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

Chapter Eleven AND THOUGH SHE BE BUT LITTLE SHE IS FIERCE

Sunday

I am not at my best this morning. I slept badly and have a headache. I can only pick at breakfast, which makes my mood worse when I consider how much this is costing me. David, on the other hand, is very chipper, engaging Freda in bright conversation and chomping his way through the full Cumbrian breakfast, black pudding and all. He is keen to look at the possible crime scene on the lakeside and deigns to agree to my joining him. Freda, I assume, will be off somewhere with the gang.

David and I wait until the ferry has been and gone, and then I take him out onto the jetty to show him the theatre opposite and the small boats tied up in front of the boatyard. I describe the interval extravaganza with the floating fairies and invite him to imagine the scene. Then we walk along to the area marked off by police tape. The boat is no longer there – removed for forensic examination – so all there is to see is an area of grass. We stop at a gap in the bushes that screen the lake from the road, which interests David.

‘That’s not a newly-made gap,’ he says. ‘It looks as though the boat was moored there deliberately for access to the road.’

‘Which fits bunk, abduction or crime and escape.’ I say.

‘Yes.’

We go through and stand just outside the taped-off area. I have seen crime scenes before: tape across the doors of a college library, where a student had been killed; tape across the drive of a country house where a teenage girl had died; tape flapping in the wind on a desolate area of beach where I myself had found a body; broken fragments of tape clinging to the railings of a Bloomsbury basement where a young woman had been strangled. I ought to be hardened to it, but this morning it gets under my skin. Is this all we know about what happened to Ruby Buxton? Is this the best the police can do – come out and wrap tape round a patch of grass that just might have been the scene of her death?

I turn to David. ‘If they think this is the place, and they – and you – think she’s dead, why haven’t they dragged the bloody lake?’ I demand. ‘Her parents have a right to know, don’t they?’

Surprisingly, he puts an arm round me. ‘If there’s a body in there, it will come to the surface soon. Dragging a lake is hugely expensive. They are still looking – following other lines. It’s a question of where to put their resources. You’d rather they were still looking for a live girl, wouldn’t you?’

I don’t have an answer but I do like the feel of his arm round me, and I am about to lean into it when a voice calls, ‘Hi!’ and there is Freda standing in the gap by the road. Not only has she interrupted us but she is extremely sarky – a proper Year Nine this morning. She soon flounces off but she has broken the moment and we go back to the hotel for coffee, and for me to have another session with Dumitru.

His face is looking worse, if anything, this morning; the bruising has come out and he looks grey and preoccupied. I take the risk of a head-on approach.

‘There’s something the matter, Dumitru, isn’t there? Not just your face. You’re not with me. Do you want to tell me what it is?’

He looks at me, but his eyes are blank. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Just learning. No talking.’

He shakes his head vigorously as he says this but stops and closes his eyes.

‘You’ve got a headache, haven’t you?’ I ask, and don’t wait for an answer. ‘We need to work on your spelling, but you don’t look in a fit state for reading and writing.’

I wish I had the flash cards I promised but I’ve been too busy to get Freda onto those – and she’s not in the mood to be helpful anyway.

‘Wait here a moment,’ I say, and I hurry off to the hotel lounge, where I grab a fistful of smart headed notepaper from a desk in the window, and a couple of felt pens from a basket of children’s toys. Then, back at our garden table, I improvise on-the-spot flash cards, giving him a series of aphonetic words to pronounce. Knife, know, knot and kneel we do, and then thought, through and though, taught, and laugh, and vague, league and tongue. I don’t go into homophones; the delights of right and write, there and their, hole and whole, and by and buy, and all their friends. They can wait for another day.

Dumitru is not much engaged. He goes through the motions but tomorrow he will have forgotten most of this. I am glad when he is called back to his bar duties and I can go and find David.

Freda deigns to join us for lunch. I find her in her room, drawing. Of course she is no longer a child, eager to run and show me what she has done – I know that, but I am still a bit wounded by the haste with which she bundles her sketchpad away as soon as I come into the room. I thought I was prepared but I discover that I am not quite ready yet to find myself consigned to the adult camp, automatically Them – untrustworthy, if not hostile – so over lunch, when David says that he is going back to the police station later, I dangle an invitation to her to help me with the crossword. She doesn’t seem to be seeing her friends today – presumably they are caught up in family Sunday routines – so wouldn’t she like a bit of companionable clue-solving?

She would not, it seems. It has suddenly become urgent for her to finish Lord of the