Where Everything Seems Double

by Penny Freedman

  I look around. The SOCOs are looking at the room where I found Dumitru and have the door open. Gary is sitting on a chair, waiting patiently. I don’t want to unleash my fury at David in front of them so I grab hold of his arm and take him outside, into the porch, where I watch Tracey speed away on a motorbike, then shut the heavy front door, push him against a wall and yell at him.

  ‘I have been through Hell,’ I scream. ‘I lost Freda, Ellie will never forgive me, the police were fucking useless, I found a man dying and a maniac with a weapon. I didn’t know if we were any of us going to come out of it alive. You came just in time, I admit, but only because I told you where to come. I lost her but I was the one who found her too, and I have the right to take her home to her mother, and I will not – WILL NOT – let you pack me off home in a taxi as though I had nothing to do with it.’

  It is not until I have finished that I realise that as I have been yelling I have been driving home my points by thumping him in the chest. He could, of course, have restrained me with one twist of an arm, but he didn’t, and as I step back, he rubs gently at his sternum and says, ‘You only had to ask, you know.’

  And then I burst into tears. All over the place. A horrible, messy, snotty business which requires him to produce a handkerchief. Then he steers me to his car, puts me in the front seat and says, ‘I’ll send Gary home and round up the girls. Try to get it together or I shall have a car full of wailing women.’

  Ten minutes later, he emerges with the girls and Gary. He ushers the girls into the back of the car and calls to Gary, ‘Pizza Heaven, OK, Gary?’ Then he gets into the car and says, ‘The girls are starving, they say. And tea won’t do. We think that only a pizza place will offer a meal at this time in the afternoon, so we’re heading there. I invited Gary to join us – the least I could do, I thought.’

  So now, here we are. I don’t know what our waiter makes of us as a group, dishevelled as we all are and in varying states of anxiety, elation and exhaustion. Grace and Ruby are genuinely starving.

  ‘Ruby and I have had hardly anything but juice and biscuits for the last ten days,’ Grace says as she forks a huge mouthful of pizza. Then she looks guiltily at David. ‘Sorry, I know we’re not allowed to talk about it all till we’ve been interviewed by the police, but I just needed to explain why we’re being such pigs.’

  ‘Fish and chips we had,’ Ruby says. ‘Twice.’

  ‘True.’ Grace looks round the table. ‘Somebody change the subject,’ she says, ‘or we shall start blabbing.’

  No-one, though, can think of anything to say. If these children can’t talk about what has just happened to them, how can we prattle about anything else? We munch on in silence. I see Gary’s fist clench as though regretting reflexively that he didn’t have a chance to use it on Neil Buxton, but he munches his way stolidly through his pizza. David eats most of his. I start off with enthusiasm but quickly start to feel nauseous. I watch the girls eating and hope they won’t throw up in the car.

  And then we’re off. I thank Gary and tell him he’s a hero and a gentleman, causing him to blush horribly and hurry away. We get back into David’s car and start our five-hour drive with a slow crawl through suburban rush hour.

  Chapter Eighteen

  METHINKS I SEE THESE THINGS WITH PARTED EYE

  Tuesday evening

  We are all very quiet in the car. I can hear a certain amount of whispering from the back but the girls are daunted, I think, by being trapped in this car with a pair of adults. David is focusing on the driving, intent, serious – grim, even – and I am suddenly pole-axed by tiredness, the adrenaline of tension and terror leaking away to be replaced by a thirst for oblivion. I lean my head against the window frame and close my eyes but I don’t sink into the slumber I’m hoping for; I doze shallowly and when I jerk awake I know exactly where I am and who is with me. I turn to look at the back seat. Ruby and Grace are curled together, deeply asleep, like babes in the wood; Freda looks sleepy but is still awake.

  I look at David. ‘Freda’s the only one awake,’ I say quietly, ‘and I would like to ask her some questions but I’m not sure how much is sub judice. What am I allowed to talk to her about?’

  He has been expecting this, I can tell, because his answer is immediate. ‘Well, nothing. There will be charges against Dumitru if he pulls through, so anything Freda says will be evidence, and the Cumbrian police will want that fresh from her when they interview her, and not tainted by discussion with you first. So, I’m afraid the answer is there is really nothing she can talk to you about.’

  I am extraordinarily – and probably unreasonably – irritated by this, not just the word ‘tainted’ but the tone – the lofty pronouncement delivered without so much as a glance at me. All right, I know he is driving, but he could manage a momentary flicker, couldn’t he, rather than maintaining the stony profile? Well sod him. I dig in my bag and pull out Eve’s now rather crumpled sketch of Freda, with the enigmatic diagram on the back. I turn round in my seat and show the paper to Freda, who is sitting immediately behind me.

  ‘This is a sort of flow chart, isn’t it?’ I ask, keeping my voice down. ‘This is your theory about what happened to Ruby?’

  She glances at Ruby, sleeping beside her. ‘I like to think of it as a sort of mind map,’ she murmurs, ‘but whatever.’

  Brilliant! I look at David. ‘A mind map, Detective Superintendent. I’m not sure that the police can object to our discussing that, can they? This isn’t Oceania, is it? We don’t have Thought Police yet.’

  He still doesn’t look at me. His head is rigid, his eyes are on the road in front of him. He allows himself a single grunt of irritation before he says, ‘By all means talk to Freda about what has been in her head. Dreams and imaginings are outside our remit.’

  I think of pointing out that Freda has spent time with Ruby and Grace since she made her map and has had a chance to verify everything, so we shall not actually be confining ourselves to imaginings, but then I realise that he knows this perfectly well and – as annoyingly often – he is way ahead of me. I watch his face, hoping for just a flicker of complicity, but he gives me nothing, so I just murmur, ‘Lovely!’ and look again at the mind map before twisting awkwardly again to get as close as I can to Freda.

  ‘So, I would like to see if I’ve interpreted this right,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell you what I think, and you can tell me if I’m getting it right or wrong. Is that OK?’

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Fire away.’

  I take a deep breath, but keep my voice low. ‘Well, I made a mistake at first because I tried to read it across and then, of course, it doesn’t make any sense. But then I saw it’s a circle, isn’t it? It’s that kind of flowchart, not the sort that goes from top to bottom, with branches ending in possible outcomes. So there’s an inner circle and a sort of outer circle – satellites if you like.’

  ‘So far so good. Carry on.’

  ‘OK. So, I started by thinking about Grace. This inner circle, that’s all the young people you’ve met in Carnmere, but Grace is there too, and she wasn’t in Carnmere – you didn’t know her – so why does she feature here?’

  ‘And your answer was…?’

  ‘My answer was that she had to be important – and that meant that she had to be either the beginning or the end of the flow. I put some arrows in, by the way – I hope you don’t mind my interfering but I thought it might help me – and then I thought, Let’s imagine that Grace is both the beginning and the end. Because it is a circle after all. How am I doing?’

  She leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. ‘All right so far. You can keep going. I’ll stop you when you go off track.’

  ‘Good. So, this is all about Ruby, obviously, and there she is in the middle, and the others round her are like a protective ring. I wondered at first whether it could be a threatening ring, but Grace being there made me think not. So Grace thought Rub
y needed protecting, and that’s the start. We won’t talk about why Ruby needed protecting, because that’s police business.’ I shoot a glance at David but am met by the impassive profile once again. ‘We’ll just say Grace thought it was a good idea for Ruby to leave Carnmere.’

  I look again at the paper. ‘I assumed that we are supposed to go clockwise round the circle – I didn’t think this was widdershins business – so next to Grace comes Venetia. What’s the connection between Grace and Venetia? I didn’t know, except that Grace had been part of the gang, and she and Venetia are the same age. But next to Venetia is Milo, and there are two things we know about Milo in this business. One is that he took the phone call on the backstage phone that night that summoned Dumitru back to work and left Ruby, to some extent, free. And the other is that he had Ruby’s phone and told nobody that he had it. At the very least, it means that he saw Ruby that night. Maybe significant, maybe not.’

  I stop. Freda has been very quiet and I wonder if she has actually fallen asleep. She hasn’t. She says, ‘Keep going, but I do hope you’re going to get something wrong.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there are bits I don’t know at all. But I think I know this bit. Milo took the phone call from the hotel. And who, in this little inner circle, could have made a call from the hotel? Who else but Venetia, whose dad owns the hotel? I don’t know where she made the call from. Did she slip into her father’s office, or was it from somewhere else in the hotel?’

  ‘The kitchen phone,’ Freda murmurs, still with her eyes shut. ‘There’s a phone in the storeroom. She uses it sometimes instead of going over to the car park to use her mobile. They don’t mind.’

  ‘So they’re used to her using it and it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to link it up to the mystery message that called Dumitru back to work when he wasn’t needed. So far so good. So Venetia makes the call to the theatre, where Milo is primed to take it. There had to be a call, of course. Milo couldn’t just invent it. They knew the police would check that. You all watch TV crime dramas. You know what the police do. So Milo takes the call, goes and finds Dumitru, and Dumitru goes back to the hotel.’ I pause.

  ‘Go on,’ she says.

  ‘Well here I’m not sure, and I think you weren’t either. That’s why you’ve got a question mark against Dumitru’s name. You weren’t sure whether he was a part of this. But we’ll come back to that – if we’re allowed to.’

  I resist looking again at David and being ignored. Instead I plough on. ‘My theory is that Ruby wanted to make sure that Dumitru didn’t get the blame when she disappeared. She knew how her father felt about him, and she wanted to make sure that he was well out of it. So with Dumitru safely back at the hotel, Ruby gets on with the business of the evening, and when the interval comes, she gets into her boat and a mysterious young man joins her. He’s masked and dressed as one of Oberon’s attendants. Everybody saw him and maybe some noticed that he wasn’t Dumitru, but nobody wondered who he was. I wouldn’t have guessed if your mind map hadn’t told me. My money was on Gheorghe. But you worked out that it was Fergus. Nobody had thought of Fergus – we all thought of him as just a boy. But he’s pretty tall for thirteen, and with Dumitru’s costume on to bulk him out, he looked like all the others in the lantern lights.’

  Freda has opened her eyes and is leaning forward. She is getting into this now, seeing the chance of being the instructor for once and turning me into the eager student.

  ‘So what happened then?’ she asks.

  ‘I guess that in all the melée of the floating boats and the flickering lights, he paddled Ruby along the lake to that convenient little inlet, where she took off her costume and put on clothes that she had brought with her, or Fergus had brought for her – who knows? Anyway, it was a place to change, and if they left the boat there with her costume in it, that had the advantage of suggesting that Ruby was a victim, stripped of her clothes, and it would keep the search for her local.’

  David speaks at this point and I swing back from looking at Freda, as startled as if a statue had suddenly given tongue.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ he says, ‘they considered the hours of overtime the search would involve – the cost. They very nearly dredged the bloody lake.’

  ‘Will they be in trouble?’ Freda asks, and we both look at the sleeping girls.

  ‘There will be some sharp words tomorrow, I imagine, but if it’s clear that Ruby was running away from abuse, I don’t suppose it will go further than that,’ he says.

  I look at the mind map again. ‘David and I did talk about this sort of scenario as being possible. We didn’t have the specifics but we could see that Ruby might have been running away – with help. But we couldn’t work out what happened next. How could Ruby have got away at this point? That was what puzzled us. She didn’t catch a bus from up on the road and we didn’t believe that she’d hitched a lift because this was a careful plan and you don’t make a careful plan that depends on standing out on the road at night with your thumb out – certainly not if you’re a thirteen-year-old girl.’

  ‘Micky,’ Freda says.

  ‘So I see from the map. And Micky has two advantages. One is that he has access to boats – his father owns them, his uncle hires them out. Micky can get hold of a boat any time. So Micky comes and picks her up – in a rowing boat or another canoe. But where does he take her?’

  ‘You said Micky had two advantages,’ Freda says. ‘What was the other one?’

  ‘He’s a local. He knows his way around.’

  ‘He does,’ she says.

  ‘I wasn’t sure about this bit, but Ruby wasn’t going to try to travel at that time of night, was she? So where did Micky take her?’

  ‘The ferry,’ David says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How did you know?’ Freda asks. ‘I didn’t know that bit till Ruby told me.’

  ‘You said it,’ David says. ‘Micky had access to boats, but the only one someone could spend the night in in any safety was the ferry.’

  I do have a momentary impulse to shout ‘OK clever clogs’ at him, but I restrain myself. Instead I say, ‘And that meant she didn’t start out on her journey till the following morning, but the police were checking CCTV at the bus station for the previous evening.’

  I have my back to Freda at this point but she leans forward to say in my ear, ‘They wouldn’t have recognised her anyway, because of the wig.’

  ‘She was wearing a wig?’

  ‘I guessed that,’ she says with some smugness. ‘That was why no-one spotted her even after the police put out descriptions and photos the next morning, while she was on buses going down to Oxfordshire. You remember in the play, all the fairies had those short blonde pixie wigs. So everyone was looking for a girl with long red hair, but she was a short-haired blonde.’

  ‘A cunning plan,’ I say.

  ‘And the rest is obvious,’ Freda says, as though the interest has now gone out of this exercise. ‘Grace met Ruby in Oxford and took her back to her school. She’d been hiding out there since term ended at the weekend. She’s done it once before to get out of going home for the holidays. Mostly she went and stayed with schoolfriends.’

  ‘So Grace wasn’t in any touring production,’ I say. ‘I knew that. The detective superintendent checked that out for me – among other things. But what was the plan then?’ I glance back at David. ‘Are we allowed to talk about this? We’re not in Freda’s mind anymore.’

  ‘It’s not a crime to run away,’ he says.

  ‘Good.’

  Freda says, ‘OK. Well Grace and her mum had cooked up the plan for Grace to go to Alcott Park two years ago, when her dad started – you know… but then this year, when they were going to try the same thing with Ruby before he got interested in her, he wouldn’t let her audition for a scholarship. He was suspicious that she might try anyway and he was watching her all the time, which was why it wa
s hard for her to get away. Her mum had given in – she’s really scared of him – but Grace forged her signature on an application and she got an audition.’ She stops suddenly and claps a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh! The auditions are tomorrow. What’s she going to do?’

  ‘It’s all different now, isn’t it?’ I say.

  ‘I suppose,’ she says. She looks at Ruby. ‘I wonder what she will do now.’

  ‘That depends rather on how her mum’s doing.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.’

  We are quiet until I say, ‘What were they going to do if Ruby got her scholarship?’

  ‘Go back, confront their dad and tell him they would go to the police if he didn’t let Ruby go.’

  ‘Why hadn’t they done that before?’ I ask. ‘Wouldn’t that have saved all this business?’

  ‘I asked them that,’ Freda says. ‘It was their mum. She begged and begged them not to go to the police.’

  ‘And she really didn’t know where Ruby had gone?’

  ‘They were afraid their dad would get it out of her.’

  ‘Well it looks as though he thought she knew anyway. Somebody’s done something very nasty to her. It’s an odd coincidence if it wasn’t him.’

  David clears his throat. ‘Gina, enough,’ he says, and I subside. I tuck Freda’s crumpled mind map back in my bag. When I get home I shall frame the sketch with all its secrets tucked into its creases.

  I pass my phone back to Freda. ‘Ring Mum,’ I say. ‘Give her an ETA.’

  ‘Say ten-thirty,’ David puts in, ‘but we shall have to check in at the police station as soon as we get there. I can’t see them wanting to interview any of you at that time of night, but they will want to see that you’re back and make arrangements for interviews in the morning.’

  Freda has a muffled conversation with Ellie, consisting on her side mainly of ‘OK’s, then she hands back my phone and says, ‘They’ve booked into a B & B and they’ve got a room for me.’