“From your oldest two children,” I say. “From Thomas and Emily Braid.”
“If I told you that, you’d have asked why. You’d have demanded an answer. You remind me of Lewis sometimes, with your determination to get the result you want. I’m not a strong person, Beth. You’d have broken me down eventually. Lewis and I both knew that. We agreed that the best thing to do was get me out of the way, where you couldn’t find me.”
“Except I did.”
“You did.” Is that hatred in her eyes, or something else? “Here you are.”
“And here you are, telling me the story. What if I go to the police now?”
“You promised Lewis you wouldn’t tell anyone but Dom.”
“Flora, Lewis might be your lord and master, but he’s not mine. What if I break the promise I made?”
“You won’t. You wouldn’t do that to me, or to any of the other people who would suffer if you did. Georgina’s been gone twelve years. What would it achieve to stir things up now? Have some compassion for Lewis, if you’ve got none for me.”
“Flora, how can you say that? That’s so far from—”
“He isn’t my lord and master, but he is my savior,” she talks over me. “He says he’s not doing any of it for me, but I still get the benefits. He made this escape plan for me. He’s helped in all kinds of ways—like letting me and Kevin have the Hemingford Abbots house, which he didn’t have to do. It was still his, he hadn’t sold it. And once he’d moved to America—”
“Flora, I know you’re lying.” The words spill out of me as a sudden realization hits hard. How did it take me so long to see it? “You’re so intent on cutting all ties with your old life that you disown your kids, change your name, cut off your parents—something you’d never do, by the way—and then you choose to live with your new husband and bring up your new children in the house where Georgina died? You expect me to believe that?”
Flora stands up. “I don’t have to talk to you,” she says. “Not anymore. You already know the only thing I wanted to keep from you. Do what you want with it, I don’t care.”
“Really? That’s not plausible either—that you suddenly don’t care about the effect it would have on your parents, for example, if I were to go to them next week and tell them the truth.”
Flora moves toward the door. I try to block her path, but she shoves me hard. I land on the bed on top of my bag.
“Flora, wait!” I call out. The door slams.
Rubbing my sore side, I get up and run after her, but there’s no sign of her in the corridor in either direction.
* * *
I don’t want to go back inside and shut the door to the outside world. Not yet. Instead, I stay in the corridor, leaning against the wall, watching my hotel room through its wide-open door and half expecting somebody to burst out of it. That doesn’t happen, and won’t, since there’s no one in there. All I see is an ordinary, unremarkable room: suitcase spread open with clothes spilling out, rumpled duvet cover, cushions scattered on the floor. No hotel guest who passed now and glanced in would see any sign of unusual activity.
Maybe it’s not unusual. Thinking about it, it can’t be. It must be absolutely standard: people lie to each other in hotel rooms all the time.
If I’d run down to the lobby as fast as I could, determined to find Flora at all costs, would it have done me any good? If I’d tracked her down, would she have told me the truth, and would I have believed her if she did? I’ve lost count of the number of times she’s lied to me.
It has to be another lie: all of it.
I slide down the wall into a seated position and start to make a mental list of all the reasons why I’m certain the detailed story Flora and Lewis just told me is not true.
I don’t believe that Kevin doesn’t know what’s going on between Flora and Lewis. Any spouse would demand to know the details before saying, “Fine, you go off to America with your ex. I’ll stay here and mind my own business.” When Dominic and I met Kevin Cater, he had the manner of someone who was in on the plan. There was an in-charge air about him. Everything I can recall of his behavior that day makes me think he knows all the details there are to know. He also knows why it matters that Dom and I should be kept in the dark. Yanina knows too.
Lewis feigned resentment when he told me the story; so did Flora. They hadn’t wanted to tell me, they didn’t want to be in my hotel room unburdening themselves, but I’d been so persistent, I’d left them no choice. A lie. I knew Lewis Braid well for years, and people don’t change—not that much. There’s no way he’d ever dance to anyone else’s tune. The more reluctant to talk he seemed, the more I was likely to believe the story—that was his thinking.
Then there’s the eyes. Thomas’s, Emily’s. Flora can lie all she likes, but I’ve seen their faces. Yes, Rosemary Tillotson has brown eyes, but she doesn’t have those brown eyes. All four children are Lewis’s. That links to another part of the lie: Flora told me that, when Lewis rang her to say I’d contacted him, she hadn’t seen or heard from him in twelve years. That can’t be true, if the two of them had two more children together.
The truth is that Lewis came back to Hemingford Abbots and, while there, got Flora pregnant. Twice. Tilly, his former neighbor at number 3, saw him, and, to explain away his presence, he pretended he was obsessively in love with her, when really he was there to see Flora.
The Lewis Braid I knew would never leave me to decide his fate. He has no idea if I’ll keep the promise I made to tell no one but Dom, and he wouldn’t take that risk.
Another lie, possibly the most insulting one of all, is Flora’s claim that she distanced herself from me because she feared I’d drag the truth out of her. Doesn’t she think I have a functioning memory? Her altered behavior toward me started long before Georgina’s death. In fact, it started many months before she was born, when Flora must have been just a few weeks pregnant. Whatever made her push me away, it had nothing to do with the guilt she felt after killing her daughter.
Maybe she didn’t kill her. If the rest was a lie, why not that too?
The main proof of Flora’s dishonesty, as I told her, is the house on Wyddial Lane. No one determined to cut all ties with their former life would willingly live in the house where the tragedy occurred that had brought their whole world crashing down. No one.
Then there are the things that seem more like contradictions or details that don’t add up than outright lies. Lewis was right: I knew from our various holidays with them that Flora often sunbathed topless and he never minded, so why did he scream at her when she breast-fed Georgina in front of me and Dom, as if there was something objectionably immodest about it?
If Flora did cause Georgina’s death, and her and Lewis’s aim was to stop me finding out, they could have succeeded. Easily. Flora could have brazened it out in the car park in Huntingdon. “Lewis and I have split up,” she could have said. “Our kids are with him in Florida, apart from Georgina who died tragically—cot death—and I’m not part of their lives anymore. He won’t let me see Thomas and Emily.” When I asked her, as I certainly would have, why her children with Kevin Cater were also called Thomas and Emily, she could have said, “I wanted to annoy Lewis. It was a bit petty, but I didn’t care.”
What could I have done if she’d told me that, even if I didn’t believe her? She and Lewis could have told me that exact story today, instead of telling me the very thing they’ve supposedly gone to all this trouble to stop me from finding out.
I go back into my room, unzip my bag and pull out my phone. I press the red button to stop it recording. Whenever I want to, I can listen to all those lies again—lucky me.
I lock the door to my room, slip the key card into my bag and head down to the lobby, telling myself there’s zero chance of me finding Flora still in the building. She’ll be long gone by now.
What should I do next? I can only think of one thing: go back to VersaNova and tell Lewis I’ve seen through his and Flora’s little performance.
>
And he’ll say you’re deranged and throw you out. He’ll say, “Look what happens when I try to talk to you, Beth. You don’t listen. You don’t believe me. Why should I bother wasting any more of my time?”
What will happen if I go back to PC Paul Pollard with Flora’s taped confession that she killed her daughter? Would she be brought in for questioning? What about Lewis, who admitted to misleading the authorities to protect his family? Does my recording count as admissible evidence? I have no idea how these things work.
There are lots of people in the hotel lobby, but Flora isn’t one of them. I approach the concierge, who stands smiling behind his lectern by the entrance doors, unoccupied. I describe Flora to him and he listens attentively. “Did you see her leave?” I ask. “It was about ten minutes ago. Did she ask you to get her a taxi, maybe? She didn’t have a car with her. Or maybe her husband came to pick her up?” I describe Lewis.
The concierge shakes his head. “No husband, but I think I know the lady you mean. She asked the quickest way to the beach from here.”
“The beach?” I suppose there must be one, though I haven’t seen any sign of it. “Delray Beach?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you give me whatever directions you gave her?” I ask him.
Outside the hotel, I cross the busy road. On the pavement opposite, there’s a sign in the shape of an arrow that says, “To the beach.” I have a strange feeling: that if I find Flora like this, I’ll have found her too easily.
Except finding her isn’t the challenge. Getting the truth out of her is the hard part.
I follow a roped-off path until I arrive on a long, wide, sandy beach. Stretching out in both directions are two long rows of blue sun umbrellas and wooden recliners with cushions, mainly occupied. The blue-green sea is calm, barely moving apart from where it’s being disturbed by people determined to have fun in it. I take off my shoes and hold them in my hand as I walk between the rows of sun loungers.
It doesn’t take me long to find her. “Flora,” I say, half expecting her to get up and run away.
She’s sitting on the sand, in a large patch of shade from the umbrella in front. There’s some shade left over, so I sit down next to her. “I’m sorry,” I say, and mean it. Provoking her so that she ran away was a bad strategy. “I shouldn’t have accused you of lying.”
“I don’t mind.” She says it as if there was never a break in our conversation. She looks peaceful; almost content. “You don’t see why I’d want to stay in the same house. I understand that.”
“But you did want to?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She gives a small laugh. “It’s funny that I still want to hide things from you even after I’ve told you the worst. Don’t you think that’s funny?”
I wait.
“Lewis only offered me the house once I was pregnant with Thomas—my Thomas. Not newly pregnant but quite far gone. I’d already had the twenty-week scan and knew I was having a boy. Kevin and I were living in a tiny flat with only one bedroom. He was doing one short-term contract after another for tech companies, and couldn’t seem to find a full-time job. No one would have given us a mortgage at the level we needed. I knew Lewis hadn’t sold the Hemingford Abbotts house—”
“How did you know that? You told me you and he hadn’t been in touch for twelve years until he rang you to talk about me.”
“That wasn’t true. The truth would have sounded too weird.”
“Try me.”
“We’ve always kept in touch. Kevin knew nothing about it. It was Lewis’s initiative, not mine. He liked to check on me, so he rang me every few months. To check that my situation was stable.”
“Didn’t you mind, if you wanted to cut all ties with your old life?” Is this a new lie I’m hearing or, finally, some of the truth? I wish I knew.
Flora shakes her head. “Turned out I had the same need he did: to check he’d said nothing, told no one our secret. Neither of us could let the other one drift too far out of reach.”
“So, what, every few months you’d talk?”
“Not for very long. They weren’t warm, friendly chats between friends. Far from it. Just . . . updates about our life situations. I told him when I changed my name, when I met Kevin, then later when I married him. Lewis needed reassurance that I wouldn’t confide in him about . . . the past.”
“Presumably you told Lewis about being pregnant with Thomas the second, then?”
“Don’t call him that,” says Flora.
“Shall I call him Thomas Cater?”
“Yes, I told Lewis. He knew Kevin and I were hard up and couldn’t easily afford a house that was big enough for the new family we wanted to start, so he very kindly offered for us to live at Newnham House—which he still owned. He’d rented it out intermittently, but it had been empty for a while at that point.”
“And you said yes,” I state the obvious. “I still don’t understand why.”
“I knew by then that I was having a boy and that I’d be calling him Thomas,” says Flora. She stares at me with a plea in her eyes, as if urging me to work it out.
“And . . . you thought that with a child called Thomas, in the same house you’d lived in before, you could almost pretend that nothing bad had ever happened?” I say.
From Flora’s expression, I can see that I’ve guessed correctly.
“Georgina had been dead for quite a few years by then,” she says. “At first, yes, I wanted to get as far away from any reminders as I could, but I felt differently after I got pregnant again, and especially once I knew we were having a boy and what I was going to call him. Then, I wanted to try and . . . I don’t know, re-create what I’d had, I guess.”
“And the house helped with that?”
She nods eagerly.
Is it possible? I don’t know why I’m bothering to ask myself. I can’t bring all the relevant facts to mind and listen to Flora at the same time.
“Beth, never mind the house,” she says suddenly. “Do you understand about my need for Lewis and his for me, even after everything?”
“I think so.”
“I never really loved Kevin.”
“Yeah, you said.” Is this going where I think it’s going?
A large yellow and blue beach ball rolls past us. Gleefully screaming children run after it, kicking sand in my eyes. I blink to get the grit out.
“You were right,” says Flora. “Thomas and Emily, they’re . . .” Again she looks hopefully at me, inviting me to fill in the blanks.
“Thomas and Emily Cater are Lewis’s children,” I say.
“Yes. Kevin has no idea. Please, please don’t tell him. Lewis’d kill me if he knew I’d told you.”
The idea of me telling Kevin Cater anything nearly makes me laugh. “What would you have called Emily if she’d been a boy?”
I’m expecting an “I don’t know,” but Flora says, “I wouldn’t have let that happen. I knew I needed to have a girl next. I paid for an early blood test. Luckily, it was her. It was Emily. I know what you’re going to ask me next.”
“Please make it so that I don’t have to,” I say, shivering despite the heat.
“I’d do it if I could,” Flora says so quietly it’s almost a whisper. “Another Georgina. Lewis won’t, though. After Emily, he . . . he said it wasn’t good for me; it was twisted. He said he wouldn’t let it happen again, and he hasn’t.”
Another Georgina.
She’s staring out toward the sea with the trace of a smile on her lips.
“Flora, you have to listen to me.” I reach over and squeeze her hand. “You need help. Professional help, to deal with all this trauma properly. I’ll help you. If you don’t like Kevin or love him, you can leave him.”
“He loves me, though. And the children. They’re his in every way that matters. He’s the one they call Daddy.”
“Does he treat them well?” I’m not sure I intended to say this out loud, but I have and it’s to
o late. Might as well press on. “Is he kind to them? Is Yanina?”
Flora’s expression is guarded. It wasn’t before I asked the question. “Stop it, Beth. You can’t keep doing this. I’ve told you everything. You need to leave me alone.”
“Flora, please. Look at me. Kevin doesn’t treat Thomas and Emily very well, does he? Are you sure he doesn’t know they’re Lewis’s children and not his?”
She stands up, dusting the sand off her clothes. “I’m going. Don’t follow me. That wouldn’t be fair. I’ve tried to be as fair to you as I can, and now you need to stop. Go back home. You’ve got a family of your own, haven’t you?”
“Flora!” I call after her as she walks away. I could chase her, but what good would it do?
I stay where I am, watching as she gets smaller and smaller. A man in a baseball cap leans down into my view and asks me if I want to rent a sunbed instead of sitting on the sand. I tell him I don’t. By the time he’s moved aside, I can’t see Flora anymore.
23
I run all the way back to my hotel room, flop down on one of the beds with my phone and ring the landline at home. I count the seconds. Someone picks up at the exact moment I’m starting to worry about why no one’s answering. It’s Dom. “Is everything okay?” he asks. “What’s happening?”
You’ve got a family of your own, haven’t you? Flora’s words have been ringing in my head since she said them, wrapped in the fear that I’m somehow risking the people I love most by taking too much of an interest in another family. I know that’s not true, but it didn’t stop me wanting to check.
“Everything’s fine,” I tell Dom. “I just wanted to hear your voices.”
“I’m afraid I’ve only got one.”
“What?”
“Voice.”
I smile.
“I’ll do my impression of Chandler from Friends if you ask me nicely.”
“Please don’t. It’s terrible.”
Perfect Little Children Page 25
