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

on either side of him now, and Gustav is retreating to his desk, having thrown Gheorghe to us.

‘Maybe two-thirty,’ he says.

It is four-thirty now.

‘What was she doing?’ I ask.

‘Just talking.’ He looks so shifty I want to slap him.

‘Talking to you?’

‘No.’

‘Then who?’ I yell, so loudly that he jumps.

‘Dumitru,’ he mutters.

Dumitru. Were they talking about their meeting the other night – the bundle he was carrying?

‘Were they having an argument?’ I ask.

‘No. No. Just talking.’ He looks over to Gustav at reception as though he would like to send up a distress rocket. ‘Thing is,’ he says, ‘we can’t find Dumitru. He is gone missing.’

I don’t know how I end up on the floor. I haven’t fainted. It’s just that my legs folded up. But now I’m down here I don’t want to get up. I would like just to lie here and be completely helpless. Eve is in action, though. I can hear her at the desk, imperious and threatening. ‘Ring the police immediately,’ she commands. ‘Not the local station. Nine nine nine.’

I do get up, of course – mainly because I know I am going to be sick. I grab my key from Gustav, wave Eve away and drag my wobbly legs up the stairs to my room, where I make it to the bathroom just in time. After that I feel slightly better – clearer-headed at least – and I go into Freda’s room. I deliberately banish the absurd hope that I will find her in there, sitting by the window, sketching, and I find the room almost aggressively devoid of her. It looks exactly as the chambermaid must have left it this morning – clean, tidy, and without character. I look in the wardrobe. Her jacket is still there, and so is her rucksack. Looking round the room, I find her new books, still in the bookshop’s paper bag, beside her bed, and her little shoulder bag is lying on the bed with the new bandanas screwed up inside it. There is no sign of her phone. It must be in her pocket, but as far as I can see that is all she has with her.

I am just turning to go when I see one thing I haven’t seen before. On top of her chest of drawers is a sheet of paper, a sketch. I pick it up, expecting it to be one of Freda’s own drawings, but I find it is a sketch of her. It is not a self-portrait – it is too professional to be her work. Eve. Eve has drawn her. It was done for me.

I carry it back into my room. There is a pressure round my heart. Not pain, but a squeezing that makes me think of heartbreak. The drawing is faithful but the face is sad, without the light that dances in her eyes. And yet it is how she has been looking in the last couple of days, isn’t it? She has been sad and I chose not to notice.

I am rescued by knocking at the door. I go to open it, expecting that it will be Eve and ready to send her away, but two people in uniform confront me. They flash their police IDs at me and I am seized with panic. These are not the people I want: two uniformed constables – one female in case I am hysterical – sent to reassure an over-anxious visitor who thinks she has lost a teenager, who will turn up shortly having lost track of the time. I want to scream at them to go away and send me proper detectives who are running the Ruby Buxton investigation and understand that Freda is in the hands of a possible killer. I don’t scream because harsh experience has taught me that you can sometimes win with officialdom if you go through the motions of compliance. So I invite them in and start answering their questions with as good a grace as I can muster. I give them my full name and address, followed by Freda’s full name, address and age, I confirm that she is my granddaughter and explain that her parents are in Italy, I tell them when and where I last saw her and state firmly that we had not had any kind of row or argument and she did not appear to be upset about anything. Then, when they start asking the same questions over again, I start screaming.

‘Ruby Buxton!’ I yell. ‘You don’t get it! Freda is thirteen, like her, she knows the same kids that Ruby knew, she was last seen talking to one of the waiters here who is a suspect in Ruby’s disappearance. He has a car. You need to get out roadblocks, put out his registration number – descriptions of him and Freda. It’s been three hours now. The first hours are crucial, we know that, and you’re sitting here asking me idiot questions.’

The woman puts out a hand, presumably to calm me, but I shake it off so roughly that I shall probably be accused of assaulting a police officer later on. ‘Go!’ I yell. ‘My granddaughter is in the hands of a killer, so fucking well shift yourselves.’

They don’t go. Instead they go through into Freda’s room and look round it. They aren’t there long and they come out empty-handed. They ask if I have a photo of Freda, which I haven’t, except for a dog-eared snap of her aged two, which hangs around in my wallet. I show them Eve’s sketch but refuse to let them take it away, so the woman takes a shot of it on her phone and they leave. I cling to the hope that they are seeing dimly what they are into here – I saw the look they gave each other when I mentioned Ruby – but how long it will take to get things moving I have no idea. I look at the phone beside the bed. I will have