“Who’d call this late at night?”

My heart judders as I look at the screen. “It’s Lewis,” I say, recognizing the number I tried to call back so many times on Sunday evening.

“Answer it.”

“Hello? Lewis? Hello?”

I hear muffled noise in the background. Movement.

“Is anyone there? Lewis?”

“Beth?”

“Who is this?”

“I meant to ring you back the other night, and then life took over and I never did. I’m sorry.”

“Flora?”

“Hi, Beth! Say hi to Rom-com Dom from me!” Lewis Braid calls out in the background.

“Yes, it’s me,” Flora says. “Beth? Can you hear me okay?”

I can. It’s definitely her. Definitely him, too; no one else calls my husband Rom-com Dom. It’s Lewis and Flora Braid. In Florida, now. Together.

13

Whatever I was expecting when I imagined talking to the police, it wasn’t PC Paul Pollard. I’d prepared myself for the brush-off, but when I met Pollard, I realized I’d expected the disappointing reaction to come from someone a little bit impressive, with an air of authority. Pollard seems not particularly bright and says, “Got it,” every ten seconds. He looks about thirteen. The tea he’s brought in for me and Dom, despite being in proper cups with saucers, has got tiny, reflective pools of what looks like grease spotted across the surface of the liquid. We thank him for it as he sits back down behind the table in the small, white-painted interview room.

“Right,” he says. “So Mr. and Mrs. Braid phoned you last night from America, you were saying—because she’d forgotten to call back on Sunday night?”

“She didn’t forget.” I’ve already told him this. “That was a lie.”

“Got it. Yep. And how long did you speak to them?”

“About fifteen minutes. It wasn’t us speaking to them, it was me speaking to Flora. Dom and Lewis didn’t really say much apart from calling out hi and bye. It was the tensest phone conversation I’ve ever had—both of us on edge, trying to pretend we were chatting normally, catching up on news, when it was obvious we were both massively on edge. She flat out denied having been in Huntingdon. Said I must have seen someone else the two times I thought I saw her, because she hasn’t been back to England recently.”

“Got it.” Pollard makes a note.

“After she ran away from me in the car park, they all must have decided urgent action was needed—an emergency trip to America for Flora. As if that would make anything more plausible!”

“Did you tell her you’d visited her parents, or that they’d told you her daughter Georgina had died as a baby?” Pollard asks.

“No. What’s the point? She’d only have lied about that too if it suited her.”

“Got it.”

“I don’t think Georgina Braid is dead,” I tell him. “For some reason, Lewis and Flora wanted Flora’s parents to believe that she was, so that’s what they told them—and then broke off all contact so that their lie would never be discovered.”

“There must have been a funeral, if Georgina died,” says Dom. “I wonder if Gerard and Rosemary went to it.”

“She didn’t die,” I tell him. “She’s Chimpy—and she seems to be nowhere! From Lewis’s Instagram, it seems as if she’s not part of his life in Florida, and Lou Munday told me the Caters only had two kids, so she’s not in Hemingford Abbots. Where is she?”

“Mrs. Leeson—”

“Call me Beth.”

“Got it.” Pollard rubs the index finger of his left hand across the skin between his nose and his mouth. It looks as if he’s making an obscene gesture, or pretending to have a mobile mustache. “I can’t see that there’s anything criminal here to be investigated. I’m not saying it’s not a strange story—it is—but you’ve not brought me any crimes I can investigate.”

“I understand that. But when something’s so strange that some element of criminal behavior behind it all seems likely, can’t the police look into it?”

“If there’s a solid lead, yes. But—”

“Four adults with presumably quite busy lives have gone to huge lengths—spent money on a transatlantic flight, even—to make me believe I can’t have seen Flora in Cambridgeshire twice in the last week. Why? Who would bother doing that to cover up weirdness? Doesn’t the sheer effort made to deceive me suggest that something criminal might be going on? I mean . . . Flora must have gone home after seeing me in Huntingdon, taken off her clothes and given them to that other woman to put on, so that she could come back to the car park wearing the same outfit and hopefully make me think I’d been hallucinating again. I don’t believe anyone would go to those lengths unless it was to cover up something that could land them in prison for a very long time.”

“By a solid lead, I mean evidence that points to a crime,” says Pollard, whose expression reminds me that he has endured my little speech with great patience. “For example, if you’d seen someone at 16 Wyddial Lane causing bodily harm to another person. What you’ve told me is unusual but it’s not enough. I can’t do anything with it.”

“Could you maybe find out for us if Georgina Braid is dead?” Dom asks.

“I could find out if I needed to, but I’m afraid I can’t—”

“Of course. I understand. It’s not your job to satisfy the curiosity of members of the public when no crime has been committed.”

“Though safeguarding and child protection are your job, presumably?” I ask Pollard. “How will you feel in two weeks’ time if you get an emergency call from Wyddial Lane and you arrive to find that something terrible has happened to Thomas and Emily Cater?”

“Mrs. Leeson—sorry, Beth—I understand that you’re concerned, but you need to be careful. What you’ve just said could be construed as a threat to those children.”

“What?”

“Beth wasn’t making a threat, she was making a point,” says Dom. “Her point was, it’s better to be safe than sorry, and it’s a good one. We might not have witnessed any physical harm to anybody, but I think there’s enough in what we’ve told you to justify a quick check. You could talk to the head teacher at the prep school, ask her if she’s aware of any issues in the family. Maybe he or she could tell you who the woman Beth and I met really is. She introduced herself to us as Jeanette Cater, but she had a non-English accent, and the school receptionist told Beth that Jeanette Cater didn’t. She also told her the Cater kids are called Thomas and Emily, when Kevin Cater and that woman, whoever she was, said their names were Toby and Emma. Is that not sufficiently worrying? I mean . . . can you say with a hundred percent confidence that you believe the children in that house aren’t at risk?”

Dom’s words seem to be having an effect. Please, please. See reason. “PC Pollard, you didn’t hear Flora on the phone last night. I did. She sounded the way someone would sound if someone had a gun to their head.”

“Got it. Got it. Let me ask you something, Beth. Last Saturday, you were convinced you saw the Thomas and Emily you’d known twelve years ago getting out of that silver Range Rover. Correct?”

I nod.

“Yet all through our conversation, you’ve referred to the children living at 16 Wyddial Lane as Thomas and Emily Cater.”

“As far as I know, their surname is Cater. That’s what the school calls them.” What’s he getting at?

“But if they’re Thomas and Emily Cater, five and three years old, then they can’t also be the Thomas and Emily Braid you used to know. So which is it?”

“Are you asking me if I still believe that the two young children I saw on Saturday are actually the same people as the Thomas and Emily Braid I knew twelve years ago?”

“I am, yes.”

I take a deep breath. “Then you think I’m either crazy or stupid. They can’t be the same people, can they? It’s impossible. People age. Children grow. Time doesn’t go backward. Last Saturday, what I saw were two children who looked pretty much identical to my memory of the Thomas and Emily I knew. I heard them called by the same names. It was such a shock, I . . . for a while, a short while, I thought it was them and they hadn’t grown. But obviously I soon realized that would be impossible.”

“Got it.” Pollard writes this down, smiling. He seems to have liked that answer. “All right, let me see what I can do to help here. How about if I arrange for someone who’s more well versed in child protection issues than I am to have a word with a few people at the school? If any member of staff there has concerns about the Cater children’s safety or welfare, that’ll give us an angle to do more.”

“That would be amazing,” I say. “Thank you.”

“Did you note down the registration plate of the silver Range Rover?” Pollard asks me.

“No.”

“Why not?”