“No particular reason.”

“You seem to have been looking into the Caters and the Braids fairly thoroughly, that’s all. You’ve said you think the Cater children must be Flora Braid’s because of the strong resemblance, and you think the photos of . . .” He looks down at his notes “. . . groups of birds on the wall at number 16 have to belong to Lewis Braid. The registration number’s a way of knowing for sure who that car belongs to. I’m surprised you didn’t write it down.”

“I don’t care who the car belongs to. Kevin Cater, Lewis—who cares? They’re both involved in this, either way.”

“Got it.” PC Pollard stands up and gives his upper lip one final rub. “Leave it with me. If anyone at the school thinks the Cater children are at risk, then, as I say, we might be able to get somewhere.”

*

Ten minutes later, Dom and I are sitting in his car outside the police station. “I think that went pretty well,” he says. “Better than I expected. It’s a relief to hand it over to the professionals.”

Not for the first time in our twenty-three-year marriage, I wonder how two people can live happily side by side and sleep in the same bed every night—two people who would probably die for each other if necessary—and yet see the world in such profoundly different ways. I try to imagine how I might feel if I believed Paul Pollard was capable of resolving the problem. Why don’t I believe it? Maybe I should try to.

Dom starts the car and we pull out of the car park and set off for home. “Beth, I need to tell you something,” he says. “I don’t think it means anything—beyond what we already know, that something messed up’s going on—but I wouldn’t feel fair keeping it from you. I was going to tell you last night, but then—”

“Just tell me.”

“Yesterday, all the Braids’ social media accounts disappeared. Every last one.”

“What do you mean? Why would they disappear?”

“It’d only happen if they’d been deliberately deleted by their owners.”

I swallow hard. “And . . . you didn’t think this was worth mentioning to PC Pollard?”

“No,” says Dom. “Because about three hours later, they all reappeared. I looked through them all—Lewis’s Instagram and Twitter, Thomas and Emily’s Twitter. Nothing looked different. All the stuff that had been there before was still there, so it’s not like they did it because they wanted to delete stuff. You don’t need to deactivate an account to delete individual posts anyway.”

“How certain are you that nothing was different when the accounts reappeared?”

“Not infallibly certain, but I’m pretty sure.”

“I didn’t realize you were familiar enough with their social media accounts to know what was on them. I assumed you’d found them, had a quick look, then not looked again.”

“Yeah, well.” Dom smiles sheepishly. “You’re not the only one who’s curious.”

Of course. Who wouldn’t be curious? He’s just given himself away. “You’ve been downplaying your level of interest in the hope of getting me to ease off,” I say.

He doesn’t deny it.

“If you’re interested in how I feel about that? Not great. You could have saved me a few sleepless hours of wondering if I’m crazy because you, a normal person, just didn’t seem to care that much.”

“You’re right. I’m—”

“What time did all this happen, the social media stuff?” I ask quickly, so that there’s no time for him to apologize. Probably soon I’ll forgive him for trying to manage me instead of communicating honestly, but not yet. Not for at least an hour.

“I noticed the accounts were gone early yesterday—nine-ish. By noon they were back up.”

“And then later that same day, Flora rings up, supposedly for a friendly, news-swapping chat? What does that tell you?”

Dom shakes his head with a shrug.

“They’re panicking. Whoever’s running the show can’t decide on a strategy. First it’s ‘Disappear, delete everything,’ then it’s ‘Act as normal as possible, phone, pretend all’s well.’ There’d have been no point in telling Pollard about it because it’s not a direct lead to a crime.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“We’ll never hear from him again,” I say. “If we chase him for updates, he’ll avoid us.”

“I disagree,” says Dom. “He’s going to do something, and he’ll let us know the upshot, once he has. But whether he does or not . . .”

“What?” From his tone, it sounds as if he’s about to make another attempt at managing me.

“We’re agreed that we’re leaving this now, right? You and me. We take no further action. We don’t even look at Lewis’s Instagram. For us—apart from gratefully receiving any updates PC Pollard chooses to give us—this ends here. Yes?”

Bearing in mind his views about the benefits of avoiding a hard “no,” I say, “I can’t give you an unconditional guarantee that I’m not going to look at Lewis’s Instagram and Twitter again. I’m sorry.”

“And if I ask you to promise that’s all you’ll do? No more than that?”

“I could make that promise and then end up breaking it because of . . . something I can’t foresee at this precise moment. Like: more and worse sinister shit happens, and PC Pollard turns out to be useless.”

“You don’t have to be the person who deals with every problem in the world, Beth.”

“Really?” I snap. “Just remind me what global problems you’re dealing with, currently?”

“I’m dealing with trying to keep our family in one piece.”

“That’s so unnecessarily dramatic! Our family’s fine. Stop reciting lines you’ve heard in bad films that have nothing to do with our situation.”

Dom takes a deep breath and goes on. “I’m trying to make sure that Zannah passes her exams, that you and I continue to do our jobs and earn money, that our life stays on track. I’m sorry if that doesn’t feel like an ambitious enough project for you.”

“I care about our family as much as you do, Dom. And I know we’re okay and will remain okay. Caring about your own family doesn’t have to mean turning a blind eye to something terrible that’s happening in another family. I know it’s not my job to make sure the Caters’ kids are safe. It’s Pollard’s job. And if he does it . . . great.”

Dom says nothing. He doesn’t like any of my answers. Not one bit.

Gerard Tillotson’s words come back to me: “Lewis won’t have liked that at all.”

By the time we turn onto the A14, I’ve worked out what it means—why it snagged in my mind as sounding strange at the time, though I couldn’t work out what the significance was.

I say to Dom, “When Zannah and I were at the Tillotsons’ house, he said something weird—Flora’s dad.”

Nothing. No response.

“I told him I’d asked Lewis on the phone how old Georgina was now, in a ‘doesn’t time fly’ sort of way, and he said, ‘Lewis won’t have liked that at all.’ As soon as he said it, I thought, ‘No, that’s wrong, there’s something off about it,’ but then the conversation moved on and I forgot about it until just now.”

“Doesn’t sound strange to me,” says Dom. “If one of your kids is dead and you’ve decided to pretend they’re still alive—though God knows why you would, but anyway—you’re hardly going to welcome being asked about them and having to spout a load of bullshit to maintain the fa?ade, are you?”

“You didn’t hear how Flora’s dad said it. It wasn’t like ‘Lewis will have found that deeply uncomfortable or upsetting,’ it was more . . . wry and knowing. ‘Lewis won’t have liked that at all.’ Almost as if he was thinking that, for Lewis, it would be more of a PR or image failure. Someone’s seen through the image he was hoping to project and that’s a disaster for his ego. Or maybe it was ‘Lewis will have hated to learn that something he thought he’d gotten under control had escaped his control.’ Either way, trust me, it wasn’t Lewis’s grief that Gerard was thinking about.”

I’m not expecting a reply, but eventually Dom says, “You don’t know Gerard Tillotson well enough to read his tone. His words make perfect sense in the context.”

“The tone was unmistakeable. Whether he realizes it or not, Gerard knows that Lewis cares more about image management and controlling everything than he does about his dead daughter. Who isn’t dead, I don’t think.”

“We don’t know if she’s dead,” says Dom. “And I don’t see how this gets us any farther forward. All right, Lewis is a control freak—everyone who knows him probably agrees, including Flora’s dad—but so what? What’s that bringing to the table? As people say in all the boring meetings I have to go to, where the only things brought to the table are boring ones. And the table’s also boring.”

I smile, knowing the joke is meant as a peace offering.

“Lewis is a control freak,” I say. “He cares about image management and control. Exactly.”

“Exactly what?”

“The Tillotsons also said Georgina was born prematurely. She wasn’t robust, they said. She had various health complications. What if that wasn’t good enough for Lewis, to have a not-perfect child?”