‘It’s Lewis,’ I say, recognising the number I tried to call back so many times on Sunday evening.
‘Answer it.’
‘Hello? Lewis? Hello?’
I hear muffled noise in the background. Movement.
‘Is anyone there? Lewis?’
‘Beth?’
‘Who is this?’
‘I meant to ring you back the other night, and then life took over and I never did. I’m sorry.’
‘Flora?’
‘Hi, Beth! Say hi to Rom-com Dom from me!’ Lewis Braid calls out in the background.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ Flora says. ‘Beth? Can you hear me okay?’
I can. It’s definitely her. Definitely him, too; no one else calls my husband Rom-com Dom. It’s Lewis and Flora Braid. In Florida, now. Together.
13
Whatever I was expecting when I imagined talking to the police, it wasn’t PC Paul Pollard. I’d prepared myself for the brush-off, but when I met Pollard, I realised I’d expected the disappointing reaction to come from someone a little bit impressive, with an air of authority. Pollard seems not particularly bright and says, ‘Got it,’ every ten seconds. He looks about thirteen. The tea he’s brought in for me and Dom, despite being in proper cups with saucers, has got tiny, reflective pools of what looks like grease spotted across the surface of the liquid. We thank him for it as he sits back down behind the table in the small, white-painted interview room.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘So Mr and Mrs Braid rang you last night from America, you were saying – because she’d forgotten to call back on Sunday night?’
‘She didn’t forget.’ I’ve already told him this. ‘That was a lie.’
‘Got it. Yep. And how long did you speak to them?’
‘About fifteen minutes. It wasn’t us speaking to them, it was me speaking to Flora. Dom and Lewis didn’t really say much apart from calling out hi and bye. It was the tensest phone conversation I’ve ever had – both of us on edge, trying to pretend we were chatting normally, catching up on news, when it was obvious we were both massively on edge. She flat out denied having been in Huntingdon. Said I must have seen someone else the two times I thought I saw her, because she hasn’t been back to England recently.’
‘Got it.’ Pollard makes a note.
‘After she ran away from me in the car park, they all must have decided urgent action was needed – an emergency trip to America for Flora. As if that would make anything more plausible!’
‘Did you tell her you’d visited her parents, or that they’d told you her daughter Georgina had died as a baby?’ Pollard asks.
‘No. What’s the point? She’d only have lied about that too if it suited her.’
‘Got it.’
‘I don’t think Georgina Braid is dead,’ I tell him. ‘For some reason, Lewis and Flora wanted Flora’s parents to believe that she was, so that’s what they told them – and then broke off all contact so that their lie would never be discovered.’
‘There must have been a funeral, if Georgina died,’ says Dom. ‘I wonder if Gerard and Rosemary went to it.’
‘She didn’t die,’ I tell him. ‘She’s Chimpy – and she seems to be nowhere! From Lewis’s Instagram, it seems as if she’s not part of his life in Florida, and Lou Munday told me the Caters only had two kids, so she’s not in Hemingford Abbots. Where is she?’
‘Mrs Leeson—’
‘Call me Beth.’
‘Got it.’ Pollard rubs the index finger of his left hand across the skin between his nose and his mouth. It looks as if he’s making an obscene gesture, or pretending to have a mobile moustache. ‘I can’t see that there’s anything criminal here to be investigated. I’m not saying it’s not a strange story – it is – but you’ve not brought me any crimes I can investigate.’
‘I understand that. But when something’s so strange that some element of criminal behaviour behind it all seems likely, can’t the police look into it?’
‘If there’s a solid lead, yes. But—’
‘Four adults with presumably quite busy lives have gone to huge lengths – spent money on a transatlantic flight, even – to make me believe I can’t have seen Flora in Cambridgeshire twice in the last week. Why? Who would bother doing that to cover up weirdness? Doesn’t the sheer effort made to deceive me suggest that something criminal might be going on? I mean … Flora must have gone home after seeing me in Huntingdon, taken off her clothes and given them to that other woman to put on, so that she could come back to the car park wearing the same outfit and