“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 often 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.