Where Everything Seems Double by Penny Freedman (popular romance novels .txt) 📕

‘It’s called being a mother. You wait. You’ll be the same.’

‘I absolutely won’t. I’m determined. I shall trust my children.’

‘David’s here, by the way,’ I say.

‘Right,’ she says.

Back in our room, she takes a sharp look round for evidence of David’s occupation.

‘He’s got a nice room on the third floor,’ I say.

‘Right,’ she says again.

Keeping my back to her, and making a performance of tidying the stuff on my bedside table, I ask, oh so casually, ‘So how did Milo get on?’

‘Fine,’ she says, sitting on the window seat and looking out at the lake.

‘They were happy with his explanation?’

‘I don’t think he was aiming to make them happy.’

I grit my teeth. ‘They believed his story, I mean,’ I say, still trying to maintain my casual tone and feigning deep interest in my phone, into which nothing of any importance can have made an entrance.

‘Well it’s the truth, not a story, so they’ll have to believe it, won’t they?’ she snaps.

‘And the truth is…?’ I ask, my eyes still glued to my phone.

She sighs. ‘Ruby brought her phone to the theatre by mistake. She didn’t want to leave it in the dressing room and she gave it to Milo to look after.’

‘And after she disappeared?’

‘HE FORGOT,’ she shouts.

I give up the pretence of casualness. ‘It’s an odd thing to forget, isn’t it? When a friend goes missing?’

‘People forget things. You forget things all the time.’

‘But I have age as an excuse. My brain cells are dying at an exponential rate.’

‘Well Milo was in shock.’

‘And that’s what he told the police?’

She gets up. ‘I’m going to my room to read,’ she says. ‘Don’t you want to talk to David?’

‘He’s gone to the police station.’

‘Then you didn’t need to interrogate me, did you?’ she says, and closes her door behind her.

*

David gets back from his consultation with the local police hours later. He taps on my door, holds up a hand to silence my questions and says he will talk to me later when he has his thoughts in order. By this time, Freda has relented enough to open her door and ask what time we are having dinner and we agree to meet in the bar in half an hour.

There I watch the meeting between the two of them with interest. Freda, who has always liked David, is not hostile but is certainly challenging, influenced, I suppose, by the view of the Flynn/Fletcher family that he and I were responsible for Colin’s downfall, but David takes this in his stride, used as he is to difficult women, and by the time we are sitting at our table Freda has changed tack. She has seen, I suspect, that David and I are not quite love’s old dream at the moment and has decided to adopt him as an ally in getting at me. She starts with the menu.

‘As you see, it’s in French,’ she tells him. ‘My grandmother is delighted because it gives her the opportunity to lecture us. Try not to choose the sole meunière because we’ve had that lecture already, on our first night.’

David, who could easily say something affectionate about enjoying my lectures (which he does, actually, for the most part) grins conspiratorially at her and says, ‘I was thinking of steak-frites. Do you think I’m safe there?’

She grins back. ‘Give it a try,’ she says.

I have a choice: I can either ignore them and maintain a lofty detachment or I can enter into the joke and be a good sport. I am thinking of having the jaune doré. This fish is John Dory in English, but that is a corruption of the French name, which means ‘golden yellow’. In Italian, it is pesce san Pietro, because it has a dark mark on its side, which is supposed to be St Peter’s thumbprint. So I could give them a lecture on this but I haven’t the energy, really, and why should I make myself a willing butt of their joke? Instead I pull the rug out from under them by saying that I will have steak-frites too. Then I order a large glass of Merlot and sit back and sulk.

As it turns out, they don’t even notice the sulk – or if they do they collude in ignoring it. Freda is charming to David, chatting while we wait for our food and asking him if he ever watches TV crime dramas and whether any of them are truthful in the way they show the police, and David admits – as he has never done to me – that he has a liking for Scott and Bailey. I have time to reflect on this as neither of them is talking to me. He gains Brownie points, of course, for liking such a female-oriented show, but I can’t believe that he sees me in Janet Scott or Rachel Bailey – neither the level-headed mum nor the edgy risk-taker with a screwed-up family life. DCI Gill Murray, though. Could he see me in Amelia Bullmore – gone blonde and about two stone heavier? Freda is laughing now at something David has said, and I am attacked by a pang of guilt – the reluctant recognition that he could have been her cool grandfather if I hadn’t – for reasons which seem less compelling now – sent him packing years ago when he invited me to marry him. Picking up my glass, I find that it is nearly empty and when our food arrives I order another.

When we have finished, and David and Freda have shared a sticky toffee pudding and a chocolate mousse while I scraped daintily at a single scoop of lemon sorbet, Freda says she is going upstairs to watch TV, and David and I go into the bar for coffee. There, finally, I get a rundown on his dealings with the local police.

We settle in a corner with our coffee.

‘So?’ I say.

‘There are four possibilities when someone goes missing,’ he says, and