Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  “We’re neither murderous nor political,” I tell her.

  “Fantastic. Come in, then.” We can’t. She’s blocking the doorway. “I’ll tell you what I meant. So. For months, I’ve not been answering the door when the bell rings. Justin and the kids are out all day during the week, and I’ve got those hours and only those hours to do all my work—I work at home—and clean, and cook, and the rest, you know how it is. So, my New Year’s resolution was: no more rushing to the door when the bell rings. I stuck to it, too. Religiously. Unlike my other resolution, which was to cut out sugar and flour and alcohol, but hey! And at first it was so liberating. Understanding for the first time in my life that my doorbell—like my phone, like my email inbox—is there to serve me. Not the other way around! You know? And it’s been amazing, I’ve been so productive since January, but . . . lately, I’ve started to think it’s a shame. Who knows what those doorbell rings might be, you know? What if I’m too willingly closing myself off to new, fantastic experiences? So today, on an impulse, I thought to myself—I needed a break, to be honest—‘Get off your bum and open that door.’ And immediately panicked in case it was something dull like a survey about shopping habits. I never shop, anyway. Hate it. Waste of a day.”

  “If you want the opposite of dull, you’re in luck,” I tell her. “I rang your bell in the hope that you’d answer a whole load of . . . unusual questions that no one else will answer honestly—about Wyddial Lane.”

  “What kind of unusual?”

  “It’s a long story. The short version is, I had some friends who used to live at number 16, and—”

  “Number 16. That’s the Caters, right? And before that . . .” She stops. Her eyes widen. “Lewis Braid? Is he your friend?”

  “Not anymore, no. Not for twelve years.”

  “But you’re here to ask unusual questions about him? Please say you are! That man is crying out to have unusual questions asked about him. Well, the opposite actually—he’s not crying out for it, he’d hate it, but the world is, or at least, I am.”

  “I am too,” I say.

  She moves to one side and waves us in. “I’m so glad I opened the door,” she says as we follow her across a wide entrance hall and into a messy kitchen with a red Aga and many blobby children’s paintings stuck up on the walls. “This was meant to be—I truly believe that. Time to rethink that resolution!”

  I try not to stare at the most eye-catching thing in the room: an enormous and scary-looking wall-chart calendar with boxes for all the days of the year, and black-and-white drawings of branches and leaves wrapped around them. There’s tiny, spidery handwriting in many of the boxes in four different colors: red, green, purple and orange. It’s weirdly beautiful, as long as you don’t need to read the writing.

  On a battered pine table at the center of the room, papers and forms are spread out. They look confusing and boring. Tilly’s work, presumably. She sweeps them to one side, saying, “Fuck off, boring company tax returns!”

  Does that mean she’s an accountant?

  “Okay, let’s get this kettle on,” she says. “Tea? Coffee? Rubis? And feel free to fire questions at me while I make drinks.”

  “What’s Rubis?” I ask.

  “You’ve not discovered Rubis? Oh, my good God! I’m about to become your favorite person. Oh.” She frowns. “You’re driving, probably. It’s alcoholic.”

  “Tea for me, thanks,” I say.

  “Rubis is heaven. Imagine the most yummy chocolate that’s also a delicious velvety red wine.”

  “I’ll have some,” Zannah says sweetly.

  “You do right—as we Yorkshire folk like to say!” Tilly beams at her.

  “Just a tiny bit,” says Zannah’s killjoy mother. Yorkshire? Tilly’s accent couldn’t be less northern if it tried.

  She hands Zannah a bottle and glass, then puts the kettle on. I tell her a much-curtailed version of the story so far: that I saw Flora at number 16 and in Huntingdon, and that, despite this, the Caters and Lewis have all insisted that Flora’s in America.

  “Huh. Interesting,” says Tilly. “As far as I know, they live in America now. Is it possible Flora was back, or is back, to visit the Caters?”

  “Yes, but then why would everyone lie? On the phone, Lewis didn’t say, ‘Yeah, you might well have seen Flora, she’s in England at the moment.’ Flora herself rang me and said she was in Florida—no mention of any trip to Hemingford Abbots. And when I told her I was sure I’d seen her outside her old house, she said, no, no way, impossible. She ended the phone call after about ten seconds, having promised to ring me back, which she didn’t. And then the next day, I bump into her in a car park in Huntingdon.”

  “That is deeply, deeply peculiar,” Tilly says, handing me my tea. “Lewis is, though. Or was when I knew him. Maybe his wife is too. Maybe she was back, and didn’t want to see you. Nothing against you, just a case of ‘This particular trip is about this and I don’t want to use any of it to do that.’”

  “That’d explain her saying, ‘How’s things? Hope all’s well! Gotta dash.’ But lying about what country she’s in when she knows I’ve seen her? And Lewis lying, and the Caters lying?”

  “You’re right,” says Tilly. “No one would go to those lengths to avoid maybe having to have a coffee for half an hour with an old friend they’d rather not see.”

  Zannah says to Tilly, “You said before that maybe Lewis’s wife is weird too, because Lewis is weird. Didn’t you know Flora, when they lived here?”

  “No. That was one of the weirdest things about Lewis: his wife, whom he worshipped—but no one ever saw her! It was the talk of the WLRC.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Sorry. Wyddial Lane Residents’ Committee. We all decided Lewis’s wife was a hermit who never left the house. Lewis was very sociable—came to every meeting and every drinks do, sometimes with his kids—but never invited anyone over to his place. Ever. Normally, that would make you unpopular—very keen on proper turn taking, is the WLRC; drives me crazy! Sometimes I can’t face hosting a party for forty people! So shoot me!—but everyone loved Lewis because he’d make every party a success. He was a one-man show—and a brilliant one, too. And he’d always arrive laden down with booze and cakes and treats. But . . . yeah. We all wondered about the invisible wife. He talked about her nonstop but it was almost as if . . .”

  “As if he wanted to make her feel like a presence in spite of her absence?” I suggest.

  Tilly slaps me on the arm with the back of her hand. “That’s it precisely. That very thing.”

  “Even if she didn’t come to events, people must have seen her, though.”

  “Yeah. One or two did report having seen a dark-haired woman driving out through the gates but that was about the extent of it. And, actually, it’s maybe unfair to label Lewis an oddball since she might well have been the weird recluse, and he was covering for her, trying to present a show of normal family life, but even if that was the case, what he did later . . .”

  “What did he do?” Zannah asks. I notice that her glass is full. Last time I glanced at it, it was empty. I pick up the Rubis bottle and move it away from her.

  “If I tell you, you must never tell anyone. Swear on all you hold dear. I’ve never told anyone on Wyddial Lane. Only Justin, my husband.”

  Zan and I promise not to tell anybody.

  Tilly leans in conspiratorially. “He stalked me. Obsessed with me, he was. Lewis Braid, perfect husband and dad, turned into an honest-to-God creepy stalker.”

  * * *

  “What? What?” says Dom, when I come to the bit about Lewis stalking Tilly. “I simply don’t believe that. Sorry. No way!” His protests are so loud that I have to hold my phone away from my ear. Zannah and I are in the car in a service station car park on the A14. I’d been fobbing Dom off all day with quick, jolly “All fine! Talk later!” replies. I would have waited until we got home to tell him all this, except I’ve changed the plan again. Driving home isn’t next on
my agenda anymore.

  “Why don’t you believe it?” I ask him.

  “I mean . . .” I hear something crunch in the background at his end, and picture him at the kitchen table, eating an apple. “I just don’t.”

  “I want to hear why. It’ll confirm what Zan and I think. Spit it out. Don’t worry about being ungallant.”

  “You said she had frizzy hair, brown streaked with gray?”

  “The essence of frizzy! So frizzy, you could barely see the individual strands of hair. If she’s ever used conditioner, I’d be surprised.”

  “Did she have a pretty face?”

  “She had a pleasant face, I’d say.”

  “Thin? Fat?”

  “Neither. Maybe about like Mrs. Adlard.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Dominic,” I say flatly.

  “What?”

  “Mrs. Adlard is Ben’s tutor.”

  “Oh, her. Right. So, not thin.”

  “But not fat either. Like, maybe a size 14.”

  “Lewis would think that was fat,” Dom says without missing a beat. I give Zan a thumbs-up sign. One more subscriber to our opinion; we must be right. “If Lewis was going to stalk a woman, he’d pick a skinny, beautiful one. Someone who looked like Flora used to look before she had three kids.”

  “Zan and I agree. And he might pick that skinny, beautiful woman to stalk because Flora no longer looked exactly the way she did before she had three kids—he could easily be that shallow, with his constant search for perfection—but what he definitely would never do is become obsessed with a plain-but-pleasant-looking, not-thin, frizzy-haired, gray-haired person.”

  “Never.”

  “But I’m sure Tilly was telling the truth, that’s the problem.”

  “She was,” Zannah confirms. “Mum, put it on speaker. Aaand you have no idea what that means. Pass it here.”

  She fiddles with my phone, then balances it on the armrest between us. “Speak, Dad,” she orders.

  “Hello! Testing, testing.”

  “So lame. See, Mum, now we can both hear him. Dad, she said they’d always been friendly, and Lewis helped her set up her own business, went above and beyond, came around at all hours of the day and night to provide support—but she didn’t think anything of it because he was helpful to everyone, he was just that kind of guy.”

  “He was,” says Dom. “That’s true. He couldn’t stand for anything to fail, and that included his friends’ projects. Remember when I ran the marathon, Beth?”

  “What happened?” asks Zan.

  “Lewis nearly fell out with me because I wouldn’t let him be my coach and personal trainer—even though he had a full-time job, wasn’t a sports coach and had never run a marathon himself. Still, he wanted to take time off from work to make sure I succeeded and would barely take no for an answer. He couldn’t imagine me being able to do it without his help. I did, though, and he was genuinely happy for me.”

  “At the same time as going on for months about how you’d have finished much faster if you’d let him coach you,” I say.

  “Sounds like how he was with Tilly’s business,” says Zan. “She thought, great, what a nice friend. Her business did well. The Braids moved. But he still kept turning up outside her house, after he’d moved to Florida—spying on her from his car. The first couple of times it happened, he made crap excuses—like, really crap. One time she found him in her back garden and he said he’d been passing and heard something that sounded suspicious, so he’d gone to investigate. Another time she found him asleep on a bench in her back garden. On his chest was guess what? A pair of Tilly’s silk pajama bottoms that she’d left to dry on the washing line.”

  “And . . . all this happened after the Braids moved to Florida? When the Caters owned the house?”

  “Yeah, and when Lewis was working in America,” I say. “Tilly, thinking it was all very odd, googled him and found that he definitely had a job in Florida at the time . . . but he also kept making time to come back and . . . fall asleep in her garden clutching items of her clothing.”

  “It all came to a head after the silk pajamas,” Zannah tells Dom. “Tilly and her husband confronted him, told him they weren’t going to pretend to believe any more excuses, and he broke down in tears and admitted it. He cried, Tilly said. Wept buckets.”

  “What did he admit?” asks Dom.

  “That he’d fallen in love with her!” Zannah slurs. “He actually said that to her and her husband. Begged them never to tell anyone, especially not his wife, and swore blind that he’d never do it again. Which he didn’t. The silk-pajama time was the last stalking episode.”

  “Zannah, you sound drunk. Beth, what’s wrong with her?”

  “Tilly gave her some booze.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Beth!”

  “Yeah, Mum.” Zannah grins at me. “This happened on your watch. You tell her, Dad.”

  “Can you two come home now, please?”

  “Not immediately. Dom . . . is it possible that there are two sides to Lewis? What if the perfection-seeking side of him makes him miserable, with the pressure it piles on? Tilly’s dynamic, happy, relaxed. Doesn’t give a damn about a few gray hairs.”

  “And Lewis had a secret urge to abandon his perfect life and run off with her? I mean . . . I’m not saying it’s not possible, because anything’s possible, but . . . Why aren’t you coming home? What else are you doing?”

  “Going to Wokingham. I need to try and find Flora’s parents. They must know something about what’s going on. Lewis Braid has been their son-in-law for twenty years.”

  “Her parents? Beth, you don’t need to do that.”

  “I want to.”

  “Please don’t. Beth, the time comes when you have to draw a line. That time has come. Now. Today. Zannah needs to get back here and start revising. She’s on exam study leave, not . . . crazy-dashing-around-the-country leave. Ben wants you to come home.”

  “Straight after Wokingham, I promise. Zannah was desperate to come with me, Dom. She’s really interested in this.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  “No revision would have happened even if I hadn’t brought her with me. You know as well as I do—she’d have done fuck all apart from paint her nails and watch reruns of Love Island.”

  “Hashtag when your parents believe in you,” says Zan with a chuckle.

  “She’s got a brilliant mind and today, all day, that mind has been working.” I was planning to say that anyway, but now it looks as if I only said it to ingratiate myself. Zannah makes a face at me.

  “Do you want to hear what happened at Kimbolton Prep School?” I ask Dom.

  Without waiting for his answer, I launch into a full account. He may be right: there might be a point at which one ought to draw a line, but I’m hoping there’s also a point at which any intelligent person realizes that they have to find out what the hell’s going on or it’ll bother them forever. I reached that point some time ago.

  I describe my conversation with Lou Munday.

  “That all sounds . . . strange, horrible and worrying,” Dom says when I’ve finished.

  “Yep. I’d swear that secretary wanted to tell me something—more than she told me. Zannah agrees.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” she says unhelpfully. “Maybe. Maybe Lewis Braid stalked her too.”

  “She didn’t give me the brush-off in a normal, routine, off-you-go-you-nut kind of way. There was something she could have told me if she’d wanted to, if she’d not been scared of losing her job.”

  “Or scared of getting involved in something really unpleasant,” says Dom. “Which you should be too, Beth. Whatever’s going on in that house and with the Braids and the Caters, it’s something our family needs to keep out of. Think about everything you’ve told me so far—Tilly, now the school stuff—it all adds up to a giant neon sign saying ‘Stay the hell out of this mess.’”

  “Typical graphic designer response there from Dad,” say
s Zan. “Bringing signage and the visual into everything. Me and Mum aren’t graphic designers so we can’t see that sign.”

  Dom makes a disgusted noise. “Kevin and Jeanette Cater told us their children were called Toby and Emma.”

  “Uh-huh. And, don’t forget, she turned up at the car park wearing the same clothes Flora was wearing less than an hour before. Oh—and she isn’t Jeanette Cater. Lou Munday told us Jeanette doesn’t have a foreign accent. I forgot that bit.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Memory of a goldfish,” Zan mouths at me.

  “Oh, the school secretary. Right. Well, whoever the woman at Newnham House was, she and Kevin Cater, assuming that’s his real name—”

  “Yeah, they fed us a load of bullshit,” I say. And you thanked them for it.

  “To our faces? While smiling and supposedly trying to help sort things out? I guess they must have, but . . . that’s pretty twisted, isn’t it?”

  After more than forty years on this planet, Dominic has trouble believing that a civilized and solvent couple with an immaculate house could lie to him. He’s still keen to believe in a version of the world in which everyone has each other’s best interests at heart.

  “They flat out lied.” He still can’t believe it.

  “Yes. Dom, I have to go. I’ll see you later tonight, okay? Bye.” I press the end-call button before he can give me any more reasons for why I should come home right away.

  11

  Three hours later, we’re parked on Carisbrooke Road in Wokingham, outside a house that I hope still belongs to Flora’s parents. I only came here once with Flora while we were students, but I’m sure it’s the right place. I remember thinking it looked odd from the outside, and number 43 is the only one that fits that description. It’s a lone detached house on an otherwise terraced street, and so narrow that its detachedness looks like a mistake—as if it’s been cut off the row as an afterthought and shoved along a bit. It protrudes awkwardly from the low-walled private garden that’s been built around it like a little green island.