“Harm Flora?” says Rosemary. “No. Never. He adored Flora and the children. Treated them as if they were made of gold. I didn’t like him, though.”

Gerard makes a spluttering noise. He puts down his cup of tea and wipes his mouth. “Rosemary, of course you liked Lewis. We both did.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did,” he insists, looking perplexed.

“I pretended to. I’ve always pretended to, even after they told us they didn’t want us in their lives anymore. It was probably silly of me, Ged. You and I should have discussed it before now. I shouldn’t have told you in front of people we hardly know.”

“Never mind,” he says. He looks as if he does, though.

“Why didn’t you like him?” I ask Rosemary.

“It’s hard to describe, especially at a distance of so many years. But whenever he came here, I felt as if I was a guest in his house and not the other way around. Not even a guest, actually. More of a servant. He always had an air of being in charge, even in places where he shouldn’t have been. Even in my kitchen.”

“He was always perfectly genial, as far as I recall,” Gerard defends the man who told him he’d never see his daughter or grandchildren again. “Life and soul of every gathering.”

“But we couldn’t be ourselves around him, Ged. Not at all.”

“I could.”

“Well, I couldn’t,” says Rosemary in a shaky voice. “I always felt I needed to please and impress him, and that, if I didn’t, my relationship with Flora would suffer. I worked out, very early on, what kind of mother-in-law he would most want, and then I pretended to be that person.”

“When I spoke to Lewis on the phone, I asked after Georgina,” I tell her. “I said, ‘How old is she now?’ Obviously, I had no idea she’d passed away. I said it in a ‘Wow, she must be nearly a teenager’ kind of way.”

“Lewis won’t have liked that at all,” says Gerard Tillotson quietly. Something chimes at the back of my mind—some sort of alarm or warning—but it’s gone before I can grasp it.

“What did he say?” asks Rosemary.

“He told me Georgina was twelve,” I say. I know I’ve said enough, but I’m so furious with Lewis that I can’t control it, and the rest spills out: “There was no hint of distress or unease in his voice. He sounded his usual, upbeat, extrovert self, even though, it turns out, he was telling me the most outrageous lie: that his daughter who died when she was six months old is alive and well and living in Delray Beach, Florida.”

12

“Beth? It’s pitch black in here,” Dom complains.

I’m in the bath, in the dark, with Kiehl’s Lavender, Sea Salts and Aloe Vera bath foam and a few extra drops of essential lavender oil added for good measure, to make the scent stronger. My face is covered with a stiff, dried mask: Zannah’s favorite—a blend of lavender and chamomile that comes as a powder. You have to add water and stir it into a paste.

Some people believe that tea is the answer to stress, and others resort to alcohol. For me, it’s lavender.

“You want to talk yet?” says Dom.

I nod. I’m ready. It might be nearly midnight, but since getting back from Wokingham I’ve dealt with my work email inbox and had an hour or so to get my thoughts in order. The bath has helped hugely. I feel like I have a grip on things again. I’ve adjusted, digested all the new information.

“Good.” Dom closes the door and locks it. Now we’re in total darkness.

“Can I turn a light on?” he asks.

“No. Your eyes’ll adjust in a minute.”

He sits down on the floor, leaning his back against the wall. “We need to talk,” he says. “Seriously.”

“I agree.”

“Great. I’m glad.”

I know what’s coming.

“You need to drop this now. Completely. No more driving to far-away places, no more hanging around schools. And don’t turn this into ‘My husband doesn’t understand my point of view,’ because that’s not true. I do.”

“I’ve literally never said those words, by the way.”

“Zan told me what happened at Flora’s parents’ place. Something fucked up is going on with Lewis and Flora, big time, but it doesn’t affect us. By which I mean: it doesn’t need to, unless you keep your obsession stoked up. You’ve been lied to and fobbed off repeatedly—that means Flora and Lewis don’t want you to know what’s going on with them, they want you out of their lives. Let that happen—stop pursuing this—and we’ll never see or hear from the Braids again. And that’ll be brilliant, Beth. That’ll be the best possible outcome.”

“For who?”

“All of us. Me, you, Zan and Ben.”

“And we’re the only people who matter?”

“In this case, yes. No one’s having their life threatened or endangered, are they? Flora’s walking around, going about her normal business. She seems not to be in too terrible a state, apart from when she sees you stalking her.”

“I’m not—”

“So you heard her talking on the phone outside her house and she sounded upset—so what? These people haven’t been our friends for twelve years. Let them get on with their lives, whatever weirdness those lives might involve, and let’s us get on with ours. The alternative is what? Letting down more clients? Isn’t that going to harm your business? You’ve always been the one out of the two of us who cares about your job. Maybe you don’t anymore, but it’s not only about you.”

Here it comes.

“Today, Zannah should have been at home revising. Instead, she was sticking her nose into other people’s business and getting drunk. That can’t happen again, Beth.”

“I agree. It was a one-off.”

“Yeah, well, it should have been a none-off.” He sounds slightly mollified.

“I’ve made a decision. I need one more day, and then I’ll stop. At that point I’ll have done all I can. I’ve already rescheduled all the clients I canceled. They’re all fine about it. Zannah’s got some revision sessions coming up at school, which she’ll go to. Our lives aren’t falling apart, Dom. We’re all fine.”

“Right, and we’re going to stay fine—by accepting that other people’s lives are their business and their problem. I don’t agree that you need one more day.”

I don’t care.

“What will this extra day involve?”

“I’m going to go to Huntingdon and try and talk to the police there.”

“What?” Dom laughs. “Beth, no crime has been committed.”

“I agree, there’s no proof of any crime.”

“But you think there is one?”

“I’ve no way of knowing, and no power to find out. I strongly suspect something is really horribly wrong. For all I know, it involves an element of crime. Generally, people don’t go to such extreme lengths to hide whatever they’re hiding unless it’s criminal. One person alone might be desperate to hide a shameful personal secret, but four? Lewis, Flora, Kevin Cater and the woman who told us she was Jeanette?”

“Yeah, they’re four liars who all know each other. It’s hardly a huge underground network. And there’s absolutely no reason to suspect a criminal conspiracy. But . . . you’re not going to take my word for it, so let’s go and see the police. Maybe if you hear them say, ‘We don’t think there’s anything for us to investigate here,’ it’ll put your mind at rest.”

“It won’t stop me wondering what’s going on. I don’t think anything could, apart from finding out the answer. But I need to know that I’ve done everything I possibly could to help Flora and . . . whoever those two kids were that I saw outside her house. And the two in Florida. All of them.”

“You said the two kids you saw outside the Wyddial Lane house last Saturday looked normal and healthy,” says Dom.

“They did.”

“And it’s clear from Lewis’s Instagram that Thomas and Emily are doing great. So there’s no evidence that anyone’s harming any kids, is there?”

“Dom, for God’s sake.”

“What? What did I say?”

I sit up and wash off the face mask. Once it’s all gone, I say, “How sure are you that those four children are fine—the two in England and the two in America? Really think about it, Dom. I heard Flora call the two little ones Thomas and Emily. They were outside Kevin Cater’s house, and Lou Munday at Kimbolton Prep School told me that those are the Cater kids’ names: Thomas and Emily. That means it’s likely to be them that I saw.”

“I know all this.”

“The two kids I saw were absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt Flora’s children. Like teenage Thomas and Emily when they were little, they bore a strikingly strong resemblance to Flora. There’s no way they aren’t hers. So. Think about what that means.”

Dom stands up. He walks over to the bathroom mirror and stares at himself. Eventually he says, “Flora had three children. One died. Then she had two more and called them the same names as the two children she already had.”

“Except no one does that,” I say.

“But she has.” Dom turns to face me. He looks confused. “If everything you’ve just said is true, that the younger two must be Flora’s, then that must be what happened.”

“Must it? We’ve only seen pictures of teenage Thomas and Emily on the Internet. The people in those pictures could be actors hired by Lewis.”