what happened when I asked Marilyn Oxley about the Caters’ children. How do you explain that?”

  “What happened?” Zannah asks.

  “Her whole demeanor changed. She went from restrained and suspicious to . . . full-on contempt, threatening me with the police.”

  “She probably thought you were a pair of pedos,” says Zannah. “Lurking outside the house, asking weird questions about little kids.”

  “Why would she think that? The natural thing for her to think at that point is that I’m having trouble accepting that I got it so wrong. I’ve already asked her if Jeanette has dark wavy hair and a silver Range Rover—two of the things I saw, two identifying details. The logical next thing for me to ask about is the only other thing I saw: the two children.”

  “But you said she also assumed, based on nothing, that Dad was a wife beater. So she’s not logical. ‘Yes, great point, Zannah,’ said nobody.”

  I stand up and walk over to the window. Our house’s location is about as un-private as you can get: the village green—no walls or gates to protect us from prying eyes. There are always people out there walking dogs, parents pushing kids on the swings, people strolling past on their way to the village’s only pub, The Olde Jug.

  “Beth, Zan’s right. There’s no reason to think Marilyn Oxley’s capable of rational behavior and there’s some evidence that she isn’t. All that faffing around with her front door, as if she wasn’t sure whether to open it or not. And why the hell is she staring out of the window every second of every day? If she’s normal, I’m King Harold of Wessex.”

  “It wasn’t me asking about Jeanette Cater’s children that made her turn like that.”

  Dom and Zannah exchange a look.

  “Mum, you just said it was.”

  “Not at first. When I first asked her if Jeanette had kids of around five and three, she was already heading back toward her house, having decided the conversation was over. She heard my question and kept walking. It was when I said their names that she got angry and turned on me. I shouted after her, ‘Thomas and Emily.’ It was hearing those two names that made her flip out.”

  �
��So what do you think that means?” says Dom.

  “Wait. Does it mean . . .” Zannah narrows her eyes. “This is insane, obviously, but . . . might it mean that the two little Cater kids are called Thomas and Emily?”

  Thank goodness someone understands the way my mind works. I’m grateful for any scrap of evidence that proves I’m not losing the plot.

  “You’re going to have to fill me in,” says Dom. “Why, how, could it mean that?”

  “Think about it,” I say. “Marilyn Oxley moved to Wyddial Lane after the Braids left, so there’s no reason to think she knows any of their names. Let’s assume the Cater children are called Thomas and Emily—the two names I heard the dark-haired woman say. When I ask if those are their names, what’s Marilyn Oxley likely to think?”

  “You mean . . . she’d think you’ve just presented yourself as someone who knows nothing about the Caters, you don’t even know their last name, yet you seem to know the names of their children?”

  “Precisely. When she heard me say those names, she must have thought everything I’d told her was a lie. If I’ve been lying, and I’m suddenly revealing an interest in Thomas and Emily Cater that I’ve kept hidden until so late in the conversation . . . That’s the only way I can make sense of her police threat.”

  “But that only works if the Cater kids are called Thomas and Emily, which we agreed would be too much of a crazy coincidence.” Zannah groans. “Mum, this is doing my head in. I need answers. Can’t you go back there and—”

  “Get arrested? No.” Dom is keen to rule this out as an option.

  I’d willingly spend a night in a cell if it would get me the answers I want.

  “How about contacting the Braids in Florida?” Zannah suggests. “If they used to work with Kevin Cater, and he bought their house, there’s a chance they’ve kept in touch with him. If he’s got kids with the same names as their oldest two, they might know.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” I say. The Caters might be on Flora’s Christmas card list—the same one we were removed from after the photograph incident. “But . . . I’d have to explain how I came to know about the Caters in the first place.”

  “The Caters cannot have kids with the same names as the Braids and live in the same house, and look the same,” Zannah says. “That just can’t happen. It’s like something out of a horror film. I mean . . . one name the same, maybe, but two?”