‘It’s not at all suspicious once you know why,’ I tell her. ‘If I could maybe …’ Stop it. You can’t invite yourself into her house. ‘If we can talk properly, I’ll tell you the whole story. Flora Braid and I were once best friends, but we’re not any more.’
‘I think I’ve heard enough,’ says Marilyn Oxley. ‘You’d better be on your way. I’ve told you who lives next door, against my better judgement. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’
‘Please, just one more thing. You’ve been so helpful. If you could tell me … is Jeanette Cater around five foot six, with wavy, dark brown, shoulder-length hair?’
A long, tense pause follows. Then, ‘Yes, that is an accurate description of Mrs Cater. Goodbye, Mrs Leeson.’
‘Does she have two children, about five and three?’
She must have heard me, but she keeps walking in the opposite direction.
‘Thomas and Emily?’ I call after her.
She stops. Turns to face me. Her expression makes me gasp. She didn’t look this angry or disgusted a moment ago.
‘Never come back to Wyddial Lane again,’ she says. ‘If I see you here, I shall call the police.’
She walks briskly back to her house.
‘Wait …’ I whisper.
The front door of number 14 slams shut.
‘I’ll be the judge of this.’ Zannah flops down on the sofa next to me. She’s wearing pyjamas again – different ones: white, dotted with pink and green watermelons. Her hair is wet, her face pink and glowing. She smells as if she’s spent the last few hours marinading herself in some sort of rose and lemon mixture.
‘The judge of what?’ says Dom.
‘Your and Mum’s stupid argument.’
‘Not an argument,’ I say. ‘A discussion.’
It’s one that’s been in progress ever since I typed the names Kevin and Jeanette Cater into Google’s search box several hours ago. LinkedIn soon offered me a Kevin Cater who worked for a company called CEMA Technologies in Cambridge between 1997 and 2008. In 2008, Kevin left CEMA and went to work for a different company, also in Cambridge, that went bankrupt two years later. We could find nothing online about what he did after that.
Both Lewis and Flora Braid used to work for CEMA Technologies. Dom has been trying to persuade me that this is pure coincidence.
There were a few Jeanette Caters in our search results, but none who could conceivably be the woman living at Newnham House. A search for the name ‘Cater’ along with the Wyddial Lane address yielded nothing.
‘I agree with Mum,’ Zannah says. If she’s able to take a side, she must have been eavesdropping. Again. ‘It’s too big a coincidence. It’s another link between the new owners of the house and the old: first Mum sees the Braids outside the Caters’ house when they’re supposed to have moved to Florida, then it turns out Lewis and Flora and this Kevin guy all worked together. That’s weird. Like, significant weird.’
‘They didn’t necessarily work together,’ says Dom. ‘They worked for the same company.’
‘At the same time,’ I mutter.
‘All three of them were Cambridge-based science-and-tech types – in 1997 there weren’t as many of those kinds of companies in Cambridge as there are now.’
‘Dad, how often have you bought a house from someone you used to work with? Never, right?’
‘Zannah, mock all you like, but in real life there are plenty of coincidences. Did Mum tell you what happened when we went to Hemingford Abbots this morning?’
‘Yup. And the Twitter and Instagram stuff from last night – which is also just too messed up. If I ever have three kids, there’s no way I’ll put photos of only two of them on my Instagram. I think something freaky’s going on.’
‘So do I. I’m sure of it.’ I have the confidence to say this out loud, now that my brave daughter has said it first.
‘I’ve no idea what, though. I can tell you what Murad and Ben think, if you like?’
‘You’ve told them? Zan!’
‘Was I not supposed to? You didn’t say it was a secret. Why shouldn’t they know? Ben’s your son and Murad’s your future son-in-law.’ As an afterthought, she mutters, ‘Unless he bails on me, which he’d better not.’
It seems my daughter is unofficially engaged. I wonder if she’s ever going to tell us more formally.
‘When did you tell him? You haven’t seen him since I told you.’
Zan rolls her eyes. ‘I communicated with him using my electronic device, Mother. Relax. He’s not going to tell anyone.’
Dom says, ‘Shouldn’t you be revising? Your GCSEs start in a month.’
I wait for Zannah to blow up, but instead she says with a knowing weariness, ‘Ugh, Dad. Yeah, I should be doing a lot of things,’ as if he couldn’t possibly imagine the full horror of everything in her life that’s getting neglected at the moment.
She’s right – he can’t. I can, though. I never see her do any homework. Whenever I walk into her bedroom, I find it full of old plastic water and Diet Coke bottles, bowls of congealing cereal, used make-up pads covered in patches of beige foundation, false painted nails, torn pairs of tights. It takes me at least an hour to sort out the mess each time and make the room look nice again.
When I was a child, I didn’t need to tidy my room. Not once. It never got messy. Tidiness was a house rule, one of the most important to my retired Navy officer father. I would never have dreamed of leaving a discarded pair of tights on the floor overnight; I’d been trained to believe it wasn’t a possibility.
Dom and I have left it too late to introduce a strict tidiness policy with Zannah and Ben, and I’m not sure I’d want to. I look at their lives and feel instinctively that they’re much harder than mine was at their age. They both complain about stress in a way that I never did. Their friends are more troubled and difficult; their school is full of self-harmers, drug-takers and kids with a whole range of conditions I hadn’t heard of until I was at least thirty. I’m pretty sure Zan and Ben aren’t being taught properly, even in the lessons that aren’t sabotaged by out-of-control behaviour from the most chaotic students.
I didn’t love school as a teenager, but I didn’t hate it either – not the way Zannah and Ben hate Bankside Park. And I don’t remember resenting my teachers anywhere near as much as I resent theirs for the way they gleefully dish out detentions to anyone who doesn’t hand in their homework on time, while at the same marking and returning only a tiny fraction of the work their pupils submit. Neither Zannah nor Ben has ever had a piece of English homework returned with a mark or a comment from a teacher on it – not once since they started secondary school. I’ve talked to the head about it several times. He makes soothing noises, but nothing ever changes.
‘What do Murad and Ben think?’ I ask Zan.
‘About the Caters and the Braids?’
This throws me a little. The Caters and the Braids. As if they’re a kind of foursome.
‘About what I saw. Or what I think I saw.’
‘They both think Jeanette Cater is Flora Braid – same person, new name.’