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 …