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

How did I think that I could just jump in a taxi and bring her back to her mother magically unharmed? Well, the answer is that this is the only way I put things right. I lost Freda and I have to find her. Ellie rightly blames me and my only chance of being forgiven is through finding her. It makes sense in my head but I am not crazy enough yet to believe that it will make sense to anyone else.

The drive seems to speed up in defiance of the brake I am wishing on it, but the last bit takes time. The traffic here in the suburbs thickens up, and the satnav gets confused, announcing that we have reached our destination when we can see nothing but a field. Gary has to ask a woman walking a dog, and she tells us we are ‘on the wrong side’. We follow her instructions and suddenly there it is and I am paralysed with panic. There are wrought-iron gates here, standing wide open, and in front of us is a long gravel drive and a smug, symmetrical Queen Anne mansion of rosy red bricks and gleaming white stonework. Two vehicles are parked near the house, one a beaten-up Volvo, the other a white van. The Volvo I expected, but the van worries me. My intention was to pay Gary and send him home, and this is right, of course; I have no business involving him in whatever I find inside this building. And yet I can’t quite do it. I climb out of the car and thank him, pressing my notes into his hand, but the picture of him turning round and driving away is more than I can cope with. I hear myself saying, ‘Give me twenty minutes. If I’m not out by then, could you call the police?’ and before he can question or protest I walk boldly to the elaborate stone porch and turn the heavy iron handle on the oak front door.

It won’t turn of course. I try one way and then the other. I try the various tricks for dealing with a door that sticks. I pull the handle towards me and turn, I push and turn, I give it a smart kick or two. It is locked. Of course it is locked. The open gates lulled me into thinking this was going to be easy, but they were probably forced open by the driver of the car or the van. A small, hopeful thought suggests that the van might belong to a caretaker who will be on the premises, an authority figure I could get on my side. I back away from the porch and, avoiding looking towards Gary in his car, I start a circuit of the house. Memories of climbing into college after curfew, when I was a student, come back to me. My college was a building not unlike this one, in fact. Fire escapes are what you need to look for, and flat rooves when you get round the back.

There is a fire escape at the side of the house – the traditional kind with a metal staircase leading up to platforms on the first and second floors, giving access to the fire doors. I walk up but I am not hopeful. In college, we used to leave fire doors open for one another, but I can hardly expect that here. I can see that these doors are firmly closed and the only way of opening them would be to break one of their glass panels and hope to put an arm through and yank up the bar on the inside of the door, but this is a non-starter, not only because I doubt I could do that without tearing my arm to ribbons on the broken glass but because I have nothing to break the glass with. A shoe would be the conventional answer but I am wearing soft, flat pumps, chosen this morning for speed and stealth, not for breaking and entering. I come down again and continue my circuit of the building.

Round the back the building has a startling change of character. A big modern extension has been added – the business end of this establishment I can see as I peer in through the plate glass windows and see dance and drama studios, musical instruments, rostra, and a room that seems to contain instruments of torture, so is probably a gym. There are flat rooves on offer here, with windows above them that might be accessible if I were able to get up onto the roof in the first place. I prowl round but can see no way of scaling the walls. What I need is someone to hoist me up (in college, obviously, that was the job of the chap who had escorted you back in the early hours). If Freda is in here, I wonder, how did she get in? Was she hoisted up onto the roof to slip in through a window like Oliver Twist when he is kidnapped by housebreakers?

The thought that Freda is in there somewhere drives me on and I push on past the studios and round to the other side of the building. And I am rewarded. Here is a matching fire escape and I can see, squinting up to the second floor, that the door at the top is not quite closed. On unsteady legs I climb the steps, my sweaty hands slippery on the rail. The door swings open easily and I step into a narrow corridor and a row of closed doors.

I move quietly down the corridor, adjusting to where I am, and tentatively try one of the doors. It opens into a small bedroom, a standard student room with a single bed, a chest of drawers and a desk. There are some blobs of Blu Tack on the walls which suggest that posters were up there until recently but the bed is stripped, surfaces clear