‘We knew you knew about the names,’ says Flora. ‘How could I explain to you why I’d used the same ones? I knew it was the first question you’d ask me if you got the chance. There’s no explanation that makes any sense apart from the truth! And if I told you I was estranged from … from …’ She covers her face with her hands.
‘From your oldest two children,’ I say. ‘From Thomas and Emily Braid.’
‘If I told you that, you’d have asked why. You’d have demanded an answer. You remind me of Lewis sometimes, with your determination to get the result you want. I’m not a strong person, Beth. You’d have broken me down eventually. Lewis and I both knew that. We agreed that the best thing to do was get me out of the way, where you couldn’t find me.’
‘Except I did.’
‘You did.’ Is that hatred in her eyes, or something else? ‘Here you are.’
‘And here you are, telling me the story. What if I go to the police now?’
‘You promised Lewis you wouldn’t tell anyone but Dom.’
‘Flora, Lewis might be your lord and master, but he’s not mine. What if I break the promise I made?’
‘You won’t. You wouldn’t do that to me, or to any of the other people who would suffer if you did. Georgina’s been gone twelve years. What would it achieve to stir things up now? Have some compassion for Lewis, if you’ve got none for me.’
‘Flora, how can you say that? That’s so far from—’
‘He isn’t my lord and master, but he is my saviour,’ she talks over me. ‘He says he’s not doing any of it for me, but I still get the benefits. He made this escape plan for me. He’s helped in all kinds of ways – like letting me and Kevin have the Hemingford Abbots house, which he didn’t have to do. It was still his, he hadn’t sold it. And once he’d moved to America—’
‘Flora, I know you’re lying.’ The words spill out of me as a sudden realisation hits hard. How did it take me so long to see it? ‘You’re so intent on cutting all ties with your old life that you disown your kids, change your name, cut off your parents – something you’d never do, by the way – and then you choose to live with your new husband and bring up your new children in the house where Georgina died? You expect me to believe that?’
Flora stands up. ‘I don’t have to talk to you,’ she says. ‘Not any more. You already know the only thing I wanted to keep from you. Do what you want with it, I don’t care.’
‘Really? That’s not plausible either – that you suddenly don’t care about the effect it would have on your parents, for example, if I were to go to them next week and tell them the truth.’
Flora moves towards the door. I try to block her path, but she shoves me hard. I land on the bed on top of my bag.
‘Flora, wait!’ I call out. The door slams.
Rubbing my sore side, I get up and run after her, but there’s no sign of her in the corridor in either direction.
I don’t want to go back inside and shut the door to the outside world. Not yet. Instead, I stay in the corridor, leaning against the wall, watching my hotel room through its wide-open door and half expecting somebody to burst out of it. That doesn’t happen, and won’t, since there’s no one in there. All I see is an ordinary, unremarkable room: suitcase spread open with clothes spilling out, rumpled duvet cover, cushions scattered on the floor. No hotel guest who passed now and glanced in would see any sign of unusual activity.
Maybe it’s not unusual. Thinking about it, it can’t be. It must be absolutely standard: people lie to each other in hotel rooms all the time.
If I’d run down to the lobby as fast as I could, determined to find Flora at all costs, would it have done me any good? If I’d tracked her down, would she have told me the truth, and would I have believed her if she did? I’ve lost count of the number of times she’s lied to me.
It has to be another lie: all of it.
I slide down the wall into a seated position and start to make a mental list of all the reasons why I’m certain the detailed story Flora and Lewis just told me is not true.
I don’t believe that Kevin doesn’t know what’s going on between Flora and Lewis. Any spouse would demand to know the details before saying, ‘Fine, you go off to America with your ex. I’ll stay here and mind my own business.’ When Dominic and I met Kevin Cater, he had the manner of someone who was in on the plan. There was an in-charge air about him. Everything I can recall of his behaviour that day makes me think he knows all the details there are to know. He also knows why it matters that Dom and I should be kept in the dark. Yanina knows too.
Lewis feigned resentment when he told me the story; so did Flora. They hadn’t wanted to tell me, they didn’t want to be in my hotel room unburdening themselves, but I’d been so persistent, I’d left them no choice. A lie. I knew Lewis Braid well for years, and people don’t change – not that much. There’s no way he’d ever dance to anyone else’s tune. The more reluctant to talk he seemed, the more I was likely to believe the story – that was his thinking.
Then there’s the eyes. Thomas’s, Emily’s. Flora can lie all she likes, but I’ve seen their faces. Yes, Rosemary Tillotson has brown eyes, but she doesn’t have those brown eyes. All four children are Lewis’s. That links to another part of the lie: Flora told me that, when Lewis rang her to say I’d contacted him, she hadn’t seen or heard from him in twelve years. That can’t be true, if the two of them had two more children together.
The truth is that Lewis came back to Hemingford Abbots and, while there, got Flora pregnant. Twice. Tilly, his former neighbour at number 3, saw him, and, to explain away his presence, he pretended he was obsessively in love with her, when really he was there to see Flora.
The Lewis Braid I knew would never leave me to decide his fate. He has no idea if I’ll keep the promise I made to tell no one but Dom, and he wouldn’t take that risk.
Another lie, possibly the most insulting one of all, is Flora’s claim that she distanced herself from me because she feared I’d drag the truth out of her. Doesn’t she think I have a functioning memory? Her altered behaviour towards me started long before Georgina’s death. In fact, it started many months before she was born, when Flora must have been just a few weeks pregnant. Whatever made her push me away, it had nothing to do with the guilt she felt after killing her daughter.
Maybe she didn’t kill her. If the rest was a lie, why not that too?
The main proof of Flora’s dishonesty, as I told her, is the house on Wyddial Lane. No one determined to cut all ties with their former life would willingly live in the house where the tragedy occurred that had brought their whole world crashing down. No one.
Then there are the things that seem more like contradictions or details that don’t add up than outright lies. Lewis was right: I knew from our various holidays with them that Flora often sunbathed topless and he never minded, so why did he scream at her when she breast-fed Georgina in front of me and Dom, as if there was something objectionably immodest about it?
If Flora did cause Georgina’s death, and her and Lewis’s aim was to stop me finding out, they could have succeeded. Easily. Flora could have brazened it out in the car park in Huntingdon. ‘Lewis and I have split up,’ she could have said. ‘Our kids are with him in Florida, apart from Georgina who died tragically – cot death – and I’m not part of their lives any more. He won’t let me see Thomas and Emily.’ When I asked her, as I certainly would have, why her children with Kevin Cater were also called Thomas and Emily, she could have said, ‘I wanted to annoy Lewis. It was a bit petty, but I didn’t care.’