Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  “You’re in luck,” she says. “I’ve got Jeanette’s mobile number for you.”

  24

  Back in my hotel room, I sit down in the hard chair at the desk and stare at the number Lou has sent me. It doesn’t look familiar. It can’t be the same one Flora had twelve years ago. I think I’d probably recognize that number if it was in front of me, though I can’t call it to mind.

  I key in the digits, press the dial button and wait for her to answer. Each of these stages feels as if it lasts an age. How many more stages will there be?

  It doesn’t matter. However many there are, I’ll be here for them.

  “Hello?”

  “Flora, it’s me.”

  “I told you to leave me alone.”

  “I know. And I let you think I might. I should have been clearer. I can’t leave you alone until I’m sure that you and the children are safe. Flora, listen, this is important. I know you’re not okay. I knew it the second I saw you get out of that car outside your house in Hemingford Abbots. I knew when I saw the look of pure fear in your eyes in the car park in Huntingdon. I know you’ve lied to me and I understand why, but you’ve miscalculated here. You think if you lie convincingly enough, I’ll disappear, and you’re scared of what they’ll do to you if you don’t help to make me go away—I get that—but you need to believe me now. I’m not ever going to drop this. And when they see that I haven’t dropped it, they’ll blame you.”

  I stop in case she wants to try and deny any of it. I hear her breathing.

  She says nothing.

  “They’re not going to blame themselves, are they?” I go on. “People like them never do. Lewis isn’t a good person. I think you know that better than anyone. I should have realized it long before I did. Kevin and Yanina aren’t good people either. But you are, Flora. You were my best friend for years. I know you want to help make sure Thomas and Emily aren’t harmed any more than they already have been.”

  She doesn’t respond. All I can hear is her breathing.

  “I’ve spoken to people at Thomas’s school. The staff are worried about him.” Only one member of staff, but Flora doesn’t need to know that. “They know there’s something wrong at home. Shall I tell you what I’ve been told? That you cling to Thomas and Emily as if you’re terrified something bad will happen to them.”

  I hear a sob. It’s working. Keep going.

  “What do you think Lewis is going to do if you follow his instructions to the letter? Treat you well? When did he last treat you well, Flora? Not for a while, I don’t think. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Silence.

  “What will Kevin and Yanina do if you obey their orders? What will your reward be, for helping to get rid of nosy, pushy Beth? Will they suddenly treat you and the children kindly? Have they ever done that? You’ve obeyed orders for a long time, haven’t you, and where’s it got you? Nowhere.”

  Where’s this approach getting me? I have no way of knowing, and no plan. I’m acting on instinct—saying anything I think of that feels true, praying I’m right. I can’t show any doubt if I want her to believe I can help her.

  “We’re going to do it differently from now on, Flora. You’re going to listen to me, not them. I want to help you and the children. I know I can help, but you have to talk to me and tell me the truth. And you need to understand that if you don’t do that, you won’t get to avoid your fear. The opposite. You’ll make the fear last longer. You’ll create more of it if you carry on lying and avoiding me. You know why? Because I’m not going to leave this alone. Whatever you’re all so terrified of, it’s going to happen. I’m going to find out. It’s only a question of when. It might take me a year, maybe two. Do you want to live in fear for that long? You can’t keep the secret forever. None of you can.”

  She’s letting me say all this—not shutting me down, not interrupting. That has to mean something.

  “When did someone last try to help you, Flora?” I try to think of anything I can say that might flip that switch in her mind. “You know how persistent I’ve had to be. And I was your best friend for years. What if no one ever really tries to help you and the children again? What if I’m your only chance?” Shit. That sounded too threatening. In a softer voice, I say, “There’s a better, more sensible choice you can make: you can tell me the truth right now and have an ally.”

  “Why does it matter to you?” She’s crying. “Why can’t you forget about me, forget about all of us?”

  “Because there’s something badly wrong,” I tell her. “The children—Thomas and Emily Cater—are being harmed somehow. I’m not sure how but I know it’s happening. Lewis is the driving force behind it. Lewis was and is always a driving force—that’s all he knows how to be. And you’re being harmed by it, whatever it is. Maybe that’s your choice—to stay in that house with those people and let them hurt you in whatever way they’re hurting you. Maybe you don’t want to be rescued, but how can you deny your children the help you know they need?”

  “You don’t know anything! You don’t understand!”

  I wait a moment, then carry on as evenly as if her outburst hasn’t happened. “There’s a lot that I don’t understand. That’s true. I’ve worked out part of it, but not all. There are some things that still make no sense to me. Maybe you can explain them. If I’m going to help, I need to know what I’m dealing with. Why did Lewis make such a fuss about you feeding Georgina, the last time you all came to see us?”

  “What? What are you talking about?” She sounds genuinely thrown off course by the question, as if I’ve asked her about a complicated algebra problem.

  “You must remember the last time we all got together. You found out that I’d cut up the photo you sent me of you, Lewis and the kids. We both knew we’d never see each other again, though we didn’t say it explicitly.”

  “I’d forgotten that you did that,” Flora says quietly.

  “You forgot that I cut Georgina out of a photograph?” I pause to consider this. It takes me a moment to realize what it means. “I suppose that’s possible, if you had a lot on your mind, and you did, didn’t you? You’d been distancing yourself from me for a while before that day. Months. Something else was going on in your life. It started around the time you got pregnant with Georgina. Maybe that was it, the thing that changed everything: the pregnancy. Whatever it was, there was something you couldn’t talk to me about and didn’t want me to find out. Bit by bit, you started to vanish from my life. You didn’t really want to come around that last time, did you?”

  “I remember it now,” she says. “Lewis and Dom went to the pub.”

  “Yeah, for a bit. Then they came back, and they were in the kitchen, and we were in the living room with all the children. Georgina was a tiny baby. She’d been asleep all afternoon. Then she started to stir and you picked her up to feed her. You seemed on edge—more than you’d ever been with Thomas or Emily. I assumed it was because of the tension between you and me. You’d just found out about the photo, and I thought that explained the atmosphere that you could cut with a knife. That wasn’t the explanation, though, was it? You and Lewis had brought the tension with you. He came into the room while you were feeding Georgina and yelled at you. I’d never heard him shout at you like that before. Other people, yes, but never you.

  “I wish I could remember exactly what he said. It might have been as simple as ‘What are you doing?’ as if feeding your child in front of your best friend was a cardinal sin and you ought to know better. He looked and sounded appalled, and it made no sense.”

  “Yes, I remember,” says Flora.

  “I didn’t get it. I still don’t. You’d fed Thomas and Emily in front of me and Dom a million times—older Thomas and Emily—and Lewis had never batted an eyelid. He said so himself when I asked him about it earlier today: he reminded me that you used to sunbathe topless on the beach on holiday. He never minded that. So why the sudden move toward prudishness?”

  Blindly following my instincts, I press on. �
��It wasn’t about modesty, was it? Lewis had never insisted that no one should see your body except him. It was about Georgina. Somehow, this is all about her. That was when everything changed: when you got pregnant with her. You didn’t tell me when you found out you were pregnant, or when she was born. And then she died. None of the other children died. Only her.”

  “Do you really want to help me, Beth?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Then don’t ask me. Help me by . . .” I hear a ragged gasp. Then she says, “I don’t want anything to happen to you. You say you don’t want me to come to harm? I want the same for you. The used-to-be-best-friends thing goes both ways.”

  I close my eyes. There it is, finally—an admission. A cold, heavy feeling lands in the pit of my stomach. Fear. She’s telling me there’s something to be afraid of, something for me to be afraid of, if I don’t drop this.

  I’m scared of what will happen if I do. If I abandon Flora, Thomas and Emily to whatever mess they’re in, I’ll hate myself.

  And I was right. I’ve been right all along. Does that mean I’ll be right if I listen to the part of me that’s saying I have to stay and see this through?

  Right all along? Like when you thought Thomas and Emily Braid might not have grown a day older in twelve years?

  I haven’t got time to doubt myself. “Who was Georgina’s father?” I ask. “Was it Lewis? Or was it Kevin Cater?”

  “Lewis,” Flora says quietly. “Why would you think it was Kevin?”

  “I wondered if maybe Lewis didn’t want you to feed another man’s baby. I can’t think of any other explanation that makes sense.”

  “No. I was never unfaithful to Lewis. I never would have been.”

  “When he yelled at you, you ran out of the room like a frightened mouse, clutching Georgina—as if you thought you’d really screwed up.”

  “I don’t remember much about that day.”

  I get up, walk over to the balcony door and slide it open. This room, beautiful and comfortable though it is, is starting to feel like a cage. How long before I can go home?

  You can go any time you like. Back to your family, back to safety . . .

  “Want to hear something stupid?” I ask Flora.

  She doesn’t reply.

  “Remember in the lobby before, I asked you who Chimpy was?”

  “I don’t know that name. It means nothing.”

  “I know. I made a mistake. The first time I saw you in Hemingford Abbots, you were talking on the phone and crying as you got out of the car. I knew then that something was wrong. It’s not like I’d never seen you upset before. I had, loads of times, but those were all normal upset. What I saw in Hemingford Abbots looked different. It sounded different. More serious.”

  “Stop,” Flora whispers.

  “I thought I heard you say ‘Hey, Chimpy,’ and then, a few seconds later ‘Peterborough.’”

  “Please, Beth.”

  “But I didn’t. What you said was ‘HMP Peterborough,’ the name of the nearest prison to Hemingford Abbots. Hey Chimpy, HMP. They sound so similar. If it weren’t for Lewis, I’d never have worked that out. He said something in passing this morning about ‘Her Majesty’s pleasure’—a phrase I’d not heard for years. It’s such a weird expression. I thought, ‘Is that why prisons are called HMP?,’ and then suddenly it came rushing at me: ‘Hey, Chimpy.’ It sounds almost exactly the same as ‘HMP.’ That’s why I had a strange echo in my mind.”

  “I don’t know anyone who’s in any prison,” says Flora.

  “No one’s in prison. Least of all you. Right?”

  After a short silence, she says, “Plenty of people are in prison. I don’t know anything about any of them.”

  “I know what that phone call was, Flora. I know what it means. You were almost too upset to speak. I don’t blame you.”

  “You can’t possibly know who I was speaking to and what it was about,” she says.

  “I see why you’d think that, but I can and I do. Now I understand why it was such an effort to force out each word. That’s why there was a break between the two parts of the prison’s name, HMP and Peterborough, a break just long enough to make me hear them as separate. I thought I knew exactly what you’d said, and got fixated on the wrong questions: what was the relevance of Peterborough and who was Chimpy? I thought Chimpy might be Georgina.”

  “Then you’re not as clever as you think you are.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask her.

  “Lewis never allowed nicknames or shortenings. Don’t you remember? I was never allowed to say ‘Tom’ or ‘Emmy.’”

  This feels different, suddenly. As if we’re having a real conversation. “I knew you never called them anything but Thomas and Emily. I didn’t realize Lewis had forbidden it.”

  “He never explicitly said, ‘I forbid it.’ He didn’t have to.”

  I’m wondering how to respond to this when she says, “He used to be horrible about Zannah’s name.”

  “What?” Rage rears up inside me. It always does when someone criticizes Zan or Ben, even if the criticism is perfectly valid.

  “Not about her,” says Flora quickly. “Only the name. Lewis always liked her. He used to say in an admiring way, ‘That child has a steely edge.’”

  I don’t want to hear anything Lewis has said about my children, but I’m afraid to say so in case it discourages her from talking about other things.

  “He thought we should call her Suzannah at all times, I suppose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did he stand on Ben?”

  “Benjamin.”

  I turn and lean against the balcony rail so that I’m facing the room. The view that should lift my heart is starting to irritate me: the open sun umbrellas like spiky blue and white wheels, the rectangular, six-pillared building at the far end of the pool that makes me think of an Indian shrine.

  “Rom-com Dom was fine, though,” I say, trying to work out how to move the conversation back to HMP Peterborough in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

  “That was a joke,” says Flora. “Chimpy wouldn’t be very funny as a nickname. More of an insult. I would never compare my own child to a chimpanzee. Why did you think I would? Because of the strabismus?”

  “The what?” I picture a polished violin made of dark wood.

  “Lewis said you spoke to my parents. Did they tell you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s a strabismus?” Is it a car?

  “Weakness of the eye muscles,” says Flora. “Georgina would have needed an operation. Well, she might have. There were other options. A patch might have cured it.”

  Yes. Flora’s parents did tell me. One of them said something about Georgina maybe needing an operation. I can’t remember if they mentioned her eye, but Lewis did. He told me this morning that Georgina would have needed eye surgery, if she’d lived.

  “So . . . it’s like a lazy eye?” I ask Flora. A girl at my primary school had one. She wore a patch for months. She still looked a little cross-eyed afterward, but nowhere near as much.

  “That’s amblyopia,” Flora says. “They’re connected, but they’re not exactly the same thing. Why are we talking about this, Beth? Georgina’s dead.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I . . . Why would you think there might be a link between the name Chimpy and Georgina’s eye condition?”

  “There’s no connection in my mind. I thought you might think it. To think that Chimpy might be a nickname for a beautiful girl . . .” Her voice shakes. “A girl who looks like a chimp would be ugly, and Georgina was beautiful. She was beautiful. Her eye made no difference. It didn’t make her ugly.”

  “Flora, I never said it did. I would never say or think that. I now know that Chimpy is nobody’s nickname, so it’s irrelevant, but I don’t think it implies ugliness at all. Dom and I used to call Zan and Ben little chimps and it was nothing but affectionate. We certainly didn’t think they were—”

  The words fall
away as my brain races ahead. No, we didn’t. We didn’t think our children were ugly, and Flora didn’t think Georgina was ugly because of her eye problem.

  Someone did, though. “Lewis thought Georgina was ugly,” I say. “Because of her eye.”

  The other four all have his eyes. Georgina might have had too, except her eyes were flawed. And Lewis can’t handle flaws. He never could.

  “Flora, did . . . did Lewis . . .” I can’t bring myself to ask. If the answer is yes, how does it fit with what’s happening at Newnham House now, with Kevin and Yanina and little Thomas and Emily having the same names as their older brother and sister?

  “Can you come over now?” Flora says, making my heart jolt. This is how she used to sound, at university and when we all lived in Cambridge. It’s what we’d both say when we rang each other, if there was something new and entertaining to gossip about. “Lewis isn’t here. I’m in the house he put me in, on my own. He won’t be coming back today. It’ll be safe.”

  “Yes, of course. Tell me where and I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  There’s silence.

  “Flora?”

  “We’ll have to be quick,” she says. “I don’t think he’ll come back today, but there’s a chance he might in the evening.”

  “That gives us plenty of time.” Plenty of time to get her out of there.

  There’s a taut silence. I can’t even hear her breathing. If this chance slips away, I’m not sure I’ll be able to bear it. “Flora, please. You can trust me.”

  “I know.”

  “Then tell me. Where are you?”

  She gives me an address.

  25

  Delray Beach’s North Fayette Boulevard is grander than I thought it would be. It’s the kind of street where I’d expect to find millionaire film stars behind every door. The houses are all enormous and all in different architectural styles, a bit like Wyddial Lane except this road must be thirty times as long. The house number Flora gave me was 4451. I’ve never been to a four-figure address in England. I’m not sure there are any.