What time will Lewis Braid get to his office? Seven thirty?
Or not at all, maybe. He might be on his way to the airport to fly to Japan on business, and you’ll have wasted your time and money.
My stomach lurches at the thought. Then I realise it’s not necessarily true. I might be able to find out more with Lewis gone than with him here in Florida. He won’t have warned his colleagues not to tell me anything because it wouldn’t occur to him that I’d turn up. If he’s away on a business trip, I might be able to get his home address from someone if I play it right. I could go to the house, and if Flora’s still here, which she might well be if Lewis wants to keep her well away from me …
Don’t get carried away. Flora might not have been in America when she rang you. Lewis could have rigged it so that it looked as if that was where they were calling from.
They might both be in England.
Then where are seventeen-year-old Thomas and fifteen-year-old Emily? Home alone?
I need to think of a way to make Lewis’s colleagues give me his home address. I searched online in the hope of finding a home address but nothing came up, so my obvious first port of call is Lewis’s workplace, which was easy to find.
I chose this hotel because the offices of VersaNova are only a seven-minute drive away. So close. I try not to let myself believe this means I’m close to getting the answers I want. The more I hope this is nearly over, the more disappointed I’ll be if my trip achieves nothing.
I dial the number for room service and skim-read the menu while I wait for someone to answer. Breakfast doesn’t start till five thirty, so I order a pepperoni pizza from the all-night menu, telling myself that Italians must do it all the time. Then I brush my teeth, run my hands through my hair and wash my face, so that the waiter I’m about to meet won’t mistake me for a scarecrow. The food, when it arrives, is delicious. I sit at the long black desk beneath the large TV screen on the wall, enjoying my early, inappropriate breakfast, and knowing I’d enjoy it more if I didn’t think I might soon be face to face with Lewis Braid.
I’ve witnessed Lewis’s anger a few times. Once in a restaurant, he yelled at a group of women at the next table who were making too much noise, and made such a forceful impression on them that they paid up and left before their main courses had been served – but I’ve never seen him angry with me. Not yet. How will he react when I turn up at his office, uninvited? Will he morph into a monster the way Camilla Hosmer did in Zannah’s low-budget film?
Or maybe he’s a monster already. It’s so easy to believe that the label only fits infamous historical figures and mug-shot faces we see on the news. When it’s someone in our personal life – someone we’ve sat laughing with in a pub, someone who’s punted us down the River Cam singing ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat’ in a cheesy American accent – it’s hard to believe that their true nature might be monstrous.
I think again about the incident in the restaurant. It happened while we were all still students. Flora and Lewis had only been an item for a few months. Two of the women from the noisy group were crying as they left the restaurant. I can’t remember precisely what Lewis yelled at them, but it wasn’t only about the racket they were making; it was more personal than that. He insulted their appearances and their intelligence – wittily and with his usual articulate brio, since every occasion and opportunity had to be The Lewis Braid Show. He wanted to solve the noise problem, but not as much as he wanted to make everyone else in the restaurant laugh.
None of us did. We looked down at the floor and wished it would swallow us up. I remember feeling ashamed to be out for dinner with someone who could behave in that way. Flora turned bright red and mumbled, ‘Lew-is’, as she always did. He never normally had trouble raising a laugh, but he misjudged his audience on this occasion and took it too far.
Assuming I find him today, I’m going to need to talk to him alone in order to get anywhere.
I wonder if he’ll deem it worth staging The Lewis Braid Show for me alone. Probably. One person is still an audience, though a small one. I expect his first move will be an attempt to lavish hospitality on me. ‘Beth! What a fantastic surprise! It’s so great to see you. Let me take you on a boat trip/to the best beach for miles around/to a baseball game!’
When he realises that I’m as determined to know the truth as he is to keep it from me, will the friendly façade slip? And the question that really interests me: if it does, what will I see?
By 8 a.m., I’m already so tired that I could sleep for another seven hours if I let my eyes close. No chance of that. Not with Lewis Braid maybe about to arrive at any moment.
I’m sitting in the back of a taxi in the vast outdoor car park that belongs to his company, VersaNova. My driver called it a ‘parking lot’. It’s so well landscaped and generously proportioned, it almost seems to be the main point of this whole exercise – as if someone designed an enormous, attractive car park first, for its own sake, and then said, ‘You know what? It’s a shame to waste this – let’s put the head office of a multi-million-dollar tech company next to it.’
Despite the early hour, I’m not the only person here. There are plenty of other cars around. None, yet, looks expensive enough to belong to Lewis Braid.
Now that I’m here at his workplace, in the full light of a day that promises to be warm and sunny, the thoughts I was thinking in my hotel room a few hours ago seem almost deranged. I came pretty close to wondering if Lewis was evil. He and Flora might be mixed up in something strange and unsavoury – I’m certain they are, in fact – but there’s a lot of distance between unsavoury and monstrous. Lewis Braid is hardly a murderous villain.
You can handle him. You can handle the encounter you’re about to have.
Assuming he comes into the office today.
I stare at the tanned, tyre-shaped bulges of skin at the base of my taxi driver’s skull and wish I could feel as calm as he seems. He’s been luxuriating in silence all the way from the Marriott to VersaNova, as if wanting me to notice that it’s a deliberate lifestyle choice. When I asked if he’d be happy to wait for as long as I need him to this morning, he did some slow, relaxed nodding. He has the manner of someone who would only emit words if you pierced a thick plastic seal inside him, turned him upside down and squeezed him hard.
I sit up straight as a car that looks like a contender pulls into the lot: it’s low, flat, waxed to a powerful shine. No roof.
It’s him. Lewis.
I open the taxi’s passenger door. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ I say to my driver as if he’s urged me to hurry. His eyes are half closed. I’m not sure he’s fully awake.
Lewis is quicker at getting out of cars than I am. By the time I’m out, he’s several feet ahead, swinging a large black leather bag around and humming a tune – a gratingly fast-paced, bouncy one, if you’re jet-lagged. Whatever he’s hiding, he doesn’t seem unduly worried about it.
He hasn’t seen me. He’s marching along briskly. Soon he’ll reach the building, go inside, and then I’ll have to deal with doormen, receptionists and probably security checks in order to get to him. He’ll have a choice about whether to see me or not, whereas if I can get his attention now …