“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 learn 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.”

“So? Can you do nearly impossible things? Yes, of course you can. You love to do nearly impossible things.” The following day he turned up at our flat with a sign he’d had made for me, saying, in capitals, “WE CAN DO NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE THINGS.” “I’m not leaving till it’s up on a wall,” he said bossily. Would he be a great boss, or the worst in the world? It’s hard to know. Both, probably.

“Er, Mother?”

“Sorry, I was just . . .”

“In a trance. I know. So, why are you so sure the Braid-slash-Cater kids go to this school?”

Excellent question. When I have to explain to Dom later why I let Zannah come with me when I should have made her stay at home and spend her pre-GCSE study leave revising, this is what I’ll tell him: she’s got a sharp mind and a powerful capacity to get to the heart of a problem. Nothing associated with school ever brings this out in her. Thinking about the Braid-slash-Cater problem does.

“I know what type of school Lewis would pick for his kids,” I tell her. “This type—of which this is the closest example to Wyddial Lane.”

“But they might not be Lewis’s kids.”

“I trust what I saw,” I repeat my mantra. “I saw Thomas and Emily Braid, aged five and three. Or, at least . . . two children who looked so similar to them that they can only be Lewis and Flora’s.”