‘Fine. There was something I had to pursue. Something I can’t really talk about, I’m afraid, but nothing for you to worry about.’
‘Well, you pursue away!’ she says. ‘You’re the sort of person who’d make a success of whatever you decided to do.’
‘Am I?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Pam says confidently.
Apart from persuading PC Pollard to check on the Cater children. We still haven’t heard anything from him. I wanted to ring him this morning, but Dom said we ought to give it more time. ‘If he doesn’t get back to us by the end of Thursday, we can ring him then,’ he said.
It’s Monday today. Pollard’s already had long enough. I’ve spent the days since we saw him trying to prove to Dom that I can put the Braids and the Caters to one side and get on with normal life. He’s been impressed and so have I. I’ve done better than I thought I would. Every time a new theory occurs to me and I’m about to say, ‘You know, another possibility …’ I manage to stop myself in time.
If I ring Pollard on Thursday and find out he’s done nothing …
‘He will have done,’ Dom assured me this morning. ‘If he’s doing it properly, through child protection channels, it might take a while. There’ll be processes they have to go through. It’s probably all underway. Be patient.’
I think again of Thomas Cater’s broken shoe, with its flapping sole. I don’t want to be patient. I want to do something. I know what I want to do, but I’ve been pushing it down whenever it surfaces in my mind because it’s too extreme.
‘Beth? There’s something worrying you, isn’t there?’ says Pam. ‘I’m not asking you to tell me what it is, but there’s something.’
‘Sorry, Pam. I was miles away.’ I try to sound light-hearted. ‘Something I’m trying to figure out, that’s all. How to take a particular project forward.’
‘You can’t think how to get to where you want to be – is that it?’
‘No, I know how to get there. It’s whether I should go at all – that’s the problem. If and when I arrive, I might find it’s the last place I want to be.’ It’s hard to discuss it without any of the specifics.
‘I’ve been listening to an excellent podcast,’ Pam says as I pour some more oil into my hands to rub into her back. ‘I tell you, since Ed died, podcasts have saved my life. Anyway, this one said that you can fear change and still allow change to happen if it’s necessary.’
‘Sounds good, but fear’s not my problem. It’s more a straight choice. Deciding what to do between two options that are diametric opposites.’
1) Do whatever I have to do to find out what’s going on with Flora and her family. 2) Leave it to PC Pollard.
‘Ah, well, this podcast had something to say about choices too,’ says Pam. ‘And indecision. Mind you, it hasn’t managed to help me resolve to move house yet. Though if it does, it’ll be thanks to one particularly useful piece of advice.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Imagine you could pursue both choices, in parallel universes.’
‘Like a Sliding Doors scenario?’
‘What’s that?’ Pam asks.
‘A film. Never mind.’
‘Imagine you make choice number one, and it goes as well as it possibly could.’
‘Okay.’ That’s me taking action and finding out the truth. And then doing what? What if I can’t prove it, or no one will listen? What if the truth is as bad as I’m imagining it must be, and I’m powerless to do anything about it?
‘Now imagine you make choice number two,’ says Pam. ‘That also goes as well as it possibly could.’
Which means PC Pollard finds out the truth, arrests whoever needs to be arrested, rescues Thomas and Emily Cater … who then go into the care system, because their parents are in jail.
Those parents, I realise with a jolt of shock, are Lewis and Flora. They must be. For the children I saw with Flora outside Newnham House to look so similar to older Thomas and Emily at the same ages, they must have both parents in common, not just one. In all four faces, there’s an unmistakeable resemblance to Flora, but the eyes are different. They’ve all got the same eyes: dark and almond-shaped, not rounder and green like Flora’s.
How the hell have I only just seen this? I’ve thought so much about the similarities between the two pairs of children, the ones living at Newnham House and the teenagers in Florida as they were twelve years ago – and then about how younger Thomas and Emily’s faces reveal that they’re Flora’s, not Yanina’s or any other woman’s – that I’ve failed to think about the eyes and what they mean.
Flora used to say it all the time: that baby Thomas or baby Emily had looked at her with Lewis’s eyes. ‘Not just his eyes, but his stubborn expression,’ she would say, laughing. ‘That “Give me what I want or else” stare.’
Last Thursday, as I watched Thomas Cater walk across the playground to Yanina after school, I told myself that he couldn’t be the Thomas I knew in 2007; he had to be a different boy because it was in every way impossible that he was the same one, frozen in time, unageing – not because he didn’t look identical to Thomas Braid. He did. Going only by the visuals, they could be the same person.
Which means Thomas Cater has Lewis Braid’s eyes. And is his son. And Emily is Lewis’s daughter.
Then why doesn’t Lewis insist on having them in Florida with him? The Lewis I knew wouldn’t allow any child of his to stay in a house where his wife was living with another man. He wouldn’t let his youngest son go to school wearing broken shoes that barely covered his feet.
‘Beth?’ Pam’s voice breaks into my thoughts. ‘Was it helpful? Or are you still trying to work out what both choices going as well as they could might look like? That’s what the exercise is: you imagine that each choice goes amazingly well, and then you choose which of those ideal outcomes would be the most ideal. It’s very clever.’
I don’t have time to answer. There’s a loud rapping on the door of my treatment room.
‘Beth, I need a word.’ It’s Dom. No apology for interrupting when I’m working – something he’s never done before.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s urgent,’ he says. ‘It’s Zannah.’
I apologise to Pam, leave her in the treatment room on the table, and close the door behind me, my heart thudding like a maniac on the loose in my chest.
Dom’s waiting for me in the hall. ‘What’s wrong with Zan?’ I snap at him. ‘Tell me quickly. Is she hurt?’ She’s supposed to be with Murad at a revision session at school. History.
‘What? No, nothing like that,’ says Dom. ‘Physically she’s fine.’
Thank God. ‘Then what?’
‘She just rang and said can I send you to school immediately. I told her you were with Pam. She said, “This is more important than someone’s stiff back.”’
‘Important how?’
‘She refused to say. I tried, Beth.’
‘Did she sound upset?’ Please, please, don’t let Murad have dumped her, not just before her GCSEs.