‘I’m good to go,’ Lewis says. ‘No bag, no concealed weapons.’ He twirls around. ‘Do you want to pat me down?’
‘Wait here,’ I say. ‘I need to use the bathroom. Then we can go up.’
‘There’s probably one in your room.’ He smiles. ‘I’ll help you find it.’
‘I’m not leaving the two of you alone in my hotel room.’
‘Worried we’ll snoop around in all your private stuff? I think that’s what they call projection.’
‘Wait here. I won’t be long.’
Locked inside a cubicle, I repeat to myself the words, ‘You are not at risk of physical harm’ until I believe them. Then I pull my phone out of my bag, go to Voice Memos and press the ‘Record’ button. I don’t know what story I’m about to be told or if any of it will be true, but I want it on record, whatever it turns out to be.
Up in my room, I decide I’m not going to open the door to the balcony. Now that we’re all here, the feeling that I might be in danger has evaporated, and the only thing worrying me is that I’m about to waste more time listening to lies. How would I know?
Lewis and Flora sit in the two chairs opposite the desk and TV. I sit on the edge of the bed nearest to them. ‘Well?’ I say, putting my bag down on the floor in front of my feet. Hopefully it will be close enough for the recording to work.
‘What do you want to know?’ Lewis asks. ‘We’ll answer your questions on two conditions. One: that you leave us alone afterwards and don’t reappear in our lives at any point in the future, for any reason. Can you give us that guarantee?’
‘If you tell me the truth, and if the children aren’t at risk of harm.’
‘The children are fine. Though I’m not sure which children you mean. Presumably the younger two?’ Lewis raises a hand to silence me. ‘Between us, Flora and I have four children. All of them are safe, loved and well looked after.’
‘What’s your other condition?’ I ask him.
‘Confidentiality. You can tell Dominic. I know him well enough to know he won’t say anything. I assume he’s still a fan of the path of least resistance?’
‘He won’t tell anybody.’
‘Good. Impress on him that he mustn’t. And you tell no one apart from him. Understood?’
I nod. Lewis must be delusional if he thinks it’s a real promise. I’ll tell whoever the hell I feel like telling – whoever I think needs to know.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘It’s all yours, Beth. Ask away.’
‘Why did you lie? Why pretend you and Flora are still together? You’re not still together, are you?’
‘No.’
‘And Flora’s married to Kevin Cater?’
‘Yes. Though she’s not called Flora any more. Her legal name is Jeanette Cater.’
I turn to Flora. ‘Why did you change it? And if you’re married to Kevin Cater, why do you live in the same house you lived in with Lewis? Why call your children Thomas and Emily when you’ve already got two children with those names?’
‘Flora?’ Lewis prompts. ‘I’m not doing this on my own.’
‘And why are they your children, if she’s with Kevin now?’ I ask him. ‘They’re not Kevin’s. I’ve seen them. They’re yours. They have your eyes, like the other Thomas and Emily. I thought they were the same people. I thought the Thomas and Emily I knew hadn’t grown in twelve years – that’s how similar they look.’
‘They’re Kevin’s children,’ says Flora. ‘Mine and Kevin’s. You’re right, they look like … their older half-brother and sister, and their eyes aren’t Lewis’s. There are brown-eyed people in my family. My mum has brown eyes like that. Maybe they’re her eyes. I know I always said they were the spitting image of Lewis’s but I never really believed it.’
‘She only said it to keep me happy,’ says Lewis. ‘They both had her face, and she thought I’d mind. I probably would have, in those days. I was still an emotional child when we had our kids.’
‘Why did you give the children you had with Kevin the same names?’ I ask Flora.
‘Georgina’s death …’ she starts to say.
‘What? What about it?’
She seems to have frozen. We wait for nearly ten seconds. Then she turns to Lewis. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘You.’
She sounds like a small child. You do it, Daddy.
Lewis rubs his temples with the flats of his hands. ‘Me,’ he says in a low voice. ‘All right. You want my version? Flora’s never heard my version before, not in my words. Why would she? She already knows the story, so I’ve never needed to tell her, but she seems to want to hear it now. She won’t like it much, but okay. You sure you don’t want to take over?’ he asks her.
She shakes her head.
Lewis looks at me. ‘You won’t like it either. Georgina didn’t die of natural causes. Gerard and Rosemary no doubt told you it was a cot death. It wasn’t. It was neither natural nor unavoidable. Georgina died because Flora made two bad decisions. One: to have Georgina sleep in our bed. Thomas never did, Emily didn’t … but Georgina was premature and Flora was neurotic about her. For no reason that I could fathom, she wanted Georgina in bed next to her every night. Insisted it would be better for her. Fine – she was the mother, and I assumed she knew what she was talking about. I moved into the spare room. Couldn’t sleep properly with a snuffling baby that close.
‘One night, I came home to find Flora halfway down a bottle of white wine. I was surprised. She didn’t normally drink, but she’d had a tough day with all three kids being difficult in some way. Still, I told her to take it easy. She said she was fine, she’d only had a couple of glasses. I told her that was more than enough and she swore at me – said it was none of my fucking business. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to me like that.
‘We had a big row. I went up to my office – my office at home – slammed the door and worked for the rest of the evening. Flora gave the children their baths. That was supposed to be my job, but that night I didn’t care. I was too angry. I heard Flora putting Thomas and Emily to bed, heard them asking why Daddy wasn’t joining in. Then she must have taken Georgina and gone to bed because I didn’t hear anything else. At about ten thirty, I realised I hadn’t eaten and was starving. Flora hadn’t brought me up any supper, which I took to mean that she was still angry with me. I looked in the fridge and the oven – nothing. So I went out. Drove into Huntingdon, got myself a curry. Came home, went to bed in the spare room. I was still pretty angry, and wondering what I’d do if Flora didn’t apologise first thing in the morning. There was no way I was putting up with treatment like that. I went to sleep.’
He seems to be steeling himself to continue. Finally he says, ‘A few hours later, I was woken by screaming from Flora. I ran to our bedroom and found Georgina lying there, dead. In our bed. She was blue. Not breathing. It was the worst moment of my life.’
‘I killed her,’ Flora says, her voice no more than a whisper. ‘I didn’t murder her deliberately. What I did was worse, because I didn’t want her to die but I still caused it to happen: the opposite of what I wanted. Even though I’d drunk that wine, I still put Georgina down by my side, as I always did. Normally it was fine.’