Where Everything Seems Double

by Penny Freedman

  Chapter Sixteen

  TAKING BREATH

  Tuesday

  Were they going to run out of air? It was so dark in here that though she had waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness it hadn’t happened, and that meant that there were no gaps, didn’t it? And no gaps meant no fresh air. She could hear the other two breathing, and she had hold of someone’s hand, but they hadn’t dared even to whisper. He knew they were in there, of course. He had stopped calling out to them quite early on and now he was just outside, she felt sure. Just occasionally when their breathing was very quiet, she had heard a small squeak, like someone shifting in a chair. He was waiting for them. Was he listening to their breathing? Was he waiting for the sound of them gasping for air, and would he then come in and haul them out? She thought about those stories on the news – immigrants in container lorries suffocating to death. That would be them. The thought itself made her start gasping for air. Was this what a panic attack was? Pull yourself together. The others weren’t panicking, were they? She could hear them breathing steadily – a bit fast maybe, but steady, and the hand she was holding was firm and strong. Come on, she urged herself, you’re not going to be the weak one. And he would get them out before they actually died, because he would want them alive, wouldn’t he? Except what did he plan to do with them? He had come for the other two, not for her. He could decide to get rid of her because she was inconvenient. After all, he must be mad, mustn’t he?

  Really, she thought, with three of them, couldn’t they overpower him? The trouble was that they couldn’t make a plan. Even if he couldn’t hear what they were whispering he would know they were planning something and he would be ready for them. And the real problem was that he had a weapon. She had only had a moment’s glimpse of it out in the hall – such an odd thing, glittering and pointed, like an icicle – and then they had turned and run.

  How was it possible for them to be so cut off in this world where people could contact each other 24/7? She thought about their phones. Three of them and not a phone between them: one in Dumitru’s car, one in Carnmere and one on the table a few feet away from them – or more likely in his pocket by now and switched off. And – the thought that she had been pushing away – the only person in the world who knew where they were was probably dead.

  Chapter Seventeen

  WHEN SOME VILE THING IS NEAR

  Tuesday

  The sight of the blood produces a sort of fizzing in my head and I have to hold on hard to the banister to avoid tumbling into the void that opens up below me. I breathe hard and make myself listen for sounds of life below before I move on rubbery legs down the broad curved staircase and across the hall.

  It feels unreal to be tracking the blood spots, smeared in places, along the hall, and the panicky lightness in my head has not altogether cleared. When the blood trail suddenly stops, I stop too, and see that I am standing beside a closed door. Fighting down terror and nausea, I turn the handle and push the door ajar. Looking in, I can see nothing at first but a small, neat office with a desk and a computer, and then I see what is almost at my feet. Just inside the door, on the floor, propped against the wall, lies Dumitru. He is not dead. His eyes open as I move into the room but they are unfocussed and his face is a greenish-white. He is bare-chested and he is holding a blood-soaked t-shirt against his shoulder.

  ‘Dumitru,’ I say. ‘What happened?’

  His lips open but no sound comes out. I crouch down beside him.

  ‘Where is Freda?’ I demand. And I want to shake an answer out of him. ‘Come on, Dumitru,’ I urge, staring into his blank eyes, ‘where is she?’

  I get no answer and I know I have to summon help. I stand up, get out my phone and dial 999. When asked which service I say, ‘Ambulance and Police. A man has been stabbed,’ and then I answer their questions – the where, when, how of it all – in a frenzy of impatience because I have to find Freda and I have no idea whether I am going to find her alive.

  When I am finally released and told that an ambulance will be with me in ten minutes, I kneel down and gingerly lift Dumitru’s limp hand away from the t-shirt with which he has been trying to staunch the blood. It is having little effect now because he hasn’t the strength to apply pressure and the t-shirt is saturated. I ought to stay with him and I ought to look for something else to absorb the blood, but I can’t. Whoever stabbed Dumitru has Freda and is still in this building, I am sure. He may be planning to put her into that van outside, but he hasn’t driven away yet.

  I go back into the hall and stand there with all my senses on high alert – a sound, a smell, a waft of human warmth, something must tell me where they are. And then I hear it, the very slightest scrape, like a foot readjusting its position. It came from the back of the house, and I move that way, as silently as I can manage, down a dark passageway that opens ahead into a room. As the room comes into view I stop to take stock. The door is only partly open but I can see an oblong table of the institutional kind, with metal and plastic chairs around it. Beyond that, facing me, is a wall of fitted cupboards. Is this a kitchen of some kind? I creep further and cautiously push the door open. Now I can see that this is quite a large room and besides the table and chairs there are soft chairs in a group under the windows. A common room of some kind? And then I see with a jolt that there is a chair out of place, not in the group. It is high-backed and is facing away from me and I am quite sure that someone is sitting in it. Surprise is all that I have on my side, so I take a deep breath, step into the room and demand, in a voice which I defy to tremble, ‘Where is Freda?’

  Two things happen. The occupant of the chair jumps up and pulls something sharp and glinting from his pocket and, at the same time, I hear a muffled yelp which I think comes from one of the the cupboards. I move towards it.

  ‘Freda?’ I call, while looking, transfixed, at the weapon that is being pointed at me. It looks like a shard of glass, but it is not, I can see, a random piece of broken bottle. This has been made carefully – a viciously sharp, glittering glass icicle made, of course, by a master glass-blower.

  I allow myself one glance away from his hand and up to his face. He looks utterly pathetic, his glasses crooked, his thin hair messy. Had he nodded off sitting there playing his cat and mouse game? With my eyes back on the glass dagger I call again.

  ‘Freda, are you all right?’

  There is a silence and my heart pounds. Did I imagine the sound I heard from that cupboard?

  ‘Freda?’ I call, more urgently.

  And then I hear her, muffled and shaky. ‘We’re all right.’

  ‘You’ve got Ruby and Grace with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The shiny shard shifts in Neil Buxton’s hand, as if he is preparing himself for an attack.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ I say. ‘The police will be here at any moment. And I’ve called an ambulance for Dumitru.’

  And then Neil makes his move. His arm goes up and he charges at me with that icy point directed straight at my face. I throw myself to one side, he charges past me out of the door, and as I pull myself up, I can hear that he seems to be grunting and struggling out in the passageway. Could he be having a seizure of some kind? A heart attack? Very cautiously I look out into the passage and see, of all the possible wonderful things in the world, David wrestling with him for possession of his weapon. He is no match for David, who has his arm twisted back to the agonising point where he has to let his dagger go. It clatters to the ground, where it doesn’t break, cushioned by the lino that paves the floor here, and rolls to the feet of – Gary, who, with impressive aplomb, takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and picks it up. David, meanwhile, has Neil face down on the ground and is applying handcuffs. Bless him. I’m sure he doesn’t usually carry the cuffs himself – he has menials to do that sort of thing for him – but he has come prepared and hasn’t forgotten how to do it.

  Satisfied, I r
un back to the girls, sounding, I suppose, quite hysterical.

  ‘It’s all right!’ I shout. ‘I’m coming to let you out. David is here and he’s got Neil, and I’ll have you out in a second.’

  The cupboard, I see, has sliding doors. There are two handles in the middle which must open it wide. I yank hold of one and pull furiously, babbling all the time. ‘Won’t be a moment… soon have you out…just a second.’ The door won’t yield. I try the other one, and that too stays resolutely shut. There is an agitated rustling from inside – they are panicking, I’m sure. I look again at the handle and then I see the keyhole. He locked them in. Of course he did. It wasn’t enough to threaten them with a deadly weapon.

  ‘He’s got the key,’ I shout, as I run back across the room to get David to retrieve it, but then I hear behind me the grating sound of a door being pushed open and I turn to see the three of them burst out of the cupboard. The tallest of them, who must be Grace, is saying, ‘I dropped the fucking key and we couldn’t find it in the dark,’ and they are all laughing and look extraordinarily unharmed, until, as though at some bat-squeak signal, they throw their arms around each other and start to cry.

  There is nothing I would like more than a weepy hug myself, but that’s not my role here, so I locate some glasses in a wall cupboard above a small sink in the corner and run three glasses of water. This room must be a sort of green room, I realise, close to the studios at the back, and that cupboard I can see, by a glance at its interior, is a costume store. I put the glasses on the table and go over to the weeping trio.

  ‘Drink some water,’ I say. ‘You’ll be dehydrated. And I’ve got some chocolate.’

  That breaks the spell. They pull apart, gulp the water and fall on the two small chocolate bars that I bought at the motorway services. Grace starts to divide them with scrupulous fairness, but Freda says, ‘You have them. You haven’t eaten properly for days. I’m all right.’ Then, at last, she turns to me and puts her arms round me. Leaning her head into me she whispers, ‘I’m sorry, Granny. I’m so sorry.’

  Ellie! Disentangling myself I say, ‘You must ring your mum.’

  ‘No phone,’ she says. ‘Dumitru took it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Later,’ she says. ‘There’s loads to explain, isn’t there? Is he all right?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  As I am speaking, I am getting my phone out. ‘Here,’ I say. ‘Mum isn’t speaking to me but I said I was coming to get you, so I expect she’ll answer.’

  I don’t need to worry about giving her privacy for the call. There is a tremendous banging going on at the front door and shouts of ‘Police. Open up!’ and I go out to find a melee in the hall: the handcuffed Neil slumped in a chair with Gary standing guard over him; David talking to three uniformed police officers, one female, two male, and two paramedics heading for the room where Dumitru is. I go over to talk to Gary. ‘I can’t sort out the police,’ he says. ‘I rang after twenty minutes like you asked, and they said someone had already called police and ambulance. And then that bloke turned up,’ – he gestures at David – ‘and says he’s police. So I told him you’d got in round the back somewhere and then I thought I’d better follow him in case, you know, he wasn’t police.’

  ‘You did exactly the right thing,’ I say. ‘Way beyond the call of duty.’

  He grins and looks down at Neil Buxton, who seems to have shrunk somehow. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ he says.

  The paramedics come by at a run with Dumitru on a stretcher. He has an oxygen mask over his face. I want to ask if he’ll live but I know I won’t get a reassuring answer. They are not going to tell me it’s “just a scratch”, are they? I just have to take what comfort I can from the fact that they are running.

  The woman police officer comes past me, asking, ‘Are the girls through there?’ and a terrible thought comes to me, dredged up deep from early this morning, which seems impossibly long ago. Susan Buxton is dead and Grace and Ruby don’t know that. I follow the policewoman back into the green room where the three girls are huddled together on the sofa and Grace, who has the only phone, is busy typing.

  ‘Is everyone OK here?’ she asks, and they look up and nod abstractedly. Their virtual world calls.

  ‘Just stay in here, will you, girls?’ she says, ‘and breathe deep. I know you’ve been through a nasty experience but we will need to talk to you and check that you’re not hurt.’

  I am the only person here who knows that their mother is dead – killed, I am beginning to suppose, by their father – but I am not the person to tell them. It needs someone official as well as kind. This woman sounds nice enough, and she’s all we’ve got, so I grab hold of her arm and steer her back along the passage into the hall.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I say.

  Against my expectations, she doesn’t brush me off. She takes note of who I am, introduces herself as WPC Tracey Arnold, and then listens to my information. She asks a couple of questions and then looks round for a quiet place, climbs the stairs, sits down halfway up and gets out her phone. While she is having, it seems, multiple conversations, the two other police officers finish their negotiations with David and take Neil Buxton outside. They seem to be dragging him, not because he is resisting but because his legs aren’t working particularly well. As they are leaving, their female colleague looks up from her phone and performs a thumbs-up pantomime which seems to mean that she can manage the mopping up here.

  David, who has ignored me throughout, goes to have a look at the room where I found Dumitru and I am just about to start a chat with Gary when Tracey Arnold comes down to us. She dismisses Gary with a look and takes me aside.

  ‘Who’s that bloke?’ she asks.

  ‘My taxi driver.’

  She raises an eyebrow. ‘If the meter’s still running, you must be stacking up quite a fare,’ she says. Then she lowers her voice. ‘Susan Buxton is alive, but she has been badly beaten and she’s unconscious. I spoke to the local police and to the hospital – she’s been taken to Penrith. She has head injuries and they are still assessing the extent of the damage. She’s in ICU – serious but stable is the line at the moment.’

  ‘Will you tell her daughters?’

  ‘I will. Can you take your granddaughter away somewhere and I’ll talk to the girls in there. In the normal way of things, we would interview the girls at the station in our vulnerable victims unit, and get them medically checked, but since we’ve got a detective superintendent here, and he says he will drive them back to Carnmere, we’ll be happy to leave it to the police there. Do you know if they have family up there – grandparents, aunts and uncles?’

  ‘I don’t know them well. I’m just a visitor up there. I have the feeling that the family is a bit isolated. But the girls have a close-knit group of friends. I’m sure their parents will step up.’

  ‘Thanks.’ We walk back to the green room and I detach Freda from the other girls.

  ‘You should ring Mum again,’ I say. ‘Let her know that David is going to drive us back. Otherwise she’ll be rushing down here to get you.’

  Back in the hall she phones and I go to see if I can talk to David, but two scene of crime officers have arrived now and he is over by the blood stains, giving them instructions, so I go to talk to Gary, who is waiting patiently. I am about to tell him that he’s free to go – I’ll be returning with David and the girls – but I am arrested by the sound of Freda’s voice, raised in exasperation.

  ‘I know what you think about her, Mum. But she did come and rescue me, and anyway I’m coming back with David. You trust him, don’t you? It doesn’t make sense for you to come down, and we can’t go straight on to Heathrow. I’ve—’

  I stride over and grab my phone from her. ‘David’s driving her back, Ellie. You can’t—’

  She cuts me off. I try to ring back but she doesn’t answe
r. I hand the phone back to Freda.

  ‘Take a selfie,’ I say, ‘to show her that you’re all right, and send it to her with a message that you have to go back to give a statement to the police.’

  She takes the phone, snaps the selfie with casual aplomb and starts texting.

  ‘Honestly,’ she says as she is typing, ‘she’s making such a fuss.’

  ‘She’s just had the worst twenty-four hours of her life,’ I point out.

  ‘She really hates you,’ she says.

  Tracy Arnold reappears. ‘They’d like to see Freda,’ she says, ‘and then they’ll collect up their things and be ready to go home.’

  Freda scampers off and Tracey says, ‘I just told them their mum has had a bad accident and is in hospital. No point in saying more till the force up there know more. They are upset, of course, but I think they’re feeling a bit invulnerable at the moment. People do – especially the young – when they’ve come through a danger. The PTSD comes later.’

  David comes over to speak to us. This is the first time he has actually spoken to me since he made his dramatic appearance, and what he says is, ‘You might as well go. I don’t know what arrangement you have with Gary here but you’d probably better not keep him waiting any longer.’

  I think Tracey must feel something in my body language – an intimation of something violent and alarming about to unleash itself. ‘I’ll be off then,’ she says. ‘Good to meet you, Gina. Safe journey, sir.’ She heads out, almost at a run.