Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  Dom looks appalled, understandably. “Why the hell did you keep it? Why not chuck it in the rubbish once you’ve gone as far as cutting it up? What did Flora say? Anyone cut one of our kids out of a photograph, I’d punch their lights out.”

  “I didn’t give her a chance to say anything. I started talking at a million miles an hour—saying how sorry I was, that I didn’t know what had come over me. She was upset, but she said she understood. I explained how angry I’d been—that she’d not told me, and then sent the card and the photo, assuming I knew. She apologized for forgetting to tell me. She cried. It was a bit of an apology fest all around . . . and we both knew that was it, that we’d never see or speak to each other again.”

  “Jealousy,” Dom says. “That was what came over you. Understandably, I suppose.”

  “What? No. You mean the miscarriage?” I try to fight the feeling of disappointment that’s rising inside me. Dom’s bound to think this. What else would he think? How can he know what I’ve never told him?

  “Me losing a pregnancy had nothing to do with it,” I say. “You might not believe that, but it’s true.”

  “Then why the hell did you cut a baby out of a photo?”

  “Because Flora never told me about her, and I was . . . more hurt than you can probably imagine. When she got pregnant with Thomas, she told me right away. When I knew I was pregnant with Zannah, I rang Flora within ten minutes of taking the test. I think I told her before I told you. You were in a meeting and I couldn’t get hold of you . . .”

  Dom waves impatiently to indicate that he doesn’t care about not being told first.

  “When we both got pregnant a second time, same thing: Flora phoned me immediately after she’d told Lewis and her mum. I phoned her within an hour of knowing I was pregnant with Ben. With my third pregnancy, it was different. I told Flora because I always had before, not because I really wanted to. Lewis had inherited his fortune by then, and . . . I don’t know if it was us or them, but somehow the idea of this huge wealth that they suddenly had came between us.”

  “Did it?”

  “I didn’t talk to you about it because I wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening. You didn’t notice or care, because Lewis never mattered to you the way Flora mattered to me. But we saw them a bit less, and it was awkward when we did see them. And I thought it had to be the money that had made things different, but . . . thinking about it now, the change happened at the same time that Flora must have found out she was pregnant with Georgina. Oh, God, Dom, I’ve been such a terrible friend.”

  “You mean cutting up the photo?”

  “Not only that.” I blink back tears. “I used to think that defacing a happy family photo like a psycho was the worst thing I’d done. Not anymore.”

  “Beth, what are you talking about?”

  “I’m trying to tell you!”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “When I had the miscarriage, I had to tell everyone who knew I’d been pregnant. Including Flora. She was really nice on the phone. Sympathetic. I thought, ‘Maybe we’ll be okay, maybe the awkwardness between us was just a blip and now things’ll go back to normal.’ We talked about meeting up and she said she’d ring me to arrange something, but she never did. We didn’t see or hear from her or Lewis at all, for months. It was like they’d forgotten us completely. And then, just before Christmas, those arrived.” I nod at the card and photo pieces.

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Yep. Flora had been pregnant and had a baby and not told me. Not the day she found out, like she had with Thomas and Emily, and not ever. She went through an entire pregnancy and birth without telling me. I had no idea. And then suddenly, just before Christmas, a card arrives signed from all of them, including Georgina, and there’s the photo of the five of them and . . . it’s as if Flora’s forgotten, or doesn’t care enough to be aware of it, that she’s had another baby and told me nothing about it. That’s how I found out. From being sent that.” I point to the evidence: evidence of Flora’s awful behavior as well as mine.

  “I called her. Soon as I’d finished crying, cutting up the photo, hiding what I’d done—inadequately, as it turned out—I called Flora. She sounded normal. Well, normal for New Rich Flora. I thought, ‘She has no idea why I’m calling.’ I said, ‘I got your Christmas card. Flora, I didn’t know you’d had another baby. I didn’t even know you were pregnant.’”

  “What did she say?”

  “She sounded puzzled at first. She said, ‘Didn’t you? You must have known!’ Then there was this long, horrible silence, during which she must have realized I couldn’t have known because she never told me. She’s not stupid, and she knows I’m not either. We both knew that any charade of us still being best friends was finished.”

  “Maybe she didn’t tell you because of the miscarriage,” Dom says. “She didn’t want to rub salt into the wound.”

  “No. There was no planning or strategy. If she’d thought about it, she’d have known that for me to find out in the way I did would be the most hurtful thing of all. She just wasn’t thinking about me at all. At the time, I thought it was because she didn’t give a shit about me anymore.”

  “But . . . if this phone call revealed that the two of you weren’t close friends anymore, how did they end up coming around to ours with Georgina?”

  “After that conversation, Flora briefly felt bad enough to make a bit of an effort. And I wanted to believe the friendship could still recover. But from the second they arrived, things were wrong and awkward and . . . bad. I assumed it was because Flora felt so guilty about not having told me, or maybe she didn’t want to be there and was just doing a duty visit, for form’s sake. I was wrong.”

  “How?”

  “I’m scared you’ll think I’m a terrible person if I tell you,” I say tearfully. “I’m scared I am a terrible person.”

  “Don’t be silly. Just tell me.”

  “All these years, I’ve been making it all about me. When Flora changed and seemed less interested in me, I put it down to Lewis’s inheritance. When months passed and I didn’t hear from her, it never once occurred to me that she might be in trouble. When she was pregnant and had a baby and didn’t tell me, I used it to back up my theory: that she and Lewis were rich now so she didn’t need to bother with the likes of me anymore. I didn’t ever think, ‘Flora wouldn’t treat me like this unless something was really wrong.’ And I should have thought that, Dom—because she wouldn’t.”

  Finally, Dom sees what I’m driving at: “You think that whatever weird shit’s going on now started then?”

  “Yes, I do. And . . . after that last time they came to ours, I drew the wrong conclusion again. Apart from their new address card, Flora never contacted me after the day she found out I’d cut up the photo. I assumed that was why . . . but it wasn’t. Sure, she’d have been hurt by that, but it wasn’t the reason. Flora never got in touch again because she couldn’t risk having me in her life anymore. She couldn’t risk being close to me—because if she was then I might find out the truth. The secret. Whatever that was. Is,” I correct myself. “Dom, whatever it is, it started before Georgina was born. Months before.”

  “I wish we’d talked about this at the time. I had no idea—about any of it.”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it. I was . . . ashamed, I guess. People aren’t supposed to feel jilted and have their hearts broken by their friends.”

  Sudden ringing makes me jump. “Is that your phone?” Dom asks.

  I nod, reaching down to pull my handbag up onto the bed.

  “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?”<
br />
  “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 i
ssues 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?”

  “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.”