‘No revision would have happened even if I hadn’t brought her with me. You know as well as I do – she’d have done sod all apart from paint her nails and watch re-runs ofLove Island.’
‘Hashtag when your parents believe in you,’ says Zan with a chuckle.
‘She’s got a brilliant mind and today, all day, that mind has beenworking,’ I was planning to say that anyway, but now it looks as if I only said it to ingratiate myself. Zannah makes a face at me.
‘Do you want to hear what happened at Kimbolton Prep School?’ I ask Dom.
Without waiting for his answer, I launch into a full account. He may be right: there might be a point at which one ought to draw a line, but I’m hoping there’s also a point at which any intelligent person realises that they have to find out what the hell’s going on or it’ll bother them forever. I reached that point some time ago.
I describe my conversation with Lou Munday.
‘That all sounds … strange, horrible and worrying,’ Dom says when I’ve finished.
‘Yep. I’d swear that secretary wanted to tell mesomething– more than she told me. Zannah agrees.’
‘I’m not sure I do,’ she says unhelpfully. ‘Maybe. Maybe Lewis Braid stalked her too.’
‘She didn’t give me the brush-off in a normal, routine, off-you-go-you-nutter kind of way. There was something she could have told me if she’d wanted to, if she’d not been scared of losing her job.’
‘Or scared of getting involved in something really unpleasant,’ says Dom. ‘Which you should be too, Beth. Whatever’s going on in that house and with the Braids and the Caters, it’s something our family needs to keep out of. Think about everything you’ve told me so far – Tilly, now the school stuff – it all adds up to a giant neon sign saying “Stay the hell out of this mess”.’
‘Typical graphic designer response there from Dad,’ says Zan. ‘Bringing signage and the visual into everything. Me and Mum aren’t graphic designers so we can’t see that sign.’
Dom makes a disgusted noise. ‘Kevin and Jeanette Cater told us their children were called Toby and Emma.’
‘Uh-huh. And, don’t forget, she turned up at the car park wearing the same clothes Flora was wearing less than an hour before. Oh – and she isn’t Jeanette Cater. Lou Munday told us Jeanette hasn’t got a foreign accent. I forgot that bit.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Memory of a goldfish,’ Zan mouths at me.
‘Oh, the school secretary. Right. Well, whoever the woman at Newnham House was, she and Kevin Cater, assuming that’s his real name—’
‘Yeah, they fed us a load of bullshit,’ I say.And you thanked them for it.
‘To our faces? While smiling and supposedly trying to help sort things out? I guess they must have, but … that’s pretty twisted, isn’t it?’
After more than forty years on this planet, Dominic has trouble believing that a civilised and solvent couple with an immaculate house could lie to him. He’s still keen to believe in a version of the world in which everyone has each other’s best interests at heart.
‘They flat out lied.’ He still can’t believe it.
‘Yes. Dom, I have to go. I’ll see you later tonight, okay? Bye.’ I press the end-call button before he can give me any more reasons why I should come home straight away.
11
Three hours later, we’re parked on Carisbrooke Road in Wokingham, outside a house that I hope still belongs to Flora’s parents. I only came here once with Flora while we were students, but I’m sure it’s the right place. I remember thinking it looked odd from the outside, and number 43 is the only one that fits that description. It’s a lone detached house on an otherwise terraced street, and so narrow that its detachedness looks like a mistake – as if it’s been cut off the row as an afterthought and shoved along a bit. It protrudes awkwardly from the low-walled private garden that’s been built around it like a little green island.
‘Would you mind waiting in the car?’ I ask Zannah.
‘Yes.’
‘I think they’ll tell me more if I’m alone. They know Flora and I were best friends for years. And confiding’s easier to do with an audience of only one, I think.’
‘All right. If you insist. But remember everything they say. Even better, record it.’
Recording a voice memo is one of the few things that my phone and I both know how to do. Dom showed me so that I could illicitly record Ben singing, with the most reluctance and embarrassment I’ve ever seen packed into one boy in a school hall, a song called ‘Piratical Style’ from the musicalPirates of the Curry Bean.
‘Wish me luck,’ I say to Zannah as I get out of the car. I’m not going to record Flora’s parents if I’m lucky enough to find them – I’d feel guilty and it would show on my face – but Dom gave me some wise advice about a year ago, one day when I was crying because, yet again, Zannah and I were at loggerheads. He said: ‘Try this: say a direct “No” as rarely as possible. If it’s possible to not give in but not actually say, “No, you can’t” or “No, I won’t” then do it. It works like magic.’ I thought it sounded like the worst advice I’d ever heard, but I tried it and it worked.
