Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  “Mrs. Leeson, there’s no need to make unpleasant threats. Why don’t we all calm down a bit, and then, once the dust has settled, I’ll talk to Miss Hosmer and see if we can—”

  “No, that sounds like bullshit,” I say. “If you don’t want me to contact my friend, you need to tell Miss Hosmer to apologize to Murad and Zannah. Right now. Go and find her in whatever toilet cubicle she’s crying in and let’s get on with it. I’m not leaving until I’ve heard those apologies.”

  “Nothing is going to happen right now,” says Stevens, in the most patronizing tone of voice I’ve ever heard. “Why don’t you and Zannah go home, and I’ll contact you once I’ve had a chance to—”

  “Give Zannah back her phone and we’ll go, if that’s the way you want to play it. But then I will be contacting my friend, and some of the national papers too, I think—the ones that have education supplements. Pieces will run, and the video will be shared far and wide.”

  “All right,” Stevens snaps as he springs out of his chair. “All right. Wait here.”

  He leaves his office at speed. I turn to Zannah. Tears are streaming down her face. “Mum,” she whispers. “What happened? Did we just . . . win?”

  17

  An hour later, we’re at Mario’s, the nearest half-decent café to Bankside Park. It’s far enough away to guarantee that no one from school is likely to walk in, and the coffee and cakes are from heaven, even if the owner isn’t. Silvia thinks she’s a “character” and sings loud arias from operas whenever she feels like it, sometimes making it hard for customers to continue their conversations.

  Zannah and I are eating her magnificent iced orange and cinnamon rolls, to celebrate our victory. “You’re a ledge, Mum,” Zan says. “I can’t believe I got my phone back and an apology.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “Hosmer wasn’t really sorry, you know.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Ugh. She’s such a . . . there’s no word bad enough. I can’t even insult her anymore. It’d be an insult to insults.”

  “Dad would have done the same as I did, you know.”

  Zannah wrinkles her nose. “No, he wouldn’t. Would he have pretended to have a client who was a local news editor? I don’t think so! He’d have said they were being unfair and asked for an apology, but he wouldn’t have gotten creative and blackmailed them. And he’d have let them give me and Murad detentions for having our phones in school and being cheeky, when you were, like, ‘That’s not happening.’”

  She’s probably right.

  “They gave me back my phone too late, though.” Zannah giggles. “I wish I could have recorded you saying, ‘Tell you what, Mr. Stevens—why don’t you and your staff work on your own behavioral problems for a few weeks first and then maybe I’ll allow Zannah to accept a detention from you.’ Mum, you know what I’m gonna do?” Zannah brushes crumbs off her hoodie. “Revise the fuck out of my GCSEs from now till they’re done.”

  “That’s great, don’t swear, and how come?”

  “Nothing will piss Hosmer off more than me doing better than they all expect me to.” Zannah peers at me. “What?” she asks. “What was that funny look?”

  “You made me think of Tilly.”

  “Who?” Zannah says. “Oh, Rubis Tilly who got me drunk?”

  “You got you drunk. Yes, that Tilly. And Lewis Braid. If the true explanation for someone’s behavior is unusual enough, it’s the easiest thing in the world to hide it behind a more obvious explanation.”

  “What’s that got to do with me revising the fuck out of my—?”

  “Imagine you get all 9s in your GCSEs, because you work really hard.”

  “Never gonna happen. But I could get all 6s and 7s, maybe.”

  “You would know that you’d only made the effort in the hope of ruining results day for Camilla Hosmer, but that would never occur to most people. If you said to a stranger, for example, that you did nothing, and did nothing, and did nothing, and then suddenly started revising like a maniac in the run-up to your exams, why would any stranger think you might do that?”

  “Weird question. They’d probably think I suddenly panicked and was worried about failing.”

  “Right. So if you told them that was why, they’d believe you without a second thought. They wouldn’t question it. Just like, if Lewis is hanging around outside Tilly’s house in his car when he should be in Florida, what’s the obvious explanation there? If you keep turning up outside someone’s house, and lie about why when they ask what you’re doing there . . . well, it looks as if you might be an obsessive stalker, doesn’t it?”

  “So?”

  She’s impatient for the conclusion, but I’m not quite there yet. “Lewis Braid is the father of Thomas and Emily Cater. They have his eyes, just like older Thomas and Emily do. Flora was with him when she rang me last week. That means he’s still around, still involved in whatever’s going on at Newnham House.” I raise my hand to stop Zannah asking questions before I’ve finished. “But he’s not supposed to be. Think about the lies he and Flora have told me: Georgina’s twelve and doing great; they have no young children, only the three they had when they moved to America, where they now live; they have no connection with Hemingford Abbots anymore.”

  “I don’t get it, Mum.”

  “Tilly kept finding Lewis loitering outside her house. Then she found him in her back garden clutching her silk pajamas, at which point he declared his obsessive love for her. She and her husband had a word with him, he promised faithfully to stop, and he did—he never bothered them again.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Stalkers don’t just stop, Zan. Someone as determined and driven as Lewis Braid wouldn’t have given up so easily. Nor would he pick Tilly to obsess over. She isn’t his type. So why would he pretend to stalk her and be in love with her?”

  “I don’t think he would,” says Zannah. “You can’t be sure—”

  “I’m sure,” I cut her off. “Think about what Tilly told us: the pajamas in the back garden and the crying and admitting it all—that came later. The first thing, she said, was that she noticed Lewis outside her house a few times. I assumed she meant he was lurking in her front garden near the house—number 3 doesn’t have any gates, so that’s possible—but she didn’t say that. She said ‘outside my house.’ That could mean that she was in her front garden or on her driveway and she saw Lewis in his car, parked where we parked when we went to Wyddial Lane.”

  “If she just saw him in a car on the street, she wouldn’t assume he was in love with her.” Zan rolls her eyes.

  “No, but if she spotted him more than once, she might think, ‘Why does he keep turning up? I thought the Braids had moved to America.’ And think about what kind of person Tilly is. She said the first few times she confronted Lewis, he made crap excuses for being there. That probably means she trotted enthusiastically up to his car, knocked on the window, said, ‘Hi, Lewis! What are you doing back? I thought you’d moved to America.’ And he was forced to lie.

  “I’ve been to Wyddial Lane three times now. It’s a silent, mind-your-own-business sort of place. Everyone’s hiding behind their high walls and gates, not watching what’s happening on the road. I’d bet everything I own that no one except Tilly on that street would rush up to a parked car and cheerfully demand to know the business of the person sitting inside it. Marilyn Oxley at number 14 is nosy and observant enough, but she’s also keen on keeping her distance. You should have seen the effort I had to put in to persuade her to leave her house and come and talk to me through the gate. Anyone would have thought I was waving a bomb around or something.”

  “Okay, so Tilly saw Lewis parked outside her house, and she went and tried to chat to him,” says Zannah. “She asked him what he was doing there, and he made crap excuses. I still don’t get it.”

  Silvia picks this moment to wander over to our table. “You ladies want more rolls? More coffee?”

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “
They are very good, though?”

  “Sublime, as always.”

  “Ah, you are very kind to me!” She wanders away. Mercifully, there’s been no singing so far today.

  I say to Zannah, “Lewis would have known his excuses for being there weren’t remotely plausible. That will have bothered him. He’ll have worried that he’d made Tilly suspicious. If the lie that he and Flora desperately want the world to believe is that they’re living in Florida, done with Wyddial Lane, and a different family now owns their old house, a family that has nothing to do with them—”

  “I get it!” Zannah flaps her hands. “So he starts acting like more of a stalker to Tilly and gets caught with her PJs in the garden deliberately.”

  “Yes. If he arranges it so that she ‘finds out’”—I make air quotes with my fingers—“that he’s been stalking her, and then breaks down and sobs and says he loves her wildly, then his crap excuses are no longer suspicious. Suddenly, there’s an explanation that looks obvious.”

  “And it explains why he then stopped stalking her: because he never wanted to or really did in the first place. Wait: that only works if you’re right about Tilly first spotting him in his car on the street, not in her garden.”

  “I’m going to contact her and find out,” I say. “I didn’t take her number, but I know she runs a business from 3 Wyddial Lane. Shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “Another thing I just thought of,” Zan says. “You know what Tilly said about none of the neighbors ever seeing Flora? What if that was deliberate? Lewis and Flora planned it so that no one saw her because they knew she’d be coming back as Jeanette Cater. They didn’t want the neighbors to say, ‘Wait, you’re not Jeanette, you’re Flora.’”

  A shiver runs through my body. Pretending to be an obsessive stalker, hiding from the world so that you can come back with a different name . . . What can the Braids be so determined to hide that they’d go to such extremes? The more I know about the lengths they’ve gone to, the more convinced I am that the truth must be unbearable. For who, though? The Braids themselves, or for other people?

  “Did Georgina Braid have Lewis’s eyes like the other four?” Zannah asks.

  “I don’t know. Don’t think I ever saw her with her eyes open. She was a tiny baby the only time they came around. Resemblances often don’t become obvious till you’re a bit older, anyway.” Even in the photograph Flora sent with the Christmas card, Georgina had her eyes shut. The image of that tiny cutting lying on my kitchen floor flashes up in my mind. I push it away. “Why?” I ask Zannah.

  “Dunno. I just wondered if she might have been Kevin and Yanina’s baby, not Lewis and Flora’s.” Zannah laughs at my immediately alert expression. “Relax, Mum. That’s not a brilliant new theory. I don’t know why I said it.”

  “You wouldn’t have said it for no reason.” If Flora was never pregnant with Georgina, then what I was annoyed about never happened: she didn’t fail to tell me that she was pregnant or that she’d had a baby—because she wasn’t, and she didn’t.

  Zannah says, “Assuming you’re right about the eyes thing . . . which, okay, I believe you. Then little Thomas and Emily are Lewis and Flora’s, but everyone’s pretending they’re Kevin and Jeanette Cater’s. But there is no Jeanette Cater, not really, and Yanina lives in that house too, and she and Kevin might be together . . .”

  “And also might not be.”

  “It would be neat, though,” Zan says. “A straight swap. Kevin and Yanina have Georgina and for some reason Flora and Lewis pretend she’s theirs. Then a few years later, Lewis and Flora have Thomas and Emily number two, and Kevin pretends they’re his.”

  None of this strikes me as impossible or even unlikely, given all that’s happened and everything I know to be true. It would explain why Flora seemed distant and less interested in spending time with me in 2006, when she—or somebody—was pregnant with Georgina. If she knew she was about to have to tell the world the most outrageous lie and then sustain it, pretending that another woman’s baby was hers, there wouldn’t have been room in her mind or life for anything else. And . . . she wouldn’t have wanted her parents around her, either. They knew her better than anyone; they’d have been able to tell for sure that she wasn’t herself, that something was horribly wrong.

  I was too wrapped up in what I thought was her rejection of me to worry about what might have been going on in her life. It’s unbearable to think that Thomas and Emily Cater might be suffering now because of my failure to realize twelve years ago that not everything was about me.

  Flora’s suffering is more complicated. She has to be one of the main liars behind all this, whatever it is, but I’ve twice seen her behave like a victim.

  “That could be what ‘Chimpy’ means, if Chimpy’s Georgina,” Zannah goes on. “Lewis and Flora and their kids are all perfect looking, aren’t they? Kevin and Yanina’s kid might not have been. From what you’ve said about Lewis, I can imagine him giving someone an insulting nickname, and expecting them to find it funny.”

  “Taunting,” I mutter.

  “What?” says Zan.

  “You’re right. Lewis liked to taunt people with nicknames, so you might be right about Chimpy. But what if he took it further?”

  “How?”

  “If you call your youngest two children names that your oldest two already have, and make them wear their old clothes and shoes . . . Couldn’t there be an element of taunting there too?”

  “That’s creepy, Mum.”

  It is. And if it’s not true, if it’s miles away from the truth, then maybe I’m the sick one for dreaming it up. Flora would never willingly harm a child, especially not her own.

  Lewis is a different matter. I have no idea what he’s capable of, and I can’t help asking myself the question: what if he chose to call his youngest children Thomas and Emily as a deliberate act of cruelty?

  * * *

  Dom’s hovering in the hall when Zannah and I get home. “PC Pollard rang,” he says, trying to sound matter-of-fact. In the short silence that follows, I hear the gloating he’s trying so hard not to indulge in: I told you he would.

  I drop my bag on the floor—something I frequently moan at the children for doing. “What did he say?”

  “Tell me about school first.”

  “It’s all fine. Sorted out.”

  “I was hoping for a bit more detail than that.” Seeing my glare, Dom says, “Pollard went to 16 Wyddial Lane.”

  “Himself? I thought he was going to send child protection people?”

  “I don’t know. He said he went himself.”

  “Do you think that means he passed it on to child protection and they weren’t convinced enough to do anything?”

  “I’ve no way of knowing.”

  “Try letting Dad speak,” Zannah suggests.

  “He talked to Kevin Cater and Yanina, and also to the children: Thomas and Emily. Had a nice long chat with them all, he said. In his opinion, all’s well and there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about?” Don’t lose it, Beth. Don’t scream. Think about how insane Miss Hosmer sounded on Zannah’s video. You don’t want to sound like that. “What did you say, when he said that?” I ask.

  “I thanked him for looking into it and for letting me know he had.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. Should I have said something else? He’d done all he was going to do, and, let’s face it, he needn’t have done anything.”

  “But, Dad, you know there’s something to worry about: all the things that still don’t make sense.”

  “Pollard knows about those things too,” I say quietly.

  Dom looks past me into the middle distance, as if listening intently to someone behind me that I can’t see or hear. I’ve got a strong feeling that person is begging him not to lose his temper.

  “You’re right, Beth. Pollard knows everything that’s happened, he’s been to the house, and the net result of all that is what I’ve just
told you: he’s satisfied nothing more needs to be done.”

  “And so we should be too? Did he go to Thomas’s school? Did he talk to Lou Munday?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about the school.”

  “Course he didn’t go to the school,” says Zannah.

  “Did he find out if Georgina Braid is dead or still alive?”

  Dom looks puzzled—as if this is the last question he’d have expected me to ask. “He didn’t mention Georgina at all.”

  “And you didn’t either?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did he speak to any of the Caters’ neighbors? Did you tell him about the shoes?”

  “The . . .” He looks puzzled. Then he remembers. “No, I didn’t tell him about Thomas Cater’s fucking shoes!” Dom snaps. “I’m sick of this, Beth. Do you want to know why I didn’t ask all the questions you wish I’d asked? I don’t care anymore! Whatever the Braids are up to, I don’t give a shit, as long as I can get my life back—the life that didn’t involve talking about the Braids and the Caters every waking second of every day.”

  “That’s understandable,” I say. Now that he’s lost his temper, I feel calmer. “I’ve been expecting you to share my level of obsession. It wasn’t fair of me. I’m sorry, okay?”

  Dom eyes me suspiciously.

  “I promise I’ll stop talking to you about this soon,” I say, knowing he won’t notice the “to you,” or think about what it might mean. “I have one more question: did Pollard say anything else, apart from what you’ve told me? Anything at all.”

  “Yes.” Dom looks trapped. I know how he feels. I also know I’m not prepared to feel it for much longer. “He told me Kevin Cater admitted lying to us about his children’s names. Cater told him he’d been reluctant to reveal the real names because he was worried you had a strange obsession with his children.”