Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  “No, they’re not,” says Kevin Cater, looking at me. “They’re Toby and Emma Cater. My children.”

  Dominic turns to me and says, “I remember quite clearly what the Braid children looked like when I knew them, and these are not their faces.”

  “I agree,” I say. “They’re not Thomas and Emily.”

  “I suppose from a distance, if you were in a car on the other side of the road . . .” Now that he believes I’ve conceded, Kevin is ready to be generous. “An easy mistake to make, maybe.”

  “Those aren’t the two children I saw. Whoever they are, I’ve never seen their faces before. Dom, did you notice anything else about that photo—anything interesting?”

  “What do you mean?” Dom’s face reddens. “Beth, come on.”

  “What? You think I’m being rude? I asked a simple question: do you notice anything else about the photo?”

  “No.”

  “Like what, exactly?” Kevin Cater snaps.

  I stare at him.

  “There’s nothing to notice, Beth,” says Dom. “It’s a photo of two children. Come on. I think we’ve taken up enough of these people’s time.” He stands up.

  Cater follows his lead. Jeanette too. I’m the only one still seated. All three of them are thinking that this will soon be over.

  “Who’s Chimpy?” I ask Kevin Cater.

  “I’ve no idea,” he says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looks at Jeanette, who shakes her head.

  “Means nothing to us,” says Kevin. “Sorry.”

  My sense is that they’re telling the truth—but only about not knowing who Chimpy is. About everything else, they’re lying. Watching them now, the way they’re rearranging themselves, getting into position for the next rehearsed lie, I feel as if we’re back in the charade after a small interlude of honesty.

  “I hope we were able to help?” says Jeanette.

  “Hugely,” says Dom.

  “I’m not sure your wife agrees.” Kevin stares at me.

  “Oh, I do,” I say, adjusting my tone carefully. “I’m very glad we came. It’s been extremely useful.”

  “I don’t want to find you outside my house or in my wife’s car again, Mrs. Leeson.”

  “I know you don’t, Kevin. I wouldn’t want that either, if I were you.”

  * * *

  I’m sitting in my room in the dark when Zannah comes in and switches on the light. “Are you hiding?” she says. “Dad said he couldn’t find you.”

  “He didn’t look very hard, then. What time is it?”

  “Twenty past ten.”

  I’m about to say “at night?” but stop myself in time. The curtains are open and it’s dark outside. “Ben’s not still playing Fortnite, is he?” I ask.

  “No, he’s in bed—teeth brushed, clean pajamas, room tidied.” She smiles proudly. “I am going to make such a great parent one day.”

  “Dad should have sorted Ben out,” I say, and it feels like a monumental effort to push out each word.

  “Yeah, or you should, as you’re his mother,” Zannah quips. “Dad’s snoring in front of the world’s most boring documentary. Mum, what’s going on? Dad said you’ve barely said a word since you left the Caters’ house. Are you pissed at him? Was he, like, really annoying?”

  I smile. “Not really. He did and said what almost anyone in his situation would do and say.”

  “So you’re all good, you and him?”

  “I’m not annoyed with him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “He also said you threatened Kevin Cater.”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “But you kind of threatened him.”

  “Kind of. Nonspecifically. I just let him know that I think he and his wife are creepy liars.”

  “Mum, you should be careful. At this rate Ben’s going to have to get some of his baddest roadman mates to back you on ends.”

  “Back me on what?”

  “Ugh, you’re so old. Never mind. But that’s why you shouldn’t go around starting trouble.”

  “Because I’m too old? I’m really not that old, Zannah.”

  She flops down on the bed next to where I’m sitting. “So what happened then?”

  “Didn’t Dad tell you?”

  “He said the kids living in that house aren’t Thomas and Emily Braid, and don’t look anything like how Thomas and Emily used to look when they were little.”

  “We were shown a photo of two young children who looked nothing like Thomas and Emily Braid. That’s true.”

  “So . . . how come you’re not saying, ‘I made a mistake, it’s all over’?”

  “Because the more I’m told and the more I see, the more certain I am that I didn’t make a mistake.”

  “Fair enough,” she says easily.

  “Have you been revising?”

  She snorts. “No.”

  “Zan—”

  “Tell me about the Greek changing room.”

  “What?”

  “Your Lewis Braid story about the two-thousand-pound changing room in Corfu.”

  “If I tell you, will you start revising?”

  “Definitely. Immediately afterward. All night long.” She grins. “Please?”

  “It’s nothing important or particularly interesting. Just something funny that happened when Dad and I went on holiday with Lewis and Flora to Corfu before you were born. We’d booked an apartment on a beach—literally on the sand, a few meters from the sea, beautiful sandy beach . . . Anyway, one day we went off in search of a restaurant serving better food than what was available nearby. Flora and Dad and I were all fine with the usual tzatziki and olives and stuff, but Lewis was appalled, pretty much from day one, by the quality of the meat at the two tavernas on the beach. He called it ‘gray flesh cubes on sticks.’”

  “Sticks?”

  “Kebab sticks. Anyway, he made a fuss—and when Lewis kicked off, it was impossible to ignore—so we went off looking for somewhere better and we found this hotel. It wasn’t exactly posh—really good hotels are in short supply on Greek islands—but it was certainly a step up from where we were staying, and the closest to posh that we were likely to find, and we had a lovely lunch there with meat that Lewis thought was good, but he still wasn’t happy. He was always such a perfectionist. Like, nothing could be wrong. Nothing unsatisfactory could be allowed to stand.”

  “He sounds like a twat.” Zannah yawns.

  “You know what? I think he is, and was, but I somehow didn’t fully realize it. I was young and easily impressed and he was so entertaining, and confident. We all just kind of assumed he was brilliant because he acted as if that was beyond doubt. Anyway . . . the hotel’s restaurant opened out onto a swimming-pool terrace. Stunning pool: huge, with absolutely no one in it or sitting around it. Apart from us, there were only two other people eating in the restaurant. We got the impression that the hotel was pretty much empty, and by the time we were ready to pay the bill and leave, Lewis was obsessed—completely obsessed, as much as he had been before about finding decent meat—with that swimming pool.”

  “Why? Shit!” Zannah presses all of her fingers against her forehead, then spreads them out. “I’m trying not to frown, so that I don’t get too wrinkly when I’m older. Antiaging moisturizer can only do so much. I’ve got to train myself to be surprised without scrunching up my face. Why did Lewis suddenly get obsessed with a swimming pool?”

  “He said that no holiday was worth going on unless it had a great swimming pool as well as a great beach. He said it as if it was something he’d always thought and passionately advocated, though he’d never mentioned it before. It was so weird. He was the one who’d booked our holiday, chosen the place, everything. He’d happily booked an apartment on a gorgeous beach, with no swimming pool—but only about thirty footsteps from the most stunning, clear blue sea!—and then suddenly he was in the most horrendous mood because going to the hotel had ruined everything for him. Seeing that pool had made him think that h
is holiday was beyond flawed.”

  “Mum, he sounds like the biggest arse that ever lived.”

  “He certainly acted like one that day. He looked as if he might explode with murderous rage at any moment. Dad was taking the piss out of him, Flora was warning him to stop, and I couldn’t stop laughing. Then, suddenly, he leaps up from the table and storms over to reception. No one knows what he’s planning to do or say. Obviously we follow him, and find him negotiating with the receptionist: why can’t we come and swim in their pool every day if we want to, if we eat at the restaurant? No one else is using the pool. The receptionist explained that the pool is for hotel guests only. An argument started, lasting twenty minutes at least, with Lewis insisting that anyone who eats in the restaurant surely qualifies as a temporary hotel guest, and the receptionist saying, no, it doesn’t work like that, a guest is someone actually staying in the hotel.”

  “Ugh. Weren’t you horribly embarrassed?” Zan asks.

  “Weirdly, no. Anyone watching would have noticed no one but Lewis, so the embarrassment, I figured, was all his. Not that he felt it for a second. Once he saw that his valid guest argument wasn’t going to work, he tried another tactic. He asked if we could pay a small fee to come and swim at the hotel, as day guests. The receptionist was nearly in tears by this point.”

  “I’m not surprised. I’d have said, ‘You like our pool so much? I’ll be happy to drown you in it, you fucker.’”

  “Zan, don’t swear.”

  “Ugh, Mum, relax. What happened next?”

  “The receptionist said no to Lewis’s day-membership scheme, even after he told her in great detail about various hotels in the UK that allow people to do precisely what he was proposing.” I laugh at the memory. “What does a Corfu hotel receptionist care if the Quy Mill Hotel in Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridgeshire, lets anyone buy a day membership for a tenner? She just kept saying, ‘My boss not allow, my boss not allow.’ It looked as if Lewis was defeated for once—Dad was helpfully pointing that out, saying, ‘Come on, Lewis, you’ve tried your best. Isn’t it time to give up now?’”

  “Ha! Dad always thinks it’s time to give up. Like, even before you’ve started trying.”

  “True. But in this case he was right, or at least we all thought he was. Lewis had other plans, however.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Asked if there were rooms available at the hotel. ‘You seem pretty empty,’ he said, stressing the last word.”

  “As if the receptionist cares,” Zannah mutters scornfully. “It’s not her hotel. She’s not going to get a share of the profits even if it’s full.”

  “I guess. She looked very confused and said, ‘You want to stay here?’ Lewis said no, he didn’t, he had no intention of staying there, but since the only way he was going to be able to use the pool was to book a room, then that was what he’d have to do—that was what the receptionist was forcing him to do. He tried to book two rooms, there and then: one for him and Flora and one for me and Dad. We said not to book one for us, we were quite happy with the beach, but Lewis wouldn’t listen. Trouble was, they didn’t have two double or twin rooms in the hotel. They weren’t empty, whatever Lewis thought, and all they could offer us was some kind of self-catering villa in the grounds that slept six people and was part of the hotel but also self-contained. Thankfully, it counted, for pool-using purposes. Dad and I were begging Lewis to see sense and be happy with the beach, not waste his money, but he was a man on a mission. He booked the villa—‘the most expensive changing room I’ve ever used,’ he called it later. Two grand, it cost—in 1997. The craziest thing was, none of us slept a single night there, even though it was much plusher than our beach apartment. Again, Dad and I tried our best to make Lewis see sense—since we’d gotten it now, we might as well use it, we said—but he was adamant. He said, ‘I want that receptionist to see that she’s made me spend two thousand of my hard-earned pounds on a villa that we’re going to use for maximum half an hour a day, and for nothing apart from changing into and out of our swim suits.’”

  “Okay, I have a theory and a question.” Zannah sits up. “You said before, ‘Flora was warning him to stop’—in the hotel restaurant. Warning who? Lewis, to stop making a fuss about the pool, or Dad to stop taking the piss out of Lewis?”

  “Dad. Flora has always been a peacemaker. A soother-over of potentially troublesome things.”

  “That’s what I thought you meant. Was she scared Lewis would hit Dad or something, if he didn’t stop teasing him?”

  “I think she might have been, yes. It’s hard to explain when you don’t know Lewis, but he could get into these weird states, almost like a maniac, and he’d be so full of passionate determination . . . It didn’t happen often, but when it did, he could be scary.”

  “Did he ever hit Dad?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Why ‘of course’? People hit people all the time. How did you get to be friends with a maniac? Unwise life choice.”

  “Flora was my best friend at university. She was younger than me, but we met through rowing and clicked right away. Lewis was her boyfriend, and I just accepted him, like she accepted Dad. We became a foursome.”

  “You rowed?” Zannah looks horrified. “In a boat? On a cold, wet river?”

  “Yeah, for my college.”

  “Oxbridge shit is so weird. I’m not going there.”

  “What, you mean because you’re never going to do any revision?”

  “Straight savage there from Mum. Nice one, Mum. You really got the crowd roaring with that one.”

  “Wanna know something I haven’t even told Dad yet?”

  “Obviously.”

  “The photograph Jeanette Cater showed me of her so-called children was a fake. It was a picture of a boy and a girl, around five and three. Kevin Cater probably printed it off the Internet. The picture didn’t fit the frame. At all. There were big black margins of backing card at the top and bottom. If you’d seen the Caters’ house . . . bland, grand, magazine-photo-ready, if you know what I mean—”

  “You mean, not a tip like our house?”

  “—but perfect, everything fitting exactly right, no expense spared. I don’t believe people who live in a house like that would frame a picture of their two children so . . . badly. Yes, our house isn’t the tidiest, but even I wouldn’t frame a photo in such a slapdash way. Notice, all the photos of you and Ben all over the house are properly framed.”

  “Why haven’t you said this to Dad?”

  “I will. I just . . .” I break off with a sigh. “I think he’ll tell me that I can’t possibly know how two strangers would frame a photograph. And he’d be right.”

  “Okay, here’s my theory.” Zan tucks her hair behind her ears. “Lewis—the maniac—used to hit Flora, like maniacs do. She eventually left him, and he let her—maybe he was bored with her and fancied getting a new wife—but he had one condition: she mustn’t ever tell anyone that he was a violent abuser. She agreed to keep quiet, in exchange for getting to keep the house. She married Kevin Cater—someone she knew from when they worked together. Lewis moved out of the Hemingford Abbots house and Kevin moved in.”

  “So Flora Braid is now Mrs. Kevin Cater? Then who’s the woman I met, who told me and Dad she was Kevin’s wife?”

  “The woman with a foreign accent?” Zan rolls her eyes. “Don’t people with huge mansions usually have foreign servants? Like, Polish nannies, Romanian cleaners? Jeanette sounds more like a French name, to be honest.”

  “It’s not her real name. She said—” I stop, gasp and grab Zannah’s arm. “Zan. Zan, you’re brilliant.”

  “Why, thank you. What did I do?”

  “I can’t believe this has only just occurred to me. Oh, my God.”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a different name for French lessons at school? A French name?”

  She laughs. “Er . . . no. Mum, no one calls us anything or teaches us anything at Bankside Park. We don’t lea
rn shit.” Normally this sort of statement would send me into a spiral of panic.

  “My French teacher gave us all French names. I was Élisabeth. I told Flora that, soon after we met. It came up when we were comparing notes about the schools we’d gone to, and she said, ‘We did that too.’ I didn’t remember until now. Why didn’t I think of it as soon as Marilyn Oxley—”

  “Mum, slow down. You’re making no sense. So what if you and Flora both had . . . Oh.” Zan’s eyes widen. “You mean . . . ?”

  “Yes. Flora’s French name at school was Jeanette.”

  9

  “Great. We’re here,” says Zannah, as we pull up on the street outside Kimbolton Prep School. “Now are you going to tell me why we’re here?”

  Three nights—mainly sleepless, for me—have passed since I realized that of course Flora would change her name to Jeanette if she were going to change it at all. I’ve forced myself to do a full two days of massages, so as not to let clients down, and to prove to myself that I’m still an ordinary person with an ordinary life.

  It’s ten in the morning. I’ve timed this trip, unlike my last visit to a school, to ensure that I won’t bump into any parents dropping off or picking up their children. I don’t want to see Flora, or Kevin Cater—or the woman who called herself Jeanette because, for some reason, I’m not allowed to know that Flora still lives in that house.

  Today I’m not here to try and catch a glimpse of any of them; I’m here to find out about the people who live at 16 Wyddial Lane—as much as I can, which will be easier if they’re not here. I’m telling myself that if I approach the task ahead with the resolve of Lewis Braid on that day at the Corfu hotel . . .

  “You can do it, Beth,” I hear Lewis’s voice in my mind. He was brilliant at motivating people. Once, when I had a deadline at work that was nearly driving me to a nervous breakdown, he said, “Have you tried telling yourself that it’s the best fun ever and you’re loving every second of it? You’d be amazed by how much that’ll change your attitude and the outcome.”

  “But I’m not loving it,” I told him. “I hate it. It’s nearly impossible.”