After a minute or so of doing this, my right hand starts to ache. I take a break to release a couple of trigger points with my left – one of the useful things about being a massage therapist is knowing exactly where to press, on the parts of my body that I can reach.
Once I’ve smoothed the ache away, I scroll down again and almost immediately find what I’m looking for. Thomas Braid is on Twitter. He’s @tomtbraid2002. The ‘t’, I remember suddenly, is for Tillotson – his middle name and Flora’s surname before she married Lewis.
2002. Thomas’s birth year. Making him seventeen now.
He has fewer followers than his father – only twenty-seven. He also hasn’t put anything up on his page since June last year, when he reposted something from someone called ‘Bav’ saying, ‘If you hear them chat shit about me, remember there will have been a time I was good to those goons’.
A lot of Thomas’s followers look similar to him: long-haired surfer types. Oh – and here’s Emily Braid, who of course follows her brother. I click on the little picture of her and her page appears. I read her biographical blurb about herself, and … wait. Does this mean …
My heart staggers an irregular beat, like a dancer out of time with the music.
‘Soulmate of @ScobyJoe, sister of @tomtbraid2002, daughter of @VersaNovaLewB #LoveFlorida #sunshine #goodvibetribe’. Followed by three small red hearts.
No mention of Georgina or Flora.
All right, so they’re not Twitter users. That’s the obvious answer. She’s only included the important people in her life who have ‘@’ names on this site. That makes sense.
But Flora and Georgina are also the only two family members missing from Lewis’s Instagram. So … they don’t do Twitter, and they don’t like having their photographs taken?
I read through Emily Braid’s Twitter posts. She’s done many more than Thomas. They’re generally dull: ‘Can’t wait for Friday!’ and ‘Need to have my lashes done again!’ above a photograph of the top half of her face that is presumably meant to reveal the woeful state of her eyelashes. They look fine to me.
Dom appears behind me, showered and dressed. ‘All sorted on the Ben and Zan front. Shall we go?’ He squints at the screen. ‘What are you doing? Is that Emily Braid’s timeline?’
‘It’s her Twitter.’
‘Same thing.’
There’s no point drawing his attention to the missing mother and sister in her blurb. I know what he’d say; I’ve just said it to myself.
And I’m not convinced. Irrational though it may be, I’m increasingly certain that something must be wrong in the Braid family.
I turn to face Dominic. ‘Please answer the question I’m about to ask you honestly, without trying to please me.’
‘Okay.’
‘Do you remember Georgina Braid? When I mentioned her yesterday, you’d forgotten all about her.’
‘There’s not much to remember. She was a tiny sprog the only time I met her.’
‘But you remember her? You remember them all coming round, and Georgina being there – a baby? Flora carried her in and rocked her in her car seat, in our lounge.’
‘I don’t remember the car seat or the rocking, but, yeah, I remember the baby.’
Good. That means I didn’t imagine Georgina Braid and I don’t need to go and look at the photograph I cut up all those years ago. The thought of holding the pieces in my hands makes me feel slightly nauseous.
‘Ready?’ Dom says, his voice full of confidence. He’s eager to get going, sure we’ll be back from Hemingford Abbots before lunchtime, having sorted out this mess once and for all.
I don’t see how he can be right, but I hope he is.
Wyddial Lane hasn’t changed. But then, why would it?
We’re in Dom’s car, not mine, parked across the road from Newnham House. Yesterday’s heat has disappeared and it’s cool and damp, the sky as grey as wet slate.
‘Right.’ Dom claps his hands together. ‘Are we doing this, or what?’
There’s something I’ve been trying not to say for a while now. I decided I wasn’t going to ask him. I still think I shouldn’t, but I know I’ll blurt it out eventually, so I might as well get it over with. ‘Do you really not remember why it ended?’
‘Why what ended?’
