‘He said everything was changing because of Brexit.’
‘But he wasn’t happy about taking you along?’ Jane Hapgood asked.
‘No. He was pretty nasty to me actually. He wouldn’t let me text Gran just to let her know that I was safe, and he took my phone away from me.’
‘We have the phone,’ Jane Hapgood said. ‘It was retrieved from Dumitru’s car.’
‘Can I have it back?’
‘When our forensic officers have finished with it.’
‘Well’ – she looked at her mother – ‘we’re going to Italy on Friday. Will I get it before then?’
‘I should think so.’ Jane Hapgood sat forward in her chair so that she was quite close to Freda. ‘You say Dumitru was pretty nasty to you. Can you tell me in what way?’
‘Well, at first he didn’t realise how long the drive was going to be. He looked up the route on his phone but I don’t think he checked the distance, and then he switched off the phone so we couldn’t be traced. He kept saying ‘It can’t be far. England is only a small country.’ His idea was that we would drive down there, scoop Ruby up and come back with her and no-one would really mind the trouble we’d caused because we’d brought Ruby. But we got lost quite a bit and it took ages and he realised that the police would be looking for us and he made me lie down on the back seat under the duvet so no-one could see me and he wouldn’t stop for a drink or the loo and it was hours and hours.’ She was horrified to hear her voice beginning to wobble. ‘He just got a bit crazy,’ she finished.
‘But he didn’t touch you?’
‘No, not at all. I know what you mean and it wasn’t like that at all.’ She stopped, thought, and then said, ‘I know I said he was nasty to me but what I want to say is that he was trying to do the right thing. He was trying to help Ruby. He is a hero, actually. When Ruby’s dad arrived, Dumitru saved us. He went straight for him even though he had that horrible glass dagger thing and it gave us the chance to get into the cupboard and lock ourselves in. So I would like that to be in my statement – that he was a hero.’
Jane Hapgood leaned back in her chair and looked at Mark Abington. ‘I hope you’ve made note of that, DC Abington,’ she said.
‘Certainly have.’
Freda had the sense that she was being laughed at and she could feel herself blushing, but her mum, surprisingly, put a hand on her arm and rubbed it gently in a way that was surprisingly comforting.
‘So can you tell us about what happened when you got to Alcott Park, Freda?’ DS Hapgood asked.
‘Well, it was quite late but it wasn’t dark yet, so we found a way in up a fire escape. We could see that the door at the top wasn’t closed. Grace had gone into the village to get some chips and she’d left it ajar.’
‘So you found Ruby there?’
‘Yes. She was really angry. We scared her and she said she wasn’t going back to Carnmere anyway. And then Grace got back and she was a bit calmer, and we all sat down to talk about it, and they gave us some of their chips. But Grace explained about Ruby’s audition for a scholarship and she said she had to stay till –well, today, actually – for that, and then if she got the scholarship they would go home and tell their parents what they’d done.’
‘And how did Dumitru feel about that?’
‘He was furious. He said he’d risked everything to come and get Ruby and now he was going to be in trouble. He was really tired, too, and he knew he couldn’t do the drive back, so we decided to stay the night and go back in the morning.’
‘You didn’t think of ringing someone then to tell them you were safe?’
‘I wanted to, but Ruby got hysterical and said then her dad would find out where she was and she was scared of what he would do. So we just went to bed. I shared Ruby and Grace’s room – I slept in one of the beds and they shared the other one.’
‘And what about Dumitru?’
‘He said he’d sleep on the sofa in the green room.’
‘And in the morning?’
‘We all slept late and then we went down to the green room and we all had some juice and an energy bar – that was all they had – and Dumitru had another go at persuading Ruby to come back with us and she said no, and they wanted to show us round the school – to see what a great place it was – and Dumitru didn’t seem to be in a hurry to go – I think he was still hoping Ruby would change her mind. So we all had a tour of the school and we had just got back to the green room when we heard someone out in the hall and it was their dad. He shouted out their names and Dumitru told us to wait there while he went to deal with him, but we followed and I saw…’ she faltered for a moment, ‘I saw this weird thing he was carrying, like a glass icicle, and he lunged at Dumitru with it and we turned and ran. Grace ran straight for the big costume cupboard and got us in there, and she had the key so she locked us in.’
Mark Abington looked up from his note taking. ‘How come she had the key?’ he asked.
‘She’d had it at the end of term because she’d done wardrobe for a show some of them put on, and she’d kept hold of it because she knew Ruby was going to need a costume for her audition piece.’
He looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe her, Freda thought. Hadn’t Ruby and Grace already told them all this? Maybe they’d been interviewed by other people. Perhaps that was how it was done – and then they compared notes.
‘And then what happened?’ Jane Hapgood asked.
‘Then their dad came in and he knew where we were, and he tried to get the door open but he couldn’t, so he said he was going to wait there until we came out or suffocated when the air ran out. And that’s where we were when my gran found us.’ She shot a look at her mum that she hoped was full of meaning, but she saw that she was wiping away tears.
‘Well, thank you, Freda,’ DS Hapgood said, and then her tone changed as she stood up and made a little speech, which Freda could have done without. ‘I’m sure you know that you behaved very irresponsibly, and I’m sure your mum has spoken to you about it. You caused a great deal of anxiety, you put yourself in serious danger and you wasted police time and resources. I hope you won’t ever be so foolish again. It may feel like an adventure now because it turned out all right, but things could have ended very differently.’
What was she supposed to say? DS Hapgood seemed to be expecting an answer and Mum was no help. She was really crying now and mopping herself up with a tissue. This was, she thought, very unfair. Mum and Gran had every right to be upset with her because they had been worried but the police? It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she might have wasted police time but she had also saved them the time they would have gone on spending looking for Ruby. What if you’d dragged the lake finally? she wanted to ask. What would that have cost? Instead she asked, ‘When will I get my phone back?’
DS Hapgood sighed. ‘When are you leaving for Italy?’
‘Friday,’ her mum answered.
‘Come in tomorrow afternoon,’ she said. ‘And think about what I’ve said.’
When they got outside, her mum said, ‘I need coffee,’ and marched across to the glass-fronted café on the other side of the square. Neither of them said anything except to order their drinks – coke for Freda and a large filter coffee for her mother, to which Freda added a request for a buttered teacake. The breakfast-time row with her mother had stopped her from eating much and now she was starving. As they waited for their order to arrive, they both looked out at the square, busy with the weekly market. All placid and ordinary, Freda thought, and would anyone looking at the pair of them guess how un-placid and un-ordinary they were feeling? She waited until they had their food and drink, until her mother had taken a good swig of her coffee and she herself was fortified by half the teacake before she said, ‘So you see it really wasn’t Granny’s fault.’
Her mother made a noise that was supposed to be a laugh but really
wasn’t one. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘She didn’t drag you up here on one of her adventures. She didn’t involve you in her self-promoting amateur sleuthing. She didn’t use you in the weird psychic games she plays with David Scott. She didn’t introduce you to a dishonest hotel waiter. And she didn’t encourage you to think you can behave as selfishly and stupidly as she does, did she?’
Freda felt as though she had been punched in the stomach, but she wasn’t going to let her mother see that. She kept her eyes on her plate and took a deep breath. ‘The police don’t seem to be blaming her,’ she said.
‘No!’ her mother hissed furiously, ‘because you managed to tell your story without including any of that, didn’t you? In your version your grandmother was the heroine who turned up just at the right moment and saved the day.’ She gulped some more coffee. ‘How did she know where you were, actually? She was the one who worked out where Ruby was, wasn’t she? She put you up to it.’
‘No, she didn’t!’ Freda was hissing now too. ‘I worked it out and she found my mind map.’
‘Your what?’
‘Mind map. It’s when you—’
‘Yes, I know what a mind map is. But what was yours a map of?’
‘How Ruby ran away. It was the easiest way to think about it. And I left it behind and Granny found it and worked out what it meant. Because she gets me. Because we’re alike.’
‘And that’s just the problem. You’re too alike and being with her isn’t good for you.’
‘Why not? Just because I went off without telling anyone it doesn’t mean she’s a bad influence.’
‘Yes it does. Thinking you know best and having no respect for people who know better. Thinking you’re superior to everyone else doesn’t bring you friends. If you model yourself on her you’ll end up as lonely and sad as she is.’
‘She’s not lonely and sad. She’s got friends. Eve for a start. She loves Eve.’
‘Oh yes, loves her so much she hasn’t seen her for ten years.’
‘And there’s David.’
‘David! David, who she could have married only she’d rather keep him dangling on a string.’
‘Anyway, she’s not lonely.’
‘Really? Living alone in that flat without even a cat. We had to take her cat because she couldn’t even manage that.’
‘Because she lives in the middle of London.’
‘But she doesn’t have to.’
‘She likes it there. And so do I.’ A thought struck her. ‘You’re not going to stop me going there at the end of the holidays, are you?’
Her mother looked away from her and out of the window. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We might stay longer in Italy, after this disruption.’
Freda stood up. ‘Well I’m sorry you hate her,’ she said, ‘because she loves you, though I can’t think why because you’re actually a complete cow.’
As she walked away, her mother called, ‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to the B and B. Please don’t get the police out looking for me.’
Pleased with her exit line, she swaggered out of the café, but then set off at a sprint towards the B and B, desperate to get to her room before the storm of tears building in her chest overwhelmed her.
DC Abington takes notes
Chapter Twenty
MEET WE ALL BY BREAK OF DAY
Wednesday and Thursday
The police really let me off very lightly. Not that I had done anything criminal, of course, but my experience has been that they don’t much like amateur detectives wandering onto their pitch and may even retaliate by repurposing them as suspects. But there was none of that. They clearly don’t know that I have form, didn’t link me to Colin’s past in spite of the Marlbury connection, and happily assumed, without my having to lie except by omission, that I am just up here for a nice holiday. I think I must have Freda to thank for this and I don’t know whether to be pleased or not. Of course, I was glad not to be berated for interference in police matters but I have always found Freda a truthful child and I am not altogether happy to find that adolescence has turned her into a skilled liar.
Anyway, the upshot was that I was treated as a bit of a heroine – a feisty grandmother who took off to rescue her missing granddaughter, called an ambulance to a man who was bleeding to death and confronted an armed attacker. They asked me, of course, why I hadn’t informed them instead of going off to find her myself but accepted fairly readily my explanation that I had no evidence to offer except my guesswork based on Freda’s mind map. The issue of the mind map was a bit tricky. I couldn’t see that it was any of their business, I didn’t want to risk losing it, and it is just too personal to be shared, so I went vague and dappy and said it had somehow gone missing in all the havoc of the previous day. I’m not sure that they believed me, but there it is.
I saw Ellie when I came out of the police station. She was sitting in the café on the other side of the square, on her own, and she looked as though she had been crying. I was tempted to go in and join her, to sit down at the table opposite her and force her to talk to me, but my courage failed and instead I went and bought Kendal mint cake to take home with me.
And then I had to get through the rest of the day. I wanted news. I wanted to know how Dumitru was, how Susan Buxton was, how Ruby and Grace were doing, whether Freda was all right, but nobody was telling me anything. I took the ferry back to the hotel, my eyes glued to my phone while I had a signal, and then sat in my room, trying to read, eating biscuits, feeling abandoned and resentful. I rang David twice, but he was already back in London and I got his terse voicemail twice; I rang Eve but got her more friendly but no less unhelpful message; I pointlessly tried Freda’s phone, though I knew it was likely to be in Dumitru’s car, probably still in Oxfordshire, and was told it was switched off anyway; I even considered ringing Annie, in case she somehow had news via Ellie, but it’s a working day and I wasn’t strong enough to be shouted at again anyway. I looked in the minibar and seriously considered just drinking everything in it, but I was saved by the arrival of a chambermaid with clean towels for the bathroom and went down to the bar to eat a sensible ham sandwich. I hoped Gheorghe might be there with news of Dumitru, but there was a barman I didn’t recognise, who only shrugged when I asked if there was any news. Walking along to Eve’s studio after my lunch, I found, as I expected, that it was closed.
It was not until late that afternoon that my room phone rang as I was sitting looking glumly out of the window at a view which had lost its charm. It was Eve.
‘How are you doing?’
‘Going cold turkey on adrenaline withdrawal and starved of news. What have you got for me?’
‘I know everything. I am sharing my house with people who are wired in to the local intelligence network. What do you want to know?’
‘Well, how is Susan for a start?’
‘That was the most difficult information to get hold of. They took a while at the hospital to grasp that Susan’s next of kin is appearing in court tomorrow morning, charged with attempting to murder her, and beyond that her only kin are her teenage daughters, and they still wouldn’t talk to me. But Grace rang and had the sense to claim to be eighteen, so she got a bulletin, and it was cautiously optimistic. She has a couple of broken bones and a fractured skull and she is in an induced coma, but the scans suggest that brain damage may not be permanent, and they expect to bring her out of the coma in the next day or two.’
‘I suppose Neil thought she knew where Ruby was.’
‘I went with the girls to their police interviews. They were adamant that she didn’t know.’
‘Maybe she just guessed.’
‘And he forced her guess out of her? It’s possible, I suppose.’
‘We’ll probably never know. Men like that don’t make confessions. Refusing to talk makes them feel that they’re still in control.’
‘As indeed she did.’
‘Exactly. Anyway, I’ve managed to do a deal with Ellie. I’m taking Milo and Fergus to Carlisle tomorrow to catch their plane to Dublin, and—’
‘They’re going home? Does Laura think you aren’t a fit grandmother either?’
‘Oh no. They were due to go back. They’ve been here for two weeks. Laura and Dermott are taking them off on a camping holiday. Anyway, Grace and Ruby are coming with me to see them off and I’ve persuaded Ellie to bring Freda to the airport as well, so they can all say their goodbyes.’
‘How does Ellie have a car?’
‘They hired one at Heathrow when they flew in.’
‘OK. I missed their arriving, of course.’
‘You did. Anyway, I thought you might want to get a lift with them and come too. There’s no more room in my car but—’
‘Nice idea, Eve,’ I say, ‘but I think Ellie would rather run me over with her car than offer me a lift in it.’
‘Are you sure it’s that bad?’
‘I’m sure. And I suppose I deserve it.’
‘They’re flying back to Italy tomorrow.’
‘And I’m going back to London. So no time for mending fences in the immediate future.’
‘You went and fetched her home.’
‘That doesn’t seem to count.’
When she rings off, I go back to the window, where the lake glitters mockingly at me and I can see Venetia and Micky, sitting on bollards, deep in conversation. I get out my wallet, retrieve a card and ring Gary. Then I walk down to the jetty.
Where Everything Seems Double Page 18
