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

but perhaps it was all internalised and finally hollowed them out, so that only oblivion would do. I picture them with stones in their pockets, wading out into the lake. Did they hold hands? Why hasn’t Neil Buxton been found? Perhaps he got caught in something under the surface. I have a vague idea that drowned women float face upward and men face downward. Would that make a difference?

Annie walks over to the window. ‘The police are down there. Are you all right now?’ Annie asks. ‘Because if so, I’ll go down and see what I can find out.’

I nod.

She says, ‘And it may have nothing to do with Freda, you know.’

I nod again and watch her go.

As soon as the door closes I am drawn back to the window, where I stand, mopping up the residual tears and blowing my nose. There are three uniformed police officers out there, milling around on the jetty, consulting in twos and threes and then drifting away again in the way that others’ activities always have of seeming aimless because you don’t understand what motivates them. Now I can see Annie out there. She is still wearing the lawyer’s clothes that she had on when she jumped onto a train yesterday evening, and though she has spent the night in most of them they still look pretty professional – a dark grey suit and black patent heels. Whether because of this air of professionalism or because she is an attractive young woman, one of the policemen seems to be willing to talk to her. I can see him gesturing out over the lake and her nodding sagely. Are they looking for Neil Buxton? I turn away. She will be able to tell me more than I can guess from standing here.

I go into the bathroom to wash my face, and when I come back I see that the sketch of Freda has fallen on the floor. I must have dropped it when Annie came thundering at the door just now. It is upside down, and as I bend down to pick it up I see that there is writing on the back. I almost decide not to read it because if it is a loving message to me from Freda I won’t be able to bear it, but when I look at it I see that, though it is in Freda’s writing, it seems to be just a random scattering of names – the names, in fact, of everyone she has met or heard about since she has been here. I sit down with it. It is odd – not a list, but spaced in a way that looks deliberate.

I stare at it. Is it a message? Is it intended for me? Am I supposed to understand it? I stare until my eyes water. If I read it across in rows it makes no sense. Venetia and her father on separate rows, then Grace and Milo (is there something I don’t know about those two?), the Buxtons, Ruby, Colin and Eve (what do those question marks mean?), Micky’s dad, Micky and Fergus, and finally, ominously capitalised and underlined but also question-marked, Dumitru. I try looking away and then quickly back again, to see if the names form a different pattern, and I do see something. Ruby is at the centre, of course, so this is about her. And the names have a sort of family grouping – the Buxtons with Grace, Micky and Venetia near their fathers, Colin and Eve near Milo and Fergus. But why like this, Freda? I try again the trick of looking away and looking back and then, very tentatively, I fetch the pencil that lies with a notepad near the bedside phone and I try putting some arrows into the medley of names.

When I have finished, I stare at what I have done. Then I close my eyes and try to conjure up that conversation I had in Eve’s studio. What was it she said? I get a glimmer – just a suggestion – but it is enough to get me trawling on my phone. Thank God it’s just the phone signal that’s blocked here and the wi-fi seems robust. I find what I’m looking for. Now the sensible thing would be to ring the police – or at least to ring David and get him to act as an intermediary – but even with his influence I don’t trust them to move fast. This is something I have to do myself, and if the niggling voice in my head is right when it tells me that this is the way I avoid being confronted by Ellie, then so be it – just add cowardice to my list of sins and I’ll deal with it later. I do make one call, though, just to assure myself that I really do have to go. I go back to the website I found earlier and I get a phone number. Then I call from the room phone and I get an answerphone message: ‘Thank you for contacting us. We are closed at present. Please consult our website if you wish to make further enquiries.’ As I expected. I go back to my phone and look at distances. It’s a hell of a long way and I’m not prepared to mess about with trains. I fish in my wallet for the card that our taxi driver gave me on the day we arrived and I make a call.

Gary, who answers the phone – and who may indeed be a one-man-band despite the impressiveness of the shiny car he drove us in – remembers Freda and me and starts to ask polite questions about our holiday. He is obviously taken aback when I cut him short, but I can’t help that. He might as well get used to the idea that I am not going to be making jolly conversation with him on our five-hour journey. So I don’t explain why I