Uarda : a Romance of Ancient Egypt — Volume 02 by Georg Ebers (ink book reader txt) 📕

at her own clothes. She hadn’t had much choice about what to bring – she hardly had what you might call an extensive wardrobe – so she had put in her only skirt to satisfy Granny’s plan for elegant dining, and her new jumpsuit, but otherwise she just had shorts and tops really. The jeans she was wearing were all right, if not as cool as they might be, and she had put her trainers in the washing machine, so they were looking good for the moment. She thought she would do.

Granny, though, was dressed to impress, she thought, which wasn’t usually her thing. (Freda could remember how she was when she lived in a funny little cottage by the seaside and her hair was all wild and she forgot to cut her fingernails and really made a very convincing witch.) So all this grooming must be to do with this friend of hers they were going to see. Eve. There was a mystery there. Granny was rushing up here to help Eve out – cancelling the week of London treats that Freda had been looking forward to – and Freda had never heard her mention her before. She thought she knew why Eve needed help, though; she had been on the internet to find out what she could about Ruby Buxton.

This was what she knew: Ruby Buxton was thirteen, and she had been playing one of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the theatre in Carnmere. Four days ago, she had disappeared during a performance and nobody realised that she was missing until her father came to pick her up at the end. From what she could gather, the theatre was very near the Carnmere lake and everyone seemed to think that she had drowned. There was a YouTube video of girls dressed as fairies, floating about in little boats on the lake, in the dark, which seemed weird, and she couldn’t see how that fitted into the play exactly. They had read it in English lessons at school, and she couldn’t see that it was a particularly watery play – it all happened in a wood, didn’t it? But anyway, the police had found a boat with Ruby’s fairy costume in it, and now they were talking about her being murdered. And the reason why Granny was here, she felt sure, was that there was a man called Colin Fletcher, who people said was a paedo, and he had been involved in the murder of a girl in Marlbury. There was lots of really angry stuff on Facebook about him being free and not having been sent to prison, and Freda had tried to ask her grandmother about it, but she had got cross with her for believing stuff that was on social media and told her she couldn’t say anything until she had had a chance to find out for herself what had gone on. ‘Fake news, Freda,’ she had said. ‘We’re not having any of that.’

She dug into her bag for her phone and encountered her sketch pad, which she had put in at the last minute. Her school report for art had been so good it had been almost embarrassing. ‘Talent’ and ‘potential’ Mrs Wade had said, and when she bumped into her in the corridor on the last day of term, she said, ‘Take a sketch pad with you wherever you go during the holidays, Freda. Draw what you see.’ So, she had the pad and the pencils with her but she really couldn’t see how she could possibly sit and sketch like a proper artist. Pretentious or what? She wasn’t going to sketch in front of strangers, and certainly not in front of the scary boys. What was Mrs Wade thinking? Freda liked her but she did wonder if she lived in the real world.

She checked her phone for messages and the time and saw that there was more than an hour of the journey still to go. Not feeling like getting back into Lord of the Flies, she looked furtively at her grandmother to see if she would notice her playing a game on her phone. If she did, she would have all sorts of sarcastic things to say, but Freda was pretty sure that she was asleep, actually, so she was safe for the moment and whiled away a happy half-hour and more until a voice suddenly asked, ‘Do you know where we are?’ and she hurriedly slid her phone into her bag.

‘Don’t you mean, “Are we nearly there?” Gran?’ Freda asked.

Her grandmother grinned; she quite liked to be teased, Freda had realised – unlike Mum who sometimes didn’t get it.

‘Well, are we?’ she whined, in a good imitation of a six-year-old.

‘Ten minutes,’ Freda said.

‘Good. I’ve booked a taxi to pick us up at the station. There are buses but there seems to be a forty-five-minute wait, so I thought we’d arrive in style.’

This was looking encouraging, Freda thought. The Carnmere teenagers might be scary but at least Granny was in treats mode, and if she could bank on that then things couldn’t be too bad, could they?

Why is she looking so smart?

Chapter Three A MARVELLOUS CONVENIENT PLACE

Wednesday afternoon

The taxi was an excellent idea. I can be as frugal as the next worthy woman but three-quarters of an hour is too long to stand around in drizzle, and drizzle is de rigeur up here. Eve says she will meet me at the hotel when we arrive and I don’t want to get there looking bedraggled. I am not quite sure why, since Eve has seen me in all sorts of disarray in the past. That was a few years ago, though, when disarray didn’t just make me look old and slightly mad, and now I seem to have something to prove. I suppose I don’t want my appearance to carry any hint of sackcloth and ashes. If Eve thinks that the reason why I am